Colonial Encounters. - book reviews

Monthly Review, July-August, 1992 by Joel Kovel

What is past is never wholly past, because the past lives on through recollection and reflection. Columbus' landing in the New World and the catastrophes this set into motion can never be undone; but our consciousness of the event and its sequelae can be expanded, with real effects on the present and future. The quincentennial anniversary of the event that ignited Europe's conquest of the world is an auspicious occasion for just such a conscientization. Nobody with any feeling for the human costs of Western imperialism should celebrate this year. We can, however, commemorate acts of resistance---- including the works of intellectuals who have undertaken the critique of empire. In 1992 the general reflection on the quincentennial can bring to light what may have been overlooked in 1986 or 1976. Two superb works from those years-- Peter Hulme's Colonial Encounters, and Francis Jenning's The Invasion of America----have recently come to my attention, and I should like to pass on some of their wisdom here."

Hulme teaches literature in the United Kingdom, while Jennings is an ethnohistorian. The former takes as his domain the "Caribbean," i.e., Northern Brazil to Virginia, from Columbus' landfall to the close of the eighteenth century; and he examines texts--including Columbus' journals, Shakespeare's The Tempest, the narratives of Captain John Smith and Pocahontas, and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe-to see how the encounters between European and Amerindian[2] became formalized into the discourses of colonialism, and from these, into the Western mentality of conquest and racial superiority. Jennings, on the other hand, writes as a historian of the Amerindian and the Conquest itself, focusing on an area of extraordinary interest, the Puritan settlement of New England and the expropriation of its native populations. I say extraordinary because New England Puritanism gave the United States its basic ideology and historical self-understanding. The Brahmin historians of New England, from Francis Parkman to Samuel Eliot Morison and Perry Miller, have defined for us the core meanings of the Conquest and its various players-a definition through which so much of the larger history of the United States has been framed. But hear Hulme on this subject:

New England has a complex history but it has always been possible in retrospect to see it as having a coherence denied to Virginia. That coherence was largely provided by the ideology of Puritanism, and one of its main planks was the establishment of a very clear division between civilization and savagery, between the city on the hill and the alien and unregenerate forces that lay beyond the pale. Much of the history of the United States, down to its current defense policies, can be traced back to that image of righteousness under threat from savagery. (p. 139)

"Righteousness under threat from savagery..." It is the signature of conquest, forged in the development of Christendom through the medieval period, applied in first encounter with the "Other" in the New World, developed to its fullest extent by the Puritans, and countlessly replayed down through the years. Christianity set forth the basic set of dichotomies, in which, as Jennings puts it, the "Caucasians of Europe are not only holy and white but also civilized, while the pigmented savages of distant lands are not only idolatrous and dark but savage" (p. 6). The Crusades and the Inquisition were the principle crucibles wherein this ideology was created, the former through outwarcl expansion and the latter through internal purification, for the imperial motion of white civilization traditionally demands repression, whether of Jews, witches, blacks, or latterly, Communists.

Different branches of European society leapfrogged over each other in their moral claims, gradually shifting the ground of their superiority from God to nature. England made much of being more virtuous than Spain;[3] and New England 1orded itself over the other colonies, claiming the high ground essential for the modern conqueror. The details are immensely complicated but the direction is unmistakable-toward white civilization--morally higher and purified, as well as technologically and militarily prepotent, a point of God's light in a sea of darkness. At the threshold of its Columbian conquests, Europe was a fractious polyglot collection of minor principalities and by no means the pre-eminent center of world civilization. When the smoke cleared--to the extent it has ever cleared--Europe had become the West, the cockpit of empire, the bearer of Reason and the notion of Progress, and the seat of universalizing values. It had named itself as a figure of whiteness against a dark ground of the peoples it had conquered and crushed under its wheels. Thus the "primitive accumulation of capital" was a crucial turning point in self-definition.

The message of Hulme andJennings is that conquest and naming are two sides of the same process. Europe did not walk in, conquer the natives with superior arms and organization and then, to congratulate itself or relieve its guilt, declare itself the white civilization and the conquered ones the dark savages. Far from being ex postfacto rationalizing, the creation of a dichotomous universe was a necessary condition of the Conquest itself. From another angle, history is not the recounting of extrinsic phenomena but something produced as it happens; and the forms of consciousness which enter into the later retelling of history are already present in its unfolding and are necessary for it to happen. Naming, in this sense, is a form of production. It constitutes the namer as well as the named, and as much as technology, transforms the world according to the human will. But naming differs from other forces of production like technology in that its deeper effects are essentially invisible. This is because consciousness is channeled by naming, or to be more exact, by the interconnected webs of names called discourses. Discourses, once established by and as part of the dominant power, occupy the heights of rationality and automatically assign whatever is outside their domain to darkness. But it is not only the true nature of the victim that remains hidden. Because nothing is harder to recognize than a self-image, the dominant group does not know itself either. Thus the naming which takes place in the course of conquest and is necessary for conquest is also a kind of repression. In Hulme's words, a massive, almost self-destructive effort [is] needed to create the self-image of the technologically superior. The discursive webs woven in and around these events [of conquest] in Virginia in the early seventeenth century to produce its "history" constitute at the same time a massive effort of repression whereby the violent dispossession of the native American is rewritten as a crusade against the unregenerate savage, the guilt of conquest being transferred from usurper to usurped: as from Prospero to Caliban. (p. 168)