Our America and the West Author(S): Roberto Fernández Retamar Reviewed Work(S): Source: Social Text, No

Our America and the West Author(s): Roberto Fernández Retamar Reviewed work(s): Source: Social Text, No. 15 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 1-25 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/466488 . Accessed: 03/07/2012 19:12 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Duke University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Text. http://www.jstor.org Our Americaand the West ROBERTO FERNANDEZ RETAMAR WHAT'S IN A NAME As in other attempts to come to terms with names, the precise definition of Our America and its historical parameters leads to the search for a name that represents it better, making us more conscious of what we are trying to understand. The almost endless succession of names coined for Our America reveal not only indecision but also geographical and historical expansion of its compass. We might even say that we're dealing here with an expanding concept.1 A first formu- lation can be found in Simon Bolivar's great plans for the newly independent Latin American republics. In December 1814 he convenes the Panama Congress, to be held two years hence, and reiterates his belief that "the American republics, for- merly Spanish colonies, will have a firm base." When the name "Latin America" emerges and spreads in the second half of the 19th century, it includes Brazil and Haiti as well as the "former Spanish colonies." In 1844 we come across an even more inclusive idea in Jose Marti: "When we say 'A People' rather than 'the peoples' we mean that everything from the Rio Bravo [i.e., Grande] to Patagonia is one." On occasion, however, Marti preferred the name "Our America" over "La- tin America," thus averting etymological traps. "Latin America" (now understood as a synonym of "Our America," beyond its original delimitations), then, includes the English and Dutch Antilles (and, of course, large enclaves of indigenous peoples) as well as those countries more closely affiliated with Latinity. We shall adopt the term in this more inclusive sense. The task of defining historical parameters of Latin America will undoubtedly be made easier if we confront its reality with that of the so-called western world, to which we have been bound and which enjoys greater conceptual clarity. How this confrontation has been tackled by representative Latin American thinkers is the topic of the pages that follow. We must, however, get over an initial hurdle: the melange of writings on the West or the western world are generally unsatisfying and scandalously mystifying, contrary to what one might deduce from the fre- quency with which the terms are used. "After World War II," writes Jose Luis Romero in 1953, "we tend to speak of a western world rather than a western culture."2 We don't know with any cer- tainty, however, when western culture, western world, or simply the West began to 1 2 RobertoFerndndez Retamar be used with their present acceptations. While it is true that the West refers to geographical boundaries, political empires, and religious schisms in a European context, its contemporary sense is other. The term is only insinuated in Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History,3 where the "heart of Europe," "European man," "European humanity," and even "the Germanic world" are preferred.4By the middle of the 19th century, however, the Russians were speaking of westerners, that is, modernizers vis-a-vis feudal backwardness. In Our America, at about the same time, Andres Bello used the West with an almost contemporary meaning. In western Europe the name was widely used by the second half of the 19th century, but only with the triumph of the October Revolution in our century does it reach its apogee. Spengler published The Decline of the West (1918-22) in evident oppos- ition to the term, and Toynbee gives it wide currency in A Study of History (1934-54). The virulent reactionary roots of these works (Chamberlain in the one,5 Gobineau in the other6) help us to understand their recent popularity in the capitalist countries-as well as the use of western culture, western world, or the West (vis-a-vis the Orient)-as a favorite weapon in the ideological arsenal of the bourgeoisie during the worst moments of the cold war. Leopoldo Zea offers us a more serene and acceptable definition of the concept in 1955: "I use 'Western world' or 'the West' for that group of countries in Europe and America, particularly the United States of North America, which have at- tained the cultural and material ideals of Modernity discernible from the 16th century on."7 From the 16th century on? Marx writes in the first volume of Capital (1867) that "the first signs of the capitalist mode of production appear sporadically in some Mediterranean cities during the 14th and 15th centuries, although the capitalist era really begins in the 16th century."8Zea will later equate the western world with capitalism.9 We are now on firmer terrain: those countries which came to know full capitalist development-first in Europe (e.g., Holland, England, France, Ger- many), and subsequently those zones populated by Europeans10 (or almost de- populated of others)-constitute the western world. Marx gives an unforgettable description of the Botticellian emergence of this capitalist world: The discoveryof gold and silverin America,the extirpation,enslavement and entombmentin minesof the aboriginalpopulation, the beginningof the conquest and lootingof the EastIndies, the turningof Africainto a warrenfor the comme- cial hunting of black-skins,signalled the rosy dream of the era of capitalist production.These idyllic proceedingsare the chief momentsof primitiveac- cumulation.On their heels treadsthe commercialwar of the Europeannations, with the globe for a theatre.1' Thus did the western world develop vertiginously, at the expense and indis- Our Americaand the West 3 pensable exploitation of the rest of the world. In Europe itself, the furthest western regions (Spain and Portugal), which contributed most to capitalist development in other countries, would not know such development. Relegated to the margins of the West, which affected the destiny of their vast colonial empires, these backward countries might be called "paleowestern." If metropolitan Spain and Portugal remained on the periphery of the West, it is not surprising that their American colonies should have had a similar fate. Yet, as Jose Luis Romero has pointed out, America is the "first territory to be wester- nized methodically." Not only because, from the 16th century on, sundry Euro- pean cultures came to know a new life and mix with other cultures here, but also because Our America was yoked to the multiple and rapacious capitalist exploita- tions which still afflict us. Such thinkers as Spengler may exclude us from the West, which fits with our condition in the capitalist world as exploited rather than exploiters. But for this very reason we are linked with western capitalism in a common history. Whether we accept it or not, whether we are oblivious of it, this link has been essential and permanent: it inheres in the reciprocal, dialectical constitution of what came to be the western world and Latin America from the 16th century on. It is absurd to trace the history of our countries without reference to the West. But, has it been equally clear that the West's history cannot be written without reference to our own? Such is what Eric Williams emphasizes in Capitalism and Slavery (1944). This does not mean that there cannot be individual histories of western countries and of our own. Enrique Semo explains that in each stage of the developmentof the socio-economicformations of Latin Americancountries, there is a metropolitan-colonialrelation which becomesa constant of their history,but not in their history, as is preferredby those histo- rians and economistswho deny or underestimatethe importanceof internal factors and reduce the complex unfolding of history to a simple dichotomy betweenmetropolis and colony. Latin Americans' ideas on the relationship between Our America and the western world must be seen within this dramatic historical framework. THE FIRST VISIONS Writers from the French Antilles like Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon have denounced the absurdity of teaching Antillean children to repeat: "Our forefathers the Gauls...." This denunciation is certainly justified, but it is equally important to decry the violence implicit in making French children repeat the phrase. Are the Gauls really the ancestors of those who have different manner of speech, dress, belief, and "racial" (i.e., zoological) inheritance? Wouldn't it be more appropriate to teach those children to say: "Our forefathers the invaders (or, 4 RobertoFerndndez Retamar even, discoverers) of Gaul"? This, of course, is not done, as far as we know. Even today the young (and not so young too) read about the adventures of their hero, Asterix the Gaul. Although written in a Neo-Latin language they do not identify with the Roman troops but with the small, and imaginary, Gallic hero and his friends. Such violent deeds, whether tragic or triumphant, are the stuff of history and shape a country's tradition. This notwithstanding, many still reject as scandalous Marti's anguished words of eighty years ago: "The history of America, from the Incas to the present, must be taught thoroughly, even at the expense of dispensing with the Greek archons.

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