Imperious

~ Clarissa

I discovered that the English Department teaches Columbus’s Diaries in its course on early American Literature.

This is very annoying. Nobody would let me teach US literature with zero preparation or education in the field but it’s perfectly fine for the English Department to do this to everybody else.

As a result, students come to me with their heads filled with the most atrocious Zinn-inspired crap about evil Europeans who destroyed feminism and hay rights among Aztecs and Mayans. Of course, most students never come to me at all, and I have no chance to teach them what actually happened.

It’s beyond dumb that at a university people should be allowed to teach stuff far out of their field with zero knowledge of it. I’m sure the prof in the course blathers endlessly about evil imperialism while acting with far less respect for other civilizations than Spanish conquistadors.

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Published by Clarissa

16 thoughts on “Imperious”

  1. Yea, funny that? If you look at English departments catalogs at basically any university in North America, it may look as if they teach anything and everything from the Veda to quantum physics.

    My personal beef is professors of comparative literature who discuss novels written in lnaguages that they do NOT know.

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  2. OT: Just saw this…

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    1. Sibarium is crazy effective. He’s doing incredible work.

      But I wonder what the problem is with this diversity crowd. Publishing diversity propaganda today is beyond easy. How come they aren’t managing even that?

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  4. It was funny to read this post as I am in the middle of writing a post of my own on students only getting the Zinn version of Columbus. 🙂

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        1. Great post!

          There are so many additional problems with Zinn’s account that one hardly knows where to begin. He disregards a vast number of sources in favor of Bartolomé de las Casas’s highly tendentious account. Then he states that Indians “treated women extraordinarily well” and uses a snippet of a text by Las Casas that shows absolutely nothing of the kind. The entire narrative glosses over cannibalism, which among Aztecs achieved proportions unknown anywhere else on the planet. It’s precisely the horror that the Spaniards felt when they encountered the cheerfully gastronomical pleasures of Aztec baby-eating that led to the entire debate about how much respect such a civilization should evoke.

          Then there’s the erasure of the religious nature of the Spanish conquest and its analysis in primitive Marxist terms.

          Then there’s the attempt to present the indigenous as some sort of early LGBTQA+++ champions.

          Readers end up with the vision of an idyllic, pre-lapsarian existence cruelly destroyed by rabid Europeans. And it’s all bonk. It’s all completely worthless.

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          1. Ooh, now let’s do the Comanche, where the men hunted, attacked the surrounding tribes, and gang-raped captives, occasionally roasted and ate enemies, and the women basically did hard manual labor all day– tanning hides, drying meat, setting up and taking down camp… part of the drive to take captives (and they took many, many captives) was because hauling pregnant women around on horseback all the time leads to a high rate of miscarriage, and because they needed more women to tan hides for them.

            But yeah, totally better than white people because noble savage reasons.

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            1. The Carib tribe would kidnap women of neighboring tribes to impregnate them and eat the babies.

              When I mentioned that tons colleague, she said, “yes, but how is that different from when Catholics eat the body of Christ during Mass?”

              Yes, it’s identical. Absolutely the same. I mean.

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          2. Thank you for your kind words. Latin American history is certainly not my expertise. I am much more comfortable with medieval and early modern intellectual history and how we get ourselves into the Enlightenment. 🙂

            On the topic of first contact with natives groups with gut churning practices, I am in middle of reading Lost in Shangri-la by Mitchell Zuckoff. It deals with the Dani in New Guinea.

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          3. The other day, I subbed for a speech class. Can you guess whose trial they were working on and what they were reading as their secondary source?

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