In many early modern cartographic and other associated documents, Asian places are found in America, or America is placed in direct proximity to Asia. For Horodowich and Nagel, categorizing these occurrences as mistakes eradicates a fundamental epistemological framework of early modernity: the metageographical construct called Amerasia. Some manifestations of it are placing Calicut—under the name of Calicutan—in Tierra Nueva America instead of in India, identifying Tenochtitlan with a Chinese city, locating China directly north of Tenochtitlan, and even identifying Moctezuma with the Last Great Khan. While acknowledging the epistemological vastness of the phenomenon, Horodowich and Nagel present the notion of an Amerasia that was a “major organizing paradigm of the world for centuries accompanying and possibly enabling the rise of Europe as an idea” (24) even though the concept did not survive. The metageographical Amerasian concept was supplanted by the “modern metageography of the seven continents” (364) during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The book contains an introduction, seventeen short chapters, and an epilogue, concluding with an afterword by Timothy Brook. The numerous chapters touch on many aspects of the Amerasian idea, some of them being: the Magi and Expanded India (chapter 3); Raphael's painting and globes (chapter 4); Amerasia and Utopia (chapter 5); the connection between Marco Polo, Columbus, and elliptic thinking (chapter 6); Parmigianino's painting in connection with political meetings in Bologna in 1530 that shaped geopolitical agendas (chapter 7); the obsessive quest for a land passage between Asia and New Spain (chapters 8, 11); the contribution of French and English navigations to the Amerasian imaginary (chapters 9, 10); the Indian semantic continuum (chapter 12); speculations about the Bible and the New World (chapter 13); Egyptian hieroglyphic writing in Asia and America (chapter 14); the creation of America in the printing houses of Italy (chapters 15, 16); and the impact of Manilla Galleon on the notion of Amerasia (chapter 17). As this quick review of the contents indicates, Horodowich and Nagel dwell on the multifaceted intellectual spaces that incubated theories about the America-Asia connection from 1492 to 1875. Yet Amerasia also offers a remarkable attempt to systematize the theoretical thinking behind this metageographical concept.
The volume culminates in an afterword by Timothy Brook, which offers the perspective of Chinese cartographers on the question of the continents. Brook argues that the contemporary Chinese cartographers took quite a different approach, subject to their lack of knowledge of America and their traditional view of China's location in the world throughout history. Utilizing maps by Luo Hongxian, Zhu Sibian, Abraham Ortelius, and Matteo Ricci, Brook concludes that unlike Amerasia, the West has been as much a creation of the Chinese as an imposition of Europeans who promised the Chinese a Greater West on their maps.
Other scholars—Nunn (1929), Frederick A. de Armas (2001), Nicolás Wey Gómez (2008), Ricardo Padrón (2020), Marica Milanesi (2021), Elizabeth Horodowich (2021), and more—have approached the discourses on Asian-American overlap and continuities by land or sea, emphasizing the Iberian, Latin American, Italian, transcontinental, and transoceanic aspects of this phenomenon. Yet, Amerasia makes the thought-provoking claim that for more than two hundred years after 1492, the connective areas between Asia and America were fertile terrain for speculation, to the point that Amerasia served as a locus of contact and a fundamental organizing concept until almost the nineteenth century.
This book will be of interest to scholars and the public who are interested in topics such as globalism, cartography, the development of the notion of America, and the age of exploration, among many others.
