Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

identity construct #5: latin america 167
tations of cultural heterogeneity posit it as a new and utopian unity (the
“we Mexicans” of Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica or the “we Brazilians”
of Andrade’s poetic and cultural manifestos), which often functions to enhance
state power and, hence, the hegemony of the elites.
Walter Mignolo, LOCAL HISTORIES, GLOBAL DESIGNS 11
I
Thinking from the colonial difference implies thinking from an other place,
imagining an other language, arguing from an other logic. The canonical
thinkers of the Western canon can no longer provide a starting point for
the epistemology that the colonial difference requires. Let me add a new
scenario. In Chapter 2 I distinguished postmodern from post-Occidental
thinking as a critique of modernity from the interior borders (postmodernism)
and from the exterior borders of the modern/colonial world (post-
Occidentalism). 12 This observation could be extended to deconstruction
(which I explore in Chapter 1) and to world system analysis, which is implied
in several of my arguments but is never directly addressed. 13 World
system analysis is indeed a critique of Eurocentrism, but a Eurocentric critique
of Eurocentrism, like postmodern theories and deconstruction are. 14
In his presidential address to the Fourteenth World Congress of Sociology,
[Immanuel] Wallerstein identifi ed six challenges to the social sciences, with
four of them more directed in particular to sociology. 15 Two of the challenges
are relevant to my argument. One comes from the external borders of the
world/colonial system (Abdel-Malek 1981) and could be added to the many
instances on which I build my argument. 16 I would like to devote a paragraph
here to the challenge of feminist theory. Evelyn Fox Keller, trained
as a mathematical biophysicist, Donna J. Haraway, trained as a hominid biologist,
and Vandana Shiva, trained in theoretical physics are Wallerstein’s
examples. 17 There is a remarkable difference between the epistemological
critique one encounters in Fox Keller and Donna Haraway—on the one
hand, and on Vandana Shiva, on the other. As Wallerstein himself observes,
“Vandana Shiva’s critique is focused less on scientifi c methods proper than
on the political implications that are drawn from science’s position in the
cultural hierarchy. She speaks as a woman of the South [i.e., developing
world], and thus her critique rejoins that of Abdel-Malek.” 18 That is, Abdel-
Malek and Vandana Shiva are critiquing epistemology in the social and natural
sciences, from the colonial epistemic difference and the experience of
subaltern knowledges. 19 Let me complement Wallerstein’s examples, which
he doesn’t push to the limits, with one of my own: Paula Moya’s criticism