To Bury or Exhume the White Gods Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words - 1

To Bury or Exhume the White Gods - Essay Example It also becomes the means by which the oppressed are made to believe in the ethical justice of the systems of production that engender their own oppression. These theories have great scope for application in postcolonial studies that seek to challenge narratives that are based on the versions of the colonizer’s memory. There are now attempts to revise the histories that have been written by such writers for the mental enslavement of the colonized. These counter-narratives too, however, stand the risk of being incorporated into the power structures of the imperialist narrative. This is to a certain extent inevitable as they come for e certain point in history when the effects of colonialism are still being overturned. It is in this context that Camilla Townsend’s article â€Å"Burying the White Gods: New Perspectives on the Conquest of Mexico† becomes important as it attempts to bridge certain gaps in historical narratives and at the same point of time also seeks to point certain flaws in the counter-narratives that one finds in the postmodern age. The essay thus points to the need for a history with lesser chinks (Townsend). The essay seeks to talk of the narratives that have been used to counter the narratives of Hernando Cortes and his conquistadors. Many such narratives talk of the situation where the people who were indigenous inhabitants of Mexico thought of the conquistadors to be gods. An elaborate system of lies is constructed whereby indigenous systems are arm-twisted into accommodating the colonizer into their narrative. The incorporation of Cortes into the narrative of the Indian God, Quetzalcoatl is a very good example of this. The God who is considered to have left the Indians’ land for the East was prophesied to come later on at a certain point of time. This narrative was changed a lot to accommodate the arrival of the colonizer into Mexico. There are several aspects that one needs to look into while analyzing