America was imagined as the primitive childhood stage from which Europe had evolved.

Evidence

The philosopher John Locke claimed that the New World provided a prism through which one could see “a pattern of the first ages in Asia and Europe”—the origins from which Europe had developed. “In the beginning,” Locke said, “all the World was America” (1976, 26). He meant by this that the world (i.e., the West) had evolved from a stage very much like that discovered in America—unfilled, undeveloped, and uncivilized. America was the “childhood of mankind,” Locke claimed, and Indians should be classed with “children, idiots and illiterates because of their inability to reason in abstract, speculative … terms” (quoted in Marshall and Williams 1982, 192). — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 660

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the Islamophobia/Orientalism framework’s treatment of the racialized Other as backward child — connects to Achille Mbembe and the racialized ‘Other’ constructs read downstream in this module.
• DEFINE: Illustrates the temporal displacement of colonized peoples into a ‘childhood of mankind’ frame — a core mechanism of colonial psychology.