The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Colonization and the Discontinuity of the Classical Tradition
presentation is what I call the "darker side" of the European Renaissance, which could be condensed in "the discontinuity of the classical tradition." Such discontinuity becomes apparent in the fractured cultural products which do not conform to the aesthetic norms of the early modern period, and they are, consequently, marginalized from histories of ideas, art or literature. I have also used elsewhere the expression "colonial semiosis" to distinguish the fractured semiotic practices in the colonial periphery resulting from the clash between hegemonic norms and values guiding semiotic practices in metropolitan centers, their extension to the colonial periphery, and the resistance and adaptation to them from the perspective of the native population to whose historical legacy the European Renaissance was quite meaningless. I have selected, therefore, those scholarly works which have in the past fifteen years introduced a new perspective by looking at the European Renaissance from the New World colonial periphery. I have also selected a few examples upon which I will comment, and I will use footnotes to honor names, articles, and books that were not included in the body of the paper, although without them this very overview would not have been written.I