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

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the Enlightenment that Walter Benjamin thought us to be proud of and that
the other members of the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimmer) had diffi
culty in understanding. 28 That “something” is a dimension of knowledge
beyond the logic of science and the dialectic of the Enlightenment. In the
case of Benjamin (but also of Adorno and Horkheimmer), it was the experience
of the imperial (internal) difference as it was lived and endured by
Jewish communities in the rearticulation of racial-religious differences in
the sixteenth century, at the inception of Occidentalism as the imaginary of
the modern/colonial world.
The link between knowledge and geohistorical locations was one of the
main concerns of this book. As someone who grew up and was educated in
Latin America, who had no choice but to internalize the fact that the Americas
are a by-product of the modern/colonial world, I recognize, of course,
the contribution of science. However, I cannot be proud of it in the same
way that Prigogine is because I am not European. And that is another version
of Chakrabarty’s dilemma. 29 Science, Prigogine is telling me, is not a
human achievement but a European one. I suspect, however, that the question
is not the distinction in the intelligence of European men who invented
science, but the favorable conditions under which they did so. Such conditions
were, in large measure, due to the emergence of the Americas in the
colonial horizon of modernity, the forced labor of slaves and Amerindians
that produced the gold and silver of the American mines and the cotton,
sugar, and coffee from the Caribbean that made possible the economical
takeoff of Europe and the conditions for intellectual production. I cannot
celebrate Prigogine’s European pride without thinking of the darker side of
the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. 30 But I am certainly proud of the
achievement of the “human species” and world civilizations, from ancient
to contemporary China; from ancient Mesoamerica and the Andes to contemporary
Latin America; from modern to contemporary Europe; from the
Muslim world south of the Mediterranean to the complex civilization of
India. Regarding the ideals of democracy, I am concerned with the fact that
the universal proclamation of democracy was blind to the local histories in
which that very proclamation was taking place in relation to almost three
hundred years of colonialism and the constitution of the modern/colonial
world system. I am concerned in general, about the legitimization of social
truth that is not predicated on the responsibilities of those who made the
predicament, but on some transcendental value that was supposed to be
independent of those who invoked it. Democracy, we all know, was invoked
by Pinochet to justify the military coup that dethroned Salvador Allende;
was invoked by Stalin on the name of socialism; was constantly named by