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At the end of World War II, the atomic breakthrough signified for the USA an awesome spectacle of technological prowess and military superiority, confirming unique American status on the international scene. Although world opinion generally viewed the Bomb as an instrument of barbarism, for US leaders it would be embraced as a benevolent source of perpetual global hegemony. Today, roughly a quarter century after the end of the Cold War, the US remains fully committed to nuclear supremacy. Throughout the postwar era the goal of nuclear supremacy has been at the heart of US global hegemony, steadily worsening hopes for world peace.

In this chapter I want to explore some early warnings of the end times we have just been contemplating writ large, on a global scale, in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and confined to a single remote island in Golding’s The Lord of the Flies. McCarthy’s depiction of a post-apocalyptic descent into the most atrocious brutality and Golding’s staging of an out-of-the-way reversion to barbarism both present human sociality in radical decline. To understand what might be presently facilitating this decline, as well as what might resist it, I want to turn to two novels of the early 1990s, Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Hoeg and The Shipping News by Annie Proulx. In these novels, sociality is in dire straits but of a different order. Subject to the dispersing or redistributing effects of global capital, humanity is on the verge of becoming abstracted from the place of its greatest effectiveness: the local. Both novels are set in contemporary society where, according to Hartman, “artificial, bureaucratic, or secondary mechanisms are blocking sources of vitality” (27). We have seen that what struggles to survive against all odds in McCarthy’s The Road is the most immediate gesture of kindness and care, the nurturing and safeguarding of the young. In Hoeg’s novel, this level of care is relegated to the status of an irrelevancy by all except the protagonist, Smilla.

The influence of Ovid on early modern English literature is so overwhelming and commented upon that little more can be said about it. The poet of love and mutability appealed to English poets’ imagination and his stories were an inexhaustible resource for Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists. Writers were attracted by the pagan myth of metamorphosis, the rhetoric of the body, love and intimacy, betrayal and desertion, friendship, and exile.1 Ovid influenced the Renaissance theories of imitation produced in Elizabethan times and the fashion for the use of classical allusions in poetry and drama made Ovid, next to Virgil and Horace, one of the most quoted or alluded to classical poets in early modern English literature. In addition, Ovid’s laments and his elegiac descriptions of the land and people at the Pontus Euxinus in Tristia and Ex Ponto transformed him into an authority on banishment, alienation, and ethnic barbarism of nations at the margins of the known Roman world.2 We all bear in mind, however, the caveat suggested by Peter White and other classical scholars, namely that “Ovid” is a fictionalized poetic persona and the name “refers to a figment of his poems.”3 The carbon copy that Ovid created in the Elizabethans’ and Jacobeans’ imaginary regarding the cold and inhospitable land and the barbarous inhabitants living at the limits of the civilized world came to be assimilated to the representation most people in early modern England had about the Western coast of the Black Sea.

No country for old men: a land that once, for Yeats, was a place of sex, sensuality, and procreation, has now become, quite extraordinarily, a place of unremitting and inexplicable violence. This strange inversion of meaning and feeling is not the doing of the Coen Brothers (who may or may not have read Yeats in their college days) but of best-selling author Cormac McCarthy, who adapted Yeats’s line (without citation) for his own version of portentous nihilism. Even the works of best-selling authors, though, are a special taste compared to the nationwide appeal of hit movies; if No Country for Old Men is read through all eternity it will still not have been read by as many persons as saw the movie on its first smash weekend. So the point is not to ask how the change in Yeats’s meaning came to McCarthy, but rather what it means now that an entire culture (minus a huddle of serious poetry readers), invited to wallow for two hours in unmitigated and uninterrogated violence, shrugs its collective shoulders and accepts what it is being shown as reasonable, as a normal vision of “the country,” as “formally beautiful,” as representing its makers “at the height of their powers,” as being an obvious candidate for a “Best Picture of the Year” Oscar nomination. And its chief competition demonstrated a similarly strange trajectory, though in a different vein: Upton Sinclair’s socialist, muckraking novel, Oil, transformed into Paul Thomas Anderson’s cinematic “masterpiece” (as it was hailed by critics), There Will Be Blood.

In 2004, the central Jewish community of Argentina, then under labor leadership, published a book entitled La cuestion Judia vista desde la izquierda (The Jewish Question Through the Eyes of the Left). A priori, the book was promising. Marcos Aguinis, the author, boasted a long-term record of social engagement and activism. He was part of the opposition to the aforementioned dictatorship that disproportionately targeted Jews in order to secure the advancement of civilization in the South. After the return of democracy he would become the secretary of culture to the democratic government that brought the perpetrators of genocide to justice. Explicitly influenced by Memmi, Aguinis’s book not only reflects on the narrative of barba- rism but also addresses “decolonial” constituencies, with the principle objective of engaging in a uniquely Jewish reading of global politics “from the South.”1

In the last quarter of the twentieth century South African author J. M. Coetzee wrote Waiting for the Barbarians. This novel, argu- ably the best-known book by the winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, is an illuminating introduction to one of the most popular versions of the Western narrative of barbarism. The story takes place in a frontier city under the jurisdiction of a political entity known as “The Empire.” The civilized inhabitants seem to have a comfortable life. Indeed, their only source of discomfort is a loose collective of nomads who live outside the immediate borders of civilization and who are designated as “the barbarians.” Despite their relative inoffensive portrayal, a militaristic faction within the Empire begins fomenting hostility, proceeding to inform the population that the barbarians are preparing to invade and destroy civilization. Depicting the barbarians as anarchically seditious, sexually perverse, and brutishly uncivilized, the Empire engages in a preemptive strike, invading barbaric territory, and kidnapping, imprisoning, torturing, and even killing barbarians in a public spectacle.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust Isaac Deutscher wrote “The non-Jewish Jew,” an essay that became a landmark of Jewish cultural studies within the English-speaking academy. The article features the provocative intersection of two biographical identities that a priori seem antithetical: rabbinical Judaism and European Marxism. On the one hand Deutscher was a prototypical traditionalist Jew. He grew up in an orthodox family, was educated in Talmudic houses of study, fled continental Europe to escape Nazism, and presented his essay for the first time in an institutional Jewish setting. On the other hand, he was a committed Marxist. He rejected a religious or national identification of Judaism, became a Trotskyist activist, wrote groundbreaking biogra- phies of leaders of the Communist revolution, and committed his life to an international struggle against imperialisms and totalitarianisms. Defining his Jewishness in strident terms, Deutscher described himself as “a Jew by force of my unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated.”1

Amid the tumultuous years of decolonization in North Africa, Albert Memmi wrote the Pillar of Salt. The book is a semi- autobiographical novel texturing the life of a Tunisian Jew dur- ing French colonial rule, the Axis occupation during the Second World War, and the incipient Postcolonial struggle in the Maghreb. Soon after its publication, the book became a landmark in North African Jewish writing. Besides the perdurable insights it offers about local Jewry, the book is a powerful testament to the deep-seated decolonial struggles of Global South Jews. In this novel Memmi represents his semi-biographical character as a border thinker. He does recognize the complexity of his identity as, in his own words, “a Jew in an anti-Semitic world,” “a native in a colonial country,” and an “African in a world dominated by Europe.” Acknowledging the common root of the narrative that thrice objectified him, he proudly declares himself an “incurable barbarian.”1

Post-war Paris was a popular locus of congregation for intellec- tuals affected by the wounds of coloniality. During the period of political decolonization, border thinkers across the barbaric networks engaged in lengthy debates and subverted the discourses that racialized their communities. Jews were not foreign to these discussions. Lithuanian Emmanuel Levinas, arguably one of the most important Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century, made a seminal contri- bution to the debate. Despite the distance he routinely took from the existentialist Marxism that was permeating society, he adopted a con- ventional negative counter-narrative in his early writings. That is, the Eastern European social theorist inverted the traditional use of bar- barism, preserving the negative valence of the term. He thus blamed the West for the atrocities committed against the alleged barbarians, exculpated Jews from these accusations entirely, and mobilized Jewish thought as an alternative. His late career, however, marks a significant turning point as he came to strongly support a second alternative, a positive counter-narrative of barbarism.1

When we talk about Henrietta Evans and criticize her ignorance, all those who want to avoid their own responsibility in this devolution to linguistic barbarism use the excuse that she is “only” 14 and thus may not have had History, yet. This excusing takes many forms and, as a professor, I am probably a part of what gets excused. But if we continue to excuse failure (the silly educationists telling us that little failures need “feedback interventions”) instead of expecting the little children who come unto us to try to do better, overcoming ignorance and failure, the results may be dangerous and even result in us perhaps not inventing but participating in an evil (one bigger even than Education Programs). Willful ignorance may come from the best of intentions and be found in a person we would call good, like the correspondent letter-writer in George P. Elliott’s, “The NRACP.”1

The ancient Greeks and Romans did not rhyme; early modern Europeans did. The sources of rhyme were non- European, Asian, or African, and this caused early modern writers, such as Thomas Campion and Gian Giorgio Trissino, to either try to write without rhyme to recapture classical purities, or, such as Samuel Daniel, try to vindicate barbarism in arguing for rhyme. This chapter argues that, though Trissino sought to go back to the classics as a way of outflanking medieval barbarism, Davnenat and Corneille sought to use rhyme in chronicling an intermediate temporality which valued barbarian memory. Though their works on the subject were not successful in their own times, these writers still valiantly strove to reveal the pertinence of barbarian material to modern European manners.

The problem of comparative victimization and the issues associated with the hierarchizing of genocide into greater and “lesser evils” are thoroughly charged, overdetermined, and, for some, even a tasteless enterprise. How does one presume to grade evils? Perhaps a further source of disquiet arises from a powerful claim made by Martin Malia: “Nazism’s unique status as ‘absolute evil,’” he writes, “is now so entrenched that any comparison with it easily appears suspect.”1 One may (or may not) find such entrenchment normatively problematic or unwarranted, but few, I think, would question the empirical accuracy of Malia’s assertion that Nazism has indeed come to occupy a unique demonic status within our moral economy, a symbol of the deepest incarnation of barbarism and inhumanity. Perhaps Malia should have added an important rider to this statement: the model of Nazism as radical evil applies peculiarly and particularly to Anglo-American spheres of influence and to Western and Central Europe societies (and to some variable and increasing degree, to certain Eastern European countries).

The journey toward an ecological radicalism will bear little fruit until it is translated into a modern, strategic—ultimately worldwide—form of politics. Revisiting the classic injunction “socialism or barbarism,” the global crisis poses the question of human survival in a world order that is unraveling much faster than all but a few seem prepared to recognize. The environmental challenge has inspired, even forced, new ways of viewing not only economic development but political governance, culture, nature, and social change. A deeply ecological outlook invites radical perspectives on the future of production, consumption, agriculture, and technology, raising new questions about modernity itself as a product of Enlightenment rationality grounded in the utopian promises of science, technology, and material growth. The global crisis reveals the extent to which the classical industrial model has run its course, even as ruling elites scramble to mobilize resources in support of the corporate-growth system over which they preside—a system giving rise to rampant material exploitation, vast inequalities of wealth and power, wasteful use of natural resources, militarism, and warfare not to mention escalating habitat destruction on the road to possible ecological collapse. As Joel Kovel writes, “. . . the current stage of history can be characterized by structural forces that systematically degrade and finally exceed the buffering capacity of nature with respect to human production, thereby setting into motion an unpredictable yet interacting and expanding set of ecosystemic breakdowns.”1

My point in this essay is that popular usage no longer despises the Middle Ages, and that, ironically, academic medievalists have been slow to see the change because we still have a stake in the Renaissance model of the world that created the superior attitude. Several years ago, I argued that American popular images of the Middle Ages were a kind of temporal Orientalism: in fiction, film, news reporting, advertising, and political cant, the period became a dumping ground for the modern Western world’s repressed evils (barbarism, torture, disease, and general chaos) and daydreams (exotic adventure, romance, honor, the simple life).2 The images were familiar: on one side (the evils), network news references to “medieval” places like Afghanistan, with their warlords and their unpaved towns and religions, or the simple youth dismissal, “that’s so medieval,” of anything built, done, written, or thought before 1980; on the other side (the daydreams), the greening of community and the Disneyfication of King Arthur. Images of violence and dirt far outnumbered images of honor and greenery, however, and clean, clear air was rarely called medieval; fictional treatment of the period always dwelled on the smelliness of the place.

The Arab world reacted fiercely to the Israeli Defense Force’s (IDF) methods of suppressing the Palestinian disturbances and demonstrations. In the global era, with the ubiquitous presence of high-powered communications media such as digital cameras, the Internet, and television, every event immediately reaches every corner of the world and draws an immediate reaction. Thus, millions took to the streets in Arab capitals to demonstrate against Israel and its sponsor, the United States. In Rabat, for example, in one of the biggest demonstrations in the history of the Moroccan capital, a million people chanted slogans against Israel’s “barbarism and despotism” in suppressing the “children of the stones.” In Turkey, Islamic political activists started to talk about a “global Intifada.” The wave of furious demonstrations across the Arab and Islamic world was unprecedented: in Cairo, Amman, and Damascus, in the refugee camps of Lebanon, in Pakistan, and in Tehran. 1

The president could not have been more justified when he condemned “the evil scourge of terrorism.” I am quoting Ronald Reagan, who came into office in 1981 declaring that a focus of his foreign policy would be state-directed international terrorism, “the plague of the modern age” and “a return to barbarism in our time,” to sample some of the rhetoric of his administration.

Previously, the call to dialogue between religions could not find its place between nations. Such a call—if one were ever delivered—was received with disdain and dismissed due to the then prevalent isolation of communities in the world that caused a deterrent to communication, and man’s inability to recognize the importance of this dialogue despite the presence of a clear religious perspective promoting it. But now such dialogue appears to be a necessity in the wake of extremists from both the East and the West who have succeeded in swaying the future course of humanity toward the theory of a clash of civilizations while dividing the world into warring factions. Dialogue has become an intellectual and pragmatic necessity in order to put an end to humanity’s slip into barbarism, especially now that we live as neighbors in a world where barriers have been lifted through communication, transportation, and new technologies. Everyone has become interconnected, and ideas are flowing from everywhere. We live in a world that is referred to as a “small village” or a “global village” in which any action in any place now has a global impact, whether positive or negative. For this reason, there remains no possibility for self-isolation or segregation from others. There is no choice but to live together in the world. So what is to be done? We must engage in dialogue, establishing its foundations as God Most High intended.

The barbarism of gender-based violence (GBV) against women in Liberia is still only whispered about in secret moments among women, but those whispers are getting louder since the end of the country’s fourteen-year civil war. There is no way to ignore that, despite the gender advancement protocols in the United Nations Millennium Development goals, a “war on women” has occurred during peacetime as well as during war in many countries. This chapter, based upon my recent interviews conducted in Liberia, deals with how violence during the Liberian War normalized and sanctioned what Liberians refer to as sexual exploitation and assault (SEA) and the postwar efforts to assess it with policy commitments, laws, public health interventions, and massive citizen reeducation.

Rendering their physical environments foremost in terms of sensory impressions, Davis and Crane tried to come to terms with the social transformations that brought different class worlds (e.g., middle- and upper-class, middle- and lower-class) together. Accordingly, Life and Maggie handle class anxieties at a more properly aesthetic level, though with unsettling literary approaches to the nature of class difference and mobility. Like many other nineteenth-century writers, Davis and Crane increasingly saw the urban environments of America as a focus of the widening class rift between the poor and rich. Both writers created the identity of a middle-class reader in direct contrast to the commonly believed barbarism, perversion, and chaos embodied in the slum, working-class, and lower-class worlds.1 At the same time, wishing to bring into view what is hidden from the general view, what is unofficial, subversive, and even scandalous for their perceived readership, Davis and Crane generated stunningly new instances of cross-class perspectives.

As we move from the late Roman imperial era where we witness a political, grammatical, social, and poetic interaction that attaches to the rhetorical concept of “barbarism,” we recognize a Renaissance reanimation of the patterns that subtend such a complex mix. The Greek and Roman competition for territories produced aggressive opposition as a core structure of relating to the peoples inhabiting those contested spaces, and the linguistic deficiency of the aliens remains a constant rationalization for inhabiting the barbarian site. In the sixteenth century, we witness the emergence of a “barbarian” Africa and New World initiated in the voyages of “discovery” and commercial interest that have become the centerpiece of recent critical deliberations on a global Renaissance. However, this period represents a moment of incubation during which the instruments (linguistic, naval, economic, religious, etc.) of cultural negotiations are being honed. While the maritime ventures prepared the way for a full-blown imperialism to come, the development of a native English tongue was also commensurate with the imperial desire of the fledgling nation. Faced with the growing interaction with a barbarian world, the English language had to be promoted as the civilized essence of the nation that legitimized its ascendant supremacy.

Civility, barbarism, and monstrosity all occupy the debate on time past. Temporality becomes a continuum in which people in the present reach into the past to project something into a present moving into the future. There is a typology between then and now that attempts to make sense of time or to give it an artistic or political shape. Shakespeare and his contemporaries were well aware of the challenges of time in terms of religion, politics, and art. This poet and playwright used many genres to explore the representation of history and was part of the Renaissance discovery of time.1

In the aesthetic of the sonnets, in which poet, mistress, and young man live in a drama of love, lust, and time, it is difficult, even at the moments of disgust or the mediations on the slipping away of hours, always to remember the breaking in of the world of culture, politics, and history, the minute particulars of those who made the way for Shakespeare and for England in the expansion of Europe. That is not to say that the sonnets in Shakespeare’s plays and in the sonnets are really about love’s empire or the clash of worlds, but that after examining the nature of time in these sonnets, I would like to shift to contexts and to another range of allusion in the texts of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The shock of discovery with the expansion of Europe was one of the many great changes that Europeans and other cultures lived through from the fifteenth century onward. The divisions between we and they, and us and other, were temptations, but there was also a making of new hybrid cultures, and in this translation, amid whatever practical problems and suspicions, considerations of barbarity and monstrosity nibbled at the edge of Shakespeare’s works and his culture like the monsters beyond the known or in uncertain places on the maps of the time.

Venezuelan author Romulo Gallegos’s (1884–1969) novel Dona Barbara, first published in Spain by Araluce in 1929, then extensively rewritten with a second, definitive version in 1930 (again Barcelona, Araluce), is generally characterized as a novela de la tierra, one that treats the Latin American countryside both in the sense of being about the land but also in the sense of coming from the tierra, or land. And indeed, Dona Barbara is a novel of the land in both senses: firstly, because it is set in the then-untamed Apure region of Venezuela, an expanse of llanos—savanna or plains—between the Colombian border and the Orinoco River drained by the Apure, Arauca, and Cunaviche rivers (Vila 9–13), and secondly, because this landscape plays a central role in the novel, symbolizing as it does wild and primeval nature, including human nature, which issues forth from it. In Gallegos’s conceptualization, the uniqueness of the land and people make both Venezuelan literature and Venezuela itself distinctive, unmatched by any other. The protagonist of the novel, Santos Luzardo (in Spanish, Santos means “saints,” and Luzardo means “I am a burning light”), brings the enlightening, domesticating, and pacifying effects of civilization from the city onto this wild landscape and its equally wild and untamed inhabitants, setting up the novel’s primary conflict, that of civilization versus barbarism.

Proponents of the current war, as of past wars, against terrorism depict their struggle as a defense of the core values of civilization against an amoral barbarism in which it is impossible to be neutral.1 Terrorists, as stereotyped by counterinsurgent theorists, are “dedicated to violence and destruction” for its own sake; under terrorist brutalization, “headstrong youths can become so hooked on the life of terrorist murder that they perform their tasks in a kind of sacrificial ecstasy.”2 The limitations of the approaches of critics of wars against terrorism are perhaps more surprising. Specifically, such critics implicitly share with counterinsurgent writers a characterization of state violence as being less chaotic than that of resistance movements. The violence of the modern state may be more powerful, but in contrast, in the Foucauldian sense, it is “ordered.”3 States, especially first world states, claim their violence is legitimate and possess an ability to disguise their violence by applying it in ways that are of a lower intensity, such as military deployments, surveillance techniques, and legal or illegal detention.4 Where wars against terrorism are criticized in such analyses, it is to suggest that states of the first world, especially the United States, have helped to generate the conditions for the emergence of terrorism owing to the ruthless pursuit of their own interests.

At first one thought that political correctness (PC) was but an absurd, and hopefully ephemeral, travesty: a collection of kitsch euphemisms patched together in order to cover, in the manner of fig leaves, the obscenities of contemporary America: her barbarism and racism. We know the story: Mrs. and Miss turned into Ms., gal became lady, colored people minorities, guy gentleman, blacks African-Americans, fat heavy (or big), Spics Latinos (or Hispanic-Americans), skinny slender, Wops Italian-Americans, Third World countries developing countries, Orientals Asians, short petite, et cetera. This was yet the folk aspect of the change. Initially—in the early eighties—all this sounded ludicrous, but one might have granted the benefit of the doubt to the whole effort and inferred therefrom that PC was but the expression of a movement that sought, in spite of all, to correct the errors and hatreds of the past by starting with the words themselves, with speech. Soon it became clear that the shift was never meant to go further. It was rhetoric all right; some kind of manneristic foreplay to the habitual doublespeak of the “Liberal democracies,” which, in their ploys of international conquest and social imbalances, always come to justify imperial intrigue in the name of “freedom” and “human rights” on the one hand, and to blame economic inequality on “culture,” on the other.

“Fundamentally, such violence is not so much an event as the explosive form assumed by an absence of events. Or rather the implosive form: and what implodes here is the political void … the silence of history which has been repressed at the level of individual psychology, and the indifference and silence of everyone. We are dealing, therefore, not with irrational episodes in the life of our society, but instead with something that is completely in accord with that society’s accelerating plunge into the void.”2 Despite the heated debates and huge mass public demonstrations about the rights and wrongs of Iraq War in 2003, the biggest shifts in the British and American publics’ perception of the conflict occurred through a series of vivid, defining images at various crucial stages. Thus what proved to be undue optimism was at its peak during the fall of Baghdad and the Ozymandias-like toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue, complete with a forewarning of the cultural misunderstandings to come when a U.S. soldier momentarily draped the U.S. flag around the statue’s face. Further grounds for Western triumphalism were provided with the images of a disorientated and disheveled Saddam shortly after his capture on December 13, 2003, with the bathos of his last underground hiding-place that contrasted markedly with the pictures of abandoned palaces.

A vote for Chinese exclusion would mean a vote against slavery, against “cooly importation,” a U.S. senator from California warned in 1882. “An adverse vote now is to commission under the broad seal of the United States, all the speculators in human labor, all the importers of human muscle, all the traffickers in human flesh, to ply their infamous trade without impediment under the protection of the American flag, and empty the teeming, seething slave pens of China upon the soil of California!” The other senator from California added that those who had been “so clamorous against what was known as African slavery” had a moral obligation to vote for Chinese exclusion, “when we all know that they are used as slaves by those who bring them to this country, that their labor is for the benefit of those who practically own them.” A “coolie,” or “cooly,” it seemed, was a slave, pure and simple. Representative Horace F. Page (California) elaborated on the same point in the other chamber, branding the “Chinese cooly contract system” and polygamy the “twin relic[s] of the barbarism of slavery.” The United States was “the home of the down-trodden and the oppressed,” he declared, but “not the home for millions of cooly slaves and serfs who come here under a contract for a term of years to labor, and who neither enjoy nor practice any of our religious characteristics.”1

In this chapter, I pose the question of the otherwise and its reading, that is, of the ethical potentialities of literary language, and how reading can be up to the task of preserving it. Two preliminary remarks are in order: the term otherwise [autrement] in this volume’s title partially translates the expression that Emmanuel Levinas coins in Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence to refer to what, in language, exceeds the imperialism of the same, the violence of the order of discourse, not without leaving the inscriptions of its proper density and alterity. The complete form of Levinas’s expression is the barbarism “otherwise than being,” in which the adverb “otherwise” does not modify any entity or action (it does not indicate another modality of doing the same), but rather the adverbial character of “the otherwise than being,” the modality by which the other comes to language beyond any ontological manifestation or epistemological determination. Levinas refers to what, without belonging to discourse, can only be said in terms of the order of discourse and which, consequently, supposes a form of betrayal: an unsayable saying that without exhausting itself in the contents or themes of the utterance (the said), in the values it expresses, defies the order of communicative reason and the imperialism of the concept.

Appended to the 1663 edition of The Siege of Rhodes, Davenant’s dedicatory epistle to the Earl of Clarendon makes an overt comparison between the fictive world of the play’s Mediterranean setting and the real world of the play’s production in London of the early Restoration which amounts to rather more than a playful conceit. As the playwright acknowledges, he has good cause to be grateful for the countenance of so powerful a patron since “Dramatic poetry meets with the same persecution now, from such who esteem themselves the most refin’d and civil, as it ever did from the Barbarous. And yet whilst those virtuous Enemies deny heroique Plays to the Gentry, they entertain the People with a Seditious Farce of their own counterfeit Gravity.” As the epistle makes clear, there is an inverse reciprocity to be drawn between the two worlds: whilst the Turkish sultan manifests a “civility & magnificence” that refutes his archetypal barbarism, those factious elements of contemporary London are charged with affecting a civility that belies their own barbarity. This pre-emptive defense indicates both the persistence of moral opposition to public theater as well as Davenant’s characteristic ability to align himself with the prevailing political wind. By the time of the appearance of the play’s 1663 edition, Davenant had capitalized upon his position as one of only two playwrights licensed to produce public theater whilst The Siege of Rhodes had established him as the first exponent of a strand of “heroic drama” which, taken by Dryden and his imitators, was set to dominate the English stage for the next twenty years.

In the West, “Never Again” became the popular slogan, especially of the young, once Hitlerism and the Nazi war machine were smashed. No one wanted to experience or witness again the horrors of genocide that had reached a climactic point in the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century. Civilization could not tolerate the apparatus of hate, whether the targets were racial, ethnic, or religious groups. Nor could it countenance the machinery of discrimination that led to horrendous forms of barbarism. To shut the door on the various forms of hate and bigotry and their excrescences was seen as the fundamental challenge to the international community in the post-war world. The challenge found early expression in the creation of the United National Charter, which was basically a treaty in which human rights occupied a central place, along with the maintenance of peace and the promotion of economic progress. Once ratified by the member-states of the UN in 1945, the Charter prompted the drive for a Universal Declaration of Human Rights of which Eleanor Roosevelt was the principal architect. It was unanimously adopted on the historic day of December 10, 1948, encompassing thirty articles that embraced the gamut of the human rights issues of the day.

Author of the first secular narrative history known to the Western world, Herodotus gathered his material through travels in North Africa and the Near East. Although The Histories became a source for later writers on monstrosity and barbarism, it is equally important as an example of comparative ethnography, focusing more on social practices than on physiological traits.

Joannes Leo Africanus was the Christian name of the Granadan-born Moroccan Hassan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan. While returning to Fez from a trip to Egypt, al-Wazzan was captured by Sicilian pirates and subsequently presented as a gift to Pope Leo X, who baptized him a Christian. In Italy, Africanus wrote A geographical historie a work that challenged European orthodoxies concerning African barbarism and monstrosity and informed almost every European text on Africa published until the end of the eighteenth century. First published in Giambattista Ramusio’s Primo volume delle navigationi et viaggi (Venice, 1550), Ageographical historie was translated into English in 1600 by John Pory, who encrusted the text with his own commentaries and fabulous accounts of African monstrosity.

Although by the turn of the twentieth century “modernism” (modernismo) had already been adopted by Hispanic writers and philosophers, with “modernization” entering common currency among U.S. social scientists during the 1920s, historians of Latin America have resisted using the terms “modernity” or “modernization” until quite recently.1 Concerned with defining the peculiar and particular experience of early European-native encounters and precocious postcolonial histories, “modernization” and “modernity” have seemed too imprecise and too deferential to classic European or Anglo-American models of development models to be considered useful for understanding the complexity of Latin American history. Instead, historians of Latin America have favored a more selective and empirical vocabulary for describing processes and dichotomies seen as peculiar to the Iberian world: “hispanization,” “luso-tropicalism,” “mestizaje,” “caudillismo,” “civilization and barbarism,” “development and dependency,” “caciquismo,” “apertura populista,” “authoritarianism,” and so forth. Yet it is hard to ignore the wealth of evidence that being and being seen to be “modern,” particularly in emulation of the United States, was what elites in Spanish America had sought since long before political independence.

Rumor has it that Henry Morton Stanley perplexed over a quandary facing colonialists: “we cannot justify our presence among “natives” if we do not educate them; but I suspect that we are not prepared for what they will say about us when and if we do teach them to write.”1 Stanley correctly predicted that “natives” would have different understandings of the colonial act and that what appeared to the colonizers as virtues and necessities may well appear to the former as weaknesses and acts of barbarism. Stanley’s ruminations also show that the colonial act was accompanied by anxieties over the eventual prise de parole by natives, that is their self-conscious expressions of thought on colonialism. The core of these anxieties has been whether postcolonial discourses can be aligned on the rationalizations of the colonial act by its agents.

“They are blacke Moores, o Queene, wash them as long as you will, you shall never alter their hue.”1 The author of this statement remains anonymous, but was most likely an English clergyman, once of Cork, but driven out of his acquired home in 1598 by Gaelic allies of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone. In The Supplication of the Blood of the English Most Lamentably Murdered in Ireland, Cryeng Out of the Yearth for Revenge, he seeks to persuade Elizabeth I that the Gaels who have dispossessed him cannot be reformed. There is no more profit to be had in that attempt “then he that endevored wth washinge to make a blacke moore white” (60). “[T]hose Englishe-bloode thirsters,” he tells her, “murder yore faithfull people: ravishe theire wives and daughters: beate out the braines of their younge children in the armes of their nurses” (72).

Inside the political parties, and most often in offshoots from these parties, cultured individuals of the colonised race make their appearance. For these individuals, the demand for a national culture and the affirmation of the existence of such a culture represent a special battlefield. While the politicians situate their action in actual presentday events, men of culture take their stand in the field of history. Confronted with the native intellectual who decides to make an aggressive response to the colonialist theory of pre-colonial barbarism, colonialism will react only slightly, and still less because the ideas developed by the young colonised intelligentsia are widely professed by specialists in the mother country. It is in fact a commonplace to state that for several decades large numbers of research workers have, in the main, rehabilitated the African, Mexican and Peruvian civilisations. The passion with which native intellectuals defend the existence of their national culture may be a source of amazement; but those who condemn this exaggerated passion are strangely apt to forget that their own psyche and their own selves are conveniently sheltered behind a French or German culture which has given full proof of its existence and which is unconstested.

The terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 changed the security agenda of all NATO allies. The 19 allies declared in the Article 5 declaration of September 12, 2001 that they “stand ready to provide the assistance that may be required as a consequence of these acts of barbarism,” while they and other Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC) members, altogether 46 countries, in parallel pledged “to undertake all efforts to combat the scourge of terrorism.”1 The attacks thus brought to the forefront the “strategic perspectives”—focused on terrorism and other threats such as organized crime—that NATO had discussed at the Washington summit in April 1999 but which had been overshadowed by Kosovo and out-of-area crisis management. Although crisis management in 1999 had been labeled a “fundamental security task,” it was instantly apparent in September 2001 that terrorism would be a more fundamental concern: the attacks had come from abroad, had targeted the territory of an ally, and were thus an Article 5 threat—something crisis management as an out-of-area concern cannot aspire to be.

While the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo appeared to settle who could cultivate, capitalize, and control the land, literary representations of the right of way continue long after 1848 to adjudicate cultural title to the state. Regardless of their political positioning, fictions produced in the wake of the U.S.-Mexican War struggle to reestablish primogeniture within a troubled space. The editors and writers assembled in San Francisco in 1868 to discuss the inaugural cover illustration of the new western magazine, the Overland Monthly, settle upon “a growling young California grizzly bear, the mascot of the state.”1 The bear is “‘objectless,”’ Mark Twain recalls, until Bret Harte draws the lines of a railroad track under its feet. “‘[B]ehold he was a magnificent success!… the ancient symbol of California savagery snarling at the approaching type of high and progressive Civilization, the first Overland locomotive!’”(9). Twain’s salubrious recoloring of this icon contrasts strikingly with Mariano Vallejo’s pointed recollections, where the conquering bear, lampooned as an index of American barbarism, looks more like a hog.2 For both writers, however, defining who is “native” means appealing to history.

A wealthy exotic, MP, and son of a Lord Mayor of London, Beckford spent two of his several periods on the Continent after sexual scandals (the second homosexual). On his return, he spent a fortune on his Gothic mansion, Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire, whose huge octagonal tower collapsed shortly after its sale in 1822 for £300,000. His tower at the top of Lansdown Road, Bath, still stands. His travel books are overshadowed by Vathek (1786), written in French, and translated by Samuel Henley. This oriental tale relates the Caliph’s quest for knowledge and sensual experience through acts of barbarism described with a deadpan wit, which finally gives way to a horrific exposure of the price of forbidden knowledge. Here, Vathek’s mother Carathis prepares in the tower a sacrifice to the supernatural powers of the cruel Giaour. Morakanabad is his prime vizir, Bababalouk his chief eunuch.