intertribal (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
intertribal) wrote2008-09-05 03:53 pm
intertribal) wrote2008-09-05 03:53 pm
Entry tags:
discovery = the rape of the natural world
Recommended read from my class - which is called, incidentally, Colonial Encounters.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1997. Good Day, Columbus. In Silencing the Past: Power and Production in History, 108-140. Boston: Beacon Press.
In the 1990s, quite a few observers, historians, and activists worldwide denounced the arrogance implied by this terminology during the quincentennial celebrations of Columbus's Bahaman landing. Some spoke of a Columbian Holocaust. Some proposed "conquest" instead of discovery; others preferred "encounter," which suddenly gained an immense popularity - one more testimony, if needed, of the capacity of liberal discourse to compromise between its premises and its practice. "Encounter" sweetens the horror, polishes the rough edges that do not fit neatly either side of the controversy. Everyone seems to gain.
Not everyone was convinced. Portuguese historian Vitorino Magalhaes Godinho, a former minister of education, reiterated that "discovery" was an appropriate term for the European ventures of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which he compares to Herschel's discovery of Uranus, and Sedillot's discovery of microbes. The problem is, of course, that Uranus did not know that it existed before Herschel, and that Sedillot did not go after microbes with a sword and a gun.
Yet more than blind arrogance is at issue here. Terminologies demarcate a field, politically and epistemologically. Names set up a field of power. "Discovery" and analogous terms ensure that by just mentioning the event one enters a predetermined lexical field of cliches and predictable categories that foreclose a redefinition of the political and intellectual stakes. Europe becomes the center of "what happened." Whatever else may have happened to other peoples in that process is already reduced to a natural fact: they were discovered. The similarity to planets and microbes precedes their explicit mention by future historians and cabinet ministers.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1997. Good Day, Columbus. In Silencing the Past: Power and Production in History, 108-140. Boston: Beacon Press.
In the 1990s, quite a few observers, historians, and activists worldwide denounced the arrogance implied by this terminology during the quincentennial celebrations of Columbus's Bahaman landing. Some spoke of a Columbian Holocaust. Some proposed "conquest" instead of discovery; others preferred "encounter," which suddenly gained an immense popularity - one more testimony, if needed, of the capacity of liberal discourse to compromise between its premises and its practice. "Encounter" sweetens the horror, polishes the rough edges that do not fit neatly either side of the controversy. Everyone seems to gain.
Not everyone was convinced. Portuguese historian Vitorino Magalhaes Godinho, a former minister of education, reiterated that "discovery" was an appropriate term for the European ventures of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which he compares to Herschel's discovery of Uranus, and Sedillot's discovery of microbes. The problem is, of course, that Uranus did not know that it existed before Herschel, and that Sedillot did not go after microbes with a sword and a gun.
Yet more than blind arrogance is at issue here. Terminologies demarcate a field, politically and epistemologically. Names set up a field of power. "Discovery" and analogous terms ensure that by just mentioning the event one enters a predetermined lexical field of cliches and predictable categories that foreclose a redefinition of the political and intellectual stakes. Europe becomes the center of "what happened." Whatever else may have happened to other peoples in that process is already reduced to a natural fact: they were discovered. The similarity to planets and microbes precedes their explicit mention by future historians and cabinet ministers.
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