At dawn on August 8, 1444, Infante Henrique—Prince Henry of Portugal, the Navigator—sat on horseback at the port of Lagos patiently awaiting the disembarkation of cargo that had arrived from Cape Blanco. Spectators assembled to witness the portentous ritual that was about to occur. People from town and countryside lined the streets and crowded together on boats, all hoping to catch sight of this sign of Portugal’s arrival as a world power. The day before this staged event, Lançarote de Freitas, the man who had led the very successful expedition in search of this cargo, had suggested to his lord, Prince Henry, that it be taken from the ship and herded to a suitable place for auction and distribution.
Lançarote’s suggestion pleased the Infante. The place of auction and distribution would be a field just outside the city gates. The early-morning unloading time, also suggested by Lançarote, would catch the cargo during a lull in their lament. His rationale for these suggestions arose from the source of the lament: “Because of the long time we have been at sea as well as for the great sorrow that you must consider they have at heart, at seeing themselves away from the land of their birth, and placed in captivity, without having any understanding of what their end is to be.”1 Carefully planned and perfectly executed, the disembarkation and movement from port to field, from hostile sea to Portuguese interior, had the effect Prince Henry desired. These actions announced boldly that under his leadership Portugal would stand beside the Muslims, Valencians, Catalans, and Genoese as peoples with power over black flesh. They now emerged as bearers of black gold, slave traders.2
This event did not mark the first time slaves had appeared at the port of Lagos. The newness of the event lay in the number of slaves, 235, in their place of origin, parts of Africa theretofore unvisited by the Portuguese, and, most important, in the ritual that surrounded their sale. This ritual was deeply Christian, Christian in ways that were obvious to those who looked on that day and in ways that are probably even more obvious to people today. Once the slaves arrived at the field, Prince Henry, following his deepest Christian instincts, ordered a tithe be given to God through the church. Two black boys were given, one to the principal church in Lagos and another to the Franciscan convent on Cape Saint Vincent. This act of praise and thanksgiving to God for allowing Portugal’s successful entrance into maritime power also served to justify the royal rhetoric by which Prince Henry claimed his motivation was the salvation of the soul of the heathen.3
The immediate focus in this story, however, is not the famed Prince Henry the Navigator, although he is a central actor and, as will become apparent later in this chapter, an incredibly important part of my concern. Nor is the immediate focus the African slaves, though they are the point of the matter. The immediate focus is the person who was charged to record, narrate, and interpret this ritual, Henry’s royal chronicler, Gomes Eanes de Azurara (or Zurara). It was Zurara who pronounced the moods and motivations of royalty. It was Zurara who set in texts the theological vision Prince Henry performed by his actions. Zurara did not share in Henry’s power, but he shared the stage with Henry, and in that sense he manifested his own power, the power of the storyteller. Zurara might be described accurately as a pre-Enlightenment historian, but that would be a soulless description. Zurara was a Christian intellectual at the dawn of the age of European colonialism, charged with offering the only real account of official history, a theological account.
At this time in the history of late medieval Christendom all accounts of events, royal or common, were theological accounts; that is, Christian accounts. Zurara, however, draws one’s attention precisely because of what begins to happen to theological vision and Christian voice at this moment in history. He was not an official theologian of the church. Born in the ever-widening echo of Thomas Aquinas’s thinking on the church and well before the epic-making theologians of Salamanca and Alcalá, Gomes Eanes (as he signed his name) did not rub shoulders with the keenest theological minds of the time, although he received enviable scholastic training. He was apprenticed to his predecessor as chronicler, Fernão Lopes, and given complete access to the library of the royal court, one of the strongest collections in Europe. There Zurara followed a Renaissance pattern of reading, both in scope and character. He read much—from Christian Scripture to theology to philosophy to astrology (science), from Aristotle to Dante to Averroes to Augustine, Aquinas, and Peter Lombard to medieval epics and romances. This serious intellectual work prepared him to assume the mantle laid down by Lopes.4
Zurara’s ascension to the position of royal chronicler implied no small secretarial post. In addition to being the chronicler, he was in charge of the royal library and all its records. He had also been appointed a commander in the elite military Order of Christ, in which the vows of celibacy, poverty, and obedience structured the ordered existence of nobles, knights, and squires, an order under the leadership of Prince Henry himself. Zurara writes as one seated next to power, and from that position he wrote the important accounts of the Navigator’s successes. His Chronicle of the Capture of Ceuta (1450) and his Chronicle of the Deeds of Arms Involved in the Conquest of Guinea (1457) remain crucial narratives of a founding moment in Christendom’s colonialism.5
Zurara narrates this ritual of slave capture and auction on August 8, 1444, in his Guinean chronicle, showing himself to be a royal chronicler in beautiful form, telling the story of Portugal’s rise by means of the chivalric genius of Prince Henry, the bravado of his loyal men, and the divine blessing of God. One could call this narrative royal religious ideology or pious propaganda, but by the time modern readers arrive at his account of this moment they see something different, even prophetic. As Zurara describes the event planned by Prince Henry and his assistant Lançarote, the triumphal coherence of his narrative starts to crack open. It is the only time in the entire chronicle that he set a chapter in a penitent prayer:
O, Thou heavenly Father—who with thy powerful hand, without alteration of thy divine essence, governest all the infinite company of thy Holy City, and controllest all the revolutions of higher worlds, divided into nine spheres, making the duration of ages long or short according as it pleaseth Thee—I pray Thee that my tears may not wrong my conscience; for it is not their religion but their humanity that maketh mine to weep in pity for their sufferings. And if the brute animals, with their bestial feelings, by a natural instinct understand the suffering of their own kind, what wouldst Thou have my human nature to do on seeing before my eyes that miserable company, and remembering that they too are of the generation of the sons of Adam?6
Zurara has not changed. This is still the story of Prince Henry. But at this moment the story of Portugal and its leader has been displaced by the suffering presence of these Africans. The power of Zurara’s description draws life from the pathos of these slaves. He invokes the idea of divine providence, of which he is a firm believer, and as he does so he locates a question that will from this time forward shadow this doctrinal theme: How should I understand the suffering of these Africans?7 Even when not speaking of Africans, every articulation of providence by colonial masters and their subjects will carry the echo of Zurara’s question. Zurara recognizes their humanity, their common ancestry with Adam. One should not, however, read moral disgust into his words. Zurara asks God in this prayer to grant him access to the divine design to help him interpret this clear sign of God-ordained Portuguese preeminence over black flesh. He seeks from God the kind of interpretation that would ease his conscience and make the event unfolding in front of him more morally palatable. His question seeds a problem of theodicy born out of the colonialist question bound to the colonialist project.
The irony that this question is posed in a Christian prayer that grasps the divine immutability must not go unnoticed. The idea of divine immutability anchors humans in the actions of a God who does not repent, change, or get caught by surprise but who works out without failure the divine will in space and time. That idea, even with the Scholastic incrustations of Zurara’s time, still carried the strong flavor of intimacy and trust in a God who is faithful and loving, even if mysterious. It makes sense that Zurara invokes it in the context of prayer. To do so exhibits his spiritual schooling in the Psalms, which show that the proper questioning of God should indeed take place inside prayer to God. Divine immutability rightly understood holds humans and their questioning of God inside knowledge of a loving and faithful God who hears their pained inquiries. The problem here is that Zurara will put divine immutability to strange new use. He employs providence, making it work at the slave auction. He then offers the famous account that has often been partially quoted:8
On the next day, which was the 8th of the month of August, very early in the morning, by reason of the heat, the seamen began to make ready their boats, and to take out those captives, and carry them on shore, as they were commanded. And these, placed all together in that field, were a marvelous sight; for amongst them were some white enough, fair to look upon, and well proportioned; others were less white like mulattoes; others again were as black as Ethiops [Ethiopians], and so ugly, both in features and in body, as almost to appear (to those who saw them) the images of a lower hemisphere. But what heart could be so hard as not to be pierced with piteous feeling to see that company? For some kept their heads low and their faces bathed in tears, looking one upon another; others stood groaning very dolorously, looking up to the height of heaven, fixing their eyes upon it, crying out loudly, as if asking help of the Father of Nature; others struck their faces with the palms of their hands, throwing themselves at full length upon the ground; others made their lamentations in the manner of a dirge, after the custom of their country. And though we could not understand the words of their language, the sound of it right well accorded with the measure of their sadness.9
Few places in the chronicle touch the intricacy of this account. Zurura slows the story down to give us sight of this suffering as well as to express a racial calculation. He goes through the differences in flesh and spirit, body and beauty that will become an abiding scale of existence:
But to increase their sufferings still more, there now arrived those who had charge of the division of the captives, and who began to separate one from another, in order to make an equal partition of the fifths; and then was it needful to part fathers from sons, husbands from wives, brothers from brothers. No respect was shown either to friends or relations, but each fell where his lot took him. O powerful fortune, that with thy wheels doest and undoest, compassing the matters of this world as pleaseth thee, do thou at least put before the eyes of that miserable race some understanding of matters to come; that they may receive some consolation in the midst of their great sorrow. And you who are so busy in making that division of the captives, look with pity upon so much misery; and see how they cling one to the other, so that you can hardly separate them. And who could finish that partition without very great toil? For as often as they had placed them in one part the sons, seeing their fathers in another, rose with great energy and rushed over to them; the mothers clasped their other children in their arms, and threw themselves flat on the ground with them; receiving blows with little pity for their own flesh, if only they might not be torn from them. And so troublously they finished the partition.10
Zurara ends this chapter and this important episode in the chronicle with Prince Henry bringing a holy coherence to the whole matter:
The Infante was there, mounted upon a powerful steed, and accompanied by his retinue, making distribution of his favours, as a man who sought to gain but small treasure from his share; for of the forty-six souls that fell to him as his fifth, he made a very speedy partition of these for his chief riches lay in his purpose; for he reflected with great pleasure upon the salvation of those souls that before were lost. And certainly his expectation was not in vain; for, as we said before, as soon as they understood our language they turned Christians with very little ado; and I who put together this history into this volume, saw in the town of Lagos boys and girls (the children and grandchildren of those first captives, born in this land) as good and true Christians as if they had directly descended, from the beginnings of the dispensation of Christ, from those who were first baptized.11
Zurara deploys a rhetorical strategy of containment, holding slave suffering inside a Christian story that will be recycled by countless theologians and intellectuals of every colonialist nation. The telos and the denouement of the event will be enacted as an order of salvation, an ordo salutis—African captivity leads to African salvation and to black bodies that show the disciplining power of the faith. Zurara clearly intends the text to be read in this way. But his narrative inadvertently exposes a deeper point of coherence that betrays his idealized vision of Prince Henry. That point of coherence counteracts his placement of the Infante and his actions as the point of salvific coherence. The deeper point of coherence is the suffering Christ image, the paradigmatic image of suffering carried in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Zurara’s rhetoric moves inexplicably near biblical allusions and accounts of Jesus’ suffering: “Therefore, to consecrate the people by his own blood, Jesus also suffered outside the gate. Let us then go to him outside the camp, bearing the stigma that he bore” (Hebrews 13:12–13 NEB).
Zurara wrote a passion narrative, one that reads the gestures of slave suffering inside the suffering of the Christ.12 The christological architecture his words fall into is inescapable, words tracing out the actual frame of Jesus’ own march of suffering, separation, and death. Both Jesus and the slaves suffer outside the city gates. Outside the city gate for Jesus meant suffering in a place designated by the Roman state for displaying its considerable power over bodies. The parallel with the slaves is remarkable. They too stand outside the city gates and mark the orchestration of the Portuguese state over their lives. This christological architecture of the sale of slaves like the Christ event signifies a similar instrumentality, a similar use of the body for the sake of the state. As Zurara articulates the exercise of church and state power over bodies he echoes some of the deepest realities of Jesus’ agony and in effect triggers misapprehension and reversal similar to those found in the condemnation of Jesus. The innocent suffer the penalty of the guilty. Like Jesus, these peoples of distant lands are brought to a place where a crucifying identity, slave identity, will be forever fastened like a cross to their bodies: “They brought Jesus to the place called Golgotha, which means ‘Place of a Skull,’ and they offered him drugged wine, but he did not take it. Then they fastened him to the cross” (Mark 15:22–24a NEB).
The crucifixion portrays Christ’s powerlessness, a powerlessness shared by the chronicler, who is helpless to do anything other than remember the scene and tell the story. Zurara places himself in his story in the position of one who watches helplessly as horror unfolds. His position in the chronicle does not align with the positions of Pilate and the women who wept at the suffering of Jesus of Nazareth. Zurara takes a position like that of the writers of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, who recall Jesus’ torture-induced agony. His language here does not claim a connection between the two agonies, of slave and savior. But his language cannot prevent it. Jesus prostrated on the ground at Gethsemane and contorted on the cross personifies tribulation through his groans, tears, and loud cries, his eyes steadfastly on heaven seeking paternal consolation. In comparison, slave flesh throws itself to the ground, groans, fixes its eyes on heaven, and cries loudly, “as if asking help of the Father of Nature.” Holy body and slave body act the same, but Zurara will not allow himself to see a Jesus-like cry of dereliction in the slaves’ cries. That would be to see too much. The Father of Nature will not be fully identified with the Father of Jesus Christ. But Zurara comes close to it. He joins two forms of indecipherability, the screams of Jesus and the screams of the slaves. The words of the slaves expose a chasm between perception and right interpretation. In like manner the following passage from Mark’s gospel shows Christ’s words being misunderstood. Those pitiful words mark for the hearers their inability to join perceived pain to true interpretation: “At midday a darkness fell over the whole land, which lasted till three in the afternoon; and at three Jesus cried aloud, ‘Eloï, Eloï, lema sabachthani?’ which means ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ Hearing this, some of the bystanders said, ‘Listen! He is calling Elijah.’ Then Jesus gave a loud cry and died” (Mark 15:33–34, 37 NEB).”
While the listeners in this passage misinterpret Christ’s words Mark does not. Yet in Zurara’s narrative neither listener nor writer can translate the words uttered by this soon-to-be chattel. The action of church and state power, however, was not thwarted by linguistic boundaries. The languages of the newly formed slaves required no hope of a Pentecostal miracle, no need to pray for interpretation, because the imperial reflex on display captured strange tongues and drowned them in the familiar sound of Portuguese. Indeed, one may discern an evil prophecy created and soon to be fulfilled in this burial of native tongues beneath the loud sound of Portuguese: The languages of the enslaved will be bound to the languages of the Europeans, as peasant to royalty, as the lesser to the greater. Unknown tongues will be overcome not by a surprising linguistic act of God, but by the energies of market and nation-state.
Another crucial parallel between these two narratives is the central role of death. Christ takes on death to overcome it, while slaves are bound to death by being killed and through its use as a threat in order to subdue them. This is a reversal of the reversal, a christological deformation. That is, the body of Jesus will ultimately indicate the victory of God over death, but in this horrific scene the African’s body indicates the ultimate victory of death. The holy use of Jesus’ body—the one who became a slave to die as a sinner for humankind—parallels the separation of slaves into lots for Portuguese servitude. Echoing the merciless beating of Jesus, mothers are beaten, Zurara observes, “with little pity for their own flesh,” as they cling hopelessly to their children, attempting to prevent the tearing away. At the end, all that remains is the dividing of the slaves into equal lots, just as all that was left was the dividing of the Savior’s garments. What Mark writes, “They shared out his clothes, casting lots to decide what each should have,” reveals the telos of the captured body, consumption (Mark 15:24b NEB).
Prince Henry emerges from this segment of the chronicle as the stabilizing focal point, moving the reader out of the chaos of this first auction. His powerful presence overcomes the screams, cries, beatings, and noise of the captives as well as the horrified cries of some of the onlookers. He will lead them into the light of salvation for untold generations. Yet Zurara gave too much in this story. It will not all fit easily into the account. From this point forward this account haunts his constant justification of the slave trade—we, the Portuguese, will save them. They will become Christians. Yet inadvertently, in telling the story of Portugal’s rise, Zurara joins the slave body to the body of Jesus. He would not have done this on purpose, as he seems unaware of the immense tragedy of the moment he has entered. But Zurara also reveals he is not innocent. He knows—behold the man! Zurara prays, he cries, he speaks to those who do the dirty work of mutilating the black body.
The christological pattern of his narrative illumines the cosmic horror of this moment and also helps the reader recognize the unfolding of a catastrophic theological tragedy. Long before one would give this event a sterile, lifeless label such as “one of the beginning moments of the Atlantic slave trade,” something more urgent and more life altering is taking place in the Christian world, namely, the auctioning of bodies without regard to any form of human connection. This act is carried out inside Christian society, as part of the communitas fidelium. This auction will draw ritual power from Christianity itself while mangling the narratives it evokes, establishing a distorted pattern of displacement.
Christianity will assimilate this pattern of displacement. Not just slave bodies, but displaced slave bodies, will come to represent a natural state. From this position they will be relocated into Christian identity. The backdrop of their existence will be, from this moment forward, the market. Zurara narrates this horror of displacement within a strange new soteriological orientation. Divine immutability yields Christian character—an unchanging God wills to create Christians out of slaves and slaves out of those black bodies that will someday, the Portuguese hope, claim to be Christian.
Slave society was not the new reality appearing here. Zurara understood enough Scripture, Christian tradition, and ecclesial and state polities to articulate a hermeneutics of forced servitude. The new creation here begins with Zurara’s simple articulation of racial difference: “And these, placed all together in that field, were a marvelous sight; for amongst them were some white enough, fair to look upon, and well proportioned; others were less white like mulattoes; others again were as black as Ethiops [Ethiopians], and so ugly, both in features and in body, as almost to appear (to those who saw them) the images of a lower hemisphere.”13 Through comparison, he describes aesthetically and thereby fundamentally identifies his subjects. There are those who are almost white—fair to look upon and well-proportioned; there are those who are in between—almost white like mulattoes; and there are those who are as black as Ethiopians, whose existence is deformed. Their existence suggests bodies come from the farthest reaches of hell itself.14 Zurara invokes, in this passage, a scale of existence, with white at one end and black at the other end and all others placed in between.
This is not the first time the words white and black indicate something like identity. Their anthropological use in the Iberian and North African regions has an episodic history that extends well before Zurara’s utterances.15 Zurara, however, exhibits an aesthetic that is growing in power and reach as the Portuguese and Spanish begin to join the world they imagined with the world they encounter through travel and discovery. In the fourteenth-century geographical novel The Book of Knowledge of All Kingdoms (also known as The Book of Knowledge), these two worlds, the imaginary and the real, are joined.16 It is fundamentally a Christian text, beginning with its invocation of the triune identity of God in proper orthodox form. At the beginning of the book the author situates his own history within multiple accounts of time—Jewish, Christian, pagan, Muslim—in a way that could, with appropriate qualifications, be seen as quite culturally generous, if not downright pluralist. This work, known to Prince Henry and Zurara, does not offer a straightforwardly derogatory view of black flesh.17 Rather its comparison is subtle. Black is the result of environmental harm. Such harmed flesh, burnt flesh is not present among whites.
The author, in recounting his travels to different places, notes several times that the people are black, or black as pitch. They are Christian, yet they are black. As the author draws near the land of Prester John, the priest-king believed to govern a holy realm and a great army of African warriors, he again notes the people’s particulars: “But they are as black as pitch and they burn themselves with fire on their foreheads with the sign of the cross in recognition of their baptism. And although these people are black, they are men of good understanding and good mind.”18 Christian and black are juxtaposed—the one overcoming the other. The land is hot but Christian, so the people are black yet in a condition of grace. This graced but harmed condition of black bodies stands in stark contrast to the bodies of those from the land the author describes as India. That land is equally hot as the land of the blacks, but the towns are close to the sea, and the moist air tempers the heat. The result is a different body: “And in this way they derived beautiful bodies and elegant forms and fine hair, and the heat does nothing else to them except make them brown in color.”19 Few of Zurara’s or Prince Henry’s contemporaries seemed to question the veracity of the author’s accounts of people, places, and routes. Prince Henry in fact considers The Book of Knowledge one of his indispensable guides as he envisions further conquest of Africa. These accounts faltered as Iberian travelers pressed the real world against this imaginary one. Yet land and body are connected at the intersection of European imagination and expansion. The imagined geography diminished in strength as a more authentic and accurate geography emerged. The scale of existence, however, with white (unharmed) flesh at one end and black (harmed) flesh at the other, grew in power precisely in the space created by Portuguese expansion into new lands.
The often-used term European expansion fails to capture the spatial disruption taking place at this moment, a moment beautifully captured by Zurara. This Portuguese chronicler is watching and participating in the reconfiguration of space and bodies, land and identity. This is the newness present in Zurara’s simple observation. Again, land and body are connected at the intersection of European imagination and expansion, but what must be underscored is the point of connection—the Portuguese and the Spanish, that is, the European. He is the point of connection. He stands now between bodies and land, and he adjudicates, identifies, determines. The position of the agent is equal in importance to the actions. Zurara is capturing the twin operations of discovery and consumption. With those twin operations, four things are happening at the same time: first, people are being seized (stolen); second, land is being seized (stolen); third, people are being stripped from their space, their place; and fourth, Europeans are describing themselves and these Africans at the same time. There is a density of effects at work here far beyond a notion of expansion.
In this chapter I register that density of effects, especially as it relates to the formation of human identity in modernity.20 Centrally, I register the effects of the reconfiguration of bodies and space as a theological operation. That theological operation, heretical in nature, binds spatial displacement to the formation of an abiding scale of existence.
The ordering of existence from white to black signifies much more than the beginnings of racial formation on a global scale: it is an architecture that signals displacement. Herein lies the deepest theological problem. Zurara brings into view the crossing of a threshold into a distorting vision of creation. This distorting vision of creation will lodge itself deeply in Christian thought, damaging doctrinal trajectories. My use of the word distortion does not imply a prior coherent, healthy, and happy vision of creation that will be lost in the age of discovery. The newness of the world was unanticipated by all. That newness coupled with European power, greed-filled ambition, and discursive priority drew distorting form out of Christian theology.
The royal chronicler’s account of the slave auction, intended to immortalize the exploits of the Navigator, collapses into the crucifixion narrative in which the Son is subjected to evil powers. In Zurara’s narrative, these evil powers find their parallel in Prince Henry, who, of course, would never have understood himself as such.21 Instead, the Infante understood himself and Zurara described him as the good son sent for the sake of the nation. In his Chronicle of the Capture of Ceuta Zurara masterfully ascribes to the prince the trappings of anointed sonship. His mother, Queen Philippa, is described in theotokos-like ways. Her deathbed imperial oration to her sons, especially to Henry, prophesies and commands him to lead the elite of the nation to the glory that is their due. This holy beginning of his reign is further established by the appearance of the Virgin Mary next to Philippa as she lay dying. On her deathbed Philippa contemplates the divine, transfigured in the Holy Virgin’s presence.22 The religious reality of Prince Henry approximates that of the chronicle. A very pious and theologically astute man, he was known to quote Scripture to strengthen his arguments and had even considered taking religious vows. In his latter years, he established a chair of theology at Lisbon University and had at hand when he died a copy of Peter Lombard’s Libri sententiarum quatuor.
Henry thus dually represents Christ and Christ’s executioners. This contradiction is made possible by a Christianity contorting through travel and discovery. Zurara’s aesthetic judgments move with the Iberian and other colonial empires, refine through contact with other peoples, and merge into what will come to be believed as obvious. Slowly, out of these actions, whiteness emerges, not simply as a marker of the European but as the rarely spoken but always understood organizing conceptual frame. And blackness appears as the fundamental tool of that organizing conceptuality. Black bodies are the ever-visible counterweight of a usually invisible white identity. My use of the term scale should not be conflated with what will later develop as racial hierarchy, intellectual, cultural, or religious, although there are present at this time profoundly hierarchical elements. The explanatory power of the notion of racial hierarchy does not capture the density of the operation of this scale. Scale here refers to the possibility realized from the legacy of Prince Henry onward of seeing and touching multiple peoples and their lands at once and thinking them together. This process will be theological.
The process is theological because it is ecclesial. This kind of comparative thinking was not simply the child of burgeoning colonial nation-states. Church and state, popes and kings and queens enfold each other in bringing forth new ways of interfacing with their world. This is truly an inter-course. However, in this joining the church establishes the framework within which the nations will interpret not only their statecraft but also the peoples they encounter through exploration and conquest. In his bull Romanus Pontifex of January 8, 1455, Pope Nicholas V displays the power of ecclesial dictum by summarily awarding regions of the known world to Portugal. This papal power over space, which will be exercised repeatedly, rested on an abiding christological and ecclesiological principle—that the church exists for the sake of the world. It is the fount of salvation, and the pope, servant of the servants of God, for the sake of Christ and through Christ, lays claim to the entire world. Romanus Pontifex rehearses this central power of Christ’s successor:
The Roman pontiff, successor of the key-bearer of the heavenly kingdom and vicar of Jesus Christ, contemplating with a father’s mind all the several climes of the world and the characteristics of all the nations dwelling in them and seeking and desiring the salvation of all, wholesomely ordains and disposes upon careful deliberation those things which he sees will be agreeable to the Divine Majesty and by which he may bring the sheep entrusted to him by God into the single divine fold, and may acquire for them the reward of eternal felicity, and obtain pardon for their souls. This we believe will more certainly come to pass, through the aid of the Lord, if we bestow suitable favors and special graces on those Catholic kings and princes, who like athletes and intrepid champions of the Christian faith … not only restrain the savage excesses of the Saracens and of other infidels, enemies of the Christian name, but also for the defense and increase of the faith vanquish them and their kingdoms and habitations.23
The contemplation of the Vicar of Jesus Christ is a beautifully sublime and incredibly powerful action described here. It captures the central soteriological action of the church; seeking and desiring the salvation of all peoples. The position of the church in relation to the nations echoes the original constituting relation, that between Israel and the world. Here Israel has been superseded and the framework reconstituted through the Vicar of Christ so that the whole world is viewed through boundless desire. This presents the deepest theological problem and the greatest theological possibility. This boundary-less desire is to “bring the sheep entrusted to him by God into the single divine fold,” presenting a totalizing vision that activates a thoroughgoing antiessentialist rendering of peoples. Through this rendering all peoples become simply sheep bound under paternalecclesial care.
This salvific concern is at the heart of the Christian gospel, its radicalism breathtaking, but, placed by the pope in the hands of those whom the pope called the “athletes and intrepid champions of the Christian faith,” it becomes a different kind of radicalism. This radical concern becomes, through the pope’s own official narration, embodied in the energy, efforts, and exploits of Prince Henry:
And so it came to pass that when a number of ships of this kind [caravels] had explored and taken possession of very many harbors, islands, and seas, they at length came to the province of Guinea, and having taken possession of some islands and harbors and the sea adjacent to that province, sailing farther they came to the mouth of a certain great river commonly supposed to be the Nile, and war was waged for some years against the people of those parts in the name of the said King Alfonso and of the infante; and in it very many islands in that neighborhood were subdued and peacefully possessed, as they are still possessed together with the adjacent sea. Thence also many Guineamen and other negroes, taken by force, and some by barter of unprohibited articles, or by other lawful contracts of purchase, have been sent to the said kingdoms. A large number of these have been converted to the Catholic faith, and it is hoped by the help of divine mercy, that if such progress be continued with them, either those peoples will be converted to the faith or at least the souls of many of them will be gained for Christ.24
It would be a mistake to conclude that Prince Henry’s commercial interests are hidden inside the pope’s theological interests. Both concerns are joined and in the open. Indeed, it is precisely the joining of these concerns, commercial and theological, that enables the translation of soteriological radicalism into a racial radicalism. As the pope narrates Henry’s holy exploits, including the taking of “many Guineamen and other negroes,” a large number of whom, he notes, have been converted to the Catholic faith, he inscribes a new reality for black flesh. He never mentions their tribal, linguistic, or geographic specifics; these aspects of their identities are rendered irrelevant.25
Nicholas V’s description is a superficial reading of human communities that ignores their intimately particular characteristics, a descriptive practice that will be used by many explorers and priests. Yet one should not simply excuse this description as naïve anthropology or harmless generalization. Nicholas V offers insight into the power of a theological account of peoples that draws life from the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, the creation by the Creator of all things out of nothing.
Envisioning the world as created out of nothing yields two bedrock hermeneutical principles. First, there is a fundamental instability to all things. Nothing is sure in itself. All things are contingent and held together by God. Rather than rendered through a godlike stability, the world ex nihilo means that all things carry inherent possibilities of continuity or discontinuity. Indeed, the fragility of human existence marks humans’ inherent instability.
When viewed through this hermeneutical horizon, peoples exist without a necessary permanence either of place or of identity. This kind of antiessentialist vision facilitates a different way of viewing human communities. The essential characteristic of people is their need—for pardon and life, that is, for salvation from God. Nicholas V notes in hope that people may “acquire … the reward of eternal felicity, and obtain pardon for their souls.”26
The second hermeneutical principle is the identity of the Creator. Christ is the creator of all things. Locating the Creator in space and time establishes the most important aspect of the incarnation. God has come and fully entered the reality of the creation. In space and time, into the instability of the world came a new point of stability and life. Equally important is the arche, the beginning. Jesus Christ is the beginning of all things. All things belong to him as text to author. The doctrine of divine enfleshment yields both the idea of divine ownership and that of salvation embodied in the here and now. This special sense of embodiment undergirds Nicholas V’s sense of geographic authority over all peoples and all lands. God in Christ allows humans to participate in his life, and within that participation there exists a transferability of his authority to humans. As the central point of transferability, the representative of Christ, Nicholas V, may delegate Prince Henry and his cohort to act on his behalf. It is precisely this point of delegation that establishes a trajectory reaching from Henry through the pope back to the incarnation itself—a trajectory of ownership and salvation. Nicholas V states that the Infante from his youth geared his entire life to “cause the most glorious name of the … Creator to be published, extolled, and revered throughout the whole world, even in the most remote and undiscovered places.”27
I have not entered fully into the intricacies of a Christian doctrine of creation or the doctrine of the incarnation. However, the use of those doctrinal logics can be seen working to frame the concepts that will enable the thinking of peoples together with regard to race. These doctrinal logics help one understand the oft-quoted and equally theologically underinterpreted papal permission given to King Alfonso and Prince Henry:
To invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods, and to convert them to his and their use and profit … the said King Alfonso or by his authority, the aforesaid infante, justly and lawfully has acquired and possessed, and doth possess, these islands, lands, harbors, seas, and they do of right belong and pertain to the said King Alfonso and his successors.28
Repeating in part the permissions given in Dum diversas, his bull of June 18, 1452, Nicholas V granted this request of King Alfonso in light of the ongoing military struggle against Islam.29 But there is more at work here than the vicissitudes of church-statecraft. The pope granted Portuguese royalty the right to reshape the discovered landscapes, their peoples and their places, as they wished. These actions inscribe the contingency of creation itself within the will and desire of church and the colonial powers. The inherent instability of creation means that all things may be altered in order to bring them to proper order toward saved existence. Church and realm, represented in this moment by Nicholas V and Prince Henry (and King Alfonso), stand between peoples and lands and determine a new relationship between them, dislodging particular identities from particular places. Through a soteriological vision, church and realm discern all peoples to exist on the horizon of theological identities.
Displacement is the central operation at work here. The subtleties of its operation move in two directions, both of which one must see in order to understand the depth of this theological mistake. One direction is detectable from the early moments of New World discoveries. Consider the words of Christopher Columbus from the account of his third voyage to the New World. He has dropped anchor at the southeastern tip of Venezuela, near Trinidad, a place he named Punta del Arenal: “The next day there came from the east a large canoe with 24 men in it, all of them young and bearing many weapons…. As I said, they were all young and fine looking and not negroes but rather the whitest of all those that I had seen in the Indies, and they were graceful and had fine bodies and long, smooth hair cut in the Castilian manner.”30 This is simply a description intended to help Ferdinand and Isabella grasp the details of Spain’s New World, especially the lucrative new find of a continent. But it is also a down payment on things to come. The logic of Columbus’s description is obvious—the comparison begins with the known, the self. Thus the whiteness he names is reflective, even reflexive of their European bodies—graceful, fine, with long, smooth hair, even cut like theirs. Rotem Kowner writes that for European explorers at this time “the color white, did not carry explicit racial connotations but signified culture, refinement, and a ‘just like us’ designation.”31 However, its origins or originators are not what make this point of comparison critical for us.
The power of Columbus’s description lies in its comparative range. It connects the bodies of the new land (Africa) to the bodies of the other new land (the Americas), through the exercise of an aesthetic with breathtaking geographic flexibility. The aesthetic is of the land but not of the land, of the people but not of the people. It is of the land and the people in the sense that Columbus, like his intellectual predecessors, speculates that specific environs cause the specific characteristics of people. It is not of land and people because these specific characteristics become a racial transcendental, present among completely different peoples with supposedly similar climates. Again, as Columbus reflected on his discovery of a new continent and offered his famous observation that the earth is pear-shaped or like a “woman’s nipple on a round ball,” he substantiates his hemispheric theory by drawing on this aesthetic: “I find myself 20 degrees north of the equinoctial line, right of Arguin and those lands, where the men are black and the land very burnt. And when I went to the Cape Verde Islands I discovered that the people there are much darker, and the farther south one goes the more extreme their color becomes so that, at the same latitude on which I was, namely, that of Sierra Leone, where the North Star at nightfall was five degrees above the horizon, the negroes are the blackest.”32 Columbus, however, believes that, given the true shape of the earth, conditions at the island of Trinidad and the land of Gracia (his name for modern-day Venezuela) create a different result in people: “I found the mildest temperatures and lands and trees as green and beautiful as the orchards of Valencia in April, and the people there have beautiful bodies and are whiter than the others I was able to see in the Indies and have very long and smooth hair; they have greater ingenuity, show more intelligence, and are not cowardly.”33 Columbus with great precision exhibits the power of the racial scale. One sees that power in its mobility and its flexibility. It is of the world but not of any specific world. It is tied to specific flesh, but it also joins all flesh. Such identity markers do not establish racial essences as their first work. They quietly, beneath the surface, join human beings and in effect uncouple their identities from specific places. Yet the first point of uncoupling is the European himself. Consider the famous statement of Garcia de Escalante Alvarado (1548), the Spaniard who provided the first actual account of Japan and the Japanese: “It is a very cold country…. The inhabitants of these islands are good-looking, white, and bearded, with shaved heads…. They read and write in the same manner as do the Chinese; their language is similar to German…. The superior classes are dressed in silk, brocade, satin, and taffeta; the women have mostly very white complexions and are very beautiful; they are dressed in the same manner as the women of Castile.”34 His vision of the Japanese draws them into a reality that is physical yet without spatial boundary, a reality signaled by whiteness. Escalante and his compatriots are by no means singular in this operation. As all the European empires draw on the flexibility of the racial scale, they pull themselves into this boundary-less reality. This is nothing less than a theological operation. Like the designations of sinner and saint, convert and heretic, believer and unbeliever, faithful and apostate, this linguistic deployment alters reality, blowing by and through the specifics of identity bound to land, space, and place and narrating a new world that binds bodies to unrelenting aesthetic judgments. The European himself is the key to this theological act of displacement. It is not incidental that Columbus, like so many who follow in his footsteps, envisions a soteriological motive for his exploration and colonialism: “The Holy Trinity inspired Your Highnesses to undertake this enterprise of the Indies and through His infinite goodness made me His envoy on account of which I came with this plan into your royal presence, you being the most noble Christian princes toiling for the faith and its propagation.”35 The gospel is always embodied in the acts of faithful Christians, and yet the gospel is without constrictors of space. It is quintessentially movable, elastically stable over vastly different locations. The age of discovery entails that the European body will take on these exact characteristics. But not simply the European body but also, equally important, the African body will take on similar characteristics. These body differences will be articulated through white and black in such a powerful way that their similitude will extend to all peoples. These bodies, black and white, become almost spectral, more precisely, conceptually able to be superimposed over all other bodies. These bodies become visible and invisible in different ways with different purposes. That performed visibility and invisibility shows itself in the constant turnings and evolutions of comparative thinking.
The brilliant Jesuit Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606) shows this incredible ability to capture all flesh within the logic of white and black existence. Born of an elite Neapolitan family and quickly moved through the Jesuit ordination process and ranks, he arrived as vicar-general and visitor to Japan in 1579. In his famous Sumario of 1580 he offers his studied reflections on the Japanese and the viability of the mission to Japan: “These people are all white, courteous and highly civilized, so much so that they surpass all the other known races of the world. They are naturally very intelligent, although they have no knowledge of sciences, because they are the most warlike and bellicose race yet discovered on the earth.”36 Later on in the Sumario one of his points of comparison appears: here he reflects on the superiority of Japanese conversion based on their supposed racial difference:
There is this difference between the Indian and Japanese Christians, which in itself proves that there is really no room for comparison between them, for each one of the former was converted from some individual ulterior motive, and since they are blacks, and of small sense, they are subsequently very difficult to improve and turn into good Christians; whereas the Japanese usually become converted, not on some whimsical individual ulterior move (since it is their suzerains who expect to benefit thereby and not they themselves) but only in obedience to their lord’s command; and since they are white and of good understanding and behavior, and greatly given to outward show, they readily frequent the churches and sermons, and when they are instructed they become very good Christians.37
Valignano’s use of black in this derogatory fashion was not unusual. As the historian C. R. Boxer noted, it was not at all strange to hear the Indians, Chinese, or even Japanese referred to as “niggers.” Francisco Cabral, the Portuguese superior of the mission to Japan (1570-81) who resisted developing an indigenous clergy, stated that “the Japanese are Niggers and their customs barbarous.”38 In order to understand the elastic power of the term black in its derogatory form one must remember the nature of the comparative thinking that is in operation.
Because Valignano’s concern as vicar-general and visitor was to evaluate the possibilities of an authentic Christian existence and identity in the new lands—Africa, India, China, and Japan—his comparative analysis was driven by a deeply ecclesial concern. The concern was whether the performance of Christian practices was rooted in a saving effect in the individual or was merely a façade covering disingenuous behavior or impenetrable ignorance. The questions at stake were not only who could become a true Christian, but also who might ascend the heights of Christian identity and become a lay leader, priest, or even possibly a Jesuit brother. Valignano understood himself to be engaged in nothing less than an act of spiritual discernment.
What informed Valignano’s powerful spiritual discernment of the salvific possibilities of alien flesh was the presence of the most decisive and central theological distortion that exists in the church, a distortion that was growing in power and extension with each new generation. That distortion was the replacement of Israel, or, in its proper theological term, supersessionism. Crudely put, in supersessionist thinking the church replaces Israel in the mind and heart of God. It will take my entire treatment, each chapter adding layers to my account of this decisive distortion, to describe the awesome effects of this way of thinking on the imagination of Christians. At this point one can begin to glimpse the supersessionist effect in Valignano’s comparative thinking. This effect begins with positioning Christian identity fully within European (white) identity and fully outside the identities of Jews and Muslims. The space between these identities, Christian on the one side and Jews and Muslims on the other, became the space within which one could discern authentic conversion. This discernment constituted an ecclesial logic applicable to the evaluation of all peoples.
The comparative work built from this ecclesial logic and its most important precedent. In the medieval Iberian world two groups of Christians were already seen as deeply suspect in regard to the veracity of their Christian identity: moriscos (converted Muslims or Christian Moors) and conversos (converted Jews or New Christians), sometimes referred to with the derogatory term marranos (meaning swine in Spanish). It did not matter whether the conversion of Jew or Muslim was forced or chosen; their Christian identity was troubled. It was a dangerous Christian identity owing to the possibility of their return to Judaism or Islam. There was also the frightening possibility that they might be secretly practicing Jews or Muslims, lodged deep in the Christian body. This fear and suspicion had an Augustinian-like multigenerational effect so that anyone with Jewish or Moorish “blood” must be ferreted out and barred from leadership in the church.39
Such suspicion and fear, though common in Christian Spain and Portugal as well as in other parts of medieval Europe, indicated a profound theological distortion. Here was a process of discerning Christian identity that, because it had jettisoned Israel from its calculus of the formation of Christian life, created a conceptual vacuum that was filled by the European. But not simply qua European; rather the very process of becoming Christian took on new ontic markers. Those markers of being were aesthetic and racial. This was not a straightforward matter of replacement (European for Jew) but, as I have suggested, of displacement and now theological reconfiguration. European Christians reconfigured the vision of God’s attention and love for Israel, that is, they reconfigured a vision of Israel’s election. If Israel had been the visibly elect of God, then that visibility in the European imagination migrated without return to a new home shaped now by new visual markers. If Israel’s election had been the compass around which Christian identity gained its bearings and found its trajectory, now with this reconfiguration the body of the European would be the compass marking divine election. More importantly, that new elected body, the white body, would be a discerning body, able to detect holy effects and saving grace. Valignano performs this new reconfigured vision of election precisely in the discernment of racial being.
The mobility and flexibility of the racial scale carried with it a doubtfulness of being, a strong suspicion of instability precisely at the point of embodied Christian commitment. Without Israel as the point of elected stability, the idea of an elected people became an idea without its authentic compass and thereby subject to strange new human discernment. Valignano discerns in two ways—those capable of salvation and those capable of the ministry, priesthood, and ecclesial leadership. At the bottom, chained to the deepest suspicion of incapability, are the conversos (or marranos) and moriscos. Valignano locates Africans with these New Christians and Christian Moors as those he strongly doubts capable of gospel life: “They are a very untalented race … incapable of grasping our holy religion or practicing it; because of their naturally low intelligence they cannot rise above the level of the senses …; they lack any culture and are given to savage ways and vices, and as a consequence they live like brute beasts…. In fine, they are a race born to serve, with no natural aptitude for governing…. But through a just though hidden judgment of God, they are left in that state of impotence and regarded as a sterile reprobate land which gives no hope of yielding fruit for a long time to come.”40 This astounding statement, reflecting on the people of Monomotapa in Mozambique, shows Valignano drawing the logical conclusion of black incapacity—reprobation. Reprobation is not simply the state of existence opposite election; it is also a judgment upon the trajectory of a life, gauging its destiny from what can be known in the moment. Reprobation joins the black body to the Moor body and both to the Jewish body. All are in the sphere of Christian rejection and therefore of divine rejection. At the other end of capability are the Japanese (and possibly the Chinese). As is apparent in the quotation given above, Valignano believed that as a white race the Japanese showed potential to enter the depths of Christian formation. The Indians, as also noted above, fell short of the Japanese and Chinese. A sense of reprobation lies with them as well: “A trait common to all these people (I am not speaking now of the so-called white races of China or Japan) is a lack of distinction and talent. As Aristotle would say, they are born to serve rather than to command. They are miserable and poor beyond measure and are given to low and mean tasks…. Most of them are very poor, but even the rich tradesmen have to hide their wealth from their tyrannical rulers. They go half-naked and live unpretentiously. More, they are all of a very low standard of intelligence.”41
A Japanese convert, in Valignano’s view, could become as good a Christian as a purebred European or an even better one. Their intelligence and cultural superiority made Japan a fertile, attractive ground for Christian growth. Valignano knew that the work in China and especially in Japan was the most sought-after assignment for Jesuits because of they could identify with intelligent and affable “white” Asians. Thus only the very best workers were allowed on that ground.42 His comparative analysis also informed his classification of the people appropriate for ecclesial service. Most appropriate were purebred Portuguese (that is, Europeans). Second in terms of appropriateness but regarded with significant reservations were those of pure European parentage but who had been born in India or elsewhere “outside.” After these groups, the so-called half-born were quite dubious: mestiços (or Mestizos), also called Eurasian, those born of Portuguese fathers and native mothers; and castiços (or Castizos), those born of European fathers or mothers and Eurasian or mestiço mothers or fathers. Clearly beyond the veil of possibility for service were those whom Valignano termed the “dusky races, [as they are] stupid and vicious,” and those of Jewish blood. Valignano’s analysis proved decisive, as Rome agreed with all his recommendations for recruitment and the formation of priests in and for mission lands, especially Jesuits.43
It would, however, be a mistake to summarize this comparative performance as simply a particular historical characteristic of the Jesuit. Alessandro Valignano was not an innovator in either the theological or historical sense. His orthodoxy was without question, his spirituality and political ability of the first order. He spoke with the mind of the church and with the church in mind. What makes his comparative work so crucial is that in him one sees Christian formation being reconfigured around white bodies. A schematic of this reconfiguration might begin with the constellation shown in figure 1.
As may be seen from the arrows of the schematic, black and white add precision and definition in discerning peoples’ salvific possibilities. Technically, doctrines of election first refer to peoples, not individuals. However, individuals may be configured within the overall assessment of a people’s salvific viability. Black indicates doubt, uncertainty, and opacity of saving effects. Salvation in black bodies is doubtful, as it was in (Christian) Jews and Moors. White indicates high salvific probability, rooted in the signs of movement toward God (for example, cleanliness, intelligence, obedience, social hierarchy, and advancement in civilization). Europeans reconfigured Christian social space around white and black bodies. If existence between Christian and non-Christian, saved and lost, elect and reprobate was a fluid reality that could be grasped only by detecting the spiritual and material marks, then the racial scale aided this complex optical operation. For example, Valignano notes that Africans, like other reprobates, show the following characteristics: they go around half naked, they have dirty food, practice polygamy, show avarice, and display “marked stupidity.”44 The stability within this fluid reality is white and black. The racial scale signifies not only a point of exchange—white European election for Jewish election—but also a process of becoming.
Figure 1. A Trajectory of Salvific Possibilities
Valignano inherited his supersessionist thinking. His use of that thinking, however, brilliantly exhibits its development at this pivotal moment. Through a racial calculus, comparative analysis becomes the new inner logic of how one deploys supersessionist thinking. Supersessionist thinking depends on acts of discernment, that is, of reading the observable for its actualization. Valignano actualizes not simply a way of reading native bodies but a way of inscribing native bodies in the drama of redemption’s journey, a journey marked by easy paths (white bodies) and rough terrain (black bodies).
I examine this new inner logic of supersessionist thinking in the next chapter as I consider the thought of José de Acosta. But one important implication of this development stands out: in the age of discovery and conquest supersessionist thinking burrowed deeply inside the logic of evangelism and emerged joined to whiteness in a new, more sophisticated, concealed form. Indeed, supersessionist thinking is the womb in which whiteness will mature. Any attempt to address supersessionism must carefully attend to the formation of the racial scale and the advent of a new vision of Christian social space. Valignano’s inherited derogatory vision of black flesh was also present among Muslims.45 Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to find a positive view of the sub-Saharan African in this time, especially given the attractiveness of the black slave trade. Muslim slave traders drew aesthetic distinctions between white European slaves and black sub-Saharan African slaves, not only because white slaves could potentially bring more money in their sale to Christians, but also because black slaves were considered inferior in body and mind to whites.46 The fifteenth-century Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun noted that “[Negroes] have little that is (essentially) human and possess attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals.”47 Like Christianity, Islam held a comparative sensibility that distinguished, in the words of the tenth-century Persian Islamic historian Tabari, all blacks from the Arabs and Persians, who have “beautiful faces and beautiful hair.”48 However, my concern is not simply with the operation of a derogatory view of black bodies, but also with how Europeans reconfigured Christian social space and in turn entered into their own act of displacement.
Displacement operates within the expansion of worlds. In time the Iberian world will extend from South America to Africa to India to China to Japan to Australia.49 These nations will not be alone in reach or remain preeminent in power. But the reach of the Iberian nations or any other nation existed within the wider vision of the church. As I have shown, the world of the church was coextensive with that of these young colonialist powers and worked in and through them as well, providing a theological framework that extended their identities onto a spiritual plane and enabled them to articulate their forms of life in their encounters with other peoples. This extending of worlds deeply affected the African as well. In fact, mercantile and theological interests conversed and converged on the African at this moment, not only vivifying the idea of perpetual slavery, but also drawing African bodies onto a plane of existence that involved constant spiritual and material comparison with white bodies.
The subtleties of this displacement moved simultaneously in two directions. The first was conceptual, exhibited in a comparative habit of mind that was facilitated by the racial scale and that was organized within a theological matrix. The second was material, activated by the joining of European and African bodies within an economic arrangement that indicated a fundamental transforming of space. Europeans were willingly leaving their homes. Newly discovered natives were unwillingly being taken from their lands. Historically, this is so obvious as to seem trite, but the parallelism at work here, while almost imperceptible, was earth shattering. With this leaving, this exiting, one approaches the depths of this theological mistake. It will not be easy to articulate the material reality of displacement because it is the articulation of a loss from within the loss itself. To fully tell it requires the very thing that is lacking, indigenous voices telling their own stories of transformation through current concepts of space, identity, and land. Equally difficult is the attempt to peer into a theological mistake so wide, so comprehensive that it has disappeared, having expanded to cover the horizon of modernity itself.
I must now engage in an act of fragment thinking in hopes of seeing the new order that emerged during the age of discovery and conquest. In “gather[ing] up the fragments that remain that nothing may be lost” (John 6:12), I want first to examine another episode in the life of Alessandro Valignano that will help uncover the reality of loss inside the movement of displacement.
Approaching Holy Week in March of 1581, two years after his arrival in Japan, Valignano and his retinue set out on horseback to the city of Miyako (now Kyoto) to visit the Azuchi castle, home of the most powerful leader in Japan, the ruler of Tenka, Oda Nobunaga. Valignano, as was customary, was bringing gifts for the dignitaries: sets of vestments, small oil paintings, musical instruments, books, rosaries, and other things. However, the most interesting thing Valignano brought along with him for that eventful visit was his slave, a dark-skinned African. The intricate route to the castle, past Yao, Wakae, Sanga, and Okayama (Kawachi), crossing the river Yodogawa, and on to Takatsuki, took several days, right into Tuesday of Holy Week, and en route, as the historian Josef Franz Schütte relates, the party drew special attention: “All along the way the people gathered in crowds curious to catch a glimpse of the party; the giant figure of the visitor and the dark-skinned Negro who accompanied him as servant were objects of special interest.”50 Arriving in Takatsuki, Valignano performed that most sacred of liturgies, of Holy Week and Easter, celebrating the body of Christ, in suffering, death, and resurrection. He then proceeded to Miyako to prepare his own body for formal presentation and audience with the ruler. The parallel of presentation of bodies here is striking. Valignano was an usually tall man (over six feet), but as he and his black slave stood in the presence of Oda Nobunaga, the ruler’s interest turned to the African. Nobunaga was not alone in showing utter fascination with the African. A large, excited crowd had gathered outside the place where Valignano and his attendants were housed, hoping to catch sight of this black body. Some people had come to blows jostling for position. As he stood before Nobunaga, just a few days after Easter, the body of this African came under careful scrutiny. The astonished and puzzled ruler ordered that the upper body of this black man be uncovered, and then he proceeded to have him washed over and over again to see if the blackness would disappear.51
Valignano and his black slave standing there together before the ruler are instructive. Two bodies are in presentation with a third body in the background. For Valignano, it is the third body, that of Christ crucified and resurrected, that has brought him to these shores. Yet the crucial body at this moment is not the body of Jesus, but the body of an African enslaved—Hoc est enim corpus meum (This is my body). Nobunaga performs another liturgy after Holy Week, an anti-liturgy, as it were, in which the stripping and repeated washing of the dark African confirms his identity as black and slave. This moment of visitation represented the joining of the white body to the black body—together they appear. Valignano stood before the ruler and presented the new world of the “southern barbarians,” as they were called by the Japanese. He showed European mastery over lands and peoples by having this black body in servitude. Though he spoke and presented himself and his church in friendship, this was also a moment of closure, as the African was not permitted to speak for himself. Indeed, even if he had spoken his native language he would probably not have been understood. Standing there half-naked, he had been taken from his home and given a new identity calibrated to his body and articulated by his Christian master. There in that new space the slave had no name, unless it was given by Valignano. For Ruler Nobunaga, whoever this African was would issue out of an examination of his black body and the words of the visitor.
Valignano entered this moment of dislocation by choice, the slave by force. In this new space, Japan, Valignano is a white man among “white people,” established in the knowledge that being there was not a disruption of his identity, but an expansion of it into a spiritual and quasi-national network. That new space, however, meant utter disruption for the African. Gone was the earth, the ground, spaces, and places that facilitated his identity, and what remained, embodied in his master, was a signified and signifying reality of whiteness, not simply by his master’s speech but by the very location of the master’s body operating in power next to his.
This episode exemplifies a spatial disruption that the European Christian would enact and to which he would be almost oblivious, but never innocent. The age of discovery and conquest began a process of transformation of land and identity. And while worlds were being transformed, not every world was changed in the same way. Peoples different in geography, in life, in different worlds of European designation—Africa, the Americas, Europe—will lose the earth only to find it again in a strange new way. The deepest theological distortion taking place is that the earth, the ground, spaces, and places are being removed as living organizers of identity and as facilitators of identity.
What if your skin was inextricably bound to “the skin of the world,” to borrow that marvelous phrase from Calvin Luther Martin’s text The Way of the Human Being.52 What if it seemed strange, odd, and even impossible for you to conceive of your identity apart from a specific order of space—specific land, specific animals, trees, mountains, waters, and arrangements of days and nights? Martin, a historian and quasi-theologian who spent years among the Yup’ik Eskimos on the Alaskan tundra and significant time in the Navajo nation, suggests an order of things present among the indigenous peoples of the New World that a mind detached from deep participation with the earth cannot easily appreciate. In contrast Martin points to a different identity form: “People who can define themselves as cardinal points, primary colors, segments of the day, the seasons, even the journey of life itself—people such as this are clearly engaging a reality different from the usual western points of reference.”53
It is a truism to say that humans are all bound to the earth. However, that articulated connection to the earth comes under profound and devastating alteration with the age of discovery and colonialism.54 A central overlooked implication of that sense of connection is the articulation of place-bound identity, a form of existence before or “below” race, within place itself. In Martin’s account, “Native Americans universally maintain that human and animals were made to occupy the same skin—the skin of shared personhood. Here at creation’s origin, there was nothing really to distinguish humans from animals: one lived in human shape and yet was still groundhog, rabbit, tortoise, or what have you. In the native world, men and women existed more broadly as plenipotential people, people who ‘are themselves—a Clam, a Dog, a Birch Person—yet they take human shape as well. Each form contains the other. In some ways, they are seen as being both at once.’”55 Before reading this as a form of ethnographic essentializing (Martin, remember, is a historian, not an anthropologist), one should see the important claim Martin makes, a claim that joins many peoples who remember that they are tribes or peoples. Identity here requires spatial realities endowed with irreducible, even irreplaceable points of reference. What Martin invokes is difficult to capture because it must be read in light of the complex history of the social construction of Indianness and the very real politics of Indian identity in America.56 Like the African, the Indian is a necessary fiction, a pothole-filled pathway made through discursive practice that allows one to move toward understanding what is at stake in the loss of ways of life and the troubled yet admirable attempts to gather the fragments that remain.57 In this regard, one should not stumble at the usage of Indian or African or of invoking what I understand as an aspect of tribal reality for fear of falling into mind-numbing essentialism.
The greater trap is the failure to see the specifics of the loss for indigenes that includes but is not completely captured by European discursive hegemony. As Philip Deloria points out, identity construction must be understood in the context of land appropriation: “The indeterminacy of American identities stems, in part, from the nation’s inability to deal with Indian people. Americans wanted to feel a natural affinity with the continent, and it was Indians who could teach them such aboriginal closeness. Yet, in order to control the landscape they had to destroy the original inhabitants.”58 Deloria correctly notes a history of Indian-use which, like African-use, bolsters a sense of freedom and independence from the trappings of the old European world, connection to land as private property, and the possibilities of being self-made in America. The sense of connection Martin seizes upon is bound neither to nobility myths nor to European Indian invention. It is not “imperialist nostalgia.”59 Martin echoes the words of native peoples, creatively using language to capture that which is beyond the sight of many. He tells the story of an Eskimo from a tiny village by the Bering Sea, Charlie Kilangak, whose Yup’ik name means Puffin. He explained to Martin exactly what it means to be Puffin:
I am a puffin.
I live on the cliffs or on the steep hillsides.
I know and choose to live where my family will be safe.
I love to fish, and know which fish to ingest for my children.
I could both fly in the skies or under sea and master the winds and the currents.
I know where to go by looking at the world around me.
I am a puffin … from … my ancestral tree, and in blood.
I choose to dress in black and white so my children will know who they are too.
I have this wonderful colorful beak. It helps me identify my own kind, so others would know who I am.
I am a puffin, and I am what my creator has made me to be.
I am a puffin, and my son is too.60
Martin tells another story of a young Iroquois man who had an argument with his Iroquois uncle about Indian identity. The uncle asked the young man, who had just graduated from college, who he (the young man) was?
When the nephew matter-of-factly replied that he was who his name said he was, the older man was not impressed. “Yeah, that’s who you are, I guess.” Pause. “Is that all?” Sensing he was being set up for something, the young man expertly traced his parentage on both sides and then ran back through his clan. [Seeing that he was not giving the answer the uncle wanted, he conceded, angrily asking the uncle,] “Well, who the hell am I then?” The older man calmly replied, “I think you know but I will tell you. If you sit here, and look out right over there; look at that. The rocks: the way they are. The trees and the hills all around you. Right where you’re on, it’s water…. You’re just like that rock…. You’re the same as the water, this water…. You are the ridge, this ridge. You were here in the beginning. You’re as strong as they are. As long as you believe in that … that’s who you are. That’s your mother, and that’s you. Don’t forget.”61
Martin is not romanticizing Native Americans, claiming for them some essentialized ecological genius, but instead is simply noting the remnants of a sensibility concerning identity. We are the very things we may invoke spatially.62 His recounting of part of a Navajo hymn illustrates this:
The mountains, I become part of it …
The herbs, the fir tree, I become part of it.
The morning mists, the clouds, the gathering waters.
I become part of it.
The wilderness, the dew drops, the pollen …
I become part of it.63
This Native American insight draws one into a self-description built within a vision of creation bound to specific locations. This union with the world through “unbounded kinship,” as Martin calls it, turns on geographic specificity64 and on a kinship with plants, places, and animals.65 Martin isn’t noting a recalcitrant “primitivism” heroically standing against the tides of modernity. Rather, he has come upon ancient ways of articulating existence. That articulation was rooted in an ongoing conversation with the world in a “reciprocal aesthetic that announces kinship.”66
Martin suggests, unsympathetically, that those first Christians who came to the new worlds “were at the furthest limit of their conception of the real and though utterly unaware of it were fingering the ‘skin of the world.’” Those Christians went unknowingly beyond geography into identity.67 They entered what for them was a frontier of strangeness. Already fearful and angled toward isolationist practices, they enacted a spatial vertigo, renaming places, peoples, and animals and reconfiguring life.68
Christian faith and theology carry within them the possibilities of knowing and renarrating identity with geography. The Greek Orthodox theologian S. A. Mousalimas tells the story of an Orthodox Yup’ik hunter whose way of life articulates his Christian identity through his familial oneness with animals and land.69 But these were possibilities of self-articulation never to be fully realized, never to be truly explored.
Instead, the new worlds were transformed into land—raw, untamed land. And the European vision saw these new lands as a system of potentialities, a mass of undeveloped, underdeveloped, unused, underutilized, misunderstood, not fully understood potentialities. Everything—from peoples and their bodies to plants and animals, from the ground and the sky—was subject to change, subjects for change, subjected to change. The significance of this transformation cannot be overstated. The earth itself was barred from being a constant signifier of identity. Europeans defined Africans and all others apart from the earth even as they separated them from their lands.
The central effect of the loss of the earth as an identity signifier was that native identities, tribal, communal, familial, and spatial, were constricted to simply their bodies, leaving behind the very ground that enables and facilitates the articulation of identity. The profound commodification of bodies that was New World slavery signifies an effect humankind has yet to reckon with fully—a distorted vision of creation.
This is the troubled existence humans have entered upon without realizing their loss. This occurrence cannot be easily discerned because it is deeply embedded in the loss of knowledge itself. Martin, without inscribing a cultural pathology, invokes this overarching sense of loss for Native peoples in Alaska and other places:
The prison is overflowing with Yup’ik men, mostly, who are lovely and sweet people who got drunk and blacked out and did something awful. They are sad, orphaned from their old world, and what they have now is a hybrid that doesn’t work. They are a people who’ve lost the story. Or had it drowned in bootlegged vodka or watched it perish from diphtheria or influenza or tuberculosis—or put a bullet in it. Starting with the Russian fur merchants in the eighteenth century and continuing with the missionaries a hundred years later, then the teachers and government bureaucrats, all the while battered by appalling epidemics, a tidal wave of alcohol, and now the din of television sets switched on all the time, plus snowmobiles and powerboats and rifles and videos—with all this, the moose don’t dream themselves into people any more. At least, not many people. Nor do salmon, caribou, or bears or seals or walrus. I doubt the blueberries and cranberries and salmonberries give their spirit to many Yupiit, either.70
This is not the scene of the corroding effects of modernity on “primitive peoples” but an example that builds directly from the imposition of racial agency into indigenous worlds. Consider another vignette from Martin about Robert, whom he met during a visit to a prison:
[Robert] wished sometimes he could just disappear into “someone nothing.” Annihilation. His grandfather told him long ago that he could learn the white man’s ways and language, but could never become a white man. The Eskimos, warned the old man, would eventually become a “spot,” a dot, to the whites. Irrelevant. Robert reached for a paper napkin to wipe his eyes. He walked away to the chain-link fence, beneath the sign that says the guards can shoot anyone standing that close to the fence—to weep in private. Alcohol put him here. He drank and lost consciousness … and did something frightening. I asked if he’s an artist. “Oh yes, somewhat.” He told me how he once carved an Eskimo hunting a seal out of pure ivory. … Robert put his right hand up over his head and assumed the hunter’s waiting posture … the patient hunter poised above the breathing-hole. Robert, I realized, had carved himself.71
Martin delineates a sense of perception that enfolded native peoples in a reality immensely beyond the idea of an isolated body.72 He also begins to outline the loss that accompanies the slow destruction of that sense of perception. This loss is the loss of land—dispossession and resettlement—and, even more crucially, the imposition of a new calculus of signification built around white bodies. The grandfather’s warning voiced not simply a concern about overwhelming numbers of white people, but also about the reduction of indigenes’ visibility. This invisibility is not only diminished Indian populations, but an invisibility that shrinks their presence from the land and animals, water and sky. It is white perception that is at play here: “The Eskimos … would eventually become a ‘spot,’ a dot, to the whites. Irrelevant.”
Irrelevancy here points to the draining of significance of particular people in particular places. The invisibility of indigenes’ ways of life ironically is carried inside white perception of those ways of life. Martin points to the emergence of a form of perception of bodies in space that makes invisible the spatial dimensions of the identities of those bodies.
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, in The Old Way: A Story of the First People (2006), also captures this sense of perception and loss and in an equally instructive way.73 She is a member of the famous Marshall family, who during the 1950s lived among the so-called San people, the Bushmen of the Kalahari (their world surrounded by Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, and Angola), more properly designated the Ju/wasi and /Gwi peoples. Although neither she nor any of her family members were at the time anthropologists or ethnographers, together they produced some of the most important work on the Ju/wasi and /Gwi and are credited with introducing their world to the “modern West” and in turn giving witness to the ongoing effects of the colonial and postcolonial worlds on the Ju/wasi.74
The Ju/wasi were considered one of the last hunter-gatherer societies in Africa and in the world. Marshall Thomas’s text builds from her equally important book of 1958, The Harmless People, in which she offered her initial account of life among the Ju/wasi.75 The second book, The Old Way, places her experiences with these people of the Nyae Nyae in an evolutionary framework, one understandable, even admirable, yet deeply problematic: “We found people who called themselves Ju/wasi and were living the lifestyle of our ancestors, a lifestyle of the African savannah that began before we were human beings, changing in form but not in essence as time passed and the climate fluctuated and lasting until the last third of the twentieth century. That any of us are here at all is due entirely to the long-term culture that these hunter-gatherers, with their courage, skill, and knowledge, continued to uphold. To me, the experience of visiting this place and these people was profoundly important, as if I had voyaged into the deep past through a time machine. I feel that I saw the Old Way, the way of life that shaped us, a way of life that now is gone.”76 What brought the teenager Elizabeth Marshall to the Kalahari with her family was her father, the founder and former president of Raytheon, and his desire to explore a world still relatively untouched, the wilderness world of the Bushman. Her initial sense of temporal and spatial displacement continues to shape Marshall Thomas’s anthropological and literary account of the Ju/wasi people and their slow, painful demise. Unlike her earlier treatment of the Ju/wasi in The Harmless People, this text, The Old Way, leans heavily on a particular construal of time, what Johannes Fabian describes as radically dehistoricized “evolutionary” time.77
Fabian’s critique of flawed uses of time in constructing an anthropological object helps one see how Marshall Thomas’s vision of the Ju/wasi both sheds light on the problem of displacement and reflects the problem. Fabian, in his seminal text Time and the Other, suggested that the hermeneutic through which anthropologists and other Western intellectuals interpret native peoples has been through the spatialization of time. Spatialized time becomes naturalized time. Fabian lodges the origins of this way of configuring time in the Christian tradition. Enlightenment traditions found a resource in the Christian vision of the history of salvation in space and time and refashioned that vision into an immanent, observable reality of progress. This is not a new insight, yet Fabian captures an important effect of this refashioning, that is, the ability to discern “temporal relations” between geographic locations and peoples of the world.
Fabian argues that Western intellectuals, especially anthropologists, are the inheritors of an evolutionist epistemology that “imperceptibly replaces real ecological space with classificatory, tabular space.”78 Not denying the idea of development, he is trying to capture the epistemological conditions under which anthropologists and other interpreters of culture do their work. Those conditions produce such notions as primitive peoples, which is “essentially a temporal concept and a category, not an object, of Western thought.”79 He notes three uses of time in anthropological discourse: physical time, mundane time, and typological time. None of these brings clarity to anthropological description as much as they indicate the muddled thinking that has been present in the interaction of Western and colonialized peoples. Physical time is nonculturally conditioned time. It is time which, whether calibrated in evolutionary, prehistorical reconstruction or demographic or ecological terms, is objective, neutral, and natural. Mundane and typological times are improvisations on physical time. Mundane is, as the word suggests, nonprecise or “loose,” everyday attributions of periodization. And typological time denotes types of time, that is, “intervals between events,” that may be comparable: for example, feudal versus industrial, agrarian versus urban. This designation of time indicates “quality of states” and creates in effect the possibility of designating real people without history. Here “time may almost totally be divested of its vectorial, physical connotations.”80
Fabian believes these uses of time are a kind of coping mechanism. Naturalized and spatialized time “gives meaning(s) to the distribution of humanity in space.”81 This is a strong reversal of the idea that the vast distance of human cultures in space self-generates temporal relations through the discovery of ages. Spatialized time allows the “distancing of those who are observed from the time of the observer.” In this way, spatialized time is a means to an end, that is, to show that “natural laws or law like regulations operate in the development of a human society and culture.”82 In contradistinction, Fabian notes another kind of time, intersubjective time. Intersubjective time is time shared, shared by object and observer, shared by the referent and the speaking subject. The term he uses for this shared reality is coeval: “In fact, further conclusions can be drawn from this basic postulate to the point of realizing that for human communication to occur, coevalness has to be created. Communication is, ultimately, about creating shared Time.”83
Fabian’s is a powerful, even deeply theological idea, one that I shall return to later. However, at this point, one can begin to see what Fabian is moving toward. He notes that even where people recognize shared time there will be “devices of temporal distancing.”84 The unrelenting production of such devices results from a habit of mind Fabian calls the denial of coevalness. It is “a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse.”85 For Fabian, this problem yields a choice: “Either [the ethnographer or anthropologist] submits to the condition of coevalness and produces ethnographic knowledge or he deludes himself into temporal distance and misses the object of his search.”86 Fabian is careful to note that even the best intentions and highest morals of the cultural observer have not guaranteed overcoming of the denial of coevalness. The denial in part is inherent in the bequeathed trajectory of Enlightenment cultural chauvinism that would never treat colonialized societies on their own terms. But the denial is also due to the reconfiguration of space and time in relation to bodies. The denial is equally of shared time and of shared space. This latter denial emerges out of a simultaneous recognition of bodies different and racialized and terrain alien to the observer. Marshall Thomas, not so much an exemplar of the denial as someone who I believe achieves Fabian’s condition of coevalness, constantly deploys devices of temporal distancing. She shows that space has the same cultural density as time. In so doing, she performs a spatial distancing that is decisive in her interpretation of the Ju/wasi. In Marshall Thomas one can see, in addition to what Fabian noted as the replacement of “ecological space with classificatory, tabular space,” the effects of alienated space enacted on bodies.
The “old way” for Marshall Thomas is the way of life the Ju/wasi lived. It is the way of life that reaches back to Paleolithic times. In that reaching back humans figuratively hold hands with their mothers reaching back millions of evolutionary years when they were the animals that roamed the rain forests. The Ju/wasi, for Marshall Thomas, thus are their own unique reality, but also, more decisively, they re-present humankind (as once they lived) on the land, attuned to its subtle ecologies and sophisticated economies of food, water, and sharing. This account of the Ju/wasi is first and foremost an evolutionary tale that suggests more about humanity than about the Ju/wasi. It is a kind of swan song to a life now gone that attempts to draw implications for moderns from the Ju/wasi way of life. Such use of a people requires pause, to see both the beauty of the Ju/wasi and their tragedy. Yet tragedy exists here in two senses: the tragedy of their demise and the tragedy of their use in the narrative. They are made to signify humanity in ways that turn their lives into transparencies. Looking through them, one sees the Paleolithic.
I am not accusing Marshall Thomas of intentionally casting a derogatory gaze on the Ju/wasi. Marshall Thomas’s account draws on colonialist ways of viewing black flesh in which black bodies signify the constructs of Western minds. From the detection of the demonic to the myth of the noble savage to the interpretation of embodied cultural artifacts, the history of this vision is to conjure intelligibility from (primitive) blackness itself. Not every aspect of this troubled way of seeing is present in Marshall Thomas’s treatment, yet her unrelenting rhetorical strategy to see, that is, to imagine, in the Ju/wasi the ancient patterns of humanity’s becoming draws its logic from this derogatory optic. Be that as it may, Marshall Thomas does expose something very important, namely, the reality of the interwovenness of the Ju/wasi and the land.
The cultural logics of the Ju/wasi are inseparable from the ways of the animals of the southwest African savannah. Not only the animals, but Ju/wasi everyday practices are completely unintelligible without discerning the contours of the Nyae Nyae landscape: “On the savannah, the seasons begin and end with rain.”87 Marshall Thomas holds up this reality of space as the way the Ju/wasi count time. Water and its scarcity are keys for understanding Ju/wasi movement. Settlement and travel are shaped around the places of water. The location of waterholes is fundamental knowledge that they carry from generation to generation. In an amazing catalog of practices, she details the joining of land and the life of a people. Yet she also reveals the distance of her family from the land even as they inhabit it along with the Ju/wasi. This can be seen in something as simple as the supplies they (as opposed to the Ju/wasi) need for survival on the land: “We had tents, cots, sleeping bags, folding chairs, and tables, a compass, cameras, film, recording equipment, reference books, notebooks, pens, ink, pencils, disinfectants, antivenin kits for snakebites, brandy, cases of canned foods, boxes of dry foods, dishes, cooking pots, frying pans, knives, forks, spoons, cigarettes, matches, spare tires, auto parts, inner tubes, tire patches, jacks, toolboxes, winches, motor oil, drums of gasoline, drums of water, bars of yellow soap, towels, washcloths, toothpaste, toothbrushes, coats, sweaters, pants, boots, sneakers, shirts, underwear, socks, reading glasses, safety pins, scissors, a sewing kit, binoculars, bullets, a rifle. The Ju/wasi had sticks, skins, eggshells, and grass.”88
The land was in the Ju/wasi in an extraordinary way. Families, or, more precisely, the women of a family, were the kxai k’ xausi, the “owners who possess” the land or the n!ore.89 This concept of ownership was far more organic than that of property ownership:
What is a territory or a n!ore to a group like that? Not what it would be to us, a carefully delineated piece of property that can be bought and sold, with marked-off boundaries. A Ju/wa territory belonged to those who were born there, whose rights were acquired through a parent who was born there, on back through time. The ownership could not be transferred, and the land had no formal boundaries but faded off into no-man’s-land on the far sides of which other, different groups might hold equally extensive territories. Thus the importance of n!ore derived less from its conditions as a tract of land and more from the plants and animals that lived on it, the firewood that could be found there, and, most important of all, the water…. Thus the n!ore was not property, it was life, and the concept of n!ore was deep in the soul.90
The Ju/wasi moved around various areas of the Nyae Nyae as land, animals, and plants were available, their settlements forming semicircles or circles with grass shelters facing in every direction to guard against animal attack. As they sat, their group configurations always matched the contours of the trees’ shade from the sun. They sat close to each other for protection and comfort. They calibrated their hunting and gathering around periods when the heat of the savannah was bearable. If the land was in them, the animals were always with them, body and soul. Hunting determined almost every transition in Ju/wasi life, especially male life. Hunting produced a staple of their diet, meat, and marked a young man’s capability to enter marriage, confirming the health and well-being of a community. It also showed the complexities of the knowledge of land and animals that the Ju/wasi carried across generations: “The tracking ability of the Bushmen is legendary, and rightly so. I happened to be traveling with three Ju/wa men who had occasion to track a hyena across a wide slab of bare rock. How they did it I have no idea…. The feat seemed effortless. The trackers thought nothing of it and, being at the time unfamiliar with the general ignorance of white people regarding the natural world, they were mildly startled by my amazement. To us, however, the ability of the Ju/wasi to track a wounded antelope if the antelope is with a herd seems equally amazing.”91 Moments like this in the narrative illumine Marshall Thomas’s awareness of her difference, a difference she marks racially. Another moment of marked awareness was when she went to gather edible plants with the Ju/wasi women. These plants (roots, nuts, berries, melons, spinach-like leaves, and fruits) were the main staple of the Ju/wasi diet. Gathering was as educational and humbling for her as being with the hunters. Again she was amazed by the ability of the Ju/wasi to identify edible buried plants by only “a bit of grasslike stubble about an inch long.”92 The Ju/wasi could remember the precise locations of various melons, fruits, and other plants that had been spotted the previous season and were now ripe. This land memory stretched over vast areas that all looked exactly the same to her, but not to the Ju/wasi.
In careful detail Marshall Thomas depicts how a sense of identity can flow directly from the land. For example, elders are highly respected and valued because they are the bearers of knowledge of how to live in the world of plants, animals, earth, and sky. Elders represent not only the epistemological limits of life-knowledge but also the epistemic structure of practices for the Ju/wasi. The standard explanation for ignorance about anything was “their old people hadn’t told them,” and thus they did not know how to proceed.93 She also marks the shared social sensibilities of Ju/wasi with lions, elephants, and other animals. In one beautiful passage she describes how lions of the Nyae Nyae rarely attack the Ju/wasi because the elders of both lions and Ju/wasi taught their young not to hunt each other.94 The Ju/wasi distinguished other peoples from themselves through categories of outsider shaped by their horrifying encounters with Europeans farmers and Bantu pastoralists who usurped their land and in many cases enslaved them. As Marshall Thomas writes, “They lumped them together with the predators, calling all of them, very simply, !xohmi, the word that they would use for lions and hyenas, meaning interestingly enough, that like the lions and hyenas, the newcomers had no hooves.”95
Marshall Thomas’s narrative sheds light on ways of life that are patterned not after but actually with space, with land, trees, water, animals. However, there is also in her account an embodied sense of alienated space. She actually does not need the land as the Ju/wasi people need it. She has water, food, and escape. She is at all times completely clear that she is a white woman different from them. She respects them, cherishes them, loves them, but she is white and they are black Africans. Here spatial distancing is embodied racially. Marshall Thomas recognized she was different from the Ju/wasi and respected that difference. Although the Ju/wasi renamed her Di!ai, drew her into their everyday practices, shared their stories, introduced her to their cultural logics, and in turn drew from her knowledge, both in terms of her history and cultural sensibilities, she did not see herself as inhabiting the same space as the Ju/wasi.96 This is not primarily an issue of language. She learned their language. She and her family as well committed themselves to helping the Ju/wasi.
What is at play here is the overturning of space and the disruption of identity facilitated by its carriers. Marshall Thomas tells of an incident in 1998 that occurred during a showing of her brother’s famous documentary on the plight of the Ju/wasi, A Kalahari Family. She lashed out at someone in the audience who suggested that the Marshall family had initiated the spoiling of the Ju/wasi way of life by bringing the Western world to their doorstep. Her spirited reply to the accusation claimed the change was inevitable. However, on further reflection, she realized the accusation had merit: “I didn’t hear what he [the audience member] said because I was still fuming, but in fact, we were partly responsible for starting the change, and not just our truck tracks. Our presence certainly alerted the Ju/wasi (those who had never been slaves on farms) to the life beyond the Kalahari, and our presence in the Nyae Nyae certainly reminded the white settlers and the Bantu pastoralists of the great, untouched grasslands that lay beyond the farms.”97 The accusation had merit because the Marshall family’s presence marked the land in a new way. It marked the land as a separate reality from the reality of the people. Their presence effected a conceptual separation that became a material one. They separated the people from the land. This judgment may seem counterintuitive. Their existence on the land, even for a brief time, enacted an optic that has existed from the very beginnings of Iberian expansion and conquest. That way of seeing land drew indigenes unrelentingly, unforgivingly away from land and encapsulated their identities in typological and racial space. That is, it drew them inescapably into the same space as white identity. This way of seeing turns the earth into land in potentia: “[My father] … had known what the Bushmen could not have known, that their future was uncertain, that they were already wanted as laborers, and that other people wanted their land and were only too ready to take it from them, because in the eyes of the white farmers and Bantu pastoralists, the Bushmen ‘did nothing’ with it. They ‘didn’t use it,’ and the whites and pastoralists would. My father also knew something about the governments of the countries that shared the Kalahari and understood how ready they were to assist their constituents in land acquisition. Perhaps no one could have predicted the year that the Old Way would end, but obviously it wasn’t going to last forever.”98 The irony here seems to escape Marshall Thomas. She is describing precisely the logic of the colonialist. Her father saw clearly the matrix of utility that would be placed on the Ju/wasi and their space. Both would be interpreted through two forms of use-value, one for people and the other for land. What neither she nor her father could see was their participation in that colonialist logic through their own encapsulation in a space different from the Ju/wasi. Again, Fabian is helpful in pointing to the implications of this encapsulation procedure. In commenting on Parsonian functionalism, he notes that its effect was to encapsulate time within a given social system, thereby enabling the study of time within cultures. This process “virtually exorcised time from the study of relations between cultures.” “‘Theories of Time’ held by various cultures could now be studied with ‘timeless’ theory and method.”99 Fabian’s point here is that a bracketing comes into effect that pushes out the possibility of seeing time as a “dimension of intercultural study.”100
Translated to the reality of space, this encapsulation meant the Ju/wasi were placed in, conceptually speaking, a cultural-spatial bubble in which their land logic could be seen and evaluated. The Marshalls evaluated it positively, even romantically, but the white farmers and Bantu pastoralists evaluated it negatively. Both saw it in fundamentally the same way, as the unreal, the symbolic of a configuration of bodies in space that was functionally dissonant (figure 2).
How the Marshalls aided in the separation of Ju/wasi from their land was by enacting through their presence a new relationship to the land at the very moment they “touched” the Ju/wasi. They had reached beyond geography into identity, and in so doing they showed that continuities of identity did not require specific land or specific relationships to land. In the modernity the Marshall family embodied, identities are encapsulated by language and race, along with the important tropes culture and (ethno-)rituals. That is, as the Marshalls were in the land (in respect, in honor, even in ecological care) but not of the land, so too could the Ju/wasi be: “Our presence certainly alerted the Ju/wasi (those who had never been slaves on farms) to the life beyond the Kalahari, and our presence in Nyae Nyae certainly reminded the white settlers and the Bantu pastoralists of the great, untouched grassland that lay beyond the farms.”101 The Ju/wasi were therefore construed as people bound to the land, but not necessarily so; their binding was a matter of choice, much like the presence of the Marshalls. The Ju/wasi could now be interpreted both in their location and their being as transitional.
Figure 2. Symbolic Configuration of Bodies in Space
In less than twenty-five years, the South African government and private interests utterly inverted the Ju/wasi relation to land. It was a process rooted in centuries-long colonialist practices that had transformed the New Worlds. Beginning in 1959 with the establishment of a government outpost in Tsumkwe that would oversee Bushmen affairs from the ground to the disastrous proposal in 1960 that European-style farming be practiced through the introduction of goats, corn, and millet, the Ju/wasi were pulled into ecological holocaust. The goats, corn, and millet compromised the ecological integrity of the area. In 1970, the South African government established a Bushmen homeland (for Ju/wasi, Herero, Tswana, Kavango, and Ambo), with various groups assigned land tracts, and then prohibited all Bushmen from hunting traditional game. However, game was hunted vigorously by whites. By 1975, with limited options for finding sufficient food to eat, most Ju/wasi concentrated in Tsumkwe. By the 1980s, the Ju/wasi were forced by the South African government to live in government housing in “a location” in Tsumkwe. Marshall Thomas’s description captures the reality of life in a South African township: “The sedentary, unsanitary, overcrowded conditions of course brought disease, and the people began to get all manner of sicknesses to which they had no immunities, including TB, malaria, bilharzias, venereal diseases, and later, of course, AIDS.”102 The recruitment of Ju/wasi to military service, fighting guerrilla warfare against the South West Africa People’s Organization, and the introduction of alcohol were the final blows to the Ju/wasi way of life. Military service was one of the only means of securing income for many, and alcohol overconsumption unleashed the demons of violence and death. The people turned on each other out of frustration over limited options for thriving and the loss of their land. Indeed, some Ju/wasi committed suicide with the poison arrows they had once used for hunting life-giving game. Her quotation of a song composed by N!ai, the daughter of the woman with whom Marshall Thomas shared her Ju/wasi name, captures this horror: “Now people mock me and I cry. / My people abuse me. / The white people scorn me. / Death dances with me.”103 A few Ju/wasi continued to struggle as farmers, but the reality of the vast majority was the death of a way of life, if not of a people: “Only a small area squeezed between the nineteenth and twentieth parallels [of assigned land] remain to the Ju/wasi we knew. Of the fourteen waterholes of the former Nyae Nyae, only five are within the area, which is now known as the Nyae Nyae Conservancy. But, thanks largely to my brother [John Marshall], the Ju/wa residents of the conservancy are the only group of Bushmen in Namibia who have any land at all. The rest live on white people’s farms as farm workers or on the outskirts of pastoralist villages without rights of tenure. In Namibia, as in all southern African countries, the Bushmen are the poorest ethnic group by far, with the greatest unemployment.”104 The transformation is complete—the Ju/wasi have been turned into an ethnic group captured in poverty. As her brother so powerfully argued, it would be impossible for the Ju/wasi to return to the Old Way or anything approximating it. But sentimentalizing this impossibility of return as the loss of the premodern world that has come upon us all dehistoricizes this reality of transformation by isolating the Ju/wasi as simply a “tragic people” who were out of step with the Enlightenment processes of cultural evolution. They cannot return because white presence first interrupted the connection of land to identity and then very quickly reconfigured both.105
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas is correct that the arrival of the Marshalls was only a harbinger of the global change that was moving toward the Ju/wasi. However, her text does not recognize the crucial loss of a reality of connectivity. This reality meant not only a form of life bound to specific space but also a form of identity that reached beyond the typological and the racial, a form that was an invitation to all humankind. In its place, she proposes, she imagines the typological, the universal, by reaching back into time to an arche, a beginning that joins “us” (as the distant offspring of ancient humans) to the Ju/wasi. This is a powerful form of temporal distancing. In this way Marshall Thomas can evoke only an evolutionary connection because the other forms of connection are no longer available to her or to anyone. Their significance now is only in terms of human evolutionary beginnings. The Ju/wasi exist without contemporary significance. Now they are nothing more than poor black people, and the world has many poor black people.106
Marshall Thomas’s The Old Way attests to the seriousness of the loss of space. There is yet another dimension of loss, a dimension where memory, language, and history intertwine with space to give the moral content of identity. She hints at this other dimension when she describes the destruction of xaro, the practice of sharing and gift giving. This practice required all Ju/wasi to give gifts of things formed from the land, whether gathered, hunted, or made, to people of their communities or related ones. Jealousy’s and envy’s corrosive effects on the community were thereby averted, especially in times of water or food scarcity. The loss of land can in effect disrupt moral vision. In order to understand this one must imagine moral sensibilities as being space-textured. Keith H. Basso, in his text Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache, shows powerfully how landscape functions to cultivate wisdom and moral authority in a community. His work among the ndee, commonly known as Western Apache, in the village of Cibecue in Arizona on the Fort Apache Reservation (north of Tucson and east of Phoenix and situated at an elevation of forty-nine hundred feet) exposes the connections between landscape and how native peoples remember, learn, and perpetuate moral vision.107
Basso identifies Western Apaches for whom, in ways that reflect the Yup’ik sensibility described by Martin, specific spatial reality is the hermeneutical horizon on which they see themselves and the world. The Apache practice of naming places carries with it a constellation of identity markers. Fundamentally, place-names are the means through which Apache tell their history. As Basso states, “What matters most to Apaches is where events occurred, not when, and what they serve to reveal about the development and character of Apache social life.”108 The “where” is key because it indicates “the path or trail (‘intin)” the founding ancestors traversed both in their actual movements and in their moral and social actions. How do the Apache access that path when it becomes no longer visible, “beyond the memories of living persons”? The path must be imagined in a disciplined way from the tracks, that is, the stories, songs, relics, and, most important, place-names. When the name of a place such as Goshtł’ish Tú Bił
(Water Lies with Mud in an Open Container) is spoken, it repeats the very words of the ancestors and invokes their presence and their actions on behalf of themselves and their progeny. In this case, they arrived at and then decided on the precise location where the Apache would begin to create their future. The names enable Apache to remember what was done in a particular place. As Basso says, they answer the question, “What happened here?”109 Authentic historical accounting for Apache requires these spatial realities. It also requires a narrator or storyteller of Apache history, whom Basso called the “place-maker.”110 Anyone may function as a place-maker narrating “place-worlds,” the world of the Apache ancestors and their world as well.
The place-maker becomes the indispensable guide, revealing the bond of place to bodies through the narrative: “The place-maker’s main objective is to speak the past into being, to summon it with words and give it dramatic form, to produce experience by forging ancestral worlds in which others can participate and readily lose themselves…. The place-maker often speaks as witness on the scene, describing ancestral events ‘as they are occurring’ and creating in the process a vivid sense that what happened long ago—right here, on this very spot—could be happening now.”111 Basso understands that this way of telling history stands at odds with Anglo-American versions of native history, which seem to Apache to be “distant and unfamiliar.”112 History as place making is a performance that cultivates an aesthetic. Through that aesthetic, Apache tell their stories to make the past present in dramatic form, linking it to place. Such linking aims at “instilling empathy and admiration for the ancestors themselves.”113 This aesthetic looks at Anglo-American (Western) historiographic practice, especially regarding Apache history, as “geographically adrift” because it is detached from local landscape with “few spatial anchors,” with places often not identified, obsessed both with dating historical events and placing them in “tightly ordered sequences” organized through some totalizing theory.114 Equally important, Western historiographic practice regarding the Apache loses sight of the central purpose of telling history—to cultivate Apache people and their moral and social sensibilities, that is, to build community.
A sense of particular places anchors community building. By holding on to place-names, Apache not only understand their ancestors’ world but how their own world has changed. Changes in landscape teach them lessons about their own behavior, whether they have been faithful or not to the ways of their peoples’ past. The loss of a body of water or the absence of animals once very familiar to an area of land may mark past or present acts of disrespect. Basso recites the story of the place named Tłiish Bi Tú’é (Snake’s Water), an inactive spring west of Cibecue. At that site the activity of the people who long ago came to this place for water was framed for him through the narration of a place-world. They found snakes lying on the rock by the spring. They surmised that the snakes owned and protected the spring. A lone Apache man separated from the group who were headed for the water and approached and spoke to the snakes respectfully and correctly. The snakes left and the group approached and retrieved some water. The water was good, and the people were grateful. The story having brought the past into the present, the Apache narrator concludes that something disrespectful probably happened for the water to now be gone.115
In Apache cultural ecology, place-names preceded and helped to constitute clan names. Their local moral universe then came into place as they lived on the land and formed “commemorative names.”116 Commemorative names were place-names tied to ancestral actions of deep moral consequences. Apache express commemorative names through a form of narration called ‘ágodzaahi, or historical tale. These brief, quickly told historical tales take center stage in the process of moral formation: “Historical tales are intended to edify, but their main purpose is to criticize social delinquents (or, as the Apaches say, to ‘shoot’ them), thereby impressing these individuals with the undesirability of improper behavior and alerting them to the punitive consequences of further misconduct…. Nowhere do place-names serve more important communicative function than in the context of historical tales.”117 ‘ágodzaahi stories capture people and place them between “historical events and geographical locations,” between Apache ethics and a person’s current behavior in order to reveal to him or her what it means to be Apache.118 The place-name Chąą Bi Dałt’ohe (Shades of Shit) is a powerful example. The people who lived at this place had a great harvest and had much corn, while their relatives who lived nearby had a poor harvest and had little corn. They asked the relatives with much corn to share, but they would not. In anger, they forced their corn-abundant relatives to stay home, not letting them leave even to defecate. Unable to get to the spot of land that functioned as a toilet, they were forced to defecate at their home in their shaded areas. Their camp filled with the smell of bodily waste, and they got very sick. The relatives said, “You have brought this on yourselves. Now you live in shades of shit!” The story concludes, “Finally, they agreed to share their corn. It happened at Shades of Shit.”119
When stories such as these are told, the actors in the story join with the one to whom the story is addressed in a form of moral analogical predication. They intend to suggest that the similarities of behavior between persons past and the person addressed by the story may yield similarly damaging consequences now. This is certainly not a unique feature of a culture, yet for Apache both the stories and the land itself are active agents, stalking or hunting people, reminding them that their actions are not without consequences. The land speaks and bears witness not only to the ancestors but to the acts that are immoral and death dealing:
This is what we know about our stories. They go to work on your mind and make you think about your life. Maybe you’ve not been acting right. Maybe you’ve been stingy. Maybe you’ve been chasing after women. Maybe you’ve been trying to act like a whiteman. People don’t like it! So someone goes hunting for you—maybe your grandmother, your grandfather, your uncle. It doesn’t matter. Anyone can do it…. Many things jump up at you and block your way. But you won’t forget that story. You’re going to see the place where it happened, maybe every day if it’s nearby and close to Cibecue. If you don’t see it, you’re going to hear its name and see it in your mind. It doesn’t matter if you get old—that place will keep on stalking you like the one who shot you with the story. Maybe that person will die. Even so, that place will keep on stalking you. It’s like that person is still alive.120
This extraordinary account from Nick Thompson, one of the most crucial of Basso’s Apache interpreters, elucidates what Basso terms “the moral significance of geographical locations.”121 This sense of places as moral agents means that specific lands carry a power to, as one Apache woman said, “make people live right…. The land looks after us.” To lose the land is a very serious matter and may be seen as forgetfulness of the story or of the land itself.122 The testimony of Wilson Lavender in 1975 is a profound illustration of the consequence of land-forgetfulness: “One time I went to L.A. training for mechanic. It was no good, sure no good. I start drinking, hang around bars all the time. I start getting into trouble with my wife, fight sometimes with her. It was bad. I forget about this country here around Cibecue. I forget all the names and stories. I don’t hear them in my mind anymore. I forget how to live right, forget how to be strong.”123
Land and storied memory together work to vivify the moral imagination for Western Apache. This is true of many native clans and tribes for whom places and their names, whether mountains, rocks, or vacant fields, “endow the land with multiple forms of significance,” which actively give shape to a vision of the good and their embodiment of wisdom.124 Basso shows the close connection of language and landscape in creating a world. Together, language and landscape offer up the unfamiliar of a people never before encountered:
The shapes and colors and contours of the land together with the shifting sounds and cadences of native discourse thrust themselves upon the newcomer with a force so vivid and direct as to be virtually inescapable. Yet for all their sensory immediacy (and there are occasions, as any ethnographer will attest, when the sheer constancy of it grows to formidable proportions) landscape and discourse seem resolutely out of reach. Although close at hand and tangible in the extreme, each in its own way appears remote and inaccessible, anonymous and indistinct, and somehow, implausibly, a shade less than fully believable. And neither landscape nor discourse, as if determined to accentuate these conflicting impressions, may seem the least bit interested in having them resolved.125
It is precisely this “strangeness” of land coupled to language that faced the emerging colonialist powers as they entered the New Worlds. It is also precisely this foreignness that they overcame by splitting open the connection of people to land and to language. Here one can begin to capture the other dimension of the loss of connectivity of peoples to land, to specific spaces: disruption, even mutilation of the paths to the wisdom necessary to live in the world.126 The loss indicates the destruction of the fine webs that held together memory, language, and place to moral action and ethical judgment.127 It is a loss almost imperceptible except to the bodies of those for whom specific geography and animals continue to gesture to them deep links of identity. The loss is the overturning of space that is modernity. However, one must invoke the notion of modernity here very carefully because it may cause one to lose sight of the specifics of agency and agency recreation at work in the historic reality of displacement.
Europeans established a new organizing reality for identities, themselves. Yet to say Europeans created otherness, as Tzvetan Todorov notes in his classic text The Conquest of America, is quite imprecise and theologically beside the point.128 Europeans enacted racial agency as a theologically articulated way of understanding their bodies in relation to new spaces and new peoples and to their new power over those spaces and peoples. Before this agency would yield the “idea of race,” “the scientific concept of race,” the “social principle of race,” or even a fully formed “racial optic” on the world, it was a theological form—an inverted, distorted vision of creation that reduced theological anthropology to commodified bodies. In this inversion, whiteness replaced the earth as the signifier of identities. It would be a mistake to see this replacement as a discursive practice fully controlled by Europeans. It is a discursive practice, but one that presented itself as the only real option given the aggressive desacralization of the world. When you disrupt and destroy the delicate and contingent connection of peoples’ identities bound to specific lands you leave no alternative but racial agency. As Zurara exhibited, a scale was being formed—white, almost white, mixed, and black—a scale that captured even Europeans.
However, lack of full control of this discursive practice does not mean Europeans were passive. Whiteness was being held up as an aspect of creation with embedded facilitating powers. Whiteness from the moment of discovery and consumption was a social and theological way of imagining, an imaginary that evolved into a method of understanding the world. It was a social imaginary in that it posited the existence of difference and collectivity for those in the Old World faced with the not easily explainable peoples and phenomena of the New World. It was a theological imaginary because whiteness suggested that one may enter a true moment of creation gestalt. Whiteness transcended all peoples because it was a means of seeing all peoples at the very moment it realized itself. Whiteness was a global vision of Europeans and Africans but, more than that, a way of organizing bodies by proximity to and approximation of white bodies.
With the emergence of whiteness, identity was calibrated through possession of, not possession by, specific land. All peoples do make claims on their land. But the point here is that racial agency and especially whiteness rendered unintelligible and unpersuasive any narratives of the collective self that bound identity to geography, to earth, to water, trees, and animals. People would henceforth (and forever) carry their identities on their bodies, without remainder. From the beginning of the colonialist moment, being white placed one at the center of the symbolic and real reordering of space. In a real sense, whiteness comes into being as a form of landscape with all its facilitating realities.
I want to begin to outline some of the central ramifications for Christian theology and for a racial theory created by this reality of displacement. In chapter 2 I will explore further these ramifications as I consider the transformation of theology itself into a discourse of displacement. Here, however, I want to show how the conceptual and material processes of displacement worked together to enable a new ground for imagining identity. It is this new ground that enabled the formation of the racial self. The issue of identity now invokes a universe of modern conceptualities, some of which are respected in academic circles as new healthy convergences of multiple scholarly fields and interests, others of which are denounced as faddism, that is, creating undisciplined anachronisms running roughshod over historical periods and peoples.
In theology and other fields, the idea of identity, like the idea of culture, is prone to conceptual slippage and political signaling that is difficult to contain. This chapter is concerned less with defining identity than with showing that a form of identity coupled with processes of identity formation emerges from the colonialist moment, the effects of which scholars have not begun to conceptualize. I have also been hesitant to invoke the modern notion of self for fear of signalizing that my focus is on the emergence of a self, racial or otherwise. It is not. My concern is the arrival of new ground that replaces the land and specific places as primary signifiers of identity. On this new ground, a self grows, extends into the world, and becomes or, more precisely, enters the freedom of multiple processes of becoming.
European Christians, from the Iberians through the British, saw themselves as agents of positive, if not divine, change, as it were, the markers of creaturely contingency. They saw themselves as those ordained to enact a providential transition. In so doing they positioned themselves as those first conditioning their world rather than being conditioned by it. They performed a deeply theological act that mirrored the identity and action of God in creating. The theologian Karl Barth, in §28 of his Church Dogmatics, II/1, speaks of God as the One revealed in his act. God is the One whose being is revealed in divine action.129 Such a recognition not only banishes our abstractions regarding the identity of God, but also renders a God who is unconditioned by us. For Barth, the concrete reality in which this unconditioned God is found is Jesus of Nazareth. The unconditioned nature of God does not mean aloofness. It points to the history of a God in Israel and in Jesus, who loves us unconditionally, faithfully, and in freedom, not out of necessity. This is the way of the Creator with the creation. The freedom of the Creator to love us engenders our freedom. Barth’s positive ontology of divine being, of a God revealed in divine act, a being in becoming, casts light on the distorted ontology of being that is found in the colonialist moment.130
The relation between the colonizers and the colonized does show mutual conditioning, but that mutual conditioning was mitigated by God-like action in which the relation became as those conditioning to those conditioned, European to native. What is decisive here is that a creative authority, a creative regime, gets channeled through white presence. That creative regime activates simply by the performance of whiteness. All peoples touched by the machinations of colonialist operations get caught up in that creative regime. In order to grasp the subtlety at work in this act, consider its positive opposite articulated in Barth’s account of divine freedom and creaturely dependence:
No created beings are in fact so independent of each other that in spite of this relative mutual independence they have not also to some extent a certain mutual interdependence, in the sense that ultimately none of them would have its being and nature apart from its interlocking with the being and nature of all the others. But God confronts all that is in supreme and utter independence, i.e., He would be no less and no different even if they all did not exist or existed differently. God stands at an infinite distance from everything else, not in the finite degree of difference with which created things stand towards each other. If they all have their being and a specific nature, God in His freedom has conferred it upon them; not because He was obliged to do so, or because His purpose was influenced by their being and nature, but because their being and nature is conditioned by His being and nature.131
Barth’s weighty and theologically intricate statement about divine conditioning of the created beings must be turned on its head to understand the operation of racial ontology. Racial being is an act of continual conference in which mutual interdependence is not suspended, but placed on a trajectory toward an endless becoming organized around white bodies. European colonialists in acts of breathtaking hubris imagined the interlocking nature of all people and things within their own independence of those very people and things. This is an independence that facilitates the constant turnings of existence.
The scope of that independence is crucial—not simply of indigenes but also of landscape. Vine Deloria Jr., in his important essay “The Coming of the People,” argues that the specific realities of the land—rivers, valleys, mountains, and so forth—and the animals together with the people constitute an interconnected community. All are relatives (family members), and all must be listened to in order to live rightly. This is to be distinguished from the world wrought by European settlers:
The white man, where viewed in this context, appears as a perennial adolescent. He is continually moving about, and his restless nature cannot seem to find peace. Yet he does not listen to the land and so cannot find a place for himself. He has few relatives and seems to believe that the domestic animals that have always relied upon him constitute his only link with the other peoples of the universe. Yet he does not treat these animals as friends but only as objects to be exploited. While he has destroyed many holy places of the Indians, he does not seem to be able to content himself with his own holy places … for his most holy places are cemeteries where his forefathers lie under granite slabs, row upon row upon row, strangers lying with strangers.132
Deloria’s comments capture two joined actions, disconnection and destruction, but added to Barth’s thoughts one sees those actions within the act of conference. The conference of “a being and a specific nature,” to quote Barth again, is precisely the operation of racial attribution, of white and black with everyone in between. Yet one must see this attribution within the refashioning of the landscape. Races becomes as the land becomes—something new. This entails a reciprocal determination, both temporal and spatial. In the minds of the European settlers, the instability of both land and people called for the stability of transition. The natives, black, red, and everyone not white, must be brought from chaos to faith. The land, wetlands, fields, and forests must be cleared, organized, and brought into productive civilization. The stability is in the transition, held together by racial attribution.
Once the stability of transition is in place, then the ideas and rhetoric of mutual interdependence, mutual conditioning may be superimposed, as if one were placing layers of frosting on a cooling cake. But this is a fabricated mutual interdependence, one built upon a new ordering of things and people. Reciprocity of racial being was in play in the formation of the New World racial order, but that reciprocity must never be construed as creative equality. Toni Morrison, in her epic text Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, captures this sense of reciprocity as she notes the uses of an Africanist persona in American literature and the Euro-American imagination: “For the settlers and for American writers generally, this Africanist other became the means of thinking about body, mind, chaos, kindness, and love; provided the occasion for exercises in the absence of restraint, the presence of restraint, the contemplation of freedom and of aggression; permitted opportunities for the exploration of ethics and morality, for meeting obligations of the social contract, for bearing the cross of religion and following out the ramifications of power.”133 Morrison pictures a God-like freedom similar to that described by Barth regarding God’s own being. Of course, she is referring to fiction and the work of the writer, but she is also capturing racial reciprocal being. The creativity at play here is enabled and reinforced by the power to change native worlds, to reconfigure space, uproot peoples and replant them. It is nothing less than a creatio continua, a continuous creation, and a continuous recreation. Whiteness is co-creator with God. Morrison states further, “If we follow through on the self-reflexive nature of these encounters with Africanism, it falls clear: images of blackness can be evil and protective, rebellious and forgiving, fearful and desirable—all of the self-contradictory features of the self. Whiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable. Or so our writers seem to say.”134 The analogy I draw between God as Creator and whiteness as Creator is not a tight one. It falls apart at the point of ascribing immutability to white being. Immutability is not the point. Indeed Europeans are inside this racial becoming. The point here is conference bound to creativity. Conference and creativity are the dual realities within which racial being is in its becoming. That becoming is not simply assimilation, but more decisively a becoming facilitated by whiteness, an agency born inside the racial imagination. Morrison’s description of whiteness turns more toward a replacement—whiteness for landscape, whiteness as landscape. That is, landscape not only as Deloria envisions it, alive, speaking, instructing, but also landscape as the ground ready to be built upon, ready to have fashioned upon it racial existence.
One cannot understand what is at stake in the formation of whiteness until one understands this new order of things unleashed by colonialism. The refashioning of bodies in space to form racial existence makes little sense without seeing simultaneously the refashioning of space.135
The point here is not simply the loss of indigenous stability. I am not positing an immutability of native existence. The loss here is of a life-giving collaboration of identity between place and bodies, people and animals. The loss here is also of the possibility of new identities bound up with entering new spaces. Absent these possibilities peoples are invited into an ever-tightening insularity of collective identity and collective narration.
People today continue to live in a dual trajectory of constantly shifting geographic spaces made more mutable by the dictates of capitalistic logic and racial identities that are free-floating and changeable, yet constantly stabilized through the reciprocity of racial being. As I shall explicate in more detail later, without land functioning as identity signifier, racial designations historically understood and politically activated continue to be compelling sensible ground on which to envision collective agency. Until one begins to reflect on the interconnected turnings of space and the formation of racial being as mirrored processes, every attempt to destabilize racial identity, argue for a common humanity, and claim race as fiction, social construction, or essentialized nonsense will be superficial at best.
Theorists and theories of race will not touch the ground until they reckon deeply with the foundations of racial imaginings in the deployment of an altered theological vision of creation. We must narrate not simply the alteration of bodies but of space itself. The narration must be of both. There is an aspect of delusion in racial theory and theology that suggests possibilities of resistance to racial identity, or seeks to discern powers of racial improvisation, or advocates renouncing white privilege all without seeing how these identities are reflexively calibrated to the turnings of spatial habitations. Racial identities have taken on landscape and geographic characteristics and cannot simply be overcome by thought, any more than a mountain may be moved by turning one’s face away from it.
This means that strategies that “renounce race” often are unwittingly socially and culturally counterproductive and may lead to economically imperialist practices regarding land and claims on land because the freedom they claim by resisting discursive practices, or cultural logics, or processes of structuration flows directly out of the spatial dislocation of bodies.136 Thus the freedom to renounce race is a direct descendent of the theological power to deny and undermine geographically sustained identities. No easy answers follow. It should be clear at this point that I am not an advocate of race. Nor am I resolved to a race-bydefault position. Neither do I envision a return to life before race. At this point my concern is to illumine an intensely tangled mistake that cannot be improved by race-antinomian intellectual forays. Antiessential, antirace positions tend to move toward odd configurations of individualism that are spiritually vapid.137 The way forward, if there is a way forward, will involve several more conceptual steps before a future of communion might be envisioned.
The equally pressing concerns, however, are ones of Christian theology. This reality of displacement means deep internal shifts in theology. Theology will be formed from the colonial moment forward without what Heidegger called “the way of dwelling,” that is, the way of being mortal that requires specific spaces formed into places of organizing centers of identity.138 Without place as the articulator of identity, human skin was asked to fly solo and speak for itself. Heidegger himself would not share a notion of a “landscape that hunts for us.” His sense of signification works in only one direction, from us to the land (and certainly not the land signifying us or other creatures doing the same). Yet for Christian theology the effects of a world displaced and racialized would be devastating. Western Christian theology continues to misunderstand the theological power of white and black identities. Christian theologians and all other intellectuals continue to theologize and theorize those identities very poorly. Indeed, we continue to ignore Zurara’s tears.