Rethinking the Barbarism/Humanism Dyad

In our readings over the last few weeks, we have been exposed to several perspectives on the history of the global cultural encounter--Sahlins, Zhang, Todorov, Greenblatt, Eco. From the vantage of these interpreters we have learned that the encounter was far more complex than allowed within the conventional interpretative frame of challenge/response, or civilized/uncivilized, or West/East, or transgressor/victim, or domination/subjection. All cultures are active agents at the point of their encounter In our most recent reading in the "New Historicism" of Stephen Greenblatt, we have been encouraged to abandon the conventional lenses through which the encounter has been viewed and to attend to the primary documents of particular historical moments, such as Columbus's expedition. The purpose of this reorienting of our vision is to invite questioning and, later, disestablishment of the colonial discourse underlying the conquest of the "New World."

Scholars like Eco recast the dialectic of domination and subjection as a culturally productive misunderstanding and in this way mitigate the savagery of the historical record. Chinese was not actually the originary language of Adam, of course, but from this mistaken presumption, an imaginative cultural braid was begun joining Europe with Asia. This is the confluence narrative that Eco has called "exchange." (p. 54) Yet, there is no denying that it was conquest and cultural pillage that determined the course of the Great Encounter we have studied. Greenblatt, like Sahlins and others, is keenly aware of this fact, and he wishes for us to obtain a better understanding of the role that literature and humanist culture played in Eurocentric global expansion between 1300 and 1700. The concept of the marvelous or wondrous, standing in as it does in accounts from Columbus's diaries for "gold" or some other credible material wealth, joins both the barbaric and the humanistic urges of the colonialist. It is not so easy to segregate these motivations, still there has been a habit among some scholars (Todorov for example) of identifying colonialism as the problem and humanism as the solution.

What I would like you to reflect upon and write about in the days ahead is the curious simultaneity of barbarism and humanism in most all of the works we have read. Consider how the humanist impulse to understand and appreciate the other is fully implicated in the outrages of the worst of the European adventurers. One way of working through this reflection would be to take up Carl's observation from class of the salient disparity in the observations and conclusions of Columbus and La Casas. How could there be such a dramatic difference in perception (and thus treatment) of the natives by two Europeans living among them at the same time and place?