Europe's Indians: Producing Racial Difference, 1500–1900 - Brossura

Seth, Vanita

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0822347644 ISBN 13: 9780822347644

Casa editrice: Duke University Press, 2010

Riassunto

Europe’s Indians forces a rethinking of key assumptions regarding difference—particularly racial difference—and its centrality to contemporary social and political theory. Tracing shifts in European representations of two different colonial spaces, the New World and India, from the late fifteenth century through the late nineteenth, Vanita Seth demonstrates that the classification of humans into racial categories or binaries of self–other is a product of modernity. Part historical, part philosophical, and part a history of science, her account exposes the epistemic conditions that enabled the thinking of difference at distinct historical junctures. Seth’s examination of Renaissance, Classical Age, and nineteenth-century representations of difference reveals radically diverging forms of knowing, reasoning, organizing thought, and authorizing truth. It encompasses stories of monsters, new worlds, and ancient lands; the theories of individual agency expounded by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau; and the physiological sciences of the nineteenth century. European knowledge, Seth argues, does not reflect a singular history of Reason, but rather multiple traditions of reasoning, of historically bounded and contingent forms of knowledge. Europe’s Indians shows that a history of colonialism and racism must also be an investigation into the historical production of subjectivity, agency, epistemology, and the body.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Vanita Seth is Associate Professor of Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an editor of the journal Postcolonial Studies.

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Europe's Indians

PRODUCING RACIAL DIFFERENCE, 1500-1900By Vanita Seth

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4764-4

Contents

Acknowledgments......................................................................................................ixIntroduction.........................................................................................................11 Self and Similitude RENAISSANCE REPRESENTATIONS OF THE NEW WORLD..................................................192 "Constructing" Individuals and "Creating" History SUBJECTIVITY IN HOBBES, LOCKE, AND ROUSSEAU.....................613 Traditions of History MAPPING INDIA'S PAST........................................................................1194 Of Monsters and Man THE PECULIAR HISTORY OF RACE..................................................................173Epilogue.............................................................................................................227Notes................................................................................................................233Bibliography.........................................................................................................259Index................................................................................................................279

Chapter One

Self and Similitude

RENAISSANCE REPRESENTATIONS OF THE NEW WORLD

Self and Other: Figures of Modernity

IT HAS BECOME an increasingly common feature in contemporary writings on European colonialism to articulate the relation between the colonizer and the colonized in terms of self and other, West and non-West. While the narrative I allude to is all too familiar, it is a narrative that, nevertheless requires unpacking.

Simply put, when we speak of the self in opposition to the non-European other, are we appealing to a metaphysical rendering of the West as an entity that, following Nietzsche, can be traced back to the ancient Greeks, or are we to understand the conceptual grid of self-other as a historically bounded reference to modernity-one that locates the West-as-self within the context of the post-Enlightenment?

If it is the former, if it is a metaphysical category to which we are appealing, implicit in our understanding is a recognition that the West-non-West binary has always already inhabited the conceptual geography of self-other-at least as far back as classical antiquity. In other words, the West has always already been a self-referential subject. Alternatively, if we seek to subject the self-other narrative to historical specificity, if we wish to situate it within the world of the modern, our premise by necessity has to presuppose that the oppositional apparatus of the West-non-West binary was indebted to a particular set of historical conditions, whether these be capitalist economic relations and Enlightenment universalism, the emergence of nation-states and a distinctively modern form of governmentality, or the ascendance of science and reason and the catch-cry of secularism.

It becomes apparent, therefore, that when we speak of self and other, we need to be alert to the fact that, from this point of reference, we can traverse two radically distinct theoretical terrains-one that is organized around the trans-historical sign of the West, and the other that subjects the West to historical specificity. As I will go on to argue, the distinction drawn is an important one, and yet in some of the contemporary literature engaging with the production of the Western self and non-Western other, there often appears an ambiguity, a "collapsing together" wherein metaphysics and history intermingle in a confused interchangeability.

Illustrative of my point is Edward Said's decidedly seminal text Orientalism (1978). Said's work provides a now canonical reading of European colonialism through the conceptual grid of self-other, the Occident-Orient. In so doing, he renders a more complex appreciation of power wherein power is identified not simply with bullets, governance, and wealth extraction but with the very production of knowledge.

The fact that Said engages with nineteenth-century European literature and the twentieth-century North American academy is suggestive of the fact that he situates the oppositional binary Occident-Orient within the template of modernity. And yet while Said encloses his subject matter within a historical frame, this temporal imposition coexists with a temporal transcendence, a constant oscillation between the category of the West and the category of the modern. What is implicit throughout Said's thesis becomes explicit when he argues: "In classical Greece and Rome geographers, historians, public figures like Caesar, orators and poets added to the fund of taxonomic lore separating races, regions, nations and minds from each other; much of that was self-serving and existed to prove that the Romans and Greeks were superior to other kinds of people."

What we witness in Said's text, dramatized in the quote, is the collapsing together of Julius Caesar's Rome and the reign of Queen Victoria. Yet what remains a largely ambiguous positioning of the Classical period in Said's work finds full expression in Franois Hartog's thesis that Herodotus's Histories represents one of the earliest expressions of the Greeks' efforts to understand their neighbors through radical opposition. The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History, as the title suggests, offers an in-depth textual reading of Histories from an interpretative position that construes Herodotus's references to the Persians, Scythians, Libyans, and other non-Greeks as emblematic examples of the representational production of self-other in classical antiquity.

While Hartog's Mirror of Herodotus provides both an insightful and sophisticated reading of the Histories, the interpretation of the Histories as a text of otherness has a currency that goes beyond the jacket of his book. If Said oscillated from ancient Rome to nineteenth-century Europe, more contemporary works have found no hesitation in mapping Herodotus's Histories over Renaissance representations of the New World. Thus, in a work concerned with first contact between Spanish voyagers and indigenous Americans, Stephen Greenblatt's Marvelous Possessions retraces the roots of European constructions of the other back to Herodotus, whose ethnology, he argues, constitutes "the first great Western representation of Otherness." In a similar vein, Michel de Certeau parallels the Histories with Michel de Montaigne's famous essay On Cannibals, suggesting that both function as texts that offer "a representation of the other."

In works as different as that of Said, Hartog, Greenblatt, and Certeau-works that engage with radically distinct intellectual projects-a shared theoretical premise nevertheless exists: that it is possible to speak of the West as an entity that extends itself back to antiquity, an entity that is malleable to all historical conditions. Thus, implicit in this narrative is the contention that one can traverse centuries, from the dizzying peaks of Greek and Roman civilization to the glory of European imperialism, and encounter, throughout this breathless history, a self-defining identity of the West as conceived through the oppositional representation of the non-Western Other. It is precisely this proposition that this chapter seeks to question.

In light of the literature I have briefly reviewed, it becomes evident that in appealing to the classics for testimony of representations of otherness, we are investing the self-other distinction with no other significance than that of cataloguing-the registering of hierarchical difference. If this is the case, however, it is a practice that can hardly be preserved as the exclusive intellectual property of the West. After all, numerous civilizations throughout history have engaged in the intellectual and practical exercise of distinguishing themselves from their neighbors and have often predicated this distinction on a self-proclaimed superiority. Such an accusation could be directed at the Aztecs and Chinese no less than at the Greeks and the Romans. However, if our understanding of self and otherness is reduced to only recognizing this fact, its value is of a very limited scope. In attempting to explain everything, it fails to tell us anything. Indeed, in rendering self-other as ubiquitous, we are denied precisely that which makes such organizing categories significant-the possibility to distinguish over time and space, to acknowledge history and recognize power.

What is striking when reading a text such as Herodotus's Histories is that even if we allow for an interpretation that construes the Histories as ethnocentric (a fact that is itself questionable, given Herodotus's effusive praise of the Libyans), it is difficult to argue that power mediated the relations between the Greeks and the barbarians. Not only was the wealth and might of the Persians difficult to deny, but even the Scythians, for all their "barbarity" were regarded by Herodotus as simply indestructible-given their nomadic existence, "How ... can they fail to be invincible and inaccessible for others?"

In failing to recognize that the self-other binary was a grammatical feature of colonial representations, we risk losing sight of the fact that the ubiquitous power of modern colonialism lay not only in the unparalleled success of Europe's domination of much of the globe but also in the corresponding appropriation of the discourses of modernity by the colonized peoples-a fact immediately apparent in the narratives of nationalism, modernization, and science, and in the universalization of the language of rights and the individual. What we also risk ignoring is precisely that which makes the self-other binary an integral feature of modern colonial relations-that in the context of nineteenth-century European colonialism, the self not only constituted, defined, and represented the other for its own consumption (a charge one might level at Herodotus), but that it translated that knowledge as "truth" both in the realm of discursive practices and in the production of material realities.

Yet my objection to the temporal transmigration of the self-other binary to ancient times is not simply limited to its consequent rendering of power and history as obsolete. More significantly, once we subsume all intersocietal contact from antiquity to the present within a dialogue between self and other, we risk rendering ancient knowledge into a textual alibi in the very defense of modernity itself. It is not my intention to deny the fact that the Greeks sought to differentiate themselves from their neighbors or that their observations were mediated through categories that at times employed the language of negation to represent the antithetical non-Greeks-be she or he a Scythian nomad, an Amazon, or one of the panoply of monstrosities believed to populate India. Clearly, it is possible to interpret the Histories as a testimony to Greek constructions of self and otherness-numerous scholars, after all, have done so. And yet, I would argue that while such a reading is indeed possible, the very fact of that possibility, the very fact that the Histories can be rendered into a text of otherness, speaks less to Herodotus's Greece than to modernity more generally, and to nineteenth-century colonialism more specifically. In other words, it is from the vantage point of colonial history, a history that has in part been mediated through the grid of self-other, that we transpose our (modern) reading onto ancient texts.

Thus, while it is undoubtedly true that Histories is one in a pantheon of classical texts that has helped to shape the contours of a European self and its Oriental, African, Asian, and American other, it has become so through a process of translation wherein an ancient text has been rendered malleable to modern categories and then appealed to as confirmation of the antiquity of those self-same categories. Integral to the logic of this circular argument is the premise that from Herodotus's time to our own, the categories employed to conceptualize the other have remained unchanged; that the conceptual grids through which we order our world resonate in the texts of pre-Christian times; that the division between an East and West has always already existed; and that ancient texts are the oracles of our modern condition.

In the final analysis, to privilege the self-other binary in a reading of ancient texts is to assume that knowledge was ordered, structured, and imported through this very grid. It represents a failure to recognize even the possibility that such reading may require the visual aid of retrospective lenses. In ignoring this possibility, we risk rehearsing Said's intellectual position, whereby in extending his critique back to antiquity to historicize and debunk the truth claims of modern European colonialism, he is in fact forced to rearticulate its premises, ignore its implications, and confirm its self-made historical trajectory. Thus, in an act of imaginative migration, ancient Greece and modern Europe can speak to each other as familial brethren, sharing a language encoded with the same timeless categories of West and East, Self and Other.

The problem is: What constituted the West, and who precisely was the Self?

Europe: An Idea

In A.D. 800, Charlemagne was dubbed Pater Europa, the father of Europe. Pope Pius II, on hearing of the fall of Constantinople, feared that "now we have really been struck in Europe, that is, at home." Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote in a letter dated 1530 of "the prosperity of Europe," while the cartographer Abraham Orelius could, in his Geographical Encyclopedia (1578), confidently instruct his readers, "For Christ see Europe." Francis Bacon, in 1623, presupposed the comprehension of his readers when he spoke of "we Europeans," while 1689 saw Fontelle endeavoring to recognize a distinctive European "quality of mind or genius." More than a hundred years later, Edmund Burke pronounced that "no European can be a complete exile in any part of Europe," while the conquered Napoleon conceded that his aim had been "to found a European system, a European code, a Supreme Court for all Europe; there would have been a single European people."

All of these quotes have been extracted from a growing body of literature that has sought to trace the "idea of Europe." In an area fraught with disagreement on a number of fronts (including as to when Europe "really" emerged, when it distinguished itself from Christianity, and when it captured a collective imagination), what is nevertheless recognized in the very nature of this exercise to identify the "origins" and development of the idea of Europe is the premise that Europe was an "idea," that Europe and Europeans were never natural, self-evident, immutable, or historically neutral entities. Rather, as Gerard Delanty argues, Europe was a concept, a cultural construction. Consequently, "To speak of Europe as an 'invention' is to stress the ways it has been constructed in an historical process; it is to emphasize that Europe is less the subject of history than its product."

While the origins of the word "Europe" can be traced back to ancient Greek mythology, made famous by Albrecht Drer's painting The Rape of Europe (ca. 1495), it is generally recognized that Europe held little political, cultural, or economic meaning for the ancients. The Greeks were largely ignorant regarding the geography and inhabitants of Europe, while the Roman Empire, extending over three continents, displayed little apparent loyalty to Europe per se.

It is, rather, in the Middle Ages that an idea of Europe that expresses some significance, however vague, comes to emerge. The title bequeathed to Charlemagne as "Father of Europe" is a popularly cited early medieval example. So, too, is the late medieval reference by Pope Pius II to Europe as a home. Peter Burke also points to the increasing number of references to Europe in literary works such as that of Petrarch, where Europe is referred to with some regularity, and in Dante's Latin works, wherein Europe is cited on thirteen separate occasions. Burke is quick to point out, however, that while "Europe" may appear with increasing regularity from the thirteenth century onward, one should be wary of exaggerating the significance of the idea of Europe in the Middle Ages. After all, if Dante mentions Europe three times in his Divine Comedy, this in itself is only of limited significance when compared with the far greater number of references to Italy (eleven), Christian or Christianity (fifteen), and Florence or Florentine (twenty-two). Similarly, while Pius II is often cited in the corpus of early references on Europe, Denys Hay notes that in fact he uses Respublica Christiana far more frequently.

This alerts us to a contentious issue regarding the history of the idea of Europe-namely, at what moment did "Europe" itself come to be invested with autonomous meaning, with cultural and political significance. As Hay points out, "If by Christendom [Pope Pius II] meant Europe, that was precisely the ambiguity which was to persist." Until well into the seventeenth century, Hay suggests, Europe and Christendom were interchangeable terms.

The ebb and flow of references to Europe throughout the Middle Ages often correlated with the successive invasions first by the Mongols and later (over a protracted period of time) by the Turks. The frequency of references to Europe became pronounced precisely at those moments when Christendom was increasingly giving ground to Turkish invasions, when its authority was being narrowly contained within Europe.

Given this fact, many historians have argued that, while in the fifteenth century and sixteenth century it would not be viable to speak of a distinctive European community or of an all-encompassing identity, the idea of Europe was nevertheless emerging under the rubric of Christianity. In other words, while cultural disparities and political rivalries made a secular European identity untenable, Europe as the geographical and spiritual center of Christianity nevertheless carried emotive claim. It is in this context that Ortieus's brief instruction "for Christianity see Europe" speaks volumes, leading many historians of the idea of Europe to argue, as Delanty does, that "Christianity gave to Europe its identity."

While there is certainly some truth to this conclusion, I would suggest that the unifying role of Christianity has tended to be overstated. Two reasons lend themselves to explaining why we should be wary of defending the idea of Europe as an expression of Christianity and thus, by implication, elevating the significance of Europe itself.

(Continues...)

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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Duke University Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2010
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0822347644
• ISBN 13: 9780822347644
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 308
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile