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

172 reframing latin america
and to bring Spain at the level of France was their decision, not Napoleon’s.
Thus caught in between a foreign invasion and the theocratic forces of
Spain’s past, Spanish intellectuals at the beginning of the nineteenth century
faced a different dilemma than Spanish American postcolonial intellectuals
during the same period.
Esteban Echeverría, a postindependence ideologue in Argentina, bought
into the same idea and embraced “democracy” as defi ned in France. He did
not spend much time either in thinking about the colonial difference and
how it shaped the local histories of France in Europe and Argentina in Spanish
America nor to the two hundred years of imperial confl icts in the North
Atlantic that preceded the French Revolution. Born and educated in Latin
America, I am concerned with the ideological presuppositions of Prigogine’s
remarks in which the colonial difference is once more reproduced, the colonial
side of modernity obscured, and the contribution of other local histories
around the planet ignored. Asians, Africans, and (Latin) Americans shall not
feel less proud than Prigogine for having made it this far in the history of the
universe, of life on earth. However, the imaginary of the modern/colonial
world is such that Prigogine’s remarks are made out of a “natural” belief
and as a “natural” development of universal history. 33 Cosmopolitanism
cannot be achieved by insisting on continental pride forged by the history
of the modern/colonial world system. Nativism or regionalism from the
center is as pernicious as nativism or regionalism from the periphery. Border
thinking, as an intellectual and political project, calls attention to the
fact that achievements located in Europe (and, not in Africa, Asia, or [Latin]
America) are a historical consequence of the formation and transformation
of the modern/colonial world. I shall not repeat here what crossed the Atlantic
from east to west while the general belief was that civilization was
west to east. Neither shall I mention again the slave trade, paradoxically
following the same geographical direction as the spread of civilization, from
East to West.
The epistemological potential of border thinking is to contribute to Dussel’s
call to move beyond Eurocentrism, recognizing the achievements and
revealing the conditions for the geopolitics of knowledge in the modern/colonial
world—recognizing and revealing the coloniality of power imbedded
in the geopolitic of knowledge. 34 As someone who was educated and lived in
(Latin) America half of his present life span and relocated in (Anglo) America,
after a three-year intermission in France, I am proud (echoing Prigogine)
of the Haitian Revolution. I am proud because it showed the limits of liberal
democracy a few years after its very promulgation and was locally based
on the experiences of a “new” European order in which France, England,