Local Histories/Global Designs

Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking

Walter D. Mignolo

• Editorial: Princeton University Press
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781400845064
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Anthropology

Local Histories/Global Designs is an extended argument about the "coloniality" of power by one of the most innovative Latin American and Latino scholars. In a shrinking world where sharp dichotomies, such as East/West and developing/developed, blur and shift, Walter Mignolo points to the inadequacy of current practices in the social sciences and area studies. He explores the crucial notion of "colonial difference" in the study of the modern colonial world and traces the emergence of an epistemic shift, which he calls "border thinking." Further, he expands the horizons of those debates already under way in postcolonial studies of Asia and Africa by dwelling in the genealogy of thoughts of South/Central America, the Caribbean, and Latino/as in the United States. His concept of "border gnosis, " or sensing and knowing by dwelling in imperial/colonial borderlands, counters the tendency of occidentalist perspectives to manage, and thus limit, understanding.
In a new preface that discusses Local Histories/Global Designs as a dialogue with Hegel's Philosophy of History, Mignolo connects his argument with the unfolding of history in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Part One

IN SEARCH OF AN OTHER LOGIC

CHAPTER 1

Border Thinking and the Colonial Difference

In march 1998, I participated in a workshop jointly organized by the University of Tunisia and the Mediterranean Studies Group, from Duke University. The subject of my talk, which is a recurrent theme of this book, was the mapping of the racial foundation of modernity/coloniality. Basically, I explored the reconversion and formalization of the “purity of blood” principle in sixteenth-century Spain (and, therefore, in the Mediterranean), which locked a long-lasting history of conflicts between the three religions of the Book and, parallel to it, the legal-theological debates, in the School of Salamanca, of the “rights of the people”—debates that turned around the vexing question of the location of Amerindians in the natural order of things and, therefore, in the Atlantic. The joint exploration of “purity of blood” with the “rights of the people” allowed me to put my finger on a crucial moment in the construction of the imaginary of the modern world system (e.g., the moment of emergence of a new commercial and financial circuit linking the Mediterranean with the Atlantic) and, at the same time, to look at it not only from the interiority of its formation and expansion but also from its exteriority and its margins. I was assuming, with Quijano and Wallerstein (1992) and Dussel ([1992] 1995; 1998a), that the particular moment I was looking at marked at the same time the emergence of a new world system and also of modernity/coloniality. In other words, the historical coexistence between the expulsion of the Jews and the Moors from Spain and the “discovery” of America was at the same time a landmark for both modern colonialism and colonial modernities—that is, of modernity/coloniality.

This historical logic was so obvious to me (as it would be to those working within world system theory or on the history of Spain and of Latin America) that I did not pay attention to the fact that most of my audience was from North Africa, and the history of Maghreb is significantly different from the history of Spain and (Latin) America. At the end of my talk I was asked a question, by Rashida Triki, art historian from the University of Tunisia, about precisely this coupling of modernity/coloniality. I did not understand the question very well and, obviously, I did not answer it, even if I did spend a few minutes talking around the question I did not fully understand. After the session was over, I approached Rashida and asked her to formulate the question and, finally, I understood! The misunderstanding was in our respective presuppositions: Rashida was thinking the history of colonialism, from the perspective of French (and modern, post-Enlightenment European) history, while I was looking at the “same” scenario from the perspective of Spain and (Latin) American history—that is, from the perspective of a national history marginalized from post-Enlightenment Europe (Spain) and a colonial moment (Indias Occidentales, later on Latin America), which was also erased from the construction of the idea of colonialism and the modern world (post-Enlightenment). From my perspective it was “natural” that modernity and coloniality are two sides of the same coin. For Rashida, coloniality not only came “after” modernity, but it was not easy for her to understand that for me they are two sides of the same coin—that is, to understand that from the perspective of the Americas, coloniality is constitutive of modernity. The colonial difference is here at work, revealing at the same time the difference between French colonialism in Canada and the Caribbean before the French Revolution and Napoleon era, and French colonialism thereafter. The colonial difference, in other words, works in two directions: rearticulating the interior borders linked to imperial conflicts and rearticulating the exterior borders by giving new meanings to the colonial difference.

Several years before, I had a somewhat similar conversation with the Mexican-based Argentinean anthropologist, Nestor García-Canclini, about colonialism and modernity in Latin America. For García-Canclini, colonialism is linked to the colonial period, roughly from early sixteenth century until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Since this time, what we have is the beginning of modernity, the nation-building process after several countries attained independence from Spain or autonomy from Portugal. In this linear fashion, colonialism structured the past of Latin America. Once again, from that perspective, the “colonial period” is perceived before “modernity,” not as its hidden face. I found a different view articulated by Andean intellectuals (sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui in Bolivia; sociologist Aníbal Quijano in Peru) as well as in the Argentinean philosopher Enrique Dussel. Basically, for Rivera Cusicanqui, the history of Bolivia could be divided in three periods: the colonial period, roughly until mid-nineteenth century; the period of the republic, until 1952; and the period of modernization (which coincides with U.S. politics of progress and modernization in Latin America), until today. However, Rivera Cusicanqui (1992) does not conceive of these periods as successive, but as simultaneous: they all coexist today in diachronic contradictions, and what coexists is the colonial remora of Bolivian history, the different articulations of colonizing forces and colonized victims. Quijano (1992; 1997) talks, instead, of the coloniality of power. And Dussel ([1992] 1995) writes of a planetary and a European modernity whose inception coincides with, and is a consequence of, the “discovery” of America and the making of the Atlantic commercial and financial circuit.

COLONIALITY OF POWER: THE MODERN WORLD SYSTEM FROM THE COLONIAL PERSPECTIVE

As I explain in the introduction, I start and depart from the modern world system model or metaphor. As a starting point it simplifies my argument: the connection of the Mediterranean with the Atlantic through a new commercial circuit, in the sixteenth century, lays the foundation for both modernity and coloniality. The new commercial circuit also creates the condition for a new global imaginary built around the fact that the new “discovered” lands were baptized “Indias Occidentales.” The Occident, the West, was no longer European Christendom (as distinguished from Eastern Christians in and around Jerusalem) but Spain (and by extension the rest of Europe) and the new colonial possessions. “Occidentalism” was the geopolitical figure that ties together the imaginary of the modern/colonial world system. As such, it was also the condition of emergence of Orientalism: there cannot be an Orient, as the other, without the Occident as the same. For this very reason, the Americas, contrary to Asia and Africa, are not Europe’s difference but its extension. This motif did not change when French and German naturalists, historians, and philosophers in the eighteenth century replaced the early descriptions of America provided by missionaries, soldiers, and men of letters with their own impressions: from Buffon to Hegel, America was conceived as the daughter of Europe and its promised future. Asia and Africa were the past, America the future. This motif lasted until the second half of the nineteenth century when “America” (Anglo-America) had really “grown up” and began to take over the leadership of the world order. One can say that Spain was the beginning of modernity in Europe and the beginning of coloniality outside of Europe. This view remains the canonical view today: there are books about colonialism and about modernity, but they do not interact—their genealogies are different. The reason for such a division is either the belief (contested by Quijano and Dussel) that modernity is only a European business and coloniality something that happens outside of Europe (provided that Ireland is not considered Europe), or the conception that coloniality is from the national perspective of the colonizing country. Algeria, for example, will seldom be included as part of French national history, although a history of Algeria, as a nation, cannot avoid France.

In this chapter I explore theoretical responses to and departures from the modern world system. I make an effort to connect and draw a genealogy of thinking from local histories subsuming global designs. First, I look into Anibal Quijano’s concept of “coloniality of power” and Enrique Dussel’s “transmodernity” as responses to global designs from colonial histories and legacies in Latin America. The second part is devoted to Abdelkhebir Khatibi’s “double critique” and “une pensée autre” (an other thinking) as a response from colonial histories and legacies in Maghreb. I also examine Edouard Glissant’s notion of “Créolization,” proposed to account for the colonial experience of the Caribbean in the horizon of modernity and as a new epistemological principle. These perspectives, from Spanish America, Maghreb, and the Caribbean, contribute today to rethinking, critically, the limits of the modern world system—the need to conceive it as a modern/colonial world system and to tell stories not only from inside the “modern” world but from its borders. These are not only counter or different stories; they are forgotten stories that bring forward, at the same time, a new epistemological dimension: an epistemology of and from the border of the modern/colonial world system.

I close the chapter by discussing two indirect criticisms of the type of argument I am proposing. One, indirectly related, is by a sociologist of Marxist persuasion and Arabic/Muslim descent, Aziz Al-Azmeh, whose attachment to disciplinary principles would make it difficult for him to understand or accept positions and proposals as those advanced by Quijano, Dussel, Khatibi, and Glissant. Al-Azmeh doesn’t engage personally any of the thinkers I have discussed. I am interested, however, in Al-Azmeh’s rejection of the possibility of cross-cultural understanding that reestablishes the monotopic principle of modern epistemology and, therefore, casts a doubt about transdisciplinary perspectives of those introduced by Glissant or Dussel. The second is Jacques Derrida’s critique of Khatibi’s concept of bilingualism and, consequently, of double critique. In closing the chapter, I open it up to a new dimension of thinking from the border of the modern/colonial world system by bringing into the discussion Du Bois’s “double consciousness” and Gloria Anzaldúa’s “new mestiza consciousness” grounded in the experience of the borderlands.

The “hidden” aspect of the “modern” world system was recently brought to light by the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano and by the Argentinian philosopher of liberation, Enrique Dussel. Quijano came up with the concept of coloniality, while Enrique Dussel originated the different but complementary idea of transmodernity. What both concepts share, however, is a sense that the modern world system or modernity, for that matter, is being thought out and through from the “other end,” that is, from “colonial modernities.” Quijano insists on the fact that, in Latin America, the “colonial period” should not be confused with “coloniality,” and that the nation building that followed it during the nineteenth century in most Latin American countries (with the exception of Cuba and Puerto Rico) cannot be understood without thinking through coloniality of power. And this is so, precisely, because modernity and coloniality are the two sides of the modern world system, although in Wallerstein’s version this double side was not clearly articulated. It was only recently, when Quijano and Wallerstein cosigned an article (“Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas in the Modern World-System,” 1992), that coloniality made its appearance and brought to light the articulation of modernity/coloniality and the relevance of the Americas, and the sixteenth century in it.

The modern world-system was born in the long sixteenth century. The Americas as a geosocial construct were born in the long sixteenth century. The creation of this geosocial entity, the Americas, was the constitutive act of the modern world system. The Americas were not incorporated into an already existing capitalist world-economy. There could not have been a capitalist world-economy without the Americas. (Quijano and Wallerstein, 1992, 549)

This emendation applies to two of the three basic items that Wallerstein originally singled out as constitutive of a capitalist world economy: an expansion of the geographical size of the world, the development of variegated methods of labor control for different products and different zones, and the creation of the relatively strong state machinery in the core states of the world economy (Wallerstein 1974, 38). The variegated methods of labor control were tied to the first racial mapping of the modern world system. The well-known debate of Valladolid—between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan de Sepúlveda and, later on, the legal-theological scholarship in the School of Salamanca devoted to finding the place of the Amerindians in the chain of being and in the social order of an emerging colonial state—culminated in the enunciation of the “rights of the people” (a forerunner of the “rights of man and of the citizen”) as vassals of the king and servants of God. Labor was needed for two reasons: first, to facilitate the massive death of Amerindians and, second, for the partial implementation of the crown legislation, helped by the church vigilance over the liberties taken by the conquistadores with Amerindians under their tutelage.

In what sense is coloniality of power helpful in understanding the current reconfiguration of the world economy and world imaginary in the history of Spanish control over the Indias Occidentales and the emergence of Latin America as a group of countries whose common denominators are the Spanish and Portuguese colonial legacies? In his 1997 article, Quijano presents the following argument. “Coloniality of power” and “historicostructural dependency” are two interrelated key words tracing the particular, local history of Latin America, not so much as an existing entity where events “happened” and “happen,” but as a series of particular events whose location in the coloniality of power and in the historicostructural dependency has made Latin America, what Latin America has been and is today, from the colonial period in Peru to Fujimori as the paradigmatic articulation of neoliberalism. Coloniality of power underlines the geo-economic organization of the planet which articulates the modern/colonial world system and manages the colonial difference. That distinction allows Quijano to link tem. The well-known debate of Valladolid—between Bartolomé de Las Casas capitalism, through coloniality, to labor and race (and not only class) as well as to knowledge:

La colonialidad del poder y la dependencia histórico-estructural, implican ambas la hegemonía del eurocentrismo como perspectiva de conocimiento. . . . En el contexto de la colonialidad del poder, las poblaciones dominadas de todas las nuevas identidades fueron tambien sometidas a la hegemonía del eurocentrismo como manera de conocer, sobre todo en la medida que algunos de sus sectores pudieron aprender la letra de los dominadores. (Quijano 1997, 117)

Coloniality of power and historicostructural dependency: both imply the hegemony of eurocentrism as epistemological perspective. . . . In the context of coloniality of power, the dominated population, in their new, assigned identities, were also subjected to the Eurocentric hegemony as a way of knowing ([Quijano explains how “Indian” and “Black” were homogenizing identities established by the coloniality of power, erasing the diversity of “Indian” and “black” identities]).

A note on “dependency theory” and its mark in the imaginary of the modern/colonial world system is here necessary for two reasons. One, is the fact that dependency theory was one of the responses, from Latin America, to a changing world order that in Asia and in Africa took the form of “decolonization.” In the Americas, independence from colonial powers (Spain and England) was obtained long before in what can be labeled the first wave of decolonization (U.S. and Haitian revolutions; Spanish American independence). Dependency theory “preceded”—on the one hand—by a few years Wallerstein’s “modern world system” metaphor as an account from the perspective of modernity. It was “followed”—on the other hand and in Latin America—by a series of reflexions (in philosophy and the social sciences) as an account from the perspective of coloniality. Both Quijano and Dussel are indebted to the impact of dependency theory in its critique to “development” as the new format taken by global designs once the “civilizing mission” was winding down with the increasing process of decolonization. Although dependency theory has been under attack from several fronts (Cardoso 1977), it is important not to lose sight of the fact that from the perspective of Latin America, it clearly and forcefully put in the agenda the problems involved in “developing” Third World countries. The impact of dependency theory in Latin American philosophy was remarkable too. Peruvian philosopher A. Salazar Bondy saw in dependency theory an epistemological provocation and a model to put an end to a long “imitative” tradition and dependency of Latin America over European philosophy (Salazar Bondy 1969). It was a crucial moment of self-discovery, of understanding philosophy in Latin America and the Third World as part of a global system of domination. In this regard, dependency theory was for philosophy, in Latin America, what Father Placide Tempels’s Bantu Philosophy (1945) was for the self-discovery of African philosophy (Mudimbe 1988; Eze 1997, 10–14; Serequeberhan 1994).

In the preceding pages, I hope to have suggested that the modern world system looks different from its exteriority as Quijano, following José Carlos Mariátegui, tries to show.¹ At the same time, underlining particular local histories that have been constructed around the density of “Indias Occidentales” and “Latin America” (constructions that could be explained through coloniality of power and as historicostructural dependency), I hope to have suggested and it will be clear as my argument proceeds, that Occidentalism was a planetary rearticulation during the sixteenth century, which continued as the overarching imaginary of the modern/colonial world system and of modernity/coloniality. “Indias Occidentales” and “Latin America” became crucial pieces in that redistribution and, indeed, made Orientalism possible. However, and paradoxically enough, the emergence of Orientalism (in Said’s analysis; see Said 1978) coincided with the second stage of modernity as an interimperial transformation of capitalism and the modern/colonial world system with England and France expanding toward Asia and Africa. This is also the moment in which “modernity” and “modernization” began to make a difference in an emerging Latin America composed by several nations gaining independence from Spain and Portugal. A few years after the United States of North America gained independence from England, the French Revolution took place and the Haitian Revolution followed suit. However, at this moment of transition in the modern world system, U.S. independence and the French Revolution became the standards of modernity and modernization, and set the economic, political, and epistemological standards. Thus, it was clear that “Latin America” was not the Orient but the “extreme Occident,” and its own intellectuals, like Domingo Faustino Sarmiento of Argentina, appointed themselves as the leaders of a civilizing mission in their own country, thus opening up the gates for a long history of intellectual internal colonialism, which began to break apart in 1898 when the system reaches a turning point. The United States entered the planetary scene as the new imperial power, and, in Latin America, a tradition of “peripheric intellectuals” contesting imperialism and the civilizing mission made its appearance (José Martí in Cuba, at the end of the nineteenth century; José Carlos Mariátegui in Peru, in the 1920s—see chapter 3). The emergence of “civilizing mission” displacing the “Christian mission” of early colonalism summarizes this switch in the modern world system and establishes the first articulation of internal borders, the borders between two empires in decay (Spain and Portugal), the raising of the British Empire and French colonialism, and the consolidation of Germany as a third powerful nation in western Europe. The standards of knowledge and its exportation were established mainly in these three countries and in these three languages (see chapter 7).

Whereas Quijano began his intellectual production in the late 1960s in sociology, Enrique Dussel began writing during the same years but in philosophy. Coming from their respective disciplines and trajectories and working independently of each other, they arrived after 1990 at similar conclusions and perspectives, as is often the case in Latin America where genealogies are regularly broken by a new wave of ideas and intellectual production from the center of the world system (in German, French, and English). In 1992, Quijano published “Colonialidad y modernidad-racionalidad” (Quijano 1992) and Dussel came out with “Eurocentrism and Modernity” (Dussel [1993] 1995). In his article, Dussel insists that what is today Latin America was the first periph...