In his seminal essay Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire asserts that colonization ultimately works to decivilize the colonizer, awakening baser, brutalizing, and dehumanizing instincts. In this crucial new study, Villate-Isaza explores the violent colonial history of the New Kingdom of Granada (modern-day Colombia and Venezuela) by examining three seventeenth-century historical accounts—Pedro Simón’s Noticias historiales, Juan Rodríguez Freile’s El carnero, and Lucas Fernández de Piedrahita’s Historia general—each of which reveals the colonizer’s reliance on the threat of violence to sustain order. Despite their attempts to convey a narrative of European political, technical, and moral superiority, these accounts reveal tensions |