postconquest

One might describe what happens between Columbus's first letter and the postconquest narratives of Francisco López de Gómara or Bernal Díaz del Castillo as the European imposition of meanings onto American society — rendering allegorical what was encountered as autoreflexive — and the consequent loss of the indigenous perspectives that might challenge that construction of the New World.

1999, Roland Greene, Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas, page 13