Between the exotic and the authentic: racialists manifestations and the interpretations of the landscape and inhabitants of the New World

Abstract

This article seeks to contribute to the broad debate about the European perception of the New World. Focusing on the period between the last decades of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th century, it points out the changes and permanences that marked the dawn of Romanticism as an heir movement yet critical of the Enlightenment. In this wake, there are relevant reinterpretations of the European perception of the New World landscape and its inhabitants. The pejorative notions of exoticism that accompanied the European descriptions about the climate, nature, and the American peoples started to be substituted for more positive impressions associated with European recognition of difference, endorsing the authenticity of the other. Although the European look to the landscape of the New World was reframed, the native and African, non-white inhabitants were praised for the Indian's virtuosity and the physical strength of the black, being them African or Creole people. Such perceptions show rooted racialist conceptions, responsible for biologically and psychologically justifying the supposed physical and moral inferiority of these human contingents. Thus, the article intends to emphasize the multiple discursive layers that contributed to the European view concerning otherness and collaborate to broaden the field of discussion about what is conventionally called racialism.