Abstract
Comparing literatures and cultures provides perspectives on a person’s own language, culture, and nation. It allows for a deeper knowledge of self and social context, so it is as self-regarding as it is altruistic. All of us are other to ourselves, so that our personal pasts and the past of our language, culture, and nation, with all their changes and shifting configurations, tell us about ourselves. They also discipline or ironize, some might say relativize, ourselves and, paradoxically, put us all into relief and keep us from narcissism or solipsism. The classical past, the expansion of Europe, the Reformation, and the various revolutions and evolutions since then help us to read our present without being presentist. The Viking expansion, which also included the Norman Conquest of 1066, is a great force in Europe and the New World (Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland). Moreover, the quest for a trading route to Asia by sea, which included the expansion of Portugal into Africa, then Brazil and India, as well as Columbus’s westward enterprise, was as crucial an event as there was in the history of globalization. Ultimately, the move from the biological order to the industrial one, based on fossil fuels, like coal, oil, and gas, revolutionalized the world and transformed the face of the earth even more than the agricultural revolution 10,000 years before. This is one way to explain why I speak about earlier periods in my discussions of literature, theory, and history and, more particularly, about otherness and authority here.
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Notes
Otherness is a vast field. Here, I mention briefly some pertinent discussions of otherness. The discussion of the stranger and otherness stretches back to Herodotus and beyond as I argue in this chapter. Montaigne is another important figure. In 1943, in Les Cahiers du sud, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote on Albert Camus and the idea of the stranger in his novel by that title. For a recent translation of this and on his work on existentialism and humanism, see Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, introduction by Annie Cohen-Solal; preface and notes by Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).
For work related to my chapter, which discusses otherness in the colonial, see Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations V (Paris: Gallimard, 1964) and his Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism, trans. Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewer, and Terry McWilliams (London: Routledge, 2001), an English translation of that work.
See also Emmanuel Levinas, Le temps et l’autre (Paris: B. Arthaud, 1947).
On otherness and Europe’s bad conscience, see Emmanuel Lévinas, Entre Nous, Essais sur le-penser-à-l’autre (Paris: Editions de Bernard Grasset et Fasquelle, 1991) and his Entre Nous, trans. Michael Bradley Smith and Barbara Harshav (1998; London: Continuum, 2006), 164–66.
See also Jacques Derrida, Psyché: inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987).
Jacques Derrida, Psyche: Invention of the Other (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Derrida relates psyche, allegory, fable, and truth to the invention of the other and appeals to Paul de Man’s rhetoric of temporality.
See also Jacques Derrida, Adieu à Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Galilée, 1997), translated as Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
On otherness in a feminist context, see Verena Andermatt Conley, Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine, Expanded Version (1984; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 100–102.
For a discussion of the relation between otherness and subjectivity in light of Freud see Jean Laplanche, La révolution copernicienne (Paris: Aubier, 1992).
Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness (London: Routledge, 1999).
On the relation between alterity and Husserl’s notion of intersubjectivity, see Bertrand Bouckaert, L’idée de l’autre: la question de l’idéalité et de l’altérité chez Husserl des “Logische Untersuchungen” aux “Ideen 1” (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), especially 1–16. I would like to thank Rajnath, the editor, for permission to reprint in this revised form “Recognitions, Otherness and Comparing Literatures and Histories,” Journal of Literary Criticism 12.1–2 (June/December 2008), 130–59. Many thanks to my colleagues in Comparative Literature at the Sorbonne-Nouvelle—Jean Bessière, Philippe Daros, Stéphane Michaud, and Alexandre Stroev—and the students in my doctoral seminar on otherness, in the spring of 2009.
Quoted in Colin Heywood, A History of Childhood: Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 26.
Herodotus, The Persian Wars. trans. George Rawlinson (New York: Modern Library, 1942), 4.110.
Christopher Columbus, The Four Voyages of Columbus: A History in Eight Documents, Including Five By Christopher Columbus, In the Original Spanish, With English Translations, trans. and ed. Cecil Jane (New York: Dover, 1988), 6.
Columbus, 16; see Jonathan Hart, “Images of the Native in Renaissance Encounter Narratives,” ARIEL 25 (October 1994), 55–76.
See Caminha, “Letter;” Jonathan Hart, Comparing Empires: European Colonialism from Portuguese Expansion to the Spanish-American War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, rpt. 2008).
See Les Français en Amérique pendant la première moitié du XVIe siècle, ed. Charles-André Julien, René Herval, and Théodore Beauchesne (Paris, 1946); Voyages au Canada avec les relations des voyages en Amérique de Gonneville, Verranzano et Roberval, ed. Charles-André Julien, René Herval, and Théodore Beauchesne (Paris, 1981).
Richard Eden, A treatyse of the newe India, with other new founde landes and Ilandes, as well eastwarde as westwarde, as they are knowen and found in these our dayes, after the descripcion of Sebastian Munster in his boke of universall Cosmographie: wherein the diligent reader may see the good successe and rewarde of noble and honeste enterpryses, by the which not only worldly ryches are obtayned, but also God is glorified, and the Christian fayth enlarged. Translated out of Latin into Englishe. By Rycharde Eden (London, 1553).
Jean Ribault, Discovery of Terra Florida, trans. Thomas Hacket (London, 1563).
Nicolas Le Challeux, A true and perfect description, of the last voyage or nauigation, attempted by Capitaine Iohn Rybaut, deputie and generall for the French men, into Terra Florida, this yeare past. 1565. Truely sette forth by those that returned from thence, wherein are contayned things as lame[n]table to heare as they haue bene cruelly executed (London, 1566).
Richard Hakluyt, Discourse of Western Planting (London: Hakluyt Society, 1993), 56.
Hakluyt 59; see Jonathan Hart, Representing the New World The English and French Uses of the Example of Spain (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
See Jonathan Hart, “Strategies of Promotion: Some Prefatory Matter of Oviedo, Thevet and Hakluyt,” Imagining Culture: Essays in Early Modern History and Literature, ed. Jonathan Hart (New York: Garland, 1996), 73–94, 201–2.
See Jonathan Hart, Contesting Empires: Opposition, Promotion, and Slavery (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
Bartolomé de Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, trans. Nigel Griffin. London: Penguin, 1992), 3–4.
Michel de Montaigne, Les essais: reproduction typographique de l’exemplaire annoté par l’auteur et conservé à la bibliothèque de Bordeaux (Paris, 1906–31), I, 169.
Michel de Certeau, “Montaigne’s ‘Of Cannibals’: The Savage ‘I,’” Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 69–70; see Hart, Contesting.
Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (1982; New York: Harper, 1984, rpt. 1992), 148, 151.
J. H. Elliott, The Old World and the New 1492–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, rpt. 1992), 11, 20–21, 32, 40, 43.
See J. H. Elliott “Cortés, Veláquez and Charles V,” Hernán Cortés, Letters from Mexico, trans. Anthony Pagden (1971; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986).
Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, rev. 1986), 11.
Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 56.
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© 2011 Jonathan Locke Hart
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Hart, J. (2011). Otherness and Authority. In: Literature, Theory, History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339583_5
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