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 mlange 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 globalizations early origins Gruzinski then fast forwards to the contemporary mlange 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.