The Critique of Coloniality

Eight Essays

Rita Segato, Ramsey McGlazer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367759834
• eBook ISBN: 9781000548914
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This translation of Rita Segato's seminal book La crítica de la colonialidad en ocho ensayos offers an anthropological and critical perspective on the coloniality of power as theorized by the Peruvian thinker Aníbal Quijano.

Segato begins with an overview of Quijano's conceptual framework, emphasizing the power and richness of his theory and its relevance to a range of fields. Each of the seven subsequent chapters presents a scenario in which a persistent colonial structure or form of subjectivity can be identified. These essays address urgent issues of gender, sexuality, race and racism, and indigenous forms of life. They set the decolonial perspective to work, and are connected by two central preoccupations: the critical analysis of coloniality and the effort to reimagine anthropology as "responsive anthropology," a practice at once answerable and useful to the communities previously regarded as the "objects" of ethnographic thought.

The Critique of the Coloniality makes important and original contributions to our understanding of colonial and decolonial processes, drawing on the author's experience of feminist and antiracist movements and struggles for indigenous and human rights. This book will appeal to students and scholars working in anthropology, Latin American studies, political theory, feminist and gender studies, indigenous studies, and anticolonial, post-colonial, and decolonial thought.

1 Aníbal Quijano and the Coloniality of Power

DOI: 10.4324/9781003164999-2

Introduction

In a century of work in social science disciplines, only four theories originating in Latin America have crossed the Great Divide, that is, the border that separates the world geopolitically into the North and the South. These theories have impacted global thought and have endured. In other words, there are only four theoretical vocabularies that have reconfigured the history that we see before our eyes and have also managed to overcome the blockade, today euphemistically referred to as “peer review,” and enter the North American market for influence. With their capacity to shed light on complications that can only be perceived by a situated gaze—even when this gaze is turned on the world as a whole—and their novelty and power to effect changes in their fields, these theories have also refused to comply with both the Anglo-Saxon and the French textual traditions, which have dominated the global market for ideas about society since the second half of the twentieth century. The theories have also refused the dominant politics of citation, the logic of productivity in publishing, and the norms of “networking” that shape access to the journals with the widest circulation, and the pretense of scientific neutrality. These four theories are: liberation theology, the pedagogy of the oppressed, the theory of marginality that breaks with dependency theory, and, most recently, the theory of the coloniality of power.

It is the last of these theoretical tendencies that I will be discussing here. Its development by the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano represents a shift in the social sciences that should be understood in the context of, and as coeval with, the epochal change that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War introduce into the political history of the twentieth century. The development of this perspective radicalizes elements that were embryonically present and diffuse in Quijano’s earlier writings before they then marked a palpable shift in his thinking that in turn led to a shift in the history of Latin American and global critical thought. This reorientation—which became possible only after the paradigm of the 1970s was dismantled together with the context defined by the cloistered antagonism between capitalism and communism—can serve again today as an inspiration for the development of critical languages and political goals that might guide diverse forms of social struggle, especially in the indigenous and environmental movements. Here I approach Quijano’s development of a critical perspective on the coloniality of power as a moment of rupture that, on the one hand, was highly consequential for critical thought in the fields of history, philosophy, and the social sciences in Latin America, and, on the other, offered new inspiration and reoriented social movements and political struggles. After an overview of Quijano’s central arguments, which began this critical tendency, I will examine his influence in the work of several of its most significant practitioners, and in the insurgent statements and demands emerging in contemporary Latin America.

It is important to note that, although it began with a gaze that was situated in the Latin American landscape and although it reconfigured the discourse on Latin America’s place in the structure of global power, this theoretical perspective does not refer only to Latin America; it addresses globally hegemonic power as a whole. In other words, Quijano’s theoretical perspective opens new directions for reading world history, and in this way it alters our perspective. This makes it possible to speak of a Copernican turn, that is, a veritable paradigm shift that rules out the possibility of returning to an earlier moment, a moment prior to this understanding. Hence, the growing influence of Quijano’s thought; this influence is attributable to the fact that there is a before and an after when it comes to the theory of coloniality and the reshaping of our understanding of the world that Quijano’s theory introduces. This has allowed it to sustain the work of influential critical interpreters of contemporary reality, including Immanuel Wallerstein, Enrique Dussel, Antonio Negri, and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, among others. In the academic world, Walter Mignolo has been Quijano’s greatest reader and most influential commentator. Indeed, the critical perspective opened by the coloniality of power has proven so influential that scholars often forget to give credit to the founder of this powerful theoretical discourse. To recognize authorship is not to suggest that there can be ownership when it comes to a critical discourse, as some have thought; instead, it means recognizing the importance and complexity of the historical scene that an author captures and condenses in a singular way in his work. An author is an antenna for his time. To recognize authorship is thus to respect the history that generates thought and occasions the taking of positions in the world.

Quijano’s theory has been expropriated in ways that weaken its original force, especially in two respects. Quijano publicly protested against these on several occasions. I am referring first to the categorization of his thought as a branch of postcolonial studies, which are rooted in Asia and were adopted later by African scholars who write and publish mainly in the two hegemonic languages, English and French. And second, I have in mind the use of Quijano’s vocabulary as a sort of academic capital, a coin that circulates among a group of initiates who use the revenues thus generated to build careers and gain intellectual prestige. To the first of these sets of readers, Quijano has responded that he does not know what “postcoloniality” might mean, given that in his framework the order of coloniality was never undone. And to the second group of readers, he has responded with a practice of constant activism and by resisting efforts to turn his reflections into anything other than a presence in and influence on the movement of society.

A creative figure, Quijano never agreed to migrate North—which is “where the elephants go to die,” in the words of the great Chilean novelist José Donoso. Instead, he stubbornly remained in Peru, except during brief periods of exile or when he spent several weeks each year serving as a visiting faculty member in the Fernand Braudel Center at the State University of New York, Binghamton, founded by Quijano’s good friend, Immanuel Wallerstein. His thought developed through conversation, which for him was a kind of tertulia, rooted in a form of life that belonged to our southern latitudes, distant from the understandings of sociological writing and from the citational politics and publishing practices governed by the academic and editorial templates of the North. Even so, he watched, without making concessions, as his texts were reprinted, translated into various languages, and vertiginously circulated on hundreds of web pages during the last twenty years. Quijano’s work, which combines social analysis with narrative, is written in a fluid prose style that at times takes distance from elevated academic registers and from elegance. Here I give an account of his work’s relation to the interconnected histories of rhetoric, historiography, and literature.

The Fall of the Wall and the Development of Quijano’s Perspective on the Coloniality of Power

As I have suggested, the paradigm shift introduced by the development of Quijano’s perspective on the coloniality of power coincides chronologically with the moment of sociological thought’s liberation from the enclosure of the 1970s, from that decade’s dilemmas and imposed loyalties, which resulted from the opposition between capitalism and communism. In fact, between the late 1970s and the late 1980s, there was a hiatus in Quijano’s work, although he did republish some earlier texts during these years. The hiatus separates the moment when Quijano concluded his analyses of the Latin American peasantry, the “marginal pole” of the economy, and “marginal labor”—constitutively excluded as early as the crisis of capital in 1973—from his first statements on the coloniality of power in 1988 and 1991. This silence was only interrupted in 1985 and 1986, when Quijano addressed the problem of transition in the social sciences, a question to which he returned in a more sustained analysis in 1989 and 1990. These four texts on the social sciences’ difficult passage through a period of global political change are important for understanding Quijano’s turn to another sociology and another historical narrative. These texts presage his definitive perspective on the coloniality of power, offered in its initial and most radical form—curiously but not surprisingly—in an interview that is now somewhat difficult to access, “La modernidad, el capital y América Latina nacen el mismo día” (Modernity, Capital, and Latin America Are Born on the Same Day, 1991).

The first of Quijano’s transitional texts—which are transitional in the context of his own thought as well as in the context of disciplinary knowledge about society—appears under the Braudelian title “Las ideas son cárceles de larga duración” (Ideas Are Longue-Durée Prisons, 1985). This title is returned to in the article’s last sentence: “But we do not need to remain in these prisons all the time.” In this text, Quijano addresses a meeting of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales or CLACSO), which was perplexed and yet obligated to lead the social sciences as they confronted both the deterioration of Marxist categories and the task of comprehending the societies that had been freed from the dictatorships that beset Latin America during previous decades. In 1986, Quijano returns to the work of his Peruvian Marxist inspiration, José Carlos Mariátegui, in his address to a conference in Puerto Rico, a response to the question “What Is Marx For?” He then elaborates on and expands his presentations from these gatherings in two extensive articles on directions in the social science discipline (1989a and 1990a). What Quijano introduces in these articles is his understanding of the Latin American difference. He insists that this specificity and the experience of Latin American history—which is not a matter of exceptionalism, as has been said of the case of Brazil, because it is a specificity with global implications—make it imperative to introduce a new reading of history that repositions the Americas in the global context and so makes sense of and represents this context in a new way.

The heterogeneity of Latin America’s economic, social, and civilizational reality—a reality in a state of permanent and unresolvable suspension—simply cannot be comprehended by Marxist categories. Likewise, the liberal, modern, and republican categories on which the construction of nation-states was based cannot form the basis of the kind of comprehensive democracy that would allow for the expression of the multiplicity of interests, projects, and forms of life found in Latin America. Although these were problems for Latin America from the first, today they present a challenge and call for a change in perspective at the level of global thought. For this reason, it is crucial to emphasize that although Quijano’s model has its origin in the region, it is not merely a theory for and about the region, but rather a theory for the world-system, as Quijano will make clear in a celebrated essay of 1992, co-authored with Wallerstein. In that text, Wallerstein welcomes the shift that Quijano’s model introduces into his theoretical framework and considers understanding both coloniality and the invention of race as the indispensable preconditions for understanding the modern world order. This, as I will suggest below, is one of the most important differences between Quijano’s perspective on coloniality and the perspective of postcolonial studies.

Already in Quijano’s transitional texts from this period, we can see a forceful critique of “Eurocentrism.” He writes, for example, that it is necessary to rescue Marxism from the vast “Eurocentric” prison in which it has been confined (Quijano 1986: 170). Quijano insists, claiming Mariátegui’s legacy as an inheritance, that there is a heterogeneity that ought to persist, a positive heterogeneity defined by forms of life in the plural. Monocausal, systematic explanations are not adequate to account for this heterogeneity; nor can it be explained by univocal historical structures and logics that are universalizing in their reach and their conclusions. In Mariátegui, as in Latin America, different temporalities live together simultaneously. Mythos and Logos coexist; they are not mutually exclusive in the long-standing, canonical, evolutionist sense in which the latter must necessarily devour the former in order to resolve the tension between the two (Quijano 1986). In the same way, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie are not sufficient categories to account for the complexity and multiplicity of forms of life in the region, which include the industrial working class and its unions; relations between landowners and peasants characteristic of the Iberian feudal order; the “marginal pole” that will never again be included in the economy and will instead consolidate itself as such, retaining its own modes of reciprocity and solidarity and its own markets; indigenous and peasant communities; black territories; associations and mutual organizations of various kinds; and others. This is a “structural articulation of diverse historical logics organized around a dominant logic, the logic of capital”; such a totality is therefore “open,” and its contradictions derive from “all of the historical logics articulated in a historical-structural heterogeneity” (Quijano 1990a: 23). This first step toward the postulate of the coloniality of power is necessary for understanding why, how, and to what end categories engendered in the North are applied, as though onto a Procrustean bed, to capture a reality for which they were not conceived. Such categorial oppression is nothing less than the consequence of coloniality in the fields of knowledge and subjectivity.

Quijano also recognizes the legacy of José María Arguedas, whose penultimate work, the monumental Todas las sangres of 1964, Quijano calls the most “vast and complex” account of Latin America’s heterogeneity. For Quijano, this irreducible heterogeneity represents what he proposes to call the “Arguedian knot,” that is, an interweaving of multiple histories and historical projects that have to be combined and articulated in the production of a new time and temporality (2011; see also Quijano’s references to this “knot” in 1990c and 2006a). When we consider this plurality, we can see how the communist ideal, proposals for solidary community, and other modern postulates that are today typically discounted as “utopian” have been and are, in fact, in Latin America, material realities in the everyday lives of indigenous peoples, in palenques and other kinds of traditional communities (Segato 2007a). Their “goals for happiness,” today referred to as buen vivir, “good living” or “the good life” in an Andean vocabulary (Segato 2012b), center on human relations and relations with the natural environment. These communities are not organized by frameworks based on cost-benefit calculations, productivity, competitiveness, or cap...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Introduction: The Coloniality of Power and Responsive Anthropology
• 1 Aníbal Quijano and the Coloniality of Power
• 2 Gender and Coloniality: From Communitarian to Colonial Modern Patriarchy
• 3 Sex and the Norm: On the State-Corporate-Media-Christian Front
• 4 Let Each People Weave Its Own History: The Coloniality of Law and the “Saviors” of Indigenous Children
• 5 Black Oedipus: Coloniality and the Foreclosure of Gender and Race
• 6 The Deep Rivers of the Latin American Race: A Rereading of Mestizaje
• 7 The Color of the Prison in Latin America: Notes on the Coloniality of Criminal Law
• 8 Toward a University for Our America
• Index