Ranging geographically from Tierra del Fuego to California and the Caribbean, and historically from early European sightings and the utopian projects of would-be colonizers to the present-day cultural politics of migrant communities and international relations, this volume presents a rich variety of case studies and scholarly perspectives on the interplay of diverse cultures in the Americas since the European conquest.

Subjects covered include documentary and archaeological evidence of cultural interaction, the collection of native artifacts and the role of museums in the interpretation of indigenous traditions, the cultural impact of Christian missions and the representation of indigenous cultures in writings addressed to European readers, the development of Latin American artistic traditions and the incorporation of motifs from European classical antiquity into modern popular culture, the contribution of Afro-descendants to the cultural mix of Latin America and the erasure of the Hispanic heritage from cultural perceptions of California since the nineteenth century.

By offering accessible and well-illustrated accounts of a wide range of particular cases, the volume aims to stimulate thinking about historical and methodological issues, which can be exploited in a teaching context as well as in the furtherance of research projects in a comparative and transnational framework.

Jenny Mander is an intellectual historian at the University of Cambridge, specializing in eighteenth-century France, the rise of the novel, colonial thought and early globalization. She has a special interest in the abbé Raynal, and is an editor of the new critical edition of Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes.

David Midgley is Professor emeritus of German Literature and Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Writing Weimar: Critical Realism in German Literature, 1918-1933 (Oxford 2000), and his research is currently focused especially on the major works of Alfred Döblin.

Christine D. Beaule is Associate Professor of Latin American and Iberian Studies, University of Hawai¿i at Manoa. Her research combines anthropological archaeology with the study of historical texts and is focused on the comparative impact of colonialism on material culture and indigenous sociopolitical organization in South America and the Philippines.