The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization

Mestizo: a person of mixed blood; specifically, a personof mixed European and American Indianancestry.

Serge Gruzinski, the renowned historian of Latin America, offers a brilliant, original critique of colonization and globalization in The Mestizo Mind. Looking at the fifteenth-century colonization of Latin America, Gruzinski documents the mélange 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 mélange 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 MestizoMind definitively conceptualizes the clash of civilizations in the style of Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and Anne McClintock.

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 fromColumbus to Blade Runner and The Conquest of Mexico.