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

identity construct #5: latin america 169
the colonial difference. He perceives the gender critique to epistemology,
not its racial component. In the case of Abdel-Malek, Wallerstein perceives
a different notion of time beyond the limits of the world system, but he fails
to see that Abdel-Malek’s elaboration of the differences in the conceptualization
of time is, indeed, ingrained in the colonial epistemic difference. It
is the colonial epistemic difference that calls for border thinking.
II
“As a European, I am especially proud of two breakthroughs for which Europe
is responsible, and which seem to be of decisive importance for the
future: the formulation of the project of modern science in the seventeenth
century; and the promulgation of the ideal of democracy. Europeans live at
the intersection of at least two different systems of values—scientifi c rationality
on one side, and collective behavior rationality on the other. This
polarity imposed by historical evolution could not but lead to some stress
which was to be felt in much European thought. It is of great importance,
particularly at present, that we reach a better harmony between the different
rationalities involved in sciences, democracy and civilization.” So suggests
Ilya Prigogine (1986). 27
If I were European, I would also be proud of Radio Tarifa, a musical ensemble
from southern Spain whose great impact and creativity reside in the
style in which the musicians articulate Spanish with Arabic music memories
and stretch themselves from the fourteenth century to today; across
the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic. They provide a powerful music
whose power emanates from the quality of the musicians, of course, but
also and perhaps mainly from the remapping of the colonial difference and
transcending it through border thinking. This kind of cultural production
is no less relevant for the future of planetary democratic diversity that will
no longer rely on the values and credos of the local concept of “democracy”
launched in eighteenth-century Europe. The “good” thinking on just social
organizations coming from all social knowledges, past and present, South
and North, East and West, are as important as the legacies of the European
Enlightenment. The same can be said about science. The future of planetary
knowledge requires transcending the colonial difference, the pride in the
belief in the privilege of some geohistorical locations without looking at the
historical conditions making them possible. Transcending the epistemological
colonial difference, having in border thinking one way to pursue it, is
of the essence once we understand that the splendors of Western sciences
go together with its miseries. There is something beyond the dialectics of