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

identity construct #5: latin america 177
of course, it is not just the “history” I am talking about here. I am talking
about “knowledges” hidden under the reproduction of Western civilization
and Western metaphysics. All those stories are tangential to Western
metaphysics; Western metaphysics is tangential to them. The coloniality
of power and the colonial difference are what link them in problematic and
confl ictive ways. If they are outside of Western metaphysics, such a statement
could only be meaningful from the hegemony of the coloniality of
power, not from the local histories for which Western metaphysics is not
a totality but a global design. It is precisely the coming into being of a historical
and critical consciousness of both the global scope of Western metaphysics
as an instrument of colonization (from religion to reason), and the
knowledges subalternized by it, that brings to the foreground the awareness
of the borders and of border thinking. There is nothing outside of totality, of
course, but totality is always projected from a given local history. Therefore,
there is nothing outside the totality of a given local history other than other
local histories perhaps producing either alternative totalities or an alternative
to totality. A nonontological cosmology, as Amerindian’s cosmologies
illustrate from the sixteenth to the end of the twentieth century, is an alternative
to Western ontological cosmology as the grounding of totality (be
it Christian faith or secular reason). The interesting aspect of all of this is
how such imaginary, which is part of the history of the modern/colonial
world system itself, justifi ed economic decisions, public policy designs and
implementations, wars and other forms of control, exploitation, and the
management of peoples [. . .].
VIII
Once upon a time I was convinced that there is no such a thing as “inside
and outside.” 48 I still hear today such a statement, in which I no longer
believe. I am not saying, of course, that “there are” inside and outside, but
that neither of such proposition holds water and that both are supported by
the same epistemological presupposition: that a referential assertion can be
made regarding the world and that assertions can be judged by their true referential
value. I understand that the assertion “there is no such a thing like
inside and outside” has another admonition. The question is not whether
such a “thing” exists or doesn’t exist. To say that “there is an inside and
outside” is as absurd as to say that there is not. For who can tell us really
which one is true beyond God? On the other hand, both propositions—as I
just stated them—are supported in a very questionable principle: that it is
possible to assert what really is or is not. What I do seriously believe is that