Globalization and the Decolonial Option
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Globalization and the Decolonial Option This is the first book in English profiling the work of a research collective that evolved around the notion of ‘coloniality’, understood as the hidden agenda and the darker side of modernity and whose members are based in South America and the United States. The project called for an understanding of modernity not from modernity itself but from its darker side, coloniality, and proposes the de-colonization of knowledge as an epistemological restitution with political and ethical implications. Epistemic decolonization, or de-coloniality, becomes the horizon to imagine and act toward global futures in which the notion of a political enemy is replaced by intercultural communication and towards an-other rationality that puts life first and that places institutions at its service, rather than the other way around. This book is profoundly inter- and trans-disciplinary, with authors writing from many intellectual, transdisciplinary, and institutional spaces. This book was published as a special issue of Cultural Studies. Walter D. Mignolo is William H. Wannamaker Professor of Romance Studies, Professor in the Program of Literature and Adjunct in Cultural Anthropology. He is also Director of the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities at Duke University and Associated Researcher, Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Quito, Ecuador. Arturo Escobar is Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, and Adjunct in the Department of Geography and of Communication, at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Globalization and the Decolonial Option Edited by Walter D. Mignolo and Arturo Escobar First published 2010 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2010 Taylor & Francis Typeset in Perpetua by Value Chain, India All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN13: 978-0-415-54971-4 CONTENTS Notes on Contributors vii 1. INTRODUCTION: COLONIALITY OF POWER AND DE-COLONIAL THINKING Walter D. Mignolo 1 I The Emergence of An-Other-Paradigm 2. COLONIALITY AND MODERNITY/RATIONALITY Aníbal Quijano 22 3. WORLDS AND KNOWLEDGES OTHERWISE: THE LATIN AMERICAN MODERNITY/COLONIALITY RESEARCH PROGRAM Arturo Escobar 33 4. THE EPISTEMIC DECOLONIAL TURN: BEYOND POLITICAL-ECONOMY PARADIGMS Ramón Grosfoguel 65 5. SHIFTING THE GEOPOLITICS OF CRITICAL KNOWLEDGE: DECOLONIAL THOUGHT AND CULTURAL STUDIES ‘OTHERS’ IN THE ANDES Catherine Walsh 78 II (De)Colonization of Knowledges and of Beings 6. ON THE COLONIALITY OF BEING: CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF A CONCEPT Nelson Maldonado-Torres 94 7. DECOLONIZATION AND THE QUESTION OF SUBJECTIVITY: GENDER, RACE, AND BINARY THINKING Freya Schiwy 125 III The Colonial Nation-States and the Imperial Racial Matrix 8. THE NATION: AN IMAGINED COMMUNITY? Javier Sanjinés 149 9. DECOLONIAL MOVES: TRANS-LOCATING AFRICAN DIASPORA SPACES Agustin Lao-Montes 163 10. UNSETTLING RACE, COLONIALITY, AND CASTE: ANZALDÚA’S BORDERLANDS/LA FRONTERA, MARTINEZ’S PARROT IN THE OVEN, AND ROY’S THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS José David Saldívar 193 vi Contents IV (De)Coloniality at Large 11. THE EASTERN MARGINS OF EMPIRE: COLONIALITY IN 19th CENTURY ROMANIA Manuela Boatca˘ 222 12. (IN)EDIBLE NATURE: NEW WORLD FOOD AND COLONIALITY Zilkia Janer 239 13. THE IMPERIAL-COLONIAL CHRONOTOPE: ISTANBUL-BAKU-KHURRAMABAD Madina Tlostanova 260 V On Empires and Colonial/Imperial Differences 14. THE MISSING CHAPTER OF EMPIRE: POSTMODERN REORGANIZATION OF COLONIALITY AND POST-FORDIST CAPITALISM Santiago Castro-Gómez 282 15. DELINKING: THE RHETORIC OF MODERNITY, THE LOGIC OF COLONIALITY AND THE GRAMMAR OF DE-COLONIALITY Walter D. Mignolo 303 16. THE COLONIALITY OF GENDER María Lugones 369 17. AFTERWORD Arturo Escobar 391 Bibliography 400 Index 402 Notes on contributors Manuela Boatcaˇ is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociological Theory at the University of Eichstat in Germany. Her research interests include political sociology, world-system analysis, gender and violence, and postcolonial studies. Among her recent publications are From Neoevolutionism to World-Systems Analysis: The Romanian theory of ‘Forms Without Substance’ (2003); ‘Peripheral Solutions to Peripheral Development’, Journal of World-Systems Research, vol. 11, no. 1, 2005; and ‘Knocking in Europe’s Door: Romanian Academia Between Communist Censorship and Western Neglect’, SAQ, vol. 105, no. 3, 2006. Semiperipheries in the World-System. Reflecting Eastern European and Latin American Experiences, in Journal of World-Systems Research, vol. XII, no. 2, 2006. Santiago Castro-Go´mez is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Universidad Javeriana in Bogota´, Colombia. He is also Associate Researcher at the Insituto PENSAR at the same university. He received his PhD in philosophy from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universitat in Frankfurt, Germany. Among his recent books are Crı´tica de la razo´n latinoamericana (1996); La postcolonialidad explicada a los nin˜os (2005) and La hybris del punto cero (2005). Arturo Escobar is Professor of Anthropology and Director, Institute of Latin American Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His main interests are: political ecology, the anthropology of development, social movement theory, and science and technology studies. Over the past ten years, he has worked closely with several social movements in the Colombian Pacific and with the Rome-based Society for International Development (SID) on projects on globalization, culture, women, environment, and place. Ramo´n Grosfoguel is a Sociologist and a Professor in the Ethnic Studies Department at UC-Berkeley. He has published many articles on the Political Economy of the World-System and on Caribbean Migrants in Western Europe and the United States. He is the author of Colonial Subjects (University of California Press, 2003). Zilkia Janer is working on a critical history of culinary thought from a translocal perspective. She has published ‘The Geopolitics of Culinary Knowledge’ (New Delhi) and ‘In Search of a High-Cuisine’ (Kathmandu). Janer is also preparing a manuscript on Latino food culture for Greenwood Press. She is the author of Puerto Rican Nation-Building Literature: Impossible Romance (University Press of Florida, 2005) and teaches Latin American literature and culture at Hofstra University. viii Notes on Contributors Agustin Lao-Montes teaches at the Department of Sociology of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where he is also affiliated with the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies, and with the Afro-American Studies Program. He has written extensively in a variety of fields including world-historical sociology, decolonial critique, social movements, cultural studies, and urban studies. He co-edited Mambo Montage: The Latinization of New York and is working on a manuscript tentatively titled ‘Afro-Latina/o Diasporas: Black Movements and Racial Politics in the Americas’. María Lugones is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Inter- disciplinary Research Center in Philosophy, Interpretation and Culture at the University of New York at Binghamton, focussing on “Decolonial Thinking” (http://cpic.binghamton.edu/decolonial.html). She is a popular educator and philosopher and teaches also at the Escuela Popular Norteña, a popular education center and in the Comparative Literature department, at Binghamton. Lugones is the author of Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Resistance Against Multiple Oppressions (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). She is finishing two books, Intimate Interdependencies: Theorizing Collectivism; and Radical Multiculturalism. Nelson Maldonado-Torres is Assistant Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and former Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities at Duke University. He works on theories and philosophies that address problems and questions related to the intersection of knowledge, ethics and politics on the one hand, and race, gender, nation, and empire on the other, particularly in connection with critical theory, phenomenology, postcolonial studies, and modern religious thought. He has published several articles and is working on two book-length projects: Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (forthcoming with Duke University Press), and Fanonian Meditations. He is also co-editor with Ramo´n Grosfoguel and Jose´ David Saldı´var of Latin@s in the World-System: Decolonization Struggles in the 21st U.S. Empire (Paradigm Press). Walter D. Mignolo is William H. Wannamaker Professor and Director of the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities at Duke University. In the recent past he has explored geo-politics and the body-politics of knowledge in the context of the colonial matrix of power; border thinking and the de- colonial option. Among his recent publications Local Histories/Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (2000); The Idea of Latin America (2005). The forthcoming