Languages Of Difference

Focusing on American culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, The Languages of Difference studies the pervasive and potent notion of ""the primitive"" - a notion with dubious colonialist backgrounds and intricate involvement with ideas of color and race, civilization and culture. Human difference and the relationship to the Other were highstakes issues both globally and within societies like the U.S., but this key defining term, ""the primitive,"" often provided only a crude amalgam of perceived difference, ethnic and personal bias, and indiscriminate classification of a variety of unfamiliar customs and characteristics. Its uses and significations, like the attitudes it projected, were various and changing.