A Different Mirror

Takaki introduces Part 1 of the book (Chapters 2-3) by narrating the history of the first European settlement in the New World. In the year 1000 Vikings sailed from Iceland to a new land that they called Vinland, “an old Norse term for grassland or pasture” (23), today known as Newfoundland. Word spread and more Vikings sailed to Vinland in hopes of permanent settlement. They encountered Indians and confrontations ensued. This did not deter subsequent Vikings from trying to settle in Vinland. They managed to set up a colony but eventually abandoned it and returned to Greenland because of the possibility of warfare with indigenous populations.

Scholars largely overlooked these Viking settlements until the 1960s, when archaeologists uncovered ancient house sites and old Norse tools. Their findings confirmed oral histories and missionary writings that suggested European settlement in the New World occurred much earlier than Columbus’s 1492 voyage to the Americas.

Chapter 2 begins with Takaki discussing Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, which he uses as an allegory to consider the social constructions of race in colonial America. The play was first performed in London in 1611 at a time when English audiences were becoming increasingly exposed to different societies. Takaki writes, “This was an era when the English were interacting with peoples that they would define as the ‘Other’ in order to enable them to delineate the boundary between ‘civilization’ and ‘savagery’” (28). Takaki traces these constructions of a racialized identity—based on “savagery” and “civilization”—to the English invasion of Ireland. To subjugate the Irish, the English “burned the villages and crops of the inhabitants and relocated them on reservations” as well as “slaughtered families, ‘man, woman, and child’” (29). These strategies served as the training ground for tactics later imposed on indigenous populations in the New World.

Takaki uses the Caliban and Prospero characters to frame his allegorical comparison. Prospero embodies the traits of white, civilized Europeans: He is educated and refined, and he has a divine right to conquer new lands. Prospero is then juxtaposed with Caliban, who personifies the stereotyped characteristics of the ethnic minority discussed in a given chapter. Takaki’s image of Caliban as Native American, for example, has shaggy hair and a dark complexion, and other racial features that suggest diminished intelligence and an inability become “civilized.”

As Takaki writes, initial encounters between the English and Powhatans in Virginia in 1607 offered possibilities of friendship and interdependence. This quickly changed as English settlers, unaccustomed to survival in the wilderness, extorted food supplies from their neighbors, using violence to achieve their ends. This pattern of English appropriation through warfare intensified with the introduction of cash crops like tobacco. Seizing wide swaths of arable land, the English justified their gains by depicting Indians as “savage” nomads who could not be entrusted with cultivating the lands (even though many of these societies were horticultural and agricultural). Not only dispossessed of their territory, indigenous populations also suffered from new diseases like smallpox, which decimated entire villages. By the early 1800s, with very few options left, most Native Americans succumbed to President Jefferson’s edict to “accept civilization” and “adopt the culture of the white man” or face extermination (45-46).

The opening statement, “But Caliban could have been African” (49), adds a twist to Takaki’s discussion of The Tempest and representations of race and identity in colonial America. While Chapter 2 makes the case that Caliban is Native American, primarily through the trope of “savagery,” Chapter 3 offers evidence from the play that suggests Caliban is black. His complexion is dark, his father is a demon, and his mother is a witch who lived in Africa. His “brutish” nature also suggests blackness (50). As Takaki writes, “In the English mind, the color black was freighted with an array of negative images: ‘deeply stained with dirt,’ ‘foul,’ ‘dark or deadly’ in purpose, ‘malignant,’ ‘sinister,’ ‘wicked’” (50). Through these representations of blackness, Takaki discusses the origins of the slave trade and its dehumanizing effects on Africans and their descendants.

Africans landed in Virginia in 1619, sold not as slaves but as indentured servants who, after four to seven years of indebtedness, could become freemen. English settlers initially preferred to rely on white indentured servants for planation labor, reproducing the class structures found in England. Africans were few in number. This demographic changed, however, as white indentured servants and freeman became increasingly discontent with the social order and started a rebellion that included black participation. Virginia landowners quelled the “giddy multitude” (60) yet felt threatened enough to make concessions. They ended indentured servitude, imported more slaves, enacted increasingly repressive legislation, and expanded the definition of blackness to the “one-drop rule” (61).

While authoritarian, slavery was never a coherent project, and Takaki narrates these inconsistencies through the writings of one particularly famous slave holder: Thomas Jefferson. Although Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence and eloquently spoke of liberty for all, he believed in innate, racialized differences and refused to consider America as a nation where blacks and whites could coexist on equal terms. He dismissed blacks’ intellectual achievements and disavowed interracial sex because of the possibility of mixed offspring—a position that was especially contradictory given his longtime relationship with Sally Hemings, a slave with whom he fathered five children. By the end of his life, Jefferson wanted to abolish slavery, viewing it as a “‘moral reproach’ that ‘tormented’ his conscience” (71), yet felt it would not be possible because “they had created an enslaved black ‘giddy multitude’ that would constantly threaten social order” (71).