Abstract
In a book on the poetics of otherness, with an emphasis on war, trauma, and literature, the wound explored here is the violence generated literally or in misunderstanding. Although the study ranges from ancient texts to recent ones, here I would like to focus on the trauma of harming, killing, and obliterating the other, in this chapter the Native Americans after Columbus and at the end of the book the European Jews in the face of Hitler. Violence can occur in misunderstanding or trying to obliterate the other, be it willful or through ignorance or ideological blindness or hatred. Language is often a focus in my work, and here it is no different. What, for instance, does the word “trauma” suggest?
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Notes
See Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation—Analysis of Government—Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944). I would like to thank Cambridge Scholars Publishing and Fatima Festić, the editor of the volume, for permission to reprint this revised version of “Rubbing the Wound: Bartolomé de Las Casas and the Trauma of the Spanish Massacre of the Indians,” Gender and Trauma: Interdisciplinary Dialogues, ed. Fatima Festić (Newcastle, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 3–19.
See Jonathan Hart, “Images of the Native in Renaissance Encounter Narratives,” ARIEL 25 (October 1994): 55–76.
Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003).
David E. Stan-nard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Jonathan Hart, “Papal Donations and Colonization,” Encyclopedia of Western Colonization Since1450, (Macmillan/Thomson Gale, 2006).
Bouda Etemad, La possession du monde: poids et mesures de la colonisation, XVIIIe-XXe siècles (Paris: Editions Complexe, 2000), 202.
See Sergio Moratiel Villa, “Philosophie du droit international: Suárez, Grotius et epigones,” Revue internationale de la Croix-Rouge (31.10.1997) no. 827: 577–591.
Antonio de Montesinos, “Advent Sermon 1511,” Radical Christian Writings: A Reader, ed. Andrew Bradstock and Christopher Rowland (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002), 63.
see Lewis Hanke, “Free Speech in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America.” The Hispanic American Historical Review 26 (1946): 135–149.
Patricia Seed, “Taking Possession and Reading Texts: Establishing the Authority of Overseas Empires,” The William and Mary Quarterly 49 (1992): 183–209.
J. Juderías y Loyot, La Leyenda negra y la ver dad histórica (Madrid: Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos, 1914).
William S. Maltby, The Black Legend in England (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1971).
Jonathan Hart, Representing the New World: The English and French Uses of the Example of Spain, 1492–1713 (New York, Palgrave, 2001).
Jon Cowans, Modern Spain: A Documentary History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 111–14.
See Jonathan Hart, “Las Casas in French and Other Languages,” Approaches to Teaching the Writings of Bartolome de Las Casas, ed. Santa Arias and Eyda M. Merediz (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2008), 224–34.
Walter Ralegh, A Report of the Trvth of the Fight about the Isles of Açores, This Last Sommer. Betwixt The Reuenge, One of Her Maiesties Shippes, And an Armada of the King of Spaine (London, 1591) D recto-D verso.
See David Day, Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 176–97.
See Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 54–80.
See Terence Cave, “Recognition and the Reader,” in Comparative Criticism: A Yearbook, ed. E.S. Shaffer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 49–70.
Terence Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, rpt. 1990).
Mark Harrison, Disease and the Modern World: 1500 to the Present Day (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 202.
Colin Heywood, A History of Childhood: Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 16.
See Jonathan Hart, Empiresand Colonies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008).
Bartolomé de Las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (Barcelona: Linkgua ediciones, 2006), 11.
Sarah Farmer, Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-Sur-Glane (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
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© 2015 Jonathan Locke Hart
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Hart, J. (2015). Trauma. In: The Poetics of Otherness. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137477453_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137477453_2
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