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

identity construct #5: latin america 175
projects; the borders between subaltern and hegemonic knowledges rearticulated
from the perspective of the subalterns.
Where is then border thinking located, in terms disciplines? Philosophy,
because I claimed gnoseology, epistemology, and hermeneutics? Sociology,
because I located it in the external borders of the modern/colonial world?
History, because my argument was built historically and from the perspective
of coloniality? Anthropology, because I dealt with issues that have been
the province of anthropology, which is the closer discipline to the colonial
difference? Cultural studies, because it is none of the above? I would say that
the transdisciplinary dimension of border thinking is cultural critique in the
precise sense that Stuart Hall defi nes cultural studies, as trans- disciplinary
and trans-national: “In a sense, if there is anything to be learnt from British
cultural studies, it’s the insistence that cultural studies is always about the
articulation—in different context of course—between culture and power. I
am speaking in terms of the epistemological formation of the fi eld, not in
the sense of practicing cultural studies.” 45
V
There are indeed remarkable differences between Western civilization, Occidentalism,
and modern/colonial world system. Western civilization is
neither a synonym for Occidentalism, nor for modern/colonial world system.
Western civilization is supposed to be something “grounded” in Greek
history as is also Western metaphysics. This reading, implicit in the Renaissance,
became explicit in the Enlightenment. Occidentalism is basically the
master metaphor of colonial discourse since the sixteenth century and specifi
cally in relation to the inclusion of the Americas as part and margin of
the West. It is an ambiguous metaphor in the sense that from the sixteenth
century up to the Enlightenment, America has had an ambiguous role in
colonial discourse. On the one hand it was portrayed and conceived as the
daughter and inheritor of Europe, thus its future. On the other, as daughter
and inheritor, it occupied a subaltern position in the geopolitics of knowledge
and in the coloniality of power: the Americas, from the point of view of
European intellectuals and until post–World War II, was the subaltern same.
There is certainly another parallel story here, which is the relocation of the
Americas (Spanish and Anglo) after 1848 and 1898. But this process seemed
to have been bypassed (perhaps with the exception of Tocqueville) by the
European intelligentsia. The situation was further complicated by the fact
that in the rearticulation of the geopolitics of colonial power, Amerindians
and Afro-Americans, with all their diversity in the Americas, were left out
of the picture of an updated Occidentalism.