The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization |
The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization
Routledge
2002-09-06
272 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-92879-3
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-92878-6
Serge Gruzinski, Research Director
National Scientific Research Center (CNRS, Paris)
Mestizo: a person of mixed blood; specifically, a person of mixed European and American Indian ancestry.
Serge Gruzinski, the renowned historian of Latin America, offers a brilliant, original critique of colonization and globalization in The Mestizo Mind. Looking at the fifteenth-century colonization of Latin America, Gruzinski documents the mélange that resulted: colonized mating with colonizers; Indians joining the Catholic Church and colonial government; and Amerindian visualizations of Jesus and Perseus. These physical and cultural encounters created a new culture, a new individual, and a phenomenon we now call globalization. Revealing globalization’s early origins, Gruzinski then fast forwards to the contemporary mélange seen in the films of Peter Greenaway and Wong Kar-Wai to argue that over 500 years of intermingling has produced the mestizo mind, a state of mixed thinking that we all possess.
A masterful alchemy of history, anthropology, philosophy and visual analysis, The Mestizo Mind definitively conceptualizes the clash of civilizations in the style of Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and Anne McClintock.
Tags: Routledge, Serge Gruzinski