Re: [-empyre-] Email exchange between Ken Wark and Geert Lovink

[Danny Butt <db@dannybutt.net>]

On 15/03/2007, at 9:05 AM, Nicholas Ruiz III wrote:

> Let's hope he will be with us for some time,
> as he is one of the Last of the Mohicans.

Excuse me.  More like the last of the James Coopers, if we get the  
analogies correct.

I haven't wanted to bring up the armchair anthropology of the  
primitive that underlies Baudrillard's work for fear of just being  
seen to be pushing my postcolonial barrow. But I think comments like  
Geert's above really do highlight something about the hostility of  
the tradition to contemporary indigenous culture, and I'm tired of  
them passing without comment.

The plot summary of LOTM below is actually quite amusing when  
substituting Baudrillard for Cooper.

x.d

<http://www.uwm.edu/Library/special/exhibits/clastext/clspg134.htm>

"Cooper established his reputation after his second novel, The Spy,  
and in his third book, the autobiographical Pioneers (1823), Cooper  
introduced the character of Natty Bumppo, a uniquely American  
personification of rugged individualism and the pioneer spirit.  
Emerson called Pioneers "our first national novel." A second book  
featuring Bumppo, The Last of the Mohicans (1826), quickly became the  
most widely read work of the day, solidifying Cooper's popularity in  
the U.S. and in Europe.
Cooper Image

Set during the French and Indian War, The Last of the Mohicans  
chronicles the massacre of the colonial garrison at Fort William  
Henry and a fictional kidnaping of two pioneer sisters. Cooper knew  
few Indians, so he drew on a Moravian missionary's account of two  
opposing tribes; the Delawares and the "Mingos." Although this  
characterization was filled with inaccuracies, the dual image of the  
opposing tribes allowed Cooper to create a lasting image of the  
Indian that became a part of the American consciousness for almost  
two centuries. His public was simultaneously touched romantically at  
the doomed Indians' fate and justified in abetting their  
extermination. Readers were thrilled by the rapacious Magua, who fit  
Gothic convention and was associated with Milton's Satan. The hero  
Natty Bumppo was incredibly popular; a rebel heroically opposed to  
industrial society, he was a hero who never married or changed his  
ideals."