Christianizing the soul, disembodying science, Americanizing the flesh, 1498--1627

This dissertation places the narratives and visual images of sixteenth-century encounters between Europeans and Americans within the context of early modern European culture and history in order to trace historical connections between biogenetic "race," Christian imperialism and scientific objectivity. I have analyzed these representations of Americans by locating them in the early modern European culture within which they were created and recovering their references to occult cosmology, renaissance art, religious reformations, the body politic, and other printed scientific illustrations. My interpretation draws on insights from post-colonial studies, queer theory, and feminist analyses of gender, as well as from the historiography on the body in medieval and early modern Europe. I also treat these representations of Americans as precursors in racial science which help explain how the sexualization of raced Others could justify racist violence and require anti-miscegenation laws in early America and the United States.; "Race," I argue, shares a genealogy with Christianity and scientific objectivity, in that value is accorded in a hierarchy which rewards a rejection of the flesh for civilization, spirituality and intellect. In the sixteenth-century, this hierarchy was based on the premise that the form of the body reflected morality, an individual's history of contact and his or her culture of the body. Medical descriptions of the body served to prevent inter-racial intimacy by promising that, like viruses, identity and cultural affinity were contagious in contact. To make these connections, I compare representations of American cannibalism to images of autopsy in illustrated anatomies, explain how exploration of America before scientific objectivity was subject to the charge of sensuality and voyeurism, and connect ideals for a Christian soul that transcends the flesh to the gender of Eve and the physiological signs which became associated with "race" and indicated lascivity and lack of intelligence in Africans and Americans. In this study, the "race" of the American Indian is shown to be nothing less than the enabling science fiction authorizing European colonization of the Americas, a phantasm which resonated in western culture until the success of conquest led to its revision in the invention of the noble savage swept aside by manifest destiny.