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Dispensable and Bare Lives: Coloniality and the Hidden Political/Economic Agenda of Modernity Walter Mignolo Duke University, [email protected]

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Dispensable and Bare Lives: Coloniality and the Hidden Political/Economic Agenda of Modernity Walter Mignolo Duke University, Wmignolo@Duke.Edu Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self- Knowledge Volume 7 Article 7 Issue 2 Historicizing Anti-Semitism 3-20-2009 Dispensable and Bare Lives: Coloniality and the Hidden Political/Economic Agenda of Modernity Walter Mignolo Duke University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarworks.umb.edu/humanarchitecture Part of the European History Commons, History of Religions of Western Origin Commons, Jewish Studies Commons, Race, Ethnicity and post-Colonial Studies Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Mignolo, Walter (2009) "Dispensable and Bare Lives: Coloniality and the Hidden Political/Economic Agenda of Modernity," Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge: Vol. 7: Iss. 2, Article 7. Available at: http://scholarworks.umb.edu/humanarchitecture/vol7/iss2/7 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks at UMass Boston. It has been accepted for inclusion in Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at UMass Boston. For more information, please contact [email protected]. HUMAN ARCHITECTURE: JOURNAL OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE A Publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics) HUMAN ARCHITECTURE ISSN: 1540-5699. © Copyright by Ahead Publishing House (imprint: Okcir Press) and authors. All Rights Reserved. Journal of the Sociology of Self- Dispensable and Bare Lives Coloniality and the Hidden Political/Economic Agenda of Modernity Walter Mignolo Duke University –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– [email protected] Abstract: Walter Mignolo discusses how racial formations in colonialism and imperialism have to be understood in the context of the simultaneous transformation of Christianity and the emer- gence of the capitalist world economy. In his contribution he focuses on how Christian theology prepared the terrain for two complementary articulations of racism. One was founded on Chris- tian epistemic privilege over the two major competing religions (Jews and Muslims), the other on a secularization of theological detachment culminating in the “purity of blood” that became the biological and natural marker (Indians, Blacks, Mestizos, Mulatos) of what used to be the marker of religious belief (Jews, Moors, Conversos, Moriscos). Mignolo also discusses the emer- gence of secular “Jewness” in eighteenth century Europe and how these developments were con- current with Western Imperialism in the New World. He concludes that secular Jewness joined secular Euro-American economic practices (e.g., imperial capitalism) and the construction of the State of Israel by what Marc Ellis describes as “Constantine Jews.” I. INTRODUCTION: BETWEEN who is neither Islamic in any of its varied DISCIPLINARY/EPISTEMIC AND ethnic configurations (Arab, Iranian, Turk- ish, Indonesian, Central Asian, or Islamic RELIGIOUS/ETHNIC population in Western Europe or the US), IDENTIFICATIONS nor a Jew, a Black or an Indigenous person. My experiences and subjectivities are only My participation in this conference-se- indirectly related to religious, national and ries (Islamophobia, Antisemitism, Anti- life experiences of people who have grown Black Racism and Anti-Indigenous Rac- up and been educated in any, or various, ism), as well as my own work on the sub- historical and subjective configurations just ject, is and has been carried out by someone mentioned. I learned to see the world first Walter D. Mignolo is William H. Wannamaker Professor and Director for the Center of Global Studies and the Humanities at Duke University. He is an active member of the project modernity/coloniality/decoloniality and has been exploring the decolonial option as an epistemic and political avenue to overcome the limits of modern and Western epistemology founded in the Greco-Latin legacies and Western Christianity and its reincarnation in Secular philosophy and sciences. Among his recent publications: The Idea of Latin America (2005), received the Frantz Fanon Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association in 2006. Co-editor with Madina Tlostanova of Double Critique: Knowledge and Scholars at Risk in the Post-Socialist World (2006). In collaboration with Arturo Escobar, Globalization and the Decolonial Option (2007). Co-edited with Margaret Greer and Maureen Quilligan, The Black Legend. Discourses of Race in the European Renaissance (2007). HUMAN ARCHITECTURE: JOURNAL OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE, VII, 2, SPRING 2009, 69-88 69 70 WALTER MIGNOLO as a son of European immigrants in Argen- dians” descended from Jews. Although he tina, more specifically from Northern Italy. dismissed the possibility, he had neverthe- Later on, when I went to the university and less addressed an issue that was in every- through my Ph.D. I became aware that at body’s mind. Acosta first dismissed the the university you learn to see the world possibility of a connection between Jews through a discipline, whatever the disci- and Indians because Jews had a sophisti- pline is. That is, you identify yourself with cated writing system from a long time ago a discipline and people identify you with while Indians were considered “illiterate” the discipline. You see yourself and they see (in the Western sense of the word). Jews like you as a historian, biologist, lawyer, sociol- money, Acosta points out, while Indians are ogist, and semiotician. Through a lengthy indifferent to it; and while Jews take cir- process I learned to identify myself by the cumcision seriously, Indians have no idea seventies as a semiotician (for which Mi- of it. Last but not least, Acosta pointed that crosoft Office doesn’t have a word in its if Jews were indeed the Indies origin of In- Thesaurus) interested in discourse analysis dians, they would not have forgotten the and literary theory on the one hand, and Messiah and their religion. the historical foundations of epistemology But then there was also the question of and hermeneutics (which later I realized enslaved Africans. What to do with them? were Western ways of framing certain op- Early in the sixteenth century, Indians were erations and procedures of knowledge considered vassals of the King and serfs of common to human beings—and perhaps God. Consequently, they couldn’t be en- living organisms) on the other hand. slaved—which legitimized the massive en- It was at the junction of this personal slavement of Africans. Bartolomé de Las turmoil that The Darker Side of the Renais- Casas supported, first, the dictum about In- sance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization dians and Africans, but then he corrected (1995) started as a process of understand- himself and condemned slavery. Africa and ing the opening up of the Atlantic in the six- Africans were already classified in Chris- teenth century, “modern” imperial tian cosmology as descendent of Ham, colonialism (that is European: Spanish, Noah’s cursed son. And that was not good Portuguese, French, British), in contradis- for one of the meanings of “Ham” was tinction to contemporary and similar orga- “Black.” The conjunction of “cursed’ and nization (cfr. Ottoman Sultanate or “black,” plus the fact that Ham’s descen- Quechua Incanate). I became aware, in the dents spread through Africa and to the cur- process of writing and researching, that rent Middle East, prompted the scenario for people in the Valley of México living in the the British to describe Spaniards as “Black- Aztec Tlatoanate, whether in conformity or amoors.” When Elizabeth I of England dissenting (like the people in Tlaxcala, who launched the campaign against the brutal- supported Hernán Cortés), were com- ity of Spaniards against the Indians (known pared—by the Spaniards—with the Jews. today as “the Black legend”), the Spanish The comparison was twofold: on the one were likened with “Blackamoors” under- hand, Indians and Jews were dirty and dis- lining the close connections between Spain trustful people; on the other hand, “Indi- and Muslims from North Africa (Greer, Mi- ans” in the New World may have been a gnolo and Quilligan, 2007). “Moors” and consequence of the Jewish diaspora. Jesuit “Black” were thus conflated as undesirable Father José de Acosta collected, in his Histo- persons in Christian Europe and used to es- ria Natural y Moral de las Indias (1589) a leg- tablish the internal imperial difference be- acy that goes back to the middle of the tween England (a want-to-be empire) and sixteenth century pondering whether “In- Spain (a leading imperial force).1 HUMAN ARCHITECTURE: JOURNAL OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE, VII, 2, SPRING 2009 DISPENSABLE AND BARE LIVES 71 Now what you have here is a messy could have been Muslim or not in Europe historical configuration, the emergence of and Africa; and finally with “African the racial matrix of the modern/colonial Blacks” when they were enslaved, trans- world; that is, of Western imperial capital- ported to the New World from different Af- ism and of racism as a necessary epistemic rican Kingdoms, diverse in their language, structure that legitimized at the moment religions and histories. The messy histori- the epistemic supremacy of Theology and, cal configuration entered, nonetheless, in a later on, the epistemic supremacy of Philos- process of order and management through ophy and Science as the ultimate proof of the creation of the Spanish Inquisition in the empirical existence of “races” dividing 1505. The Spanish Inquisition contributed the
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