Abstract
Although Czech written sources from the 16th century on the subject of overseas discoveries were the subject of interest to scholars as early as the first half of the 20th century, historical and literary studies focused and still often focus on their formal aspect. On the other hand, the formation of textual discourses and representations, part of which is the practice referred to as othering - i.e. the production of signs of difference - has been somewhat sidelined from scholarly attention in the Czech environment.
It is this practice that is the main focus of my paper, which will focus on the othering of Indians and Indian societies in selected Czech written sources of the 16th century - namely the notorious Writing on New Lands, Cosmography, and History of Sailing to America - in the context of discourses present in early modern literary production, which was strongly dominated by contemporary Christian discourse and the resulting Eurocentric interpretation of the world. European ideas about the ideal society and its organisation are also transmitted in the sources to the New World.
In my paper, I will present how textual representations of Indians and Indian societies are constituted in the context of contemporary discourses, which are usually coded through the dichotomous pair of discourses of civilization and barbarism, although this is by no means the only civilizing practice in the sources. With the help of literary historian John Barell's lesser-known typological concept of this/that/the other, I will zoom in on the other discourses through which representations of otherness are realized in texts - in addition to the aforementioned discourse of civilization, these are mainly discourses of religion and discourses of power.
After introducing the concept of this/that/the other itself, I will show with concrete examples from the sources that this concept corresponds to textual relations and structures often better than a system of binary oppositions and can be a useful tool in textual analysis, categorizing different types of otherness, among which it also reveals the interrelationships and the way power is distributed.