Work · Structuralism & Poststructuralism
The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other
Studies Columbus, Cortés, Las Casas and Sahagún to ask how Europeans understood – and failed to understand – the Indigenous peoples they conquered.
Introduction
“The Conquest of America” (1982) marks Todorov’s turn from poetics to ethics and the history of ideas. Using the writings of Columbus, Cortés, Las Casas, Durán, Sahagún and others, he asks how the Spanish perceived the Indigenous peoples of the Americas: as beings to be assimilated, as inferior, or as different but equal. He argues that the conquerors’ advantage lay partly in communication – Cortés understood and manipulated signs – and calls the destruction that followed, in terms of numbers, the greatest genocide in human history. Las Casas and Sahagún represent for him stages in a slow learning to recognise the other. The book shaped debates around the quincentenary of 1492, while historians criticised its thesis about Aztec communication and its reliance on European sources.
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