History Is Another Country

In the context of De Las Casas and early Spanish colonialization, “History is another country”. In his work, Destruction of the Indies Las Casas is protesting the process of expropriation (in the form of Amerindigene labor) in order to bring attention to the mistreatment of the Indigenous peoples of the present time Americas. What interested me about this text was the use of human to animal pairings to affect the emotion of the reader. By this, I mean that stating that a human is reasonable and free, but an animal can be sacrificed, justifiably because of their “uncivilized” or “lawless” mannerisms.

Las Casas however, inverts the stereotype of Amerindigenes as animals by arguing that the colonizers, the Spaniards, are the uncivilized because of their behaviour towards other human beings.

What I am trying to signify with this image is the major interpretation of the dichotomy between humans and animals within a single text.

Perspective is everything.

Hello! Welcome to my online journal for Empire & Globalization!

The idea for my blog is to visualize certain aspects of the lectures or readings that are significant to the course, but also to me. I want to show the different images and ideas that come to my mind throughout the course. Similar to how when reading a book, a person will develop images themselves to represent characters, settings, or certain situations.

The title for my blog stemmed from over thinking and attempting to relativize my visual strategy through a common piece of knowledge. I believe most people are familiar with the story of the big bad wolf and the three little pigs. In this context, the wolf is a symbol of thematic prevalence, and the three pigs are illustrative of how different materials or views on how to structure an argument, thesis or idea can change an outsiders’ own opinions. However, in saying that, I did not want to make it out that the title was to be more important than the content of the blog itself because that would take away from other themes our class will have discussed. (I cannot predict what will be arriving in terms of lecture themes and information!) The title is there to have my viewers draw back upon my exhibition of personal messages, that being the contrasts of perspectives on colonialism, gender, human value, society, animals, and the state of nature. In a sense, the three little pigs from the storybook are the authors that will be studied this year and what I gather from their excerpts of texts.

I have had so many alternating ideas about what I wanted to do creatively for this project, I decided to use as many of them as I could. The reason behind this was motivated from the class itself insofar (and the tutorials- much thanks to Adleen for her Tumblr inspiration). The ways in which we have discussed multiple authors on similar topics and throughout many time periods suggests that a good way to interpret something is from more than one ideology, theory or perspective.

In sum, my overarching idea -to put it simply- is to visualize my internal thoughts as an external reader throughout the remainder of this school year. Enjoy!