Civilizing the pre-modern Spanish world through the gaze of modernity

Abstract

The gaze of history when it is penned by Western scholars is often undergirded by a layer of violence through which the historian imposes his own view and perceptions upon another people and their places. During the early modern period (1492-1800), Europeans sought to describe the peoples and places they had encountered for European audiences, which gave rise to increased interest in the science of describing people (and then to the fields of anthropology and ethnography), and the invention of race. This article meditates on how the gaze imposes race while also structuring non-white people within the Enlightenment concepts of civilization and culture. Using casta paintings as well as literature drawn from the Spanish literary canon, we furthermore demonstrate how race became inscribed as a civilizing tool wielded in the nineteenth century by other Europeans against Spain as a means of othering and de-occidentalizing it from without the so-called civilized world.