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Jose Antonio (Tony) Lucero, Joff Hanauer Honors Professor in Western Civilization 2012-14: Reframing Research in the Honors Classroom

Jun 11, 2014
Tony Lucero
Tony Lucero
Jackson School of International Studies

The course I developed as the Hanauer Honors Professor is called "The Borderlands of Western Civilization." Like many of my colleagues, I do not draw a sharp line between my research and teaching interests, so it is hardly a surprise that this course grew out of my research on Indigenous politics in the Americas. The question of how we think about the encounters of the "West and the Rest" (to borrow an unfortunate formulation) is a big question and my course helps students think about some crucial moments in the history of how Europe encountered its "Others." More selfishly, it was meant to help me think about how to think about recent encounters between Indigenous and non-Indigenous worlds (here I steal from the political philosophers: “Anything you can do we can do meta-”).

Let me be more concrete. I am working on a research project on the political history of Werner Herzog's film Fitzcarraldo. This film was set and shot in Peru and generated serious conflicts and controversies. Awajun activists organized against Herzog who was, to make the story richer (and even more meta-), doing a film about colonialism (the story of a rubber baron in the Amazon) while he was arguably creating a very colonial situation by taking over a part of the Amazon and creating separate camps for his European and Native workers. Out of this conflict emerged a set of Native activists who would go on to found the most important political organizations in the Amazon.

I brought this conflict to the course through Les Blank's terrific documentary Burden of Dreams (on the making of Fitzcarraldo). The conversation over that film was terrific and I reconsidered some of my own views on it. But the question of how to think about "encounter" continued to get more interesting as we moved through the syllabus to "exemplary" tales of cultural collision, especially the world-historical year 1492, year of the Re-Conquest of Al-Andalus in Iberia and the start of the Conquest in the Americas. As we read Mara Rosa Menocal's Ornament of the World, a thrilling history of the rise and fall of a remarkably multilingual and pluricultural medieval Spain, our conversations gravitated toward the importance of aesthetics to politics. We talked about the force that the Islamic, Arabic styles of architecture and poetry exerted as magisterial examples of the power of what we might call "vernacular politics," the ways in which the built environment and languages were able to make room for and merge with local realities. Art and aesthetics were not decorative, they were foundational to the political community building of Al-Andalus. There is of course much more to say, but it helped confirm a guiding idea of my research: art and representation are often, maybe always, at the center of how politics is lived, and how orders emerge and become undone.

As we moved to Tvtezan Todorov's controversial Conquest of America, students moved beyond Europe to think about the agency of Native peoples. Many students were surprised by Todorov's treatment of the Aztecs, not as hapless victims, but as a society that had itself recently been forged through conquest. The Spaniards were able to find Native partners, peoples who had recently experienced Aztec violence and thus had little trouble imagining an alliance with the enemy of their enemy. This conversation was then enriched by our seminar's reading of Leslie Marmon Silko's amazing poem, Long Time Ago. This poem tells the story of an ancient contest among Indian witches to see how to come up with the most frightening spell. The winner is a witch who tells a tale of "fish belly white" people who come across the waters and turn all life into things, bringing death wherever they land. The poem ends with the witch saying that the very act of telling the story has already started events. The remarkable part of this poem of Conquest is that it originated in the storytelling of Native peoples. This poem enriched our conversation of Native agency. If we think of Conquest less as what Europeans did to Native peoples, but a Native story that brought in Europeans, suddenly there are new possibilities. Historians have noted that Pizarro and Cortez arrived at times of great unrest in the Andean and Aztec worlds. In a way, the Spanish walked into Native civil wars, and took the opportunities those conflicts offered.

The lesson for my work is that sometimes representatives of Western Civilization are exactly where some Native actors want them to be. Herzog complained that the Native activists selected him because, unlike mining companies or military units, his film was an enemy that could be defeated. He may have had a point. Herzog's film provided an opportunity for Amazonian Native people to constitute a political federation and make possible decades of subsequent Indigenous struggles.

My students and this course have helped me reframe my question and given me new insights into how art is part of politics and how art can inform the study of politics. The students have also taken research projects in exciting new directions. Their latest plan is to create a collaborative radio podcast for their research projects. I love it!