Decolonizing American Philosophy

Corey McCall, Phillip McReynolds, Corey McCall, Phillip McReynolds

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781438481944
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Pragmatismo en filosofía

In Decolonizing American Philosophy, Corey McCall and Phillip McReynolds bring together leading scholars at the forefront of the field to ask: Can American philosophy, as the product of a colonial enterprise, be decolonized? Does American philosophy offer tools for decolonial projects? What might it mean to decolonize American philosophy and, at the same time, is it possible to consider American philosophy, broadly construed, as a part of a decolonizing project? The various perspectives included here contribute to long-simmering conversations about the scope, purpose, and future of American philosophy, while also demonstrating that it is far from a unified, homogeneous field. In drawing connections among various philosophical traditions in and of the Americas, they collectively propose that the process of decolonization is not only something that needs to be done to American philosophy but also that it is something American philosophy already does, or at least can do, as a resource for resisting colonial and racist oppression.

PART ONE

THE TERMS OF DECOLONIZATION

CHAPTER ONE

Culture, Acquisitiveness,
and Decolonial Philosophy

LEE A. McBRIDE III

There has been a recent surge in decolonial discourse. Decolonial thought is touted (and mocked) in op-ed pieces and blogs and shared via social media. At university, there are calls to decolonize the curriculum, the canon, the faculty.1 In broader contexts, some suggest decolonizing your diet, your sexuality, your future.2 But what exactly is entailed in the call to decolonize? In an attempt to dispel straw men and feckless, superficial depictions of tenable decolonial philosophies, I wade into the discussion, articulating what I take to be general contours and goals of decolonial philosophy.3 I describe decolonial philosophy as an oppositional reaction to teleological systems of (spiritual and material) development devised to serve the imperial and economic interests of the colonizers. And, in closing, I voice my concerns about three potentially problematic issues. First, the move to decolonize can rely upon an overly simplistic conception of decolonial populations. Second, it is historically erroneous and conceptually wrongheaded to see cultural products as things proprietarily owned by one racial or ethnic group. And, lastly, I suggest that decolonial thought is mere window dressing if it fails to address the acquisitive tendencies and material conditions of present-day capitalist cultures.

Colonial Acquisitiveness and Imperialism

Here I am, writing in English. English is readily spoken in many former British colonies: South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, India, Hong Kong, Papua New Guinea, Australia, Canada, the United States, Jamaica, Barbados, Guyana, and Ireland. French is spoken in Madagascar, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Chad, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Algeria, French Guiana, Haiti, and Quebec (Canada). Portuguese is spoken in Brazil, Cape Verde, Angola, Mozambique, and East Timor. Spanish is spoken in Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, Bolivia, Uruguay, Argentina, and slew of South and Central American countries in between. It is instructive to think about the influence of the background assumptions and postulates implicit in these western European discursive practices.4 These culturally specific background assumptions (or episteme) influence our conceptual frameworks, our ontologies—what counts as “human,” as “discrete object,” as “real.”5 These culturally specific background assumptions frame the values, tacit hierarchies, conceivable genders, and sacred/profane cultural practices for a given epoch. In this vein, colonial languages, vocabularies, and basic categories bear implicit values, predilections, and hierarchies. In this sense, colonizers did more than establish colonies to seize land, extract natural resources, exploit cheap labor, and amass capital. They brought with them intervening discursive practices and conceptual frameworks. They brought intervening cultural products, intellectual traditions, and norms. Colonizers established their dominance.

During the fifteenth century, galleons sailed from various western European ports to establish new colonies.6 The Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, and British were forerunners, establishing footholds in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.7 Their ostensible purpose was to venture into the heart of darkness to bring light (Jesucristo), to save heathen souls; or, to explore the world and claim/expropriate new lands, to establish colonies for the glory of the empire; or, to find mountains of gold, diamonds, and other precious metals and deliver them back to the Monarch; or, to secure cheaper sources of spices, raw materials, and labor, enriching the trading companies that financed their expeditions; or, to allow those of lower station the opportunity to strike out and seize or settle on their own plot of land and have personal property free of religious persecution and feudal serfdom. I do not mean to suggest that there was only one shared colonial vision across western European colonial projects. In fact, the history is complicated, spanning several centuries and numerous geographical sites.8 Each of the modern colonial projects was likely motivated by more than one of these purposes, especially as empires, alliances, and trading agreements waxed and waned over time.

In 1492, Cristóbal Colón/Cristoforo Colombo (Christopher Columbus) sailed from Palos, Spain, heading West into uncharted ocean, eventually unwittingly “discovering” the West Indies.9 In 1493, on Columbus’s second voyage to the West Indies, King Ferdinand of Aragon supplied him with a letter addressed to the indigenous people that already inhabited those lands (i.e., the Taino/Arawak people). The letter reads:

In the name of King Ferdinand and Juana, his daughter, Queen of Castile and Leon, etc., conquerors of barbarian nations, we notify you as best we can that our Lord God Eternal created Heaven and earth and a man and woman from whom we all descend for all times and all over the world. … [God appointed a Pope to serve as ruler of the world.] … The late Pope gave these islands and mainland of the ocean and the contents hereof to the abovementioned King and Queen, as is certified in writing and you may see the documents if you should so desire. Therefore, Their Highnesses are lords and masters of this land; they were acknowledged as such when this notice was posted, and were and are being served willingly and without resistance; … Therefore, we request that you understand this text, deliberate on its content within a reasonable time, and recognize the Church and its highest priest, the Pope, as rulers of the universe, and in their name the King and Queen of Spain as rulers of this land, allowing the religious fathers to preach our holy Faith to you. … Should you fail to comply, or delay maliciously in so doing, we assure you that with the help of God we shall use force against you, declaring war upon you from all sides and with all possible means, and we shall bind you to the yoke of the Church and of Their Highnesses; we shall enslave your persons, wives and sons, sell you or dispose of you as the King sees fit; we shall seize your possessions and harm you as much as we can as disobedient and resisting vassals.10

Indeed, “the Pope must have been drunk, the King of Castile a madman.”11 Ferdinand seems to rely upon a (preposterous) argument from authority: God, through His Pope, has bequeathed this land to the King and Queen of Spain. Their Highnesses have documents verifying this. Recognize colonial reign or suffer the consequences.12

John Locke, in 1689, operating from a different social station, penned a different type of justification. In the Second Treatise of Government, Locke asserts that God has given rank-and-file human beings reason to make use of the world to the best advantage of life and convenience.13 He seems to suggest that anyone can acquire private property (i.e., that part of nature one mixes with their own labor). Our claim to private property is only limited by our ability to use it without waste or spoilage.14 Here, we find a barefaced argument for colonialism. First, Locke asserts that the light of reason tells us that God meant for the world to be subdued/cultivated for the benefit of life. Second, the indigenous peoples of far-off lands do not cultivate the land (in proper European fashion). No fences, no linear row crops—the lands they inhabit are “untamed” and “wretched.” In other words, the indigenous peoples are failing to maximize potential yield. They are letting the land (i.e., God’s creation) go to waste. Thus, God and reason commands “the rational and industrious” to cultivate these untamed lands (and thereby take possession of it).15 So, with hard work and initiative, anyone can own property; one only need consider the waste and wretchedness of the Americas, Asia, and Africa.16 Moreover, Locke believed that nonperishing assets (i.e., capital) could be hoarded without injury to anyone; he believed that “a disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth” was inevitable.17 Put plainly, God really intended the world to be possessed by the industrious and rational, for their cultivation of the world makes the most of it.

Whether motivated by church, empire, or raw pecuniary ambition, each instantiation of modern colonialism seems to evoke a teleological system prescribing spiritual or material development.18 That is, the colonial projects arising out of western Europe post-1492 were designed to accomplish an ultimate end—a τέλος (telos)—to serve the imperial and economic interests of the colonizers. I find it helpful to think of these systems working at two levels. At one level, colonial development is intended to compel the colonized to think and behave in a particular manner. Colonizers inculcate indigenous populations and (imported) enslaved populations with European background assumptions, values, and character traits, thereby rendering them well disciplined, beholden, subservient—subordinate functionaries, valets, and instruments of production.19 Or they are erased.20 At a second level, colonial development treats the land and the subordinated populations as raw or unrefined exploitable materials. The goal is proper cultivation, maximal production, intensified extraction, and the reaping of high yields. In these senses, colonial systems of development were designed to promulgate European cultural imperialism and to amass capital.21

Conceptual frameworks and culturally specific prescriptive behavioral pathways were vital in establishing the dominance of modern colonialism. María Lugones writes, “Modernity organizes the world ontologically in terms of atomic, homogeneous, separable categories.”22 Aristotelian categorical logic and dictates of mutual exclusion are employed to establish the oppressive logic of colonial modernity.23 One is either human or nonhuman, man or woman, Christian or heathen.24 These particular dichotomies are central to the hierarchical organization of the colonized world. The European, bourgeois, colonial, modern man was (mis)represented as the ahistorical, acultural, archetypal human subject, the truly human: “Man.”25 As such, the bourgeois European man was fit for public life and ruling, a being of civilization, heterosexual, a Christian, a being of reason. Bourgeois European human beings—men and women—were categorized as civilized. The bourgeois European woman thus occupied a civilized gender role as someone who reproduces the race, the docile object of affection for the colonial European man. But colonized people, as nonbourgeois non-Europeans, were categorized as nonhuman (perhaps subhuman, half devil and half child). As such, the colonized were not considered (proper) men or women; they were reduced to the state of beasts.26 The various sexual practices and modes of gender expression in indigenous and colonized civilizations were met with xenophobic horror and religious zealotry. In this fashion, hierarchical dichotomies functioned as normative tools to damn the colonized; their souls were judged as “bestial and thus non-gendered, promiscuous, grotesquely sexual, and sinful.”27 “Hermaphrodites, sodomites, viragos, and the colonized were all understood to be aberrations of male perfection.”28

Of course, modern colonialism came with palpable Christian overtones—at first Catholic, later Protestant.29 Some justified their colonial forays as civilizing missions.30 Ostensibly, these Europeans came to the Global South to bring salvation to the natives, to convert them to the one true faith. Fanon writes, “The colonial world is a Manichaean world.”31 One is either Christian or not. Moreover, “Christianity = civilization, paganism = savagery.”32 By this logic, the colonized are depicted as unredeemable—impervious to ethics, innately corrosive, agents of malevolent powers.33 Fanon explains: “The customs of the colonized, their traditions, their myths, especially their myths, are the very mark of this indigence and innate depravity.”34 Thus, it was the obligation of benevolent Christian colonizers to serve as patriarchs, shepherds to “those not elected for salvation” (i.e., the massa damnata).35 Michel Foucault describes these types of power relations as pastoral power relations, whereby “each individual, whatever his age or status, from the beginning to the end of his life and in his every action, had to be governed and had to let himse...