The Mestizo Mind The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization

"Mestizo: a person of mixed blood; specifically, a person of mixed European and American Indian ancestry.
Serge Gruzinski, the renowned historian of Latin America, offers a brilliant, original critique of colonization and globalization in "The Mestizo Mind. Looking at the 15th century colonization of Latin America, Gruzinski documents the melange that resulted: colonized mating with colonizers; Indians joining the Catholic Church and colonial government; and Amerindian visualizations of Jesus and Perseus. These physical and cultural encounters created a new culture, a new individual, and a phenomenon we now call globalization. Revealing globalization's early origins, Gruzinski then fast forwards to the contemporary melange seen in the films of Peter Greenaway and Wong Kar-Wai to argue that over 500 years of intermingling has produced the mestizo mind, a state of mixed thinking that we all possess.
A masterful alchemy of history, anthropology, philosophy and visual analysis, "The Mestizo Mind definitively conceptualizes the clash of civilizations in the style of Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and Anne McClintock.

Introduction PART I. MELANGE, CHAOS, WESTERNIZATION 1. Amazons 2. Melange and Mestizo 3. The Shock of Conquest 4. Westernization PART II. MESTIZO IMAGERY 5. The Lady Centaur and the Monkey 6. Mexican Ovid 7. The Invasion of Grotesques, or, Moving Images 8. The Language of Grotesques and Glyphs PART III. MESTIZO CREATMTY 9. Wolf, Rain, and Rainbow 10. Crossing the Sea 11. Colonizing Heaven 12. Sibylline Grotto, Conclusion: Happy Together

Serge Gruzinski lectures at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and is research director of EHESS's Empire/Society/Nations research center. He is recently the author of Images at War: Mexico from Columbus to Blade Runner and The Conquest of Mexico.