The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (review)

Walter Mignolo's study of colonialism's three main "technologies"—language and writing, memory and archiving, and cartography—visualizes the European Renaissance as a period of great social and cultural transformation in Europe. Renaissance culture, however, also effected similar (colonial) transformations in the Americas.

Mignolo's argument, unfolding through a critical analysis of arts, letters, and maps, is that the classical revival in the European Renaissance was a justification and agent of colonial expansion. Mignolo's opening chapter situates Nebrija's 1492 and 1517 Castilian grammars and the works of Bernardo Aldrete within the larger Spanish project of colonizing the Amerindians. Castilian was treated as the language of communication and not of scholarship, and the dissemination of its grammar, rooted in a theory of the letter, effectively erased the regionality of spoken languages and colonized the voice. Castilian became the grammar of a new colony. The emphasis on the book meant that written work was seen as the only repository of religion and knowledge. This meant that cultures with alternative modes of inscribing the sacred were rejected as primitive. The European valorization of the book, associated with literacy and authority, was thus closely aligned with the colonization of "bookless" cultures. The Western book became the symbol of the letter, conceived of as a carrier of knowledge from the New World to the European metropolis, and, most important, as a means of transmitting Eurocentric knowledge and ideas from the metropolis to the colony. This was the colonization of languages.

Historiography and archiving, argues Mignolo, are Western inventions that are complicit with early modern empire-building. Because the native oral and visual cultures of the New World had already been rejected, the next logical step was to argue that history was composed only of words (though alternative views of history writing did exist, mainly in the works of Francesco Patrizi and Eguiara y Eguren). The lack of words meant a lack of events—history—and hence it fell to the Spaniards to "record" New World history. History is linked with rhetoric in this colonial move in Vico and Boturini.

European forms of writing such as reportage of foreign events and ethnic histories (associated with Peter Martyr, among others) were attempts to colonize genres. Continuing his interest in the rhetoric of colonialism, Mignolo unpacks the assumptions and appropriative methods of European genres such as the encyclopedia and the codex. Writing was presumed to have the power to transform—or Christianize, as Mignolo argues—the native. Hybrid genres like the Sahugún's Florentine Codex organized knowledge obtained from various native (nonwritten) sources in specific ways, so that the alien culture could be made accessible to European (colonial) readers. This was the colonization of memory.

Moving on to cartography, Mignolo surveys the rise and development of the European spatial organization of the world. Mignolo argues that the shapes of the human body, landscape, and cosmos in European cartography often sought to identify and highlight cultural differences. The geometric rationalization of space redistributed ethnic maps by decentralizing ethnic centers. Reading the history of spatial and cartographic representations of the Americas, Mignolo suggests that locating the New World or the East Indies on the map symbolizes a politics of naming, representing, and, finally, administering the barbarians.

In his afterword, Mignolo emphasizes the need to shift from the idea of representation to that of enactment. Enactment, for Mignolo, is an alternative cognition. It underlines the fact that the organism constitutes and places itself in the world. The notion of enactment enables us to see the activities of cultures in colonialism, activities that effect transformations in speech, memorizing/recording, and the charting of space. In his "Second Thoughts," Mignolo accounts for more recent critical work on...