Unmapping the Renaissance

The city of Florence is regarded as the birthplace of the Renaissance. The fact that the economic and commercial power structures that developed during this time also brought about the colonization of non-European worlds through linguistic and semiotic hegemony, among other things, is to this day rarely incoporated into the traditional florentine narrative. Post colonial theoretical approaches question the role of the latin alphabet, of printing, of language in the dominance of the renaissance narrative - in particular, these more recent approaches revisit social ideals on whose flip sides are the dispossession, canonization and hierarchizing of culture, memory and space. These ideals and their contrasting opposites unfolded, and continue to unfold, in the afterlife of the renaissance narrative.