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

identity construct #5: latin america 185
not feel the need to necessarily acknowledge the issues repeatedly. This was
the basic premise of Edward Said’s argument in Orientalism.
41. Mignolo is using this amalgamation of terms to draw upon a variety
of intellectual traditions that he sees as challenging standard Westerncentric
ideology. When he calls for the undoing of “the subalternization
of knowledge,” he is not opposing those people he previously defi ned as
subaltern, i.e., Latin Americans, Africans, and Asians. He wants to overturn
the hierarchical intellectual systems that defi ne ideas coming out of subaltern
regions as being lesser than those emerging from the metropolitan (i.e.,
Western) centers.
42. Bhabha refers to Homi Bhabha (1949– ), the Indian scholar who is
identifi ed as a key intellectual fi gure in the fi eld of postcolonialism. He
has spent most of his professional life in England and the United States.
See his Nation and Narration (New York: Routledge, 1990) and The Location
of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994). Gayatri Spivak (1942– ) is
another Indian-born scholar who also has spent most of her professional life
in the United States and written extensively in cultural theory and postcolonialism.
She is one of the founding fi gures of subaltern studies. See
Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, eds., The Spivak Reader (New York:
Routledge, 1996).
43. Anibal Quijano is a professor of sociology at SUNY Binghamton,
where Immanuel Wallerstein has spent much of his professional career.
Quijano was educated in Chile and Peru and has spent most of her professional
life in Latin American universities.
44. Gloria Evangelia Anzaldúa (1942–2004), was a Chicana lesbian, feminist
theorist, poet, and writer. Her Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
(San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987) combines poetry, memoir,
and historical analysis. Anzaldúa is a foundational fi gure in the development
of mestiza consciousness and the notion of borderland studies.
45. D. Morley and K. H. Chen, (eds.), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in
Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992) 395.
46. The Tawantinsuyu and Anahuac are indigenous peoples in Peru.
47. Leslie Marmon Silko, (1948– ) is a Native American writer born and
raised on a New Mexican Indian reservation. Marmon Silko’s map that Mignolo
refers to appears in the front of the book from which this excerpt is
drawn (p. 25). It is a sort of spatial redrawing of the U.S.-Mexican border that
takes into account its complex, multiethnic history.
48. This is where Mignolo returns to the issue of interior and exterior.
Mignolo is addressing the complexity of his desire to break down such dichotomies
in order to create a more genuinely egalitarian space where Westerners
and non-Westerners can exchange ideas in an open environment. Yet,
he also recognizes the reality that unequal opportunities defi ne the difference
between the developed West and the underdeveloped non-West.