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

174 reframing latin america
under the belief of the pretense of the improvement of humanity if we can
make them all like us. Grammatology and deconstruction have vis-à-vis
the colonial experience the same limitations as Marxism vis-à-vis race and
indigenous communities in the colonized world: the colonial difference is
invisible to them. 39 Decolonization should be thought of as complementary
to deconstruction and border thinking, complementary to the “double séance”
within the experience and sensibilities of the coloniality of power. 40
Double consciousness, double critique, an other tongue, an other thinking,
new mestiza consciousness, Creolization, transculturation, and culture
of transience become the needed categories to undo the subalternization of
knowledge and to look for ways of thinking beyond the categories of Western
thought from metaphysics to philosophy to science. 41 The projects of
Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, in the past twenty years,
have been instrumental for a critique of subalternization of knowledge.
Said showed through Michel Foucault the construction of the Orient as a
discursive formation; Bhabha described through Lacan the hybridity and
the third space of colonial discourse; Spivak pushed the deconstruction of
colonial discourse through Derrida. 42 However, beyond these conceptual
genealogies where the postcolonial emerges, piggybacking on postmodern
or poststructuralist theories, there were also emerging in a parallel fashion
similar manifestations of border thinking, which I have explored in this
book, attached to particular places resulting from and produced by local
modern/colonial histories. My own conceptualization, in this book, followed
the move made by Said, Bhabha, and Spivak, but is based on the
work of Wallerstein, an (Anglo) American sociologist rather than French
philosophers or psychoanalysts. But I have also departed from Wallerstein
by introducing the colonial difference and the coloniality of power and thus
linking my work with that of Anibal Quijano in Peru and Enrique Dussel
in Argentina and Mexico, both active since the late 1960s and early
1970s—about the same years that Wallerstein, Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan
were producing their intellectual impact. 43 One of the reasons, and not a
trivial one, of my decision to follow Wallerstein and then move to Quijano
and Dussel was my need to go beyond the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment,
which is the reference and starting point of poststructuralist
and early postcolonial theorizing. I needed the sixteenth century and the
Renaissance, the emergence of the Americas in the colonial horizon of modernity,
a local history out of which Quijano, Dussel, Anzaldúa, and myself
(among many others, of course) are made. 44 What I needed to argue for was
a way of thinking in and from the borders of the colonial differences in the
modern/colonial world: the borders between enacting and desiring global
designs; the borders between transforming received global designs into local