"Mestizo: a person of mixed blood; specifically, a person of mixed European and American Indian ancestry."
Serge Gruzinski, the renowned historian of Latin America, offers a brilliant, original critique of colonization and globalization in "The Mestizo Mind." Looking at the 15th century colonization of Latin America, Gruzinski documents the melange 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 melange 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 Mestizo Mind" definitively conceptualizes the clash of civilizations in the style of Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and Anne McClintock.

In this important new book the renowned historian Serge Gruzinski returns to two episodes in the sixteenth century which mark a decisive stage in global history and show how China and Mexico experienced the expansion of Europe. In the early 1520s, Magellan set sail for Asia by the Western route, Cortes seized Mexico and some Portuguese based in Malacca dreamed of colonizing China. The Aztec Eagle was destroyed but the Chinese Dragon held strong and repelled the invaders - after first seizing their cannon. For the first time, people from three continents encountered one other, confronted one other and their lives became entangled. These events were of great interest to contemporaries and many people at the time grasped the magnitude of what was going on around them. The Iberians succeeded in America and failed in China. The New World became inseparable from the Europeans who were to conquer it, while the Celestial Empire became, for a long time to come, an unattainable goal. Gruzinski explores this encounter between civilizations that were different from one another but that already fascinated contemporaries, and he shows that our world today bears the mark of this distant age. For it was in the sixteenth century that human history began to be played out on a global stage. It was then that connections between different parts of the world began to accelerate, not only between Europe and the Americas but also between Europe and China. This is what is revealed by a global history of the sixteenth century, conceived as another way of reading the Renaissance, less Eurocentric and more in tune with our age.

The Conquest of Mexico is a brilliant account of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, written from a new and unfamiliar angle.
Gruzinski analyses the process of colonization that took place in native Indian societies over three centuries, focusing on disruptions to the Indian's memory, changes in their perception of reality, the spread of the European idea of the supernatural and the Spanish colonists' introduction of alphabetical script which the Indians had to combine with their own traditional - oral and pictorial - forms of communication.
Gruzinski discusses the Indians' often awkward initiation into writing, their assimilation of Spanish culture, and their subsequent reinterpretation of their own past and recovers the changing Indian perceptions of the sacred and their 'absorption' of elements from the Christian tradition.
The Conquest of Mexico is a major work of cultural history which reconstructs a crucial episode in the European colonization of the New World. It is also an important contribution to the study of the relationship between memory, orality, images and writing in history.

"If colonial America was the melting pot of modernity, it was because it was also a fabulous laboratory of images. . . . Just as much as speech and writing, the image can be a vehicle for all sorts of power and resistance." So writes Serge Gruzinski in the introduction to "Images at War, "his""striking reinterpretation of the Spanish colonization of Mexico.""Concentrating on the political meaning of the baroque image and its function within a multicultural society, Gruzinski compares its ubiquity in Mexico to our modern fascination with images and their meaning."
" Although the baroque image played a decisive role in many arenas, especially that of conquest and New World colonization, its powerful resonance in the sphere of religion is a focal point of Gruzinski's study. In his analysis of how images conveyed meaning across linguistic barriers, he uncovers recurring themes of false images, less-than-perfect replicas, the uprooting of peoples and cultural memories, and the violence of iconoclastic destruction. He shows how various ethnic groups--Indians, blacks, Europeans--left their distinct marks on images of colonialism and religion, coopting them into expressions of identity or instruments of rebellion. As Gruzinski's story unfolds, he tells of Aztec idols, the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe, conquistadors, Franciscans, and neoclassical attempts to repress the baroque. In the final chapter he discusses the political and religious implications of contemporary imagery--such as that in Mexican soap operas--and speculates about the future of images in Latin America.
Originally written in French, this work makes available to an English audience a seminal study of Mexico and the role of the image in the New World.

The books in this wonderfully diverse series cover topics such as archaeology, art, culture, history, literature, science, and religion in a dynamic and informative way. The texts are bolstered by rigorous historical information and accompanied by vibrant photographs and boxes that summarize key points. All of the volumes in this collection are a thorough introduction to the subject being discussed. "Los libros en esta serie maravillosamente diversa abordan temas como la arqueologia, el arte, la cultura, la historia, la literatura, la ciencia y la religion de una manera dinamica e informativa. Los textos son reforzados por datos historicos rigurosos y se acompanan de fotografias vibrantes y cuadros sinopticos. Todos los volumenes en esta coleccion son una introduccion exhaustiva al tema que se expone.""" This expert chronicle of the Aztec civilization explores its artistic and cultural achievements, its religion, and its history, from the earliest times to the empire's collapse with the arrival of the conquistadores in the 16th century. "Esta cronica experta de la historia de la civilizacion azteca explora sus logros artisticos y culturales, su religion y su historia, desde los tiempos mas tempranos hasta la caida del imperio con la llegada de los conquistadores en el siglo XVI."