Creolizing Hegel

Michael Monahan

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786600257
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

The 19 th - century German thinker G.W.F. Hegel is a towering figure in the canon of European philosophy. Indeed, most of the significant figures of European Philosophy after Hegel explicitly address his thought in their own work. Outside of the familiar territory of the Western canon, however, Hegel has also loomed large, most often as a villain, but sometimes also as a resource in struggles for liberation from colonialism, sexism and racism. Hegel understood his own work as aiming above freedom, yet ironically wrote texts that are not only explicitly Eurocentric and even racist. Should we, and is it even possible, to bring Hegelian texts and ideas into productive discourse with those he so often himself saw as distinctly Other and even inferior? In response to this question, Creolizing Hegel brings together transdisciplinary scholars presenting various approaches to creolizing the work of Hegel. The essays in this volume take Hegelian texts and themes across borders of method, discipline, and tradition. The task is not simply to compare and contrast Hegel with some 'outsider' figure or tradition, but rather to reconsider and reconfigure our understandings of all of the figures and ideas brought together in these cross-disciplinary essays.

Part I

Reason, Logic, and Dialectic

Chapter One

Boundary, Ambivalence, Jaibería, or, How to Appropriate Hegel

Rocío Zambrana

Growing up in Puerto Rico, the term jaibería had negative connotations. Jaibería derives from jaiba, a mountain crab that, in moving forward, moves sideways (Georas, Grosfoguel, and Negrón-Muntaner 1997, 30). The term is used to refer to an opportunist. A jaiba is an individual who looks for the easy way out, for the alternative with the least resistance (Morales 2012). They seek comfort and employ duplicitousness in order to achieve it. I never paid much attention to the term until I became politically conscious. In a political context, jaibería is often used to describe Puerto Rico’s political predicament. The Estado Libre Asociado (ELA) instituted in 1952 sought to offer “the best of both worlds.”¹ It affirmed Puerto Rican cultural nationalism and American economic prosperity by sacrificing the constitution of a sovereign nation-state. Jaibería indicates a Puerto Rican political idiosyncrasy, then. Unwilling to integrate to the United States or to become an independent nation-state, Puerto Ricans sought to take advantage of the material and social goods offered by a neocolonial relation—the ELA.

Recently, however, theorists from the island as well as from the diaspora have resignified jaibería, dramatically shifting its political meaning and valence. Frances Negrón-Muntoner, Ramón Grosfoguel, and Chloé Georas, for example, have argued that jaibería is a “collective practice” of “complicitous critique” or “subversive complicity” (Georas, Grosfoguel, and Negrón-Muntaner 1997, 29). Rather than expressing colonial “docility,” jaiba politics is a response to the historically specific relations that constrain political agency for Puerto Ricans in the island and in the diaspora.² Jaibería is a response to the strictures of a “double coloniality of power” in Puerto Rico—a neocolonial relation between the United States and Puerto Rico, and the ongoing forms of coloniality that reproduce race, gender, and class hierarchies established in the island throughout a colonial history. Rather than expressing the corruption (indeed, aberration) of Puerto Rican identity, then, jaibería is an attempt to work within Puerto Rico’s ambivalent relation to an ongoing colonial history. It is a form of political pragmatism, although it is neither utilitarian nor opportunistic. Jaibería is radical, since it is a way of subverting coloniality from within.³

A logic of ambivalence and the claim that ambivalence constrains—both restricts and makes possible—political agency at the core of Puerto Rican coloniality guides my reading of Hegel. Indeed, what follows appropriates Hegel in light of the logic of ambivalence distinctive of Puerto Rican coloniality. I characterize my practice of reading Hegel as an “appropriation” for important reasons. I neither seek to decolonize Hegel by opening his texts up to an analysis of a case of coloniality in the Caribbean. Nor do I intend to argue that we should go back to Hegel if we want to understand coloniality in Puerto Rico. I do not pursue an “application” in either direction. Whether implicitly or explicitly, applications resist contamination. They resist a dialectical understanding of concept and case, whereby each fundamentally modifies the other in their encounter. I thus seek to appropriate Hegelian negativity (Negativität) by developing negativity as a logic of ambivalence. As elsewhere, I turn to the Science of Logic because I believe that Hegel’s theory of intelligibility is much more available to appropriation than his philosophy of history or his social and political philosophy.⁴ The latter cannot be appropriated without assessing the logic of Hegelian negativity. Their Eurocentrism cannot be dispelled without understanding the force of Hegelian negativity, which has the power to undo the content of Hegel’s own discussions of world history, race, women, the state, and so on.

I begin by elaborating the claims that a logic of ambivalence is at the core of Puerto Rican coloniality, and that ambivalence constrains—restricts and makes possible—political agency within the Puerto Rican context. Rather than summarizing the twists and turns of Puerto Rico’s colonial history, I situate my analysis in the context of the current debt crisis. I then turn to the Logic and assess Hegel’s notions of Grenze (boundary) and Schranke (constraint). Moving from a Doctrine of Being to a Doctrine of Essence and finally arriving at a Doctrine the Concept, I show that Hegel’s discussion of boundary and constraint is a critique of understanding identity in light of a logic of infinite deferral. Deferral is problematic, since it represents a refusal to thinking identity on the basis of actuality (Wirklichkeit). It shifts attention away from the material conditions that constitute any thing or identity, and from the mediating character of those conditions. Actuality constrains how we think of any given identity and calls for an understanding of identity as ambivalent.

Double Coloniality, Decolonial Strategies

On June 29, 2015, the governor of Puerto Rico, Alejandro García Padilla, announced that Puerto Rico’s debt is “not payable” (Corkery and Walsh 2015). The island has “piled on” more public debt per capita—72.6 billion dollars—than any state in the United States. Unemployment hovers around 13% in the island. Forty-five percent of the population lives below the federal poverty line. Between 2011 and 2013, Puerto Rico’s population decreased by fifty thousand people annually. Because Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States, it can neither file for bankruptcy nor seek the assistance of the International Monetary Fund in restructuring its debt.⁵ Many have suggested that Puerto Rico is “America’s Greece” (Rosenfeld 2015). In his announcement, García Padilla stressed that the fact that there is “no other option” but defaulting on payments “is not politics.” It is simply “math.” Despite García Padilla’s assessment, the current debt crisis is a moment of political clarity. It has shifted the debate concerning the political status of the island. From a debate that interrogates the intersection between cultural and political nationalism, it is now a debate tackling ongoing forms of coloniality. Indeed, assessment of Puerto Rico’s political predicament has become a reckoning with multiple dimensions of the coloniality of power in Puerto Rico.

Aníbal Quijano articulated the concept of “coloniality of power” in order to call attention to forms of domination distinctive of a postcolonial context. The concept, however, calls into question the idea that we can speak of a colonial legacy, given that colonialism, as a form of exercising political power, was dismantled in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (see Quijano 2000, 171). In contrast to postcolonial thinkers, Quijano argues that coloniality is a “constitutive element” of a global capitalist “pattern” (patrón) (Quijano 2000, 1). Coloniality refers to the institution, reproduction, and maintenance of a global racial/ethnic system of classification. As a system of classification, coloniality organizes all areas and dimensions of existence into hierarchical relations. It organizes work and its products, nature and its resources (including sex and reproduction), subjectivity and knowledge, and authority and its instruments. It institutes a hierarchy of colonizer and colonized that organizes a global system of exploitation, a Eurocentric perspective, and institutions of collective authority that exclude “inferior” populations (Quijano 2000). While the modern, capitalist global pattern emerged in the sixteenth century with the European conquest of the Americas, Quijano’s point is that it is an ongoing mode of colonial articulation.

The coloniality of power, then, is a mode of articulating existence based on a racial/ethnic hierarchy that exceeds political exercises of power, exercises of power from nation-states. Decolonization does not necessarily dismantle forms of coloniality. The difference between the notions of “neocolonialism” or “internal colonialism” and the coloniality of power help explain why. While the former maintain a view of coloniality tied to an “effective rupture” with classical colonialism and seek to track and criticize a “renovated dynamic” (“neo” or “internal”) of colonial domination, the coloniality of power sees a continuity in forms of domination that organize existence in the so-called modern world (Grupo de Estudios Sobre Colonialidad 2016). This is not to discount the significance of political power, but to dispel the idea that decoloniality can be reduced to a matter the sovereignty of states. In addition to resisting formal institutions that organize authority and its instruments, it calls for resistance to the coloniality of subjectivity and knowledge, labor and reproduction, indeed of all areas of existence, which might be in tension with the aims of a nation-state born from an official process of decolonization.

The case of Puerto Rico is a case of “double coloniality of power,” Negrón-Muntoner, Grosfoguel, and Georas suggest in their introduction to Puerto Rican Jam. To speak of a double coloniality in Puerto Rico is to note two intersecting systems of hierarchical classification. Race, gender, and class hierarchies are instituted, reproduced, and maintained by the metropolis as well as by local elites.⁶ The double coloniality of power, then, refers to the forms of coloniality distinctive of the neocolonial relation between the United States and Puerto Rico established with the ELA, and power structures established under both Spanish and American colonial rule and maintained by the island’s elites. While the former subjects all Puerto Rican economic, legal, and political matters to the unilateral power of the US Congress, the latter subjects “Afro Puerto Ricans and mullatoes” to “racist, classist, gendered power structures” in place before the invasion of the United States in 1898 and transformed by both the US invasion and the establishment of the ELA (Georas, Grosfoguel, and Negrón-Muntoner 1997, 14). They are both grounded in race, gender, and class hierarchies, but their exercise of power, that is to say, the way that they organize existence, cannot be reduced to one or the other. Indeed, these two modes of classification intersect in complicated ways.

Perhaps the clearest example of the complexity at hand is the way in which this double coloniality constrains—restricts and makes possible—practices of critical resistance. For example, in the early twentieth century, nationalist ideology sought to resist the colonial relation with the United States, while at the same time consolidating forms of coloniality sustained by local elites. Peasantry and the working-class indeed often sought democratic guarantees from the new metropolis in the face of the racial and economic hierarchy maintained by white sugar-growing landowners and coffee-growing hacendados (Grosfoguel 2003, 54). Consider also how, in the early twentieth century, feminist suffragists sought an alliance with American suffragists that in effect called for further colonial intervention in local matters (Georas, Grosfoguel, and Negrón-Muntoner 1997, 6). Their struggle for equal rights deepened the tension between nationalists and colonialists in the island. Puerto Rico’s double coloniality, then, not only refers to the complicated ways in which the race, gender, and class hierarchies imposed by the metropolis intersect with local hierarchies. It also refers to the complex ways in which the intersection between local discourses and discourses from the metropolis inflect practices of resistance. These examples suggest that neither one critical category nor a political solution can unequivocally serve the end of decoloniality. This insight is crucial, I will suggest, for thinking through the critical valence of practices of resistance within the current crisis.

A decolonial analysis of the case of Puerto Rico suggests an understanding of double coloniality as following a logic of ambivalence. With the term “ambivalence,” I want to point out the coextensive positive and negative meaning and effects of the coloniality of power, in Puerto Rico’s case, the double coloniality of power. It is important to distinguish between a logic of ambivalence and a logic of ambiguity, however. In her introduction to the edited volume, None of the Above, Negrón-Muntoner argues that Puerto Ricans are “at home with ambiguity” (Negrón-Muntoner 2007, 6ff.). The juridical definition of Puerto Rico as an unincorporated territory of the United States functions as a border zone in which Puerto Ricans are “both in and out of the polity” (ibid., 6–7). Rather than colonial subjects, then, Puerto Ricans are constituted as “territorial citizens,” “whose citizenship standing and national worth significantly shifts according to location” (ibid., 6; cf. Rivera 2016a and b). Puerto Ricans embrace the uncertainty that follows from the multiple meanings that constitute their political status. In contrast, I argue that the complexities generated by the intersection of the two forms of coloniality of power suggest that the meaning and valence of the political status of Puerto Ricans is contradictory in the same space and at the same time. Here political status does not refer to territorial citizenship, but rather to the constitution of the meaning and valence of race, class, gender, and other political identities by the intersection of the two forms of coloniality at work in Puerto Rico.

The difference between ambiguity and ambivalence becomes clear when we contrast Negrón-Muntoner’s focus on political status in None of the Above and a decolonial analysis of the current debt crisis. During the 1998 referendum, 50.3% of the voters elected the “none of the above” (ninguna de las anteriores) option on the ballot. Originally, the ballot contained options that were constitutionally acceptable in the eyes of the US Congress: commonwealth (as defined by the United States, therefore affirming territorial status), free association, independence, and statehood. The Partido Popular Democrático (PPD; the status quo party) objected to the Partido Nuevo Progresista’s (the statehood party’s) gloss of the commonwealth option. The PPD argued that the commonwealth status should be glossed as a “bilateral pact between two sovereign countries” (Negrón-Muntoner 2007, 2). Although the PPD campaigned for the “none of the above option,” the number of votes indicates an alliance between voters of other political stripes. Ridiculed by many, the option seemed to express the Puerto Rican people’s “legal insanity.” In contrast, Negrón-Muntoner argues that the vote was an important “political performance” (ibid., 4). “In supporting ninguna de las anteriores,” she writes, “some Puerto Ricans ... appeared to be actively rejecting ... not only specific status alternatives ... but also the way that the status question itself was posed, the very idea that the US Congress, Constitution, and/or political parties could conceive a single solution to address the complexity of Puerto Rican (trans)locations” (ibid., 6). In fact, she maintains, choosing ninguna de las anteriors should be read as rejecting all of the preceding alternatives, underscoring the spatial and temporal dimensions of “anterior.” It “consigns the options of statehood, independence, and colonialism to the past, and so expresses both doubt and hope in the future” (ibid.).

Similar conclusions can be reached about the 2012 referendum. The referendum was structured by the President’s Task Force on Puerto Rico’s Status, which dictated that Congress would allow the indefinite continuation of the island’s territorial status, but would only recognize one of two non-territorial options—statehood or ...