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Title: O Brave New People: The European Invention of the American Indian by John F. Moffitt, Santiago Sebastian ISBN: 0-8263-1639-5 Publisher: Univ of New Mexico Pr Pub. Date: 01 April, 1996 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $55.00

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (2 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: a published review
Comment: Reviews of JOHN F. MOFFTTT and SANTIAGO SEBASTIAN: O Brave New People: The European Invention of the American Indian. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.

Published review, in Latin-American Indian Literatures Journal: "The book merits wide circulation. The impressive scholarship embraces both pictorial and written sources, and the lengthy quotations in English translation from the early explorers and chroniclers are helpful."

Another published review by DANIEL K. RICHTER (Dickinson College), in American Historical Review, December 1998.

This book by John F. Moffitt and Santiago Sebastián appears, at first glance, to be a blast from the historiographical past. Readers of such standard works as Robert Berkhofer, Jr.'s The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (1979) and Olive Patricia Dickason's The Myth of the Savage and the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas (1984) will find much that is familiar. Early modern Europeans invented perniciously enduring stereotypes about Indians, images rooted almost entirely in their own fantasies and fears rather than in empirical data. Those familiar with such more recent, theoretically sophisticated studies as Stephen Greenblatt's Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (1991), Anthony Pagden's European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (1992), or Gordon M. Sayre's Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature (1997) will be disappointed in a book that openly disavows "the imposition of the kind of theoretical constructs that so bedevil current, postmodernist academic writing" (p. 3). Nonetheless, this product of a long collaboration between Moffitt and the late Sebastián has at least three great strengths. First, as art historians, the authors bring to visual materials an attention to detail seldom available to more text-oriented scholars. Second, as specialists in Renaissance art, they take medieval and classical influences on those materials seriously as systems of belief rather than mere artistic conventions. These first two strengths especially come together in their analysis of the meaning of the term India to fifteenth-century Europeans. When Christopher Columbus reported that he had found "Paradise-on-Earth" on "the Indian Islands, Located Beyond the Ganges River, Which Have Just Been Newly Rediscovered," Moffitt and Sebastián argue, he was not merely compounding a geographic error with rhetorical exaggeration. Instead, "as employed by Columbus, the term precisely meant a specific place described in the Book of Genesis as having been initially inhabited by Adam and Eve," a place Columbus and contemporary artists and map-makers sincerely believed still existed at the extreme tip of the Indian subcontinent (p. 16). This framework of ideas about an Indian Eden provides a compelling context for the many descriptions of "Indians" as pre- or post-lapsarian inhabitants of an early paradise. It also helps to explain why explorers, map-makers, and illustrators peopled the Americas with every lurid humanoid type found in the pages of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (13561357) and other Indian subcontinent travel fantasies. The third strength of Moffitt and Sebastián is their effort to reconstruct the ways in which early modern viewers actually experienced images of alleged Native Americans. They are particularly effective in contextualizing dozens of woodcut and copperplate illustrations that previous historians have considered in isolation from the books in which they first appeared. When placed against the texts-and in light of the fact that European illustrators nearly always worked solely from written descriptions rather than illustrations from life-it becomes clear that the visual images were entirely products of European imaginations rather than American experience. Illustrators appear to have made almost no attempt to render details about Native American appearance and behavior contained in explorers's written accounts with any accuracy. Instead, they reproduced stock images of "savages," "wild men," "Amazons," and "cannibals" familiar from books written well before 1492. Few publications went as far as a 1554 edition of Francisco López de Gómara's Historia General de las Indias y Nuevo Mundo mas la conquista del Peru y de Mexico that recycled a set of illustrations originally drawn for a 1520 edition of Livy's history of Rome. Yet most had little more relevance to the subjects they purported to illustrate. The same disconnection from American reality apparent in negative stereotypes also applied in more positive, and presumably accurate, contexts. The famous illustrations of Theodore de Bry-most of which took as their originals the watercolors that Englishman John White painted at Roanoke in 1585-were, Moffitt and Sebastián argue, part of a concerted effort by Philip lI's Dutch Protestant opponents to promulgate the "Black Legend" of Spanish cruelty to Native Americans. In this politicized context, de Bry's images, far from attempting to convey accurate information about Native Americans, added to "the Noble and Ignoble Indian tropes" a new, third stereotype: "the figure of the 'doomed Indian'" (p. 303).

Rating: 5
Summary: Unique approach to the historical significance of "Indians"
Comment: Abstract: in Historian; a Journal of History, Winter 1998, Colin G. Calloway reviews "O Brave New People: The European Invention of the American Indian" by John F. Moffitt and Santiago Sebastian. Full Text: 0 Brave New People: The European Invention of the American Indian. By John F. Moffitt and Santiago (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. Pp. xiv, 399. $55.0.) The authors of this book, both art historians, take a rather well-worn subject but examine it from a different perspective and with more attention to detail than have other studies of the images of Indians that were generated by the Columbian encounter and subsequent contacts. That Columbus mistakenly called the native inhabitants of the Americas "Indians" will come as no surprise to anyone. That Europeans created stereotypes of Indian people out of their own preconceptions, on the basis of limited contacts, and for their own purposes, will come as no surprise to readers who are familiar with the work of Roy Harvey Pearce, Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., Olive Dickason, and others. John Moffitt and Santiago Sebastian go beyond previous studies and, in a close critical reading of pre-colonial art and literature, they search out the origins of the baggage of imagery, attitudes, and assumptions that Europeans brought to their encounters with Native Americans. Focusing primarily on Spanish contacts with native peoples in the Caribbean and, to a lesser extent, South America, Moffitt and Sebastian show how Renaissance-era Europeans not only evaluated Indians "according to certain culturally enshrined patterns that seemed most natural or logical to them," but actually reinvented them (p. 4). The authors explain how the scriptural precedent of the Edenic earthly paradise and the equally ancient concept of the noble savage influenced European perceptions and inventions of the "New World" and its people. Moffitt and Sebastian assess the influence of classical models, medieval literary conventions, and previous encounters with other non-European peoples, and they critically analyze depictions of imagined Indians in Renaissance graphic art. Examining how the Indian Eden, which was created by European imagination, was destroyed by European conquest, the authors dissect the "Black Legend" of Spanish atrocities that was established by Bartolomé de Las Casas and perpetuated by Protestant writers and printers. They show how this legend affected the evolving European image of Native Americans and how it continues to distort understanding of Spain's role in the colonization of America, but they perhaps dismiss it too easily as "largely without foundation" (290). Laden with literary and artistic allusions and block quotations, O Brave New People is written in a formal, scholarly--and, as the authors acknowledge, "often rhetorical"--style that will lose some of the readers for whom it is intended (336). Some others will be turned off as they quickly realize that the book has little to do with historical Indian people. It is a detailed examination of the origins and development of the mind-set of a particular group of Renaissance Europeans. Unfortunately, that mind-set has had an enduring legacy. Colin G. Calloway (Dartmouth)