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

identity construct #5: latin america 173
Holland, and Germany were displacing and replacing previous imperial orders.
More recently, almost two hundred years after the Haitian Revolution
and its “natural” failure, 35 the Zapatistas [in Chiapas State in southern
Mexico] are again showing the limits of democracy in its regional eighteenthcentury
defi nition and recasting it based on the fi ve hundred years of particular
local histories in the Americas. 36 “Democracy” was taken off the
domain of global designs and reconverted to the needs of Chiapas’s local history
where indigenous and Western wisdom interact—where the colonial
difference is being addressed and border thinking enacted. Government of
the people, by the people, for the people has next to it today another dictum:
“To rule and at the same time obeying.” 37 If “democracy” as a word is the
place of encounter from Pinochet to the Zapatistas and to Prigogine, one
should not waste time trying to defi ne it by fi nding its universal (or perhaps
transcendental) meaning. Instead, one could think of putting all the people
and communities claiming democracy in a domain of interaction where social
organization will be made out of the decisions and understandings of all
of them. The management of democracy by those who hold power and the
right interpretation of the word will not solve the problem of democratic
societies held together by the persuasive language and seduction of arms.
New ways of thinking are required that, transcending the colonial difference,
could be built on the borders of competing cosmologies whose current
articulation is due in no small part to the coloniality of power imbedded in
the making of the modern/colonial world [. . .].
IV
Since colonial discourse established itself in the constant and charged construction
of hierarchical oppositions, deconstructing colonial discourse is
indeed a necessary task. There is, however, another related task that goes beyond
the analysis and deconstruction of colonial discourse and the principle
of Western metaphysics underlining it. I am referring here to the colonial
difference, the intersection between Western metaphysics and the multiple
non-Western principles governing modes of thinking of local histories that
have been entering in contact and confl ict with Western thoughts in the past
fi ve hundred years in the Americas, and in the past two hundred years in India
from where Garg thinks and projects the culture of transience. 38 The Sun
and the Moon, in Amerindian categories of thought are not opposite, contrary,
or contradictory; they are complementary. To extend deconstruction
beyond Western metaphysics or to assume that there is nothing else than
Western metaphysics will be a move similar to colonizing global designs