APA Newsletters Volume 01, Number 2 Spring 2002 NEWSLETTER ON HISPANIC/LATINO ISSUES IN PHILOSOPHY FROM THE EDITOR, EDUARDO MENDIETA ARTICLES BENIGNO TRIGO “Latinamerican Genealogies: Appropriating Foucault” EDWARD DEMONCHONOK “Globalization, Postcoloniality, and Interculturality” INTERVIEWS LINDA MARTIN ALCOFF “Introduction: ‘Puerto Rican Studies in a German Philosophy Context: An Interview with Juan Flores’” LINDA MARTIN ALCOFF “Introduction: ‘A Philosophical Account of Africana Studies: An Interview with Lewis Gordon’” © 2002 by The American Philosophical Association ISSN: 1067-9464 APA NEWSLETTER ON Hispanic/Latino Issues in Philosophy Eduardo Mendieta, Editor Spring 2002 Volume 01, Number 2 States. He is known for his work on Frantz Fanon, race theory, phenomenology and Africana philosophy. His work is FROM THE EDITOR particularly significant because he has been bridging the divide between Latino Studies, Latin American philosophy, and Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American thought. These two Eduardo Mendieta “Afro-Latino” philosophers epitomize the cosmopolitanism and originality of an emergent paradigm in cultural studies In this issue of the newsletter we have been able include a and philosophy. version of the introduction to the recently published book The committee welcomes as a new chair Susana Foucault and Latin America, edited by Benigno Trigo. This Nuccetelli who has been appointed by the APA directors to wonderful collection gathers canonical texts from Latin take over Pablo DeGreiff, who resigned late last semester from American literary criticism and more recent contributions that the chairship. We are thankful to Prof. Nuccetelli for taking exhibit a creative appropriation of Foucault for the study of over this important job. We also congratulate her for the recent Latin America. In turn, these contributions also illustrate how publication of Latin American Thought: Philosophical young philosophers may begin their own path of creative Problems and Arguments (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, readings of classical figures in the Western philosophical 2001). A panel on this book has been organized for the Central canon by translocating them, by testing them, by immersing Division meeting of the APA, scheduled to meet in Chicago at them in other contexts than those of either Europe or the the end of April. United States. The next text by Edward Demonchonok introduces the reader to some recent work in Latin American The Present Members of the Committee are: philosophy. Demonchonok has been a long time student of Susana Nuccetelli (2002-2005) Chair of the Committee Latin American philosophy and he is particularly well qualified Juan De Pascuale (1998-2001) [email protected] to register the emergence of new trends and directions. In Anne Freire Ashbaugh (1998-2001) [email protected] this case, Demonchonok foregrounds the ways in which Enrique Dussel’s work on ethics has been a critique of Jose Medina (2001-2004) [email protected] ideological theories of globalization. Demonchonok then Eduardo Mendieta (1999-2002) relates Dussel’s critique of globalization to Raúl Fornet- [email protected] Betancourt’s work on “interculturality.” Fornet-Betancourt is Gregory Velazco y Trianosky (1999-2002) a Cuban philosopher who has been living in Germany for over [email protected] twenty years now, but he has remained an active participant Marcelo Sabates (1999-2002) [email protected] in the philosophical debates in Latin America. Fornet- Gregory Pappas (2001-2004) [email protected] Betancourt originally envisioned and organized the Adam Vinueza (2000-2003) [email protected] encounters between Apel and Dussel, and eventually went on to edit several volumes of these North-South encounters. More recently Fornet-Betancourt has turned his philosophical telescope to what he calls “inter-cultural philosophy.” For him this is not a new sub-discipline, or corollary within the edifice of philosophy; rather, in an age of globalization, “inter-cultural” philosophy constitutes a paradigm shift on the same level as the linguistic turn. The second part of the newsletter reproduces two interviews conducted by Linda Martín Alcoff. The first one is with Juan Flores, one of the most well known Puerto Rican intellectuals of the last two decades. Many will be surprised by the biographical details revealed in this interview, as well as the cosmopolitan and interdisciplinary character of Flores’ methodology. The second interview with Lewis Gordon is also pleasantly biographical and philosophically informative. Gordon is certainly one of the most productive, innovative and well-known philosophers of the last decade in the United — APA Newsletter, Spring 2002, Volume 01, Number 2 — deconstructive moment is crucial. The negative epistemic tries to engage the “life-world” by calling into question its own ARTICLES linguistic and rhetorical modes of operation and by problematizing its object of analysis. The episthetic only “mimics” the first, but in fact remains content with its Latinamerican Genealogies: Appropriating unexamined method and object of analysis. Indeed, it even Foucault goes so far as to “celebrate” what, for de la Campa, amounts to an aesthetic reduction of the material and spiritual needs Benigno Trigo of that “life-world.” (19) In short, for de la Campa these two SUNY at Stony Brook states or moments of Latin Americanism correspond to its postcolonial and to its postmodern respective directions after Since the mid-eighties, Michel Foucault’s work has informed the post-structuralist turn. much of the critical thought about Latin America’s cultural, In his book, de la Campa further argues that while the literary, historical, and political events. Influential works postmodern episthetic has been the dominant moment in written in the United States such as The Lettered City (1984) Latin Americanism, it is also in a state of exhaustion. He by Angel Rama, Myth and Archive (1990), by Roberto González suggests that the way out of the postmodern dead-end is not Echevarría, Foundational Fictions (1991) by Doris Sommer, so much to fully embrace the new rhetoric of globalization and At Face Value (1991) by Sylvia Molloy, draw from and its push for cultural studies, but to re-visit the postcolonial Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966), The Archaeology of moment or state and draw useful lessons from it. For de la Knowledge (1969), Discipline and Punish (1975), The History Campa, one of the last works by the critic Angel Rama (The of Sexuality (1976) and Technologies of the Self (1988) to Lettered City) contains the useful lessons taught by the develop concepts like the consciousness of an intellectual negative epistemic within the postcolonial moment of Latin elite (or letrados), the archive novel, the foundational fiction, Americanism. Significantly, de la Campa traces Rama’s H and self-writing all of which are now the common currency negative epistemic back to Michel Foucault’s “discursive ISPANIC of critical analysis in and about Latin America. Thus, it is not epistemology.” In turn, Foucault develops this epistemology surprising that a new generation of critics in universities in (according to de la Campa) during his “archaeological the United States continues this trend and turns to Foucault moment.” in an effort to develop its own insights into Latin American /L culture, politics, history, and literature. One ventures to say that The Lettered City is a true essay — in the double sense of providing a test as ATINO However, as the division of this volume into Discourse, well as a rehearsal — of many theoretical aspects Government, Subjectivity and Sexuality suggests, the trend that have fueled debates in the years since it was to appropriate Foucauldian topics, strategies, and modes of published, many of which are central to Foucault’s analysis has been selective rather than wholesale. Indeed, own work. It is now well understood that The History as is made clear in the essays by Elzbieta Sklodowska, Doris of Sexuality, or Technologies of the Self, for example, Sommer, Román de la Campa, and Kelly Oliver, the impulse constitute profound revisions of the discursive towards a selective appropriation of Foucault’s work turns epistemology that was central to The Order of Things into a critical appropriation in some cases. or The Archaeology of Knowledge. (125) What explains this selective and sometimes critical appropriation of Michel Foucault’s work; and why has Michel Thus, parallel to his description of the post-structuralist Foucault been so popular among these writers? One may turn in Latin Americanism, de la Campa describes Foucault’s begin to answer these two questions by engaging Latin work as a divided corpus. While the Foucault of The Order of Americanism, a recent and fascinating book by Román de la Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge is akin to the Campa (one of whose chapters is included in this volume). postcolonial direction of Latin Americanism, the Foucault of In that book, de la Campa maps “a transnational discursive The History of Sexuality of Technologies of the Self is akin to community” which he calls “Latin Americanism.”1 It is a the postmodern moment. Following the first Foucault, Rama powerful and indeed convincing mapping of the last thirty focuses on discourse in such a way as to simultaneously years of critical production about Latin America written both suggest discourse’s potential for empowerment and its from within and from outside of that geographical space. In constitution of