Walter D. Mignolo
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Walter D. Mignolo INTRODUCTION Coloniality of power and de-colonial thinking I The volume the reader has in her/his hands (or perhaps on the screen), is the outcome of one of the workshops of the project modernity/colonialilty, held at Duke-UNC in May of 2004, and organized by Arturo Escobar and myself. The workshop took place after his article Á collected in this volume Á was published and focused on the following question: what are the differences between existing critical projects and de-colonization of knowledge Á as Anibal Quijano formulates it in the leading article of this volume Á and other contemporary critical projects (an outline of this scenario in section III, below). We decided to focus on Max Horkheimer’s formulation of ‘critical theory’ for several reasons. The first was that the project of the Frankfurt School and the early works of Horkheimer in particular were meaningful for some of the participants in the project modernity/coloniality (chiefly Enrique Dussel and Santiago Castro-Go´mez, both philosophers from Argentina and Colombia, respectively).1 Secondly, because the Frankfurt School condensed a tradition of Jewish critical thinkers in Germany during the early years of Hitler’s regime and thirdly because the Jewish critical tradition is entangled with racism and coloniality. As Aime´Ce´saire noted, half a century ago the Holocaust was a racial crime perpetrated against racialized whites in Europe, applying the same logic that colonizer has applied to people of color outside of Europe (Ce´saire 2000). While de-coloniality names critical thoughts emerging in the colonies and ex-colonies, Jewish critical tradition in Europe, since the nineteenth century, materialized as the internal responses to European formation of imperial nation-states.2 This volume is intended to be a contribution to de-colonial thinking as a particular kind of critical theory.3 I am assuming that critical theory in the Marxist genealogy of thought, as articulated by Max Horkheimer, is also a particular kind of critical theory and not the norm or the master paradigm against which all other projects should be compared, measured, evaluated and judged.4 And I am assuming also that ‘history’ is not only linear; and that ‘historical awards’ are only endowed to those who get there first, in the uni- linear chronology of events. There are several histories, all simultaneous Cultural Studies Vol. 21, Nos. 2 Á3 March/May 2007, pp. 155 Á167 ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online – 2007 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09502380601162498 156 CULTURAL STUDIES histories, inter-connected by imperial and colonial powers, by imperial and colonial differences. II Section I features the seminal article by Peruvian sociologist, Anibal Quijano, published at the beginning of the 90s, when the dust of a crumbling Soviet Union was still in everybody eyes.5 At the beginning of this century, Arturo Escobar (and anthropologist from Colombia currently residing in the US) wrote a critical review of what he called ‘the modernity/coloniality research program’. This article is included here, following the one by Quijano. The rest of the articles reflect part of the research and publications of many of us participating in the project, that continues to meet yearly and exchange views, articles, opinions, information. Ramo´n Grosfoguel (a sociologist and activist, from Puerto Rico residing in the US) reviews world-system analysis from the perspective of coloniality. A former student of Immanuel Wallerstein, Grosfoguel’s contribution to the epistemic shift opened up, in the social sciences, by modernity/coloniality research program starts and departs from dependency theory and world-system analysis. His contribution in this volume is part of his larger argument to transcend the basic economic model in which dependency theory and world-system analysis rest. Catherine Walsh (scholar, activist and resident of Ecuador), has in the past eight years, developed a critical discourse based on her political work with Indigenous and Afro- intellectuals and communities, in Ecuador; as well as in her role as founder and director of the program in cultural studies at the said university. Here Walsh strongly argues for an ‘other thought’ to avoid the modern trap of putting every thing in one temporal line, in one highway that is already being patrolled and guarded by gate-keepers making sure that ‘other thoughts’ do not cross the borders. In section II Nelson Maldonado-Torres and Freya Schiwy engage in explorations that each have been pursuing in the past five or so years and that expand the modernity/coloniality/decolonialilty project to the sphere of philosophy and cultural critique. Maldonado-Torres (a Portorican philosopher and historian of religions), has been exploring the concept of ‘coloniality of being’, that was implied but not clearly stated in all its consequences, in Quijano’s notion of ‘subjectivity and knowledge’. In Quijano’s seminal article the colonial matrix of power has been described in four interrelated domains: control of economy (land appropriation, exploitation of labor, control of natural resources); control of authority (institution, army); control of gender and sexuality (family, education) and control of subjectivity and knowledge (epistemology, education and formation of subjectivity). Furthermore, implanting the colonial matrix of power (either in sixteenth century Anahuak INTRODUCTION 157 (Valley of Mexico) or in today’s Iraq) implies to dismantle, simultaneously, existing forms of social organization and ways of life. ‘Coloniality of being’ as unfolded by Maldonado-Torres brings forward what has been silenced beyond Heideger and Levinas: the ‘being’ of Frantz Fanon ‘damne´s de la terre’. Freya Schiwy (a cultural critic from Germany residing in the US) has distinguished herself within the research program, for her original investigation of Indigenous video making and her interrogation of the roles of gender in the colonial matrix of power. While Maldonado-Torres explores the intersection of coloniality and subjectivity in the domain of philosophy and in the tradition of the concept of ‘being’, Schiwy explores coloniality and subjectivity in the domain of cultural studies and in the debate on gender issues. In Quijano’s colonial matrix of power, gender and sexuality is one sphere in which coloniality of power is articulated. Quijano’s has concentrated himself in the spheres of the control of economy (mainly exploitation of labor) and authority articulated with the coloniality of knowledge. Maldonado-Torres and Schiwy are contributing to unfold the question of being and gender entangled with the coloniality of knowledge. In section III, ethnicity, nation-state and racism come into prominent focus. Where do these issues fit in the colonial matrix of power? Where is the nation-state in the colonial matrix of power?; in the sphere of control of authority, for sure. The emergence of ‘modern nation-states’ in Europe, means two things: that the state became the new central authority of imperial/ colonial domination and that the ‘nation’ in Europe was mainly constituted of one ethnicity, articulated as ‘whiteness’. Chronologically, South America and the Caribbean were the first cases of ‘colonial nation-states’ and in the process of their appearance and materialization, the colonial matrix of power was re- articulated in what has been described as ‘internal colonialism’: a Creole elite (e.g., white elite from European descent), took the power from the hands of Spanish and Portuguese monarchies re-enacted in their own hands. In the case of Haiti, it was the Black Creole and exÁ Slaves who took power. However, and as history demonstrated, a Black colonial state was not allowed to occupy the same position in the modern/colonial world, than the White colonial state. The co-existence of the modern nation-state with colonial nation-states is one of the key points in the transformation of racism and the colonial matrix of power since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Javier Sanjine´s (a Bolivian cultural critic and former political theorist, who splits his time between Bolivia and the US) takes Brazilian essayist and intellectual Euclides da Cunha, Los Sertones (1902) in order to explore the tensions and conflicts between race and nation in the formation of the colonial state. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Brazil was no longer a direct colony of Portugal. But it was, like the rest of Latin America, an indirect colony of the French civilizing mission and of the British Empire economy. Brazilian critical intellectuals (as it became the case all around the colonial 158 CULTURAL STUDIES world), torn between the exemplarity of European modern states and the miseries of mentality, economically, politically dependent colonial states, were the visible cases of a new subjectivity, the subjectivity of the colonial citizens of the colonial nation-states. Sanjine´s describes the particular form that the colonial state took in South America as the ‘oligarchic-liberal States’ and contrasts those who trumpeted the European model (like Argentinean Domingo Faustino Sarmiento), with those critical of it (as Sarmiento’s counterpart in Brazil, Euclides De Cunha). In the same vein, Agustı´n Lao-Montes (a sociologist from Puerto Rico, residing in the US) explores the past (in) visibility of Afro-Latinos and their growing demographic and political presence. What does it mean to be Afro- Latinos and Afro-Latinas? Where are they coming