Abstract
In this book, Serge Gruzinski examines the significance and development of a specific juncture within the process known as globalization. This moment, in which ‘many histories suddenly [became] intertwined’ (p. 3), occurred between November 1519 and December 1520, when the Spanish and the Portuguese, respectively, encounter Moctezuma in America and Zhengde in China (p. 147).
Although both China and Mexico followed trajectories far afield from Judeo-Christian monotheism and the Greco-Roman legacy, the author reminds us the two could not be more different. The points of departure and arrival differ as well. On the one hand, if imperial China dates from the third millennium
Therefore, despite their simultaneity these two expeditions yield outcomes as disparate as the lands they trod upon: if the ‘Iberians’ categorically failed in China (where ‘the Portuguese were paralyzed, silenced, and destroyed’, p. 105), they achieved unprecedented success in the Americas. In keeping with this distinction, the expedition to China did not move beyond quickly silenced rumors, whereas the Mexican scene became rapidly infused with tragic posthumous glories. Gruzinski underlines some formative texts, such as the correspondence of Hernán Cortés – that delineate the beginning of a Western literature endemic to the American continent – and the writings of various travelers and European intellectuals (e.g., Vieira, Calvo, Giovio, Cortés, and Pires), considered the first Europeans to contemplate politics beyond the Christian-Muslim world (p. 158). 2
At the same time, Gruzinski notes, unlike Pires’s failed expedition in China, Cortés’s travel did not represent an imperative priority for Spain. Thus, it is not possible to speak of an imperial project or a premeditated conquest. Such a notion could only be a retrospective illusion fomented by a black legend that exaggerates the rapidity of the so-called ‘conquest’ and ignores its slow inception, its debacles, and its improvised quality.
This memory of success is the other face of a forgetfulness that appears to suppress the disaster of the Portuguese expedition, whose members’ negative judgments regarding China (such as those of Vieira and Calvo) had minimal short-term impact. Yet oblivion is a reciprocal reality: if ‘the West only remembers the clashes which succeeded,’ it could be said that China suffers from ‘a remarkable amnesia’ (p. 106). With regard to the Americas, perhaps we could add that forgetfulness is an objective of pillage: no one appears to have noticed that – although a secure future lay ahead for Chinese literature and art –the Mexican codices, for example, were in fact the last manifestations of an art and technology that disappeared (p. 52).
That said, it is also worth noting that the investigatory principles of the book leave some elements missing. Hence, the capability for swift mobilization; the art of gathering and circulating information; the ease of operating at a continental and intercontinental scale; the capacity to mobilize material, human, and military resources at short notice; and a propensity to think on a world scale are not deemed crucial by Gruzinski. At the same time, there is a list of absences (that is, those capabilities that Mexico did not have; p. 22). Let us be clear. This is not an inaccurate list – because surely it is correct to affirm that Mexico did not possess a permanent military (p. 15) or that it was politically fragmented (p. 130); rather, it is a list that tends to define a part of the conflict in terms of what Mexico lacks (which is, implicitly, what Europe – or the ‘Iberians’ – possess).
This is most evident when the author considers a possible indigenous vision of European invaders: ‘no trace survives of anything resembling a conscious and systematic effort . . . to acquire information about, or describe [Europe] . . . no Indian has left us with their personal vision of Spain or of the Old World, and whatever view they formed [has] remained without any written posterity’ (p. 176). It is fitting to inquire whether ‘written,’ ‘systemic,’ or ‘conscious’ conceptual tools are more appropriate for describing the immanent aspects of an Amerindian vision. Aren’t those terms already inclining us to affirm, like the author, that ‘we have neither an Asian nor an Amerindian perspective about the European city’ (p. 147)? 3
An adversative situation arises with the attempt to define the pre-Colombian Mesoamerican world by referring not to its lacunae, but rather by casting it in a positive light. In this book, the characteristics of the Amerindian world are negotiated, whether it is by alluding to its irreducibility – ‘a time . . . irreducible to ours’ (p. 17); or its inaccessibility – ‘indigenous and mestizo accounts . . . inevitably distorted by the trauma of conquest’ (p. 9), ‘the thinking of ancient Mexicas remains forever inaccessible’ (p. 19).
This emphasis on Amerindian incommensurability does not, however, induce the author to resort to such an obsolete concept as ‘resistance.’ Gruzinski recognizes, on the one hand, that it is impossible to speak of a simple imposition and that the conquistadores had to constantly adapt, compromise, and adjust (p. 193); and that, on the other hand, Amerindians not only resisted, but they also reinterpreted, amended, and transformed much of what they received.
In fact, there is a patently renovative appeal in this book. Although the text (regrettably) is not devoid of outmoded conceptions held among scholars of Amerindian communities, for instance, when the author speaks of ‘memories which reproduced the past by emphasizing cycles and repetitions, though also including some doses of linearity’ (p. 13), this is certainly the most interesting aspect of this invaluable work, along with its evocative speculations and generalizations. Why juxtapose the Mexican coastline and the China Sea? The author’s response is clear: to mitigate ‘our’ inevitable Eurocentrism and encourage new questions, to restore links severed by national historiographies, and submit those newly re-established linked elements to a globalist examination in which they interact with each other and no longer solely with Europe. Gruzinski adds that we can only aspire to a history that coheres to our time by shifting the center of attention and not merely inverting points of view, much like what occurs with those approximations that allude to a ‘vision of the conquered’ (p. 59). Thus, it is imperative to abandon the ‘time-honored frameworks within which what remains of historical memory still operates’ (p. 239). Finally, always expressed with poetic elegance, the author’s propositions could not fail to seduce those interested in history and the contemporary evolutions of these two worlds.
Translated from Spanish by Natalia Rivera Morales