Date of Award

1-4-1993

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

English

First Advisor

Michael Beard

Abstract

In this quincentenary year of the Columbus landfall, as the theorists debate the limitations of Western civilization, my dissertation critiques the narratives collected by Richard Hakluyt (1552-1616) who sought to enter the geographical and ethnographic discourse of the late Renaissance by inscribing the emergent English nation as the custodian of modern civilization. The English rhetoric of civility in the New World has taken the form of a series of monologic narratives, forced inscriptions that seek to normalize the history of colonization, slavery, and imperialism.My study of the narratives in Hakluyt's Principal Navigations (1598) reveals the cultural narcissism of the English self proudly presented as "civil," while the New World other is represented as "savage." In Chapter One, the ideological work of othering is labeled as "the Hakluyt Stage" with reference to the Lacanian "mirror stage." Through the apparatus of a narrated mirror, the self perpetrates narcissistic versions of the travels undertaken in the name of geographical exploration. Chapter Two focuses on Hakluyt's self-fashioning and the limitations of his monologic narrative voice.Chapters Three and Four analyze the Hakluytian technique of advancing nationalism through constructing England's legitimacy and historicizing the traditions of pilgrimage, the Crusades, the discourses on colonization and the Christian mission. Chapter Five examines how Hakluyt uses captivity narratives of slave-runners and merchants to evade the real issues of slavery and genocide, and how these narratives present the colonizer as a hero undergoing great suffering in the name of civilization. Chapter Six focuses on the politics of ethnography and points out instances of narrative bias in representing the Turks, Indians, Africans and other peoples in such categories as the "barbarian," "heathen," and of course, "cannibal," all of which provided legitimacy to English colonists for erasing the human essence of the other.

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