Max Harris

Performing the Scriptures

This book began with literary theory. Drama, I suggested, is a dialogical genre and theatre is a dialogical edium. An examination of plays by Dryden and ‘Zarate’ and of a scenario by Artaud advanced my argument. I chose these works not because they stand out from other dramatic literature as paragons of dialogism but because they share a common historical referent: the conquest of Mexico. For the discovery and conquest of America was, in Todorov’s words, ‘the most astonishing encounter of our history’, a unique opportunity for dialogue between worlds largely squandered through the Spanish failure to conceptualize an otherness both equal and different. But even in this difficult historical context theatre proved to be a dialogical medium. Indigenous dramatizations of the theme of conquest in Mexico, whether under the auspices of the early Franciscan missionaries or as part of a still-vital folk tradition, have proved to be fruitful vehicles for what Bakhtin would call ‘communication between simultaneous differences’. The task now before me is to apply what I have learned of the dialogical theatre to the questions raised by Todorov concerning the ethics of cross-cultural encounter.

The psychology of Western European neo-racism

Europe is on the verge of an unprecedented era of social, economic, and political cooperation. Yet, there is resurgent racism and xenophobia in Western Europe, and in Central and Eastern Europe many of the fragments of the old Soviet Empire have disintegrated into ethnic violence and genocidal warfare. Prejudice is the common source of this ethnic hatred, xenophobia, and racism. The Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction is involved in developing those concepts which will provide the links between the psychological understanding of individual human beings and how they create and sustain destructive conflict in social, political, and ethnic groups. The development of prejudice in an individual and its underlying psychological mechanisms are detailed as part of the formation of identity. The fundamental structures of prejudice are then discussed using crucial new concepts in the psychology of large group processes involved in violent group hatreds.

The Persecution of the Palmesel: Iconoclasm and Survival in Prague, Zurich, and Augsburg

Known to English-speaking scholars by their German name of Palmesel, life-size wooden images of Christ on a donkey, usually mounted on wheels, were a popular feature of the processional theatre of Palm Sunday in medieval Germany and its immediate neighbours. They were also frequent victims of the iconoclasm of the long Reformation, beginning with the Hussites of early fifteenth-century Bohemia and at its most intense, a century later, in the Zurich of Zwingli and those parts of northern Switzerland under his immediate influence. Survival was more likely in cities, such as Nuremberg and Augsburg, where Luther’s more tolerant attitude to images prevailed. In this article, I consider the persecution and sometime survival of palmesels in Prague, Zurich, and Augsburg.

Aztecs, Moors and Christians. Festivals of Reconquest in Mexico and Spain

Acknowledgments List of Illustrations Part One: Prologue Beheading the Moor (Zacatecas, 1996) Reading the Mask (Cuetzalan, 1988) Part Two: Spain, 1150-1521 A Royal Wedding (Lleida, 1150) A Medley of Battles (Zaragoza, 1286-1414) A Martyrdom with Hobby Horses (Barcelona, 1424) A Game of Canes (Jaen, 1462) Part Three: Mexico, 1321-1521 The Fields of the Wars of Flowers The Festival of the Sweeping of the Roads The Festival of the Raising of the Banners The Festival of the Flaying of Men The Dance of the Emperor Motecuzoma Part Four: Mexico, 1521-1600 The Conquest of Mexico (1524-1536) The Conquest of Rhodes (Mexico City, 1539) The Conquest of Jerusalem (Tlaxcala, 1539) The Tensions of Empire (Mexico City, 1565-1595) The Travels of Alonso Ponce (New Spain, 1584-1589) The Conquest of New Mexico (1598) Part Five: Spain, 1521-1600 Touring Aztecs (1522-1529) Royal Entries (Toledo, 1533, and Naples, 1543) Great Balls of Fire (Trent, 1549) Noble Fantasies (Binche, 1549, and Rouen, 1550) Feted Dreams of Peace (Andalusia, 1561-1571) Changing Tastes (Daroca to Valencia, 1585-1586) Gilded Indians (1521-1600) Part Six: Epilogue Dancing With Malinche (New Mexico and Oaxaca, 1993-1994) Notes Bibliography Index

Incarnation and Other Dialogues

What Martin Buber has called ‘the dialogical principle’1 requires that the other be recognized not only as an object of which we may speak or whom I may address as a Thou but also as a subject, an I who speaks about me within his or her own circle and who in turn addresses me as a Thou. Buber quotes, as a precursor of his own celebration of reciprocity, Feuerbach’s observation that the real I is ‘only the I that stands over against a Thou and that is itself a Thou over against another I’.2 This realization that the other is not merely an object of my discourse and my gaze, but that he or she is also a subject observing me, leads to the startling insight that the other has a point of view that is not my own and which is no more a defective version of mine than mine is a defective version of his or hers.

Barbarians and Other Neighbours

To bring any new paradigm to bear on the ancient question of the other is to enter an enduring debate. There is not space here to review the history of that debate in detail. But by attending in this chapter to the models of alterity at work during the Spanish conquest and evangelism of Mexico, we shall be able to focus on a number of its strands. For there were, on the Spanish side, those who invoked Aristotle’s classicist view that ‘others’ are incapable of rational self-determination. And there were those who, without jettisoning the classicist assumptions of their culture, nevertheless opposed Aristotle with the biblical injunction to ‘love your neighbour as yourself. Moreover, as we shall see, the Aztec model of alterity may be said to resemble the classicist pattern. Complicating matters further, it is in this historical context that Todorov believes he can discern, along with much that is to be condemned, ‘the first sketches of a future dialogue, the unformed embryos that herald our present’.1 In Todorov’s critique of the sixteenth-century encounter, therefore, we can also hear the voice of one committed to a dialogical model of alterity.

Aztec Maidens in Satin Gowns

The best-known English dramatization of the conquest of Mexico is John Dryden’s The Indian Emperour (1665).1 It is not an easy play from which to argue for the dialogical nature of the theatre. For Dryden’s play is written throughout in heroic couplets. All the characters - priests, soldiers, nobility, men, women, Aztecs and Spaniards - speak the same language. Every trace of popular comedy or carnivalesque disruption is excluded,2 and, like Dryden’s other heroic dramas, it reflects Dryden’s conservatism in matters of political and moral theory.3 Moreover, although it was popular in its day, it has enjoyed only a short history of subsequent interpretative performances. The most graphic indication of the difficulties involved in the search for dialogism in The Indian Emperour, however, may perhaps be found in a painting, William Hogarth’s The Conquest of Mexico (1732) (see Plate I).

Hidden Aztecs and Absent Spaniards

Situated at the foot of the snow-capped volcanoes of Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl, Huejotzingo was one of the major prehispanic powers of central Mexico. Like Tlaxcala, it took part in the flower wars with Tenochtitlan; and, as an ally of Tlaxcala, it offered Cortes assistance in his march on the Aztec capital.1 Huejotzingo has dwindled in both size and importance in the meantime, however, and is now only a small, dusty town known for its Franciscan convent, its cider and its carnival. The carnival is an annual explosion of prodigious street theatre. By my count, some 2500 took part in the carnival play in 1989 and 10,000 to 15,000 filled the square to watch.2 The Huejotzingo play has none of the delicacy of the final moments of the Yohualichan danza de los santiagos. In scale, volume and violence it is more akin to the Tlaxcala Conquest of Jerusalem or to the annual fiesta de mows y cristianos at Alcoy in Spain. The dialogue between official discourse and unofficial signs, however, is just as powerful.

Aspiring Tyrants and Theatrical Defiance

It will be remembered that I am addressing Bakhtin’s reluctance to acknowledge in the theatre the same potential for dialogue between worlds that he finds in the novel, and Todorov’s observations concerning the failure of the human community to reckon with otherness in its midst. And I am doing so within the single matrix of dramatizations of the conquest of Mexico.

A Marrano in Montezuma’s Court

In The Indian Emperour Dryden openly engages his audience in dialogue with texts drawn from authorities of high current reputation, and refracted through the action and characters of his play. Matters were not so simple in contemporary Spain, the colonial power responsible for the conquest and administration of Mexico. For, according to Catherine Swietlicki, seventeenth-century Spain may be compared in some respects to ‘the Stalinist Russia of Bakhtin’s time’. ‘There are’, she observes, ‘certain similarities between the two powers’ preoccupations with establishing unified ideologies and eradicating forces opposed to the dominant culture and its philosophy’. Not least of these similarities, she suggests, is the role played by the Spanish Inquisition and the Russian secret police in ‘enforcing … monolithic dogma’.