"1492: A 'New World' View"
 
by Sylvia Wynter
 
in The New World (Spring/Summer 1991, No. 2, pp. 4-5)
 
This article is an excerpt from a position paper for the
Smithsonian Symposium "Race, Discourse and the Origin of the
Americas: A New World View of 1492," scheduled for October 31-
November 1, 1991.
 
The "New World" Question
     Columbus and his crew landed on an island in the Caribbean in
October 1492.  What was it about this event that would lead it to
"radically change the world" (Gonzalez, 1990)?  Why should that
date, more than any other, according to Tzvetan Todorov (1984),
have marked "the beginning of the modern era"?  Most urgently, how
are we, who are inhabitants of this part of the world where
Columbus landed and consequently of both European and non-European
cultural and racial origins, to look back on and interpret that
event?
     Spain, and Europe in general, are preparing to celebrate this
event and have chosen to call it "The First Encounters."  But the
view from the Americas and the Caribbean, unlike that of Europe,
must confront the fact that a non-European and indigenous
collective historical memory also exists.  This memory, in marked
contrast to the triumphalist schoolbook stereotype that "in 1492,
Columbus sailed the ocean blue" and "discovered America," is
scarred.  As Wendy Rose (1990) reminds us, for some people this
epochal event is a "time of mourning."
     Consider that within one generation of 1492, Columbus, the
conquistadors, the settlers and the new diseases that they brought
to the Caribbean had destroyed almost all indigenous human life on
the islands.  Thus, Jose Marti of Cuba mourned, "A page had been
torn from the Book of the Universe!"  Moreover, the linkage of that
event to the forcible capture and "Middle Passage" travail of the
peoples of Africa to serve as substitute slave labor for the former
native population is also historical reality.
     So, how are we--as descendants of both the invaders and the
invaded, the enslavers and the enslaved, whose process of
conflictual interaction laid the matrix of an emergent vernacular
and existential culture of the Americas--to look back on, interpret
and mark that event of 1492?  For if the displacement and defeat of
the indigenous people who first domesticated this continent are
celebrated on the day when "Columbus discovered America," then so
also are the "five centuries of humiliation" (Van Sertima, 1976)
undergone by the peoples of Africa and their diaspora descendants.
 
The Question of Human Perception
     In the editorial section of a recent New York Times, the
writer Hans Koning tells of groups who are in the process of
organizing a counter-movement to the official "celebrations" of the
500th anniversary of Columbus' landing in the Americas (Koning,
1990).  In particular, Koning narrates the story of a woman visitor
to a 1492 exhibition in the Southwest titled "First Encounters." 
An American Indian was demonstrating in protest outside the
exhibition, and the woman visitor called out angrily, vehemently to
him, "You are spoiling the pleasure of our children!"
     This incident of "the Protest-ant and the Woman Celebrant"
brings out a feature that is new with respect to how the
contemporary Americas and Caribbean are to view, interpret and
commemorate the event that lies at our origin.  For it sharply
separates the European view of 1492 from the view whose conflictual
nature the peoples of the Americas and the Caribbean are now called
upon to confront and resolve.
     From the historical perspective of Europe, 1492 marks the date
of its first expansion into Africa and the Americas, as well as of
its eventual rise in the 19th century to become a globally
hegemonic civilization.  But for us, the immediacy of the Celebrant
versus Protest-ant contradiction impels a new question, which is
specifically "new world."  That is, What are the rules that shape
and govern human perception?  What are the rules that allow the
Woman Celebrant to live existentially in the Americas and yet
continue to accept the purely triumphalist, Europe-centered terms
of the displacers rather than the dualistic and conflictual terms
of the Americas and the Caribbean?
 
Western Thinkers
     An understanding of this problem is revealed by historian T.M.
Roberts (1985), who explains that for the Americas and all the rest
of the world, all that has happened is the "echo" of Western
thinkers and a reflection of the way of life which their modes of
thought have prescribed.  The entire world has now come to see and
know reality through the mediation of the master-categories and
conceptual frameworks generated from the varying "images of the
human" put in place by Western European thinkers from the
Renaissance onward.
     Returning to the example of Koning's Woman Celebrant, it is
clear that she interprets the event of 1492 in terms of the United
States as a generically White and Euro-American nation-state--a
notion deriving from the American history she was taught in school. 
That history continues to perceive the event of 1492 from the
perspective of the existential reality of Western Europe, to whose
peoples the Woman Celebrant continues to be vertically linked by
the triumphalist terms of the Vulgate interpretation and its
"unitary system of meanings" (Castoriadis, 1981).
     This interpretive-perceptual schema of the Woman Celebrant
puts her in a relation of sharp opposition to the Protest-ant
American Indian.  Although they are of the same nation-state, they
do not share a common historical consciousness or perceptual
matrix.
     Yet paradoxically, the cognitive matrices of Western thinkers
also entrap the Protest-ant, making him continue to see the event
of 1492 only in terms of the triumphalism of the upper-dogs.  In
general, so completely have Western thinkers and actors
"transformed the world in their image" that other struggles
directed against this hegemonic dominance (whether the formidable
one of Marxism or more recently of feminism, Afro-centrism and
multiculturalism), have been couched in theoretical terms that are
themselves generated from the cognitive matrices invented by
Western European thinkers.
     In view of this paradox, we ask why we must remain caught in
the conflict described by Gregory Bateson, where "we just go round
and round in terms of the old premises," unable to call those very
premises into question (Bateson, 1969).
 
A "Root Expansion of Thought"
     In his novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert
Pirsig (1974) challenged the schoolbook stereotype that Columbus
has been made into.  Rather than accepting a "territorial" or
primarily "technological" interpretation of Columbus' achievement,
Pirsig argues that in crossing an ocean believed at that time to be
non-navigable, Columbus' actual feat involved a "root expansion of
thought."
     The point here is that Columbus' voyage, and the chain of
reasoning which led to it, challenged the belief structure
sustaining both the "image of the earth" and the rigid noble/non-
noble caste hierarchy of the feudal-Christian order of that time. 
In the symbolic geography of the image of the earth, the orbis
(world) of Christian Redemption was a Jerusalem-centered,
tripartite world of Europe, Asia and Africa.  Concomitantly, the
Western hemisphere as antipodal lands to the orbis (that is, as the
orbis alter, or Other World/Earth), should have been submerged
under the infinite expanse of water of the encircling Ocean Sea
(the Atlantic), and as such non-habitable and non-reachable (see
Thorndike, 1934).  Despite this theocentric, Christian version of
Aristotle's physics, Columbus jotted down in the margin of a page
of Pierre d'Ailly's Imago Mundi that "Between the edge of Spain and
the beginning of India, the sea is short and can be crossed in a
matter of a few days."  Thus, Columbus' challenge, factual errors
and all, to the prevailing knowledge of his age was, in his words,
Mar Totum navigable--that is, "All seas are navigable."
     Carrying his thought further, Pirsig argues that our present
space exploration can be effected within the context of a mode of
reason that is "adequate to handle it."  Thus, it does not involve
a true expansion of thought.  Any "really new exploration" that
would look to us today the way the world looked to Columbus,
according to Pirsig, "would have to be in an entirely new
direction," since it would have to move into "realms beyond
[present day] reason."
     An analogous call for a "really new exploration" has also been
made by the African scholar Theophile Obenga.  Obenga (1987) argues
that Europe's five centuries of triumph and dominance cannot be
understood without taking note of the central role played by the
new type of "lay" intellectual who emerged in Europe during the
Renaissance.  It was the synergistic interaction of "this new type
of intellectual" (such as printers, editors, merchants, jurists and
writers) that would lead to the profound "intellectual mutation,"
which gave rise to a Europe new in "social, economic, cultural and
scientific terms."
     Central to this process, Obenga continues, was the Renaissance
intellectuals' reconceptualization of their past through a
revalorization of Europe's Greco-Roman intellectual legacy.  That
legacy had been reinterpreted and stigmatized in religio-Christian
terms during the feudal era.  But in the Renaissance, it was
rediscovered and enriched by "astronomers, cartographers and
geographers" who created "a new image of the earth and another
conception of the cosmos."
     Obenga concludes that African intellectuals, if they are to
deal with the vast dimensions of the problems plaguing their
continent and their peoples worldwide, have no alternative but to
effect a second such "intellectual mutation."  This, too, would
have to be done through a reconceptualization of the history of
Africa, as one reaching back to the very emergence of the
phenomenon of the human "from within the animal kingdom," to the
rock paintings of the Grotto-Apollo in Namibia (dating back 28,000
years B.C.), and then to the flowering of this hominization in
Ancient Egypt.  Thus, Ancient Egypt would serve Africa in the same
way the Greco-Roman world has served Europe.
 
Toward a New World View of 1492
     In this context, the dispute over the interpretation of 1492
opens the possibility of going beyond the limits of our present
nation-state system of symbolic representations and attendant modes
of cognition and perception.  We need to move beyond "conventional
reason" in a way that parallels Columbus' "root expansion of
thought" (Pirsig, 1974).  Like Obenga's new type of intellectual,
we must break out of our present culture-specific mode of cognitive
closure, its related perceptual matrix, and correlated socio-racial
and other hierarchies.  Indeed, the Janus-faced character of 1492
and its aftermath (evident in its dual effects of human
emancipation and enslavement), can now be seen as the result of the
partial and incomplete nature of that first intellectual mutation. 
For that first intellectual mutation effectively led to the natural
sciences, but left us all in the dark regarding the rules that
govern our modes of cognition and, concomitantly, the perceptual
matrices which orient our collective behaviors.
     A New World view of 1492 therefore has to move beyond the
"master categories" and conceptual frameworks of our present system
of knowledge and the rules that govern its modes of self, other and
societal perception.  It should challenge symbolic representations,
such as "Columbus discovered America," which invisiblize the co-
humanity of America's indigenous peoples.  It should also include
a radical change from the "image of the human" as a natural
organism which pre-exists culture, to an image of man emerging out
of the animal kingdom and only coming into being simultaneously
with culture--that is, representation/discourse.
     A New World view of 1492 should seek to reconceptualize the
past in terms of the existential reality specific to our continent. 
It must recognize, as Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier (1976)
indicates, that all the major and hitherto-separated races of the
world have been brought together in the new world to work out a
common destiny.  This destiny would entail the transformation of
our original dominant/subordinant social structure and its
attendant perceptual and cognitive matrices into new ones founded
on reciprocal relations.
     In conclusion, we must come to terms with the tragic paradox
of 1492, which is reflected in Koning's incident of the Woman
Celebrant and the American Indian Protest-ant.  The fundamental
opposition between the Celebrant and Protest-ant is unique to our
"new world" historico-existential situation.  To resolve it, we
must now replicate Columbus' creation of a "new image of the earth"
by creating a new "image of the human," based on a trans-racial
mode of inclusive altruism, beyond the limits of the national
subject and the nation-state.
 
References
Bateson, Gregory.  "Conscious Purpose vs. Nature" in The Dialectics
     of Liberation.  D. Cooper (ed.), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
Carpentier, A.  The Lost Steps (translated by Harriet De Onis). 
     New York: Knopf, 1976.
Castoriadis, C.  "The Imaginary: Creation in the Socio-Historical
     Domain," in Paisley Livingston (ed.), Disorder and Order:
     Proceedings of the Stanford International Symposium.  Stanford
     Literature Studies 1, Anma Libri, September 14-18, 1981.
Koning, H.  "Don't Celebrate 1492, Mourn It," in The New York
     Times, Op/Ed Page, August 14, 1990.  See also H. Koning,
     Columbus: His Enterprise.  New York: Monthly Review Press,
     1976.
Gonzalez, Alicia.  "The New World Will Discuss Process."  The New
     World (a Smithsonian publication), No. 1, Spring 1990, p. 3.
Obenga, Theophile.  "Sous-Theme: La pensee africaine e la
     philosphie dans une perspective de renouvellement." 
     Unpublished paper presented at a symposium organized by
     FESPAC, Dakar, December 15-19, 1987.
Pirsig, Robert.  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  New
     York: William Morrow, 1974.
Roberts, T.M.  The Triumph of the West.  Boston: Little Brown &
     Company, 1985.
Rose, Wendy.  "For Some It's a Time of Mourning."  The New World (a
     Smithsonian publication), No. 1, Spring 1990, p. 4.
Thorndike, L.  History of Magic and Experimental Science: 14th &
     15th Centuries (Vol. 4).  New York: Columbia University Press,
     1934.
Todorov, Tzvetan.  The Conquest of America: The Question of the
     Other.  New York: Harper, 1984.
Van Sertima, I.  They Came Before Columbus.  New York: Random
     House, 1976.
                                                         WYNTER01