In colonial documents, savage breasts were signs of conquest. From accounts of European explorers such as Columbus and Magellan, to nineteenth-century maps of the Pacific drawn by American cartographers, to American postcards featuring Native American women, the bare brown bosoms of indigenous women were markers of savagery, colonial desire, and a justification for Western imperial rule. A foundational project of European and American imperialisms was the creation of an archive of images of the non-Western other whose inferiority was marked by female nakedness. Imperial cultures deployed barbarism and female nudity to justify imperial violence and articulate colonial phantasms about the savage land. Columbus, who fetishized the “colonial breasts” of native women, was convinced that the world was not round but “pearshaped and topped by a protuberance much like a woman’s nipple.”1 In his account of the New World, his early encounters with natives emphasized their nakedness and their physical beauty: “They all go naked, men and women, as the day they were born. . . . And the women have very pretty bodies.”2 The nakedness of the native, with special emphasis on the female native’s attractive body, recalls Adam and Eve’s exile from Paradise, which constructed a romantic image of the New World with “Indians” as creatures who were “spiritually naked,” gentle people with no weapons, laws, religion, or literature.3 The imperial impulse to convert these “exiles” of Christianity, coupled with travelers’ tales of wealth and gold in uncharted, exotic lands, would fuel Europe’s imperial fantasies for centuries.
