Area Studies K - Michigan7 2013

8/13/2019 Area Studies K - Michigan7 2013

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1NC (Policy Affs)

Framework our knowledge production is situated within particularepistemic contexts the 1ACs valorization of the Western academy props

up the hegemonic search for TruthGrosfoguel, Professor Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, 7(Ramon, The Epistemic Decolonial TurnCultural Studies, Vol 21 Issue 2-3, p 211-223, T&F Online)//JAG

Epistemological Critique The first point to discuss is the contribution of racial/ethnic and feminist subaltern perspectives to epistemological questions.Thehegemonic Eurocentric paradigms that have informed western philosophy and sciencesin the modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system for the last 500 hundredyears assume a universalistic, neutral, objective point of view. Chicana and black feminist scholars (Moraga &Anzaldua 1983, Collins 1990) as well as thirdworld scholars inside and outside the United States (Dussel 1977, Mignolo 2000) reminded us thatwe alwaysspeak from a particular location in the power structures. Nobody escapes theclass, sexual, gender, spiritual, linguistic, geographical, and racial hierarchies of themodern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system. As feminist scholar Donna Haraway (1988) states, our knowledgesare always situated. Black feminist scholars called this perspective afro-centric epistemology (Collins 1990) (which is not equivalent to the afrocentrist perspective) while Latin

American Philosopher of Liberation Enrique Dussel called it geopolitics of knowledge (Dussel 1977) and following Fanon (1967) and Anzalda (1987) I will use the term body-

politics of knowledge. This is not only a question about social values in knowledge production or the fact that our knowledge is always partial. The main point here is the locus of

enunciation, that is, the geo-political and body-political location of the subject that speaks.In Western philosophy and sciencesthe subject that speaks is always hidden, concealed, erased from theanalysis. The ego-politics of knowledge of Western philosophy has always privilege themyth of a non-situated Ego. Ethnic/racial/gender/sexual epistemic location and thesubject that speaks are always decoupled. By delinking ethnic/racial/gender/sexualepistemic location from the subject that speaks, Western philosophy and sciences areable to produce a myth about a Truthful universal knowledgethat covers up, thatis, conceals who is speaking as well as the geo-political and body-political epistemiclocation in the structures of colonial power/knowledge from which the subject speaks. It isimportant here to distinguish the epistemic location from the social location. The fact that one is socially located in the oppressed side of power relations, does not

automatically mean that he/she is epistemically thinking from a subaltern epistemic location. Precisely, the success of the modern/colonial

world-system consist in making subjects that are socially located in the oppressed sideof the colonial difference, to think epistemicaly like the ones on the dominant positions.Subaltern epistemic perspectives are knowledge coming from below that produces acritical perspective of hegemonic knowledge in the power relations involved. I am not claiming anepistemic populism where knowledge produced from below is automatically an epistemic subaltern knowledge. What I am claiming is that all knowledges areepistemically located in the dominant or the subaltern side of the power relationsand that thisis related to the geo- and body-politics of knowledge. The disembodied and unlocated neutrality and objectivity ofthe ego-politics of knowledge is a Western myth.Rene Descartes, the founder of Modern Western Philosophy, inaugurates a newmoment in the history of Western thought. He replaces God, as the foundation of knowledge in the Theo-politics of knowledge of the European Middle Ages, with (Western)

Man as the foundation of knowledge in European Modern times. All the attributes of God are now extrapolated to (Western) Man. Universal Truthbeyond time and space, privilege access to the laws of the Universe, and the capacity toproduce scientific knowledge and theory is now placed in the mind of Western Man. TheCartesian ego-cogito (I think, therefore I am) i s the foundation of modern Western sciences. By producing a dualism between mind and body and between mind and nature,Descartes was able to claim non-situated, universal, God-eyed view knowledge. This is what the Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro- Gomez called the point zero

perspective of Eurocentric philosophies (Castro-Gomez 2003).The point zero is the point of view that hides andconceals itself as being beyond a particular point of view, that is, the point of view that represents itself as being withouta point of view. It is this god-eye view that always hides its local and particular perspectiveunder an abstract universalism. Western philosophy privileges ego politics ofknowledge over the geopolitics of knowledgeand the body-politics of knowledge. Historically,this has allowedWestern man(the gendered term is intentionally used here) to represent his knowledge as the only one capableof achieving a universal consciousness, and to dismiss non-Western knowledge as particularistic and, thus, unable to achieve universality.


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This epistemic strategy has been crucial for Western global designs. By hiding thelocation of the subject of enunciation, European/Euro-American colonial expansion anddomination was able to construct a hierarchy of superior and inferior knowledge and,thus, of superior and inferior people around the world. We went from the sixteenth century characterization of people

without writing to the eighteenth and nineteenth century characterization of people without history, to the twentieth century characterization of people without developmentand more recently, to the early twenty-first century of people without democracy. We went from the sixteenth century rights of people (Sepulveda versus de las Casas debate inthe school of Salamanca in the mid-sixteenth century), to the eighteenth century rights of man (Enlightment philosophers), and to the late twentieth century human rights. All

of these are part of global designs articulated to the simultaneous production and reproduction of an international division of labor of core/periphery that overlaps with theglobal racial/ethnic hierarchy of Europeans/non-Europeans. However, as Enrique Dussel (1994) has reminded us, the Cartesian ego cogito (I think, therefore I am) was

preceded by 150 years (since the beginnings of the European colonial expansion in 1492) of the European ego conquistus (I conquer, therefore I am).The social,economic, political and historical conditions of possibility for a subject to assume thearrogance of becoming God-like and put himself as the foundation of all Truthfulknowledge was the Imperial Being, that is, the subjectivity of those who are at the centerof the world because they have already conquered it. What are the decolonial implications of this epistemological critique toour knowledge production and to our concept of world-system?

This is particularly true in the context of Latin America their use of AreaStudies props up a US-centric approach to fact-gathering that ensures Latin

America remains academically isolated and distinctAlverez, Arias, and Hal 11 respectively - Director, Center for Latin American, Caribbean and

Latino Studies; Professor of Latin American Literature University of Texas at Austin; Professor ofAnthropology and of African and African Diaspora Studies University of Texas at Austin (Sonia E., Arturo,and Charles R., Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, Re-visioning Latin American Studies inthe United States,Vol. 17, No. 2, December 2011, 131-145

We maintain thatLatin American Studies must be de-centered if it is to continue tothrive in thistransformed environment.Demographic shifts, diasporas, labor migrations, the movements of global capital and media, and processes of cultural circulation andhybridization have brought into question the nature of areas identities and composition.Globalization, space/time compression, andgreater international mobility have created an intensification of overlaps and broughttogether intellectual travelers that were formerly kept largely separate. What has comeinto questionis the notion that the world can be divided into knowable, self-containedareas of study.Indeed. Latin America is today a global reality. As Walter Mignolo said at a 2001 retreat toformulate the LASA Strategic Plan, Latin America isnow the perspective, not the area ofstudy. By this Mignolo meant that Latin America is no longer a

geographical entity to bestudied; rather. it now signifies a reorientation of knowledge,an epistemology that looks atglobal concerns from a Latin American perspective,independently of who is doing thelooking, from where, and what is being looked at.At thesame time. there is greater complexity in the boundaries that define the area ofstudy. Traditionally Latin American Studies haveembodied and respected disciplinaryboundaries,and in most cases Latin Americanists have been primarily organized bydiscipline. Butdisciplinary divisions no longer work as well as in the past.IncreasinglyLatinAmericanists find themselves both anchored in a disciplinary formation, and, at thesame time, crossing disciplinary boundaries into cognate areasin effect becoming trans-disciplinary. While there are stillrelatively few academic interdisciplinarians and teachingor training programs that purposely prepare interdisciplinary specialists, many LatinAmericanists today deliberately adopt either trans-disciplinary orinterdisciplinaryapproaches in addressing the intellectual issues they face. One can readily observe todayan intensification of the expectation that intellectual activity be addressed in aninterdisciplinaryfashion, whether by individuals or by teams of individuals with differentskills working together. This may be so especially in the sciences, but major fundingagencies are requiring interdisciplinary approachesabove single-disciplinary ones inmany areas of study. Latin Americanists now have the opportunity to synthesize this newintellectual reality. and to create new and meaningful disciplinary intersections and

configurations that will help in knowledge production, and in making this knowledge morereadily accessible and

applicable to communities and constituencies so as to confront realworld problems andsituations.A related challenge has to do with articulations of local. regional. national. and evenpost-national identities. 11re 2008 conferences Times of Change and Opportunities for theAfroColombian Population at Howard University. The African Diaspora in theAmericas: Political and Cultural Resistance at the University of Minnesota. Afro-Latinos: Global Spaceslbocal Struggles at UCLA.and Reconfigurations of Racism andNew Scenarios of Power Afler 200l at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. as well as the 2009 conference on indigenous and Afro-descendant issues at the Universityof Texasat Austin. are reflections of the reconfiguration of non-Latin American subjectivitieswithin transnational frameworks. Afro-Latinidades are an example of a theme that must beframed beyondconventional LAS parameters. in a larger landscape of hemispheric andglobal geopolitics. cultural politics. and political economy. New areas of knowledge arecontinually being opened by Latin Americanists.both those from Latin America and theUS. as well as across the globe. Many scholars today are inclined to extend beyond theNorth-South dichotomy. incorporating theoretical ideas and frameworks thatcirculateglobally with applicability well beyond Latin America proper. One example here is thegreat influence of the subaltern studies school of South Asia on Latin America scholarship;another is the

coloniality of power group, and the general growth of work in what mightbe termed comparative colonialities.'These and other analogous movementssignal thetransformations of disciplinary fields worldwide despite the continuedexistence of formaldisciplines as organizing principles of scholarly work. The Latin


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Americanists challengeis not to abandon the established disciplines. but rather. tobring them fully into criticaldialoguewith these transformed intellectual and geopolitical landscapes. Ultimately.remaking the fieldis not an event but a process. one that we hope to advance with thisarticle. Our contention is that Latin American Studies will remain vibrant to the extent thatinstitutions and individual scholars engage fully with these challenges.What De-centering Latin American Studies EntallsThough we concur with Paul Drake and Lisa I-liIbink's assessment that many in Latin

American Studies have made a sincere and sustained effort to be make the field acooperative endeavor between US scholars and their counterparts south of the border '2.we maintain that, as aninstitutionalized knowledge formation, LAS remain largelycentered in the United

States.Historically, moreover. the field has developed under thehegemony of its founding US-baseddisciplinary formations, with early 20" century workconcentrated in history and literature, while political science rose to predominanceafterthe l960s. One survey of the field's foremost US-based journal, Latin American ResearchReview (LARR), found that by the late 1970s, fully one-third of submissions to LARRcame from political science.which remained first into the 1990s and beyond. Historymaintained a solid second, while Languages/Literature and Anthropology submissionswere displaced by those from Economics and Sociology.'3

Disciplines. of course. shape how knowledge is produced and who is authorized toproduce it. The predominance of US-based disciplinary formations within the field ofLAS. therefore, meant that research and knowledge production were largely driven byUS-centric assumptions and political imperatives. As we noted above. even the Left ofLAS tended to be moreconcerned with US foreign policy in the region and itsconsequences than withinterrogating the often Anglo-Euro-centric epistemologicalfoundations of thedisciplines. ln some of these cases, the problem was not a lack of focuson subaltern peoples; rather, it was the fact that these interventions. thoughcritical of USgeopolitical dominance. in other respects retained dominant disciplinary

andepistemological assumptions.

Area studies is inseparable from the militaristic knowledge that views LatinAmerica in terms of its usefulness to the US their knowledge-gatheringonly shows us a target to be destroyed by US bombs, making nucleargenocide inevitableChow, Professor Comparative Lit at Brown, 6(Rey, The Ageof the World Target p 40-42)//JAGOftenunder the modest and apparently innocuous agendas of fact gathering anddocumentation, the "scientific" and "objective" production of knowledge duringpeacetime about the various special "areas" became the institutional practice thatsubstantiated and elaborated the militaristic conception of the world as target.52 In other words,despite the claims about the apolitical and disinterested nature of the pursuits "I higherlearning, activities undertaken under the rubric of area studies, such as language training, historiography,anthropology, economics, political science, and so forth, are fully inscribed in thepolitics and ideology of war.To that extent, thedisciplining, research, and development of so-calledacademic information are part and parcel of a strategic logic. And yet, if the production ofknowledge(with its vocabulary of aims and goals, research, data analysis, experimentation, and verification) in fact shares the same scientific andmilitary premises as warif, for instance, the ability to translate a difficult language can be regarded as equivalent to the ability to break military codes53is it asurprise that it is doomed to fail in its avowed attempts to "know" the other cultures? Can"knowledge" that is derived from the same kinds of bases as war put an end to theviolence of warfare, or is such knowledge not simply warfare's accomplice, destined todestroy rather than preserve the forms of lives at which it aims its focus? As long asknowledge is produced in this self-referential manner, as a circuit of targeting or getting

the other that ultimately consolidates the omnipotence and omnipresence of thesovereign "self"/"eye"the "I"that is the United States, the other will have no choicebut remain justthata target whose existence justifies only one thing, its destruction by thebomber.As long as the focus of our study of Asia remains the United States, and as long as this focus is not accompanied by knowledge of what is happening elsewhere at other times as well as at the

present,suchstudy will ultimately confirm once again the self-referential function of virtualworlding that was unleashed by the dropping of the atomic bombs, with the UnitedStates always occupying the position of the bomber, and other cultures always viewed asthe military and information target fields. In this manner, events whose historicity does not fall into the epistemically closed orbit of the atomic bomber


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such as the Chinese reactions to the war from a primarily anti-Japanese point of view that I alluded to at the beginning of this chapterwill never receive the attention that is due to them.

"Knowledge," however conscientiously gathered and however large in volume, will leadonly to further silence and to the silencing of diverse experiences.54 This is one reasonwhy,as Harootunian remarks, area studies has been, since its inception, haunted by "the absence of adefinable object"and by "the problem of the vanishing object."55 As Harootunian goes on to argue, for all its investmentin the study of other languages and other cultures, area studies missed the opportunity, so aptly provided by Said's criticism of Oriental ism, to become the site where a genuinely alternative form of knowledgeproduction might have been possible. Although, as Harootunian writes, "Said's book represented an important intellectual challenge to the mission of area studies which, if accepted would have reshaped areastudies and freed it f rom its own reliance on the Cold War and the necessities of the national security state,"56 the challenge was too fundamentally disruptive to the administrative and instrumentalist agendas so

firmly routinized in area studies to be accepted by its practitioners. As a result, Said's attempt to link an incipient neocolonial discourse to the history of area studies was almost immediately belittled, dismissed,and ignored, and his critique, for all its relevance to area studies' future orientation, simply "migrated to English studies to transform the study of literature into a full-scale preoccupation with identity and itsconstruction."57

Reject the affs Eurocentric epistemology embracing a decolonialepistemology is the best way to rupture current conceptions of Area Studiesthat guarantee intellectual exploitationGrosfoguel, Professor Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, 7(Ramon, The Epistemic Decolonial TurnCultural Studies, Vol 21 Issue 2-3, p 211-223, T&F Online)//JAG

Globalization studies, political-economy paradigms and world-system analysis, with only a fewexceptions,have not derived the epistemological and theoretical implications of the epistemiccritique coming from subaltern locations in the colonial divideand expressed in academia through ethnic studiesand woman studies. They still continue to produce knowledge from the Western man point zero

god-eye view. This has led to important problems in the way we conceptualize globalcapitalism and the world-system. These concepts are in need of decolonization and thiscan only be achieved with a decolonial epistemology that overtly assumesthe decolonial geopolitics and body-politics of knowledge as points ofdeparture to a radical critique.The following examples can illustrate this point. If we analyze the European colonial expansion from aEurocentric point of view, what we get is a picture in which the origins of the so-called capitalist world-system is primarily produced by the inter-imperial competition amongEuropean Empires. The primary motive for this expansion was to find shorter routes to the East, which let accidentally to the so-called discovery and, eventual, Spanishcolonization of the Americas. From this point of view, the capitalist world-system would be primarily an economic system that determine the behavior of the major social actors

by the economic logic of making profits as manifested in the extraction of surplus value and the ceaseless accumulation of capital at a world-scale. Moreover, the concept ofcapitalism implied in this perspective privileges economic relations over other social relations. Accordingly, the transformation in the relations of production produces a newclass structure typical of capitalism as oppose to other social systems and other forms of domination. Class analysis and economic structural transformations are privileged overother power relations. Without denying the importance of the endless accumulation of capital at a world scale and the existence of a particular class structure in global

capitalism, I raise the following epistemic question:How would the world-system looks like if we move the locusof enunciation from the European man to an Indigenous women in the Americas, to, sayRigoberta Menchu in Guatemala or to Domitila in Bolivia? I do not pretend to speak for or represent the perspective ofthese indigenous women. What I attempt to do is to shift the location from which these paradigms are thinking.The first implication of shifting our geopolitics of knowledge is that what arrived in theAmericas in the late fifteenth century was not only an economic system of capital andlabor for the production of commodities to be sold for a profit in the world market. This was acrucial part of, but was not the sole element in, the entangled package.What arrived in the Americas was a broader andwider entangled power structure that an economic reductionist perspective of the world-system is unable to account for. From the structural location of an indigenous woman inthe Americas what arrived was a more complex world-system than what political-economy paradigms and world-system analysis portrait. AEuropean/capitalist/military/christian/patriarchal/white/heterosexual/male arrived inthe Americas and established simultaneously in time and space several entangled global

hierarchiesthat for purposes of clarity in this exposition I will list below as if they were separate from each other: a particular global class formation where a diversityof forms of labor (slavery, semi-serfdom, wage labor, petty-commodity production, etc.) are going to co-exist and be organized by capital as a source of production of surplusvalue through the selling of commodities for a profit in the world market; an international division of labor of core and periphery where capital organized labor in the peripheryaround coerced and authoritarian forms (Wallerstein 1974); an inter-state system of politico-military organizations controlled by European males and institutionalized incolonial administrations (Wallerstein 1979); a global racial/ethnic hierarchy that privileges European people over non-European people (Quijano 1993, 2000); a global genderhierarchy that privileges males over females and European patriarchy over other forms of gender relations (Spivak 1988, Enloe 1990); a sexual hierarchy that privilegesheterosexuals over homosexuals and lesbians (it is important to remember that most indigenous peoples in the Americas did not consider sexuality among males a pathological

behavior and has no homophobic ideology); a spiritual hierarchy that privileges Christians over non-Christian/non-Western spiritualities institutionalized in the globalization ofthe Christian (Catholic and later Protestant) church; an epistemic hierarchy that privileges Western knowledge and cosmology over non-Western knowledge and cosmologies,and institutionalized in the global university system (Mignolo 1995, 2000, Quijano 1991). a linguistic hierarchy between European languages and non-European languages thatprivileges communication and knowledge/theoretical production in the former and subalternize the latter as sole producers of folklore or culture but not of knowledge/theory

(Mignolo 2000). It is not an accident that the conceptualization of the world-system, from decolonialperspectives of the South will question its traditional conceptualizations produced by


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thinkers from the North. Following Peruvian Sociologist, Anbal Quijano (1991), (1998), (2000),we could conceptualize thepresent world-system as a historical-structural heterogeneous totality witha specific power matrixthat he calls a colonialpower matrix(patrn de poder colonial). This matrix affects all dimensions of social existence such as sexuality, authority,subjectivity and labor (Quijano 2000). The sixteenth century initiates a new global colonial power matrix that by the late nineteenth century came to cover the whole planet.Taking a step further from Quijano, I conceptualize the coloniality of power as an entanglement or, to use US Third World Feminist concept, intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989,Fregoso 2003) of multiple and heterogeneous global hierarchies (heterarchies) of sexual, political, epistemic, economic, spiritual, linguistic and racial forms of domination and

exploitation where the racial/ethnic hierarchy of the European/non-European divide transversally reconfigures all of the other global power structures.What is new

in the coloniality of power perspective is how the idea of race and racism becomes theorganizing principle that structures all of the multiple hierarchies of the world-system(Quijano 1993). For example, the different forms of labor that are articulated to capitalist accumulation at a world-scale are assigned according to this racial hierarchy; coercive(or cheap) labor is done by non-European people in the periphery and free wage labor in the core.The global gender hierarchy is also affected by race: contrary to pre-Europeanpatriarchies where all women were inferior to all men, in the new colonial power matrix some women (of European origin) have a higher status and access to resources thansome men (of non-European origin). The idea of race organizes the world's population into a hierarchical order of superior and inferior people that becomes an organizing

principle of the international division of labor and of the global patriarchal system. Contrary to the Eurocentric perspective, race,gender, sexuality, spirituality, and epistemology are not additive elements to theeconomic and political structures of the capitalist world-system, but an integral,entangled and constitutive part of the broad entangled packagecalled the European modern/colonialcapitalist/patriarchal world-system (Grosfoguel 2002). European patriarchy and European notions of sexuality,epistemology and spirituality were exported to the rest of the world through colonialexpansion as the hegemonic criteria to racialize, classify and pathologize the rest of the

world's population in a hierarchy of superior and inferior races. This conceptualizationhas enormous implications that I can only briefly mention here: The old Eurocentric idea that

societies develop at the level of the nation-state in terms of a linear evolution of modes

of production from pre-capitalist to capitalist is overcome . We are all encompassed within a capitalist world-

system that articulates different forms of labor according to the racial classification of the world's population (Quijano 2000, Grosfoguel 2002). The old Marxistparadigm of infrastructure and superstructure is replaced by a historical-heterogeneousstructure(Quijano 2000), or a heterarchy (Kontopoulos 1993), that is, an entangled articulation of multiplehierarchies, in which subjectivity and the social imaginary is not derivative butconstitutive of the structures of the world-system(Grosfoguel 2002). In this conceptualization, race and racism are notsuperstructural or instrumental to an overarching logic of capitalist accumulation; they are constitutive of capitalist accumulation at a world-scale. The colonial power matrix isan organizing principle involving exploitation and domination exercised in multiple dimensions of social life, from economic, sexual, or gender relations, to political

organizations, structures of knowledge, state institutions, and households (Quijano 2000). The old division between culture andpolitical-economy as expressed in post-colonial studies and political-economyapproaches is overcome(Grosfoguel 2002). Post-colonial studies conceptualize the capitalist world-system as being constituted primarily by culture,

while political-economy place the primary determination on economic relations.In the coloniality of power approach, whatcomes first, culture or the economy, is a false dilemma, a chicken-egg dilemma that obscure the complexity of thecapitalist world-system (Grosfoguel 2002). Coloniality is not equivalent to colonialism. It is not derivative from, or antecedent to, modernity. Coloniality and modernityconstitute two sides of a single coin. The same way as the European industrial revolution was achieved on the shoulders of the coerced forms of labor in the periphery, the newidentities, rights, laws, and institutions of modernity such as nation-states, citizenship and democracy were formed in a process of colonial interaction with, anddomination/exploitation of, non-Western people. To call capitalist the present world-system is, to say the least, misleading. Given the hegemonic Eurocentric common sense,the moment we use the word capitalism people immediately think that we are talking about the economy. However, capitalism is only one of the multiple entangledconstellations of colonial power matrix of the European modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system. It is an important one, but not the sole one. Given its

entanglement with other power relations, destroying the capitalist aspects of the world-system would not be enough to destroy the present world-system. Totransform this world-system it is crucial to destroy the historical-structuralheterogenous totality called the colonial power matrix of the world-system. Anti-capitalistdecolonization and liberationcannot be reduced to only one dimension of social life. Itrequires a broader

transformation of the sexual, gender, spiritual, epistemic, economic, political, linguisticand racial hierarchies of the modern/colonial world-system. The coloniality of powerperspective challenges us to think about social change and social transformation in anon-reductionist way.


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1NC (K Affs)

Framework our knowledge production is situated within particularepistemic contexts the 1ACs valorization of the Western academy props

up the hegemonic search for TruthGrosfoguel, Professor Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, 7(Ramon, The Epistemic Decolonial TurnCultural Studies, Vol 21 Issue 2-3, p 211-223, T&F Online)//JAG

Epistemological Critique The first point to discuss is the contribution of racial/ethnic and feminist subaltern perspectives to epistemological questions.Thehegemonic Eurocentric paradigms that have informed western philosophy and sciencesin the modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system for the last 500 hundredyears assume a universalistic, neutral, objective point of view. Chicana and black feminist scholars (Moraga &Anzaldua 1983, Collins 1990) as well as thirdworld scholars inside and outside the United States (Dussel 1977, Mignolo 2000) reminded us thatwe alwaysspeak from a particular location in the power structures. Nobody escapes theclass, sexual, gender, spiritual, linguistic, geographical, and racial hierarchies of themodern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system. As feminist scholar Donna Haraway (1988) states, our knowledgesare always situated. Black feminist scholars called this perspective afro-centric epistemology (Collins 1990) (which is not equivalent to the afrocentrist perspective) while Latin

American Philosopher of Liberation Enrique Dussel called it geopolitics of knowledge (Dussel 1977) and following Fanon (1967) and Anzalda (1987) I will use the term body-

politics of knowledge. This is not only a question about social values inknowledge production or the fact that our knowledge is always partial. The main point here is the locus of

enunciation, that is, the geo-political and body-political location of the subject that speaks.In Western philosophy and sciencesthe subject that speaks is always hidden, concealed, erased from theanalysis. The ego-politics of knowledge of Western philosophy has always privilege themyth of a non-situated Ego. Ethnic/racial/gender/sexual epistemic location and thesubject that speaks are always decoupled. By delinking ethnic/racial/gender/sexualepistemic location from the subject that speaks, Western philosophy and sciences areable to produce a myth about a Truthful universal knowledgethat covers up, thatis, conceals who is speaking as well as the geo-political and body-political epistemiclocation in the structures of colonial power/knowledge from which the subject speaks. It isimportant here to distinguish the epistemic location from the social location. The fact that one is socially located in the oppressed side of power relations, does not

automatically mean that he/she is epistemically thinking from a subaltern epistemic location. Precisely, the success of the modern/colonial

world-system consist in making subjects that are socially located in the oppressed sideof the colonial difference, to think epistemicaly like the ones on the dominant positions.Subaltern epistemic perspectives are knowledge coming from below that produces acritical perspective of hegemonic knowledge in the power relations involved. I am not claiming anepistemic populism where knowledge produced from below is automatically an epistemic subaltern knowledge. What I am claiming is that all knowledges areepistemically located in the dominant or the subaltern side of the power relationsand that thisis related to the geo- and body-politics of knowledge. The disembodied and unlocated neutrality and objectivity ofthe ego-politics of knowledge is a Western myth.Rene Descartes, the founder of Modern Western Philosophy, inaugurates a newmoment in the history of Western thought. He replaces God, as the foundation of knowledge in the Theo-politics of knowledge of the European Middle Ages, with (Western)

Man as the foundation of knowledge in European Modern times. All the attributes of God are now extrapolated to (Western) Man. Universal Truthbeyond time and space, privilege access to the laws of the Universe, and the capacity toproduce scientific knowledge and theory is now placed in the mind of Western Man. TheCartesian ego-cogito (I think, therefore I am) i s the foundation of modern Western sciences. By producing a dualism between mind and body and between mind and nature,Descartes was able to claim non-situated, universal, God-eyed view knowledge. This is what the Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro- Gomez called the point zero

perspective of Eurocentric philosophies (Castro-Gomez 2003).The point zero is the point of view that hides andconceals itself as being beyond a particular point of view, that is, the point of view that represents itself as being withouta point of view. It is this god-eye view that always hides its local and particular perspectiveunder an abstract universalism. Western philosophy privileges ego politics ofknowledge over the geopolitics of knowledgeand the body-politics of knowledge. Historically,this has allowedWestern man(the gendered term is intentionally used here) to represent his knowledge as the only one capableof achieving a universal consciousness, and to dismiss non-Western knowledge as particularistic and, thus, unable to achieve universality.


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This epistemic strategy has been crucial for Western global designs. By hiding thelocation of the subject of enunciation, European/Euro-American colonial expansion anddomination was able to construct a hierarchy of superior and inferior knowledge and,thus, of superior and inferior people around the world. We went from the sixteenth century characterization of people

without writing to the eighteenth and nineteenth century characterization of people without history, to the twentieth century c haracterization of people without developmentand more recently, to the early twenty-first century of people without democracy.We went from the sixteenth century rights of people (Sepulveda versus de las Casas debate inthe school of Salamanca in the mid-sixteenth century), to the eighteenth century rights of man (Enlightment philosophers), and to the late twentieth century human rights. All

of these are part of global designs articulated to the simultaneous production and reproduction of an international division of labor of core/periphery that overlaps with theglobal racial/ethnic hierarchy of Europeans/non-Europeans. However, as Enrique Dussel (1994) has reminded us, the Cartesian ego cogito (I think, therefore I am) was

preceded by 150 years (since the beginnings of the European colonial expansion in 1492) of the European ego conquistus (I conquer, therefore I am). The social,economic, political and historical conditions of possibility for a subject to assume thearrogance of becoming God-like and put himself as the foundation of all Truthfulknowledge was the Imperial Being, that is, the subjectivity of those who are at the centerof the world because they have already conquered it. What are the decolonial implications of this epistemological critique toour knowledge production and to our concept of world-system?

Despite their attempt to deconstruct current imperialist practices, the affsimply replaces the military with the academy their knowledgeproduction about the Latin American subaltern gives privilege to Westernforms of thinking

Grosfoguel, Professor Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, 7(Ramon, The Epistemic Decolonial TurnCultural Studies, Vol 21 Issue 2-3, p 211-223, T&F Online)//JAGIn October 1998, there was a conference/dialogue at Duke University between the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group and the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group. Thedialogue initiated in this conference eventually resulted in the publication of several issues of the journal NEPANTLA. However, this conference was the last time the Latin

American Subaltern Studies Group met before their split. Among the many reasons and debates that produced this split, there are two that I would like to stress. TheLatin American Subaltern Studies Group composed primarily by Latinamericanistscholars in the USA. Despite their attempt at producing a radical and alternativeknowledge, they reproduced the epistemic schema of Area Studies in theUnited States. With a few exceptions,they produced studies about the subaltern rather thanstudies with and from a subaltern perspective. Like the imperial epistemology of AreaStudies, theory was still located in the North while the subjects to be studiedare located in the South. This colonial epistemology was crucial to my dissatisfaction

with the project. As a Puerto Rican in the United States, I was dissatisfied with theepistemic consequences of the knowledge produced by this Latinamericanist group.They underestimated in their work ethnic/racial perspectives coming from the region,while giving privilege to Western thinkers. This is related to my second point:they gave epistemicprivilege towhat they called the four horses of the apocalypse,2 that is,Foucault, Derrida, Gramsci and Guha. Among the fourmain thinkers they privilege, three are Eurocentric thinkers while two of them (Derrida and Foucault) form part of the poststructuralist/postmodern Western canon. Byprivileging Western thinkers as their central theoretical apparatus, they

betrayed their goal to produce subaltern studies. This is not an essentialist, fundamentalist, anti-Europeancritique. It a perspective that is critical of both Eurocentric and Third World fundamentalisms, colonialism and nationalism.What allfundamentalisms share (including the Eurocentric one) is the premise that there is onlyone sole epistemic tradition from which to achieve Truth and Universality. However, my main pointshere are three: (1) that

a decolonial epistemic perspective requires a broader canon of thought thansimply the Western canon(including the Left Western canon); (2) that a truly universal decolonial perspectivecannot be based on an abstract universal(one particular that raises itself as universal global design),but would haveto be the result of the critical dialogue between diverse criticalepistemic/ethical/political projects towards a pluriversal as oppose to a universal world;(3) that decolonization of knowledge would require to take seriously the epistemicperspective/cosmologies/insights of critical thinkers from the Global South thinkingfrom and with subalternized racial/ethnic/sexual spaces and bodies.Postmodernism


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and postructuralism as epistemological projects are caught within theWestern canon reproducing within its domains of thought and practice acoloniality of power/knowledge.

Area studies is inseparable from the militaristic knowledge that views LatinAmerica in terms of its usefulness to the US their knowledge-gatheringonly shows us a target to be destroyed by US bombs, making nucleargenocide inevitableChow, Professor Comparative Lit at Brown, 6(Rey, The Age of the World Target p 40-42)//JAGOftenunder the modest and apparently innocuous agendas of fact gathering anddocumentation, the "scientific" and "objective" production of knowledge duringpeacetime about the various special "areas" became the institutional practice thatsubstantiated and elaborated the militaristic conception of the world as target.52 In other words,despite the claims about the apolitical and disinterested nature of the pursuits "I higherlearning, activities undertaken under the rubric of area studies, such as language training, historiography,anthropology, economics, political science, and so forth, are fully inscribed in thepolitics and ideology of war.To that extent, thedisciplining, research, and development of so-called

academic information are part and parcel of a strategic logic. And yet, if the production ofknowledge(with its vocabulary of aims and goals, research, data analysis, experimentation, and verification) in fact shares the same scientific andmilitary premises as warif, for instance, the ability to translate a difficult language can be regarded as equivalent to the ability to break military codes53is it asurprise that it is doomed to fail in its avowed attempts to "know" the other cultures? Can"knowledge" that is derived from the same kinds of bases as war put an end to theviolence of warfare, or is such knowledge not simply warfare's accomplice, destined todestroy rather than preserve the forms of lives at which it aims its focus? As long asknowledge is produced in this self-referential manner, as a circuit of targeting or gettingthe other that ultimately consolidates the omnipotence and omnipresence of thesovereign "self"/"eye"the "I"that is the United States, the other will have no choicebut remain justthata target whose existence justifies only one thing, its destruction by the

bomber.As long as the focus of our study of Asia remains the United States, and as long as this focus is not accompanied by knowledge of what is happening elsewhere at other times as well as at thepresent,suchstudy will ultimately confirm once again the self-referential function of virtualworlding that was unleashed by the dropping of the atomic bombs, with the UnitedStates always occupying the position of the bomber, and other cultures always viewed asthe military and information target fields. In this manner, events whose historicity does not fall into the epistemically closed orbit of the atomic bombersuch as the Chinese reactions to the war from a primarily anti-Japanese point of view that I alluded to at the beginning of this chapterwill never receive the attention that is due to them.

"Knowledge," however conscientiously gathered and however large in volume, will leadonly to further silence and to the silencing of diverse experiences.54 This is one reasonwhy,as Harootunian remarks, area studies has been, since its inception, haunted by "the absence of adefinable object"and by "the problem of the vanishing object."55 As Harootunian goes on to argue, for all its investmentin the study of other languages and other cultures, area studies missed the opportunity, so aptly provided by Said's criticism of Oriental ism, to become the site where a genuinely alternative form of knowledgeproduction might have been possible. Although, as Harootunian writes, "Said's book represented an important intellectual challenge to the mission of area studies which, if accepted would have reshaped areastudies and freed it f rom its own reliance on the Cold War and the necessities of the national security state,"56 the challenge was too fundamentally disruptive to the administrative and instrumentalist agendas sofirmly routinized in area studies to be accepted by its practitioners. As a result, Said's attempt to link an incipient neocolonial discourse to the history of area studies was almost immediately belittled, dismissed,and ignored, and his critique, for all its relevance to area studies' future orientation, simply "migrated to English studies to transform the study of literature into a full-scale preoccupation with identity and its

construction."57

Reject the affs Eurocentric epistemology embracing a decolonialepistemology is the best way to rupture current conceptions of Area Studiesthat guarantee intellectual exploitationGrosfoguel, Professor Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, 7(Ramon, The Epistemic Decolonial TurnCultural Studies, Vol 21 Issue 2-3, p 211-223, T&F Online)//JAG

Globalization studies, political-economy paradigms and world-system analysis, with only a fewexceptions,have not derived the epistemological and theoretical implications of the epistemic


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critique coming from subaltern locations in the colonial divideand expressed in academia through ethnic studiesand woman studies. They still continue to produce knowledge from the Western man point zerogod-eye view. This has led to important problems in the way we conceptualize globalcapitalism and the world-system. These concepts are in need of decolonization and thiscan only be achieved with a decolonial epistemology that overtly assumes

the decolonial geopolitics and body-politics of knowledge as points ofdeparture to a radical critique.The following examples can illustrate this point. If we analyze the European colonial expansion from aEurocentric point of view, what we get is a picture in which the origins of the so-called capitalist world-system is primarily produced by the inter-imperial competition amongEuropean Empires. The primary motive for this expansion was to find shorter routes to the East, which let accidentally to the so-called discovery and, eventual, Spanishcolonization of the Americas. From this point of view, the capitalist world-system would be primarily an economic system that determine the behavior of the major social actors

by the economic logic of making profits as manifested in the extraction of surplus value and the ceaseless accumulation of capital at a world-scale. Moreover, the concept ofcapitalism implied in this perspective privileges economic relations over other social relations. Accordingly, the transformation in the relations of production produces a newclass structure typical of capitalism as oppose to other social systems and other forms of domination. Class analysis and economic structural transformations are privileged overother power relations. Without denying the importance of the endless accumulation of capital at a world scale and the existence of a particular class structure in global

capitalism, I raise the following epistemic question:How would the world-system looks like if we move the locusof enunciation from the European man to an Indigenous women in the Americas, to, sayRigoberta Menchu in Guatemala or to Domitila in Bolivia? I do not pretend to speak for or represent the perspective ofthese indigenous women. What I attempt to do is to shift the location from which these paradigms are thinking.The first implication of shifting our geopolitics of knowledge is that what arrived in theAmericas in the late fifteenth century was not only an economic system of capital and

labor for the production of commodities to be sold for a profit in the world market. This was acrucial part of, but was not the sole element in, the entangled package.What arrived in the Americas was a broader andwider entangled power structure that an economic reductionist perspective of the world-system is unable to account for. From the structural location of an indigenous woman inthe Americas what arrived was a more complex world-system than what political-economy paradigms and world-system analysis portrait. AEuropean/capitalist/military/christian/patriarchal/white/heterosexual/male arrived inthe Americas and established simultaneously in time and space several entangled globalhierarchiesthat for purposes of clarity in this exposition I will list below as if they were separate from each other: a particular global class formation where a diversityof forms of labor (slavery, semi-serfdom, wage labor, petty-commodity production, etc.) are going to co-exist and be organized by capital as a source of production of surplus

value through the selling of commodities for a profit in the world market; an international division of labor of core and periphery where capital organized labor in the peripheryaround coerced and authoritarian forms (Wallerstein 1974); an inter-state system of politico-military organizations controlled by European males and institutionalized incolonial administrations (Wallerstein 1979); a global racial/ethnic hierarchy that privileges European people over non-European people (Quijano 1993, 2000); a global genderhierarchy that privileges males over females and European patriarchy over other forms of gender relations (Spivak 1988, Enloe 1990); a sexual hierarchy that privileges

heterosexuals over homosexuals and lesbians (it is important to remember that most indigenous peoples in the Americas did not consider sexuality among males a pathologicalbehavior and has no homophobic ideology); a spiritual hierarchy that privileges Christians over non-Christian/non-Western spiritualities institutionalized in the globalization ofthe Christian (Catholic and later Protestant) church; an epistemic hierarchy that privileges Western knowledge and cosmology over non-Western knowledge and cosmologies,and institutionalized in the global university system (Mignolo 1995, 2000, Quijano 1991). a linguistic hierarchy between European languages and non-European languages thatprivileges communication and knowledge/theoretical production in the former and subalternize the latter as sole producers of folklore or culture but not of knowledge/theory

(Mignolo 2000). It is not an accident that the conceptualization of the world-system, from decolonialperspectives of the South will question its traditional conceptualizations produced bythinkers from the North. Following Peruvian Sociologist, Anbal Quijano (1991), (1998), (2000),we could conceptualize thepresent world-system as a historical-structural heterogeneous totality witha specific power matrixthat he calls a colonial power matrix(patrn de poder colonial). This matrix affects all dimensions of social existence such as sexuality, authority,subjectivity and labor (Quijano 2000). The sixteenth century initiates a new global colonial power matrix that by the late nineteenth century came to cover the whole planet.Taking a step further from Quijano, I conceptualize the coloniality of power as an entanglement or, to use US Third World Feminist concept, intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989,Fregoso 2003) of multiple and heterogeneous global hierarchies (heterarchies) of sexual, political, epistemic, economic, spiritual,linguistic and racial forms of domination and

exploitation where the racial/ethnic hierarchy of the European/non-European divide transversally reconfigures all of the other global power structures.What is newin the coloniality of power perspective is how the idea of race and racism becomes the

organizing principle that structures all of the multiple hierarchies of the world-system(Quijano 1993). For example, the different forms of labor that are articulated to capitalist accumulation at a world-scale are assigned according to this racial hierarchy; coercive(or cheap) labor is done by non-European people in the periphery and free wage labor in the core. The global gender hierarchy is also affected by race: contrary to pre-Europeanpatriarchies where all women were inferior to all men, in the new colonial power matrix some women (of European origin) have a higher status and access to resources thansome men (of non-European origin). The idea of race organizes the world's population into a hierarchical order of superior and inferior people that becomes an organizing

principle of the international division of labor and of the global patriarchal system. Contrary to the Eurocentric perspective, race,gender, sexuality, spirituality, and epistemology are not additive elements to theeconomic and political structures of the capitalist world-system, but an integral,entangled and constitutive part of the broad entangled packagecalled the European modern/colonialcapitalist/patriarchal world-system (Grosfoguel 2002). European patriarchy and European notions of sexuality,


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epistemology and spirituality were exported to the rest of the world through colonialexpansion as the hegemonic criteria to racialize, classify and pathologize the rest of theworld's population in a hierarchy of superior and inferior races. This conceptualization

has enormous implications that I can only briefly mention here:The old Eurocentric idea that

societies develop at the level of the nation-state in terms of a linear evolution of modes

of production from pre-capitalist to capitalist is overcome . We are all encompassed within a capitalist world-

system that articulates different forms of labor according to the racial classification of the world's population (Quijano 2000, Grosfoguel 2002). The old Marxistparadigm of infrastructure and superstructure is replaced by a historical-heterogeneousstructure(Quijano 2000), or a heterarchy (Kontopoulos 1993), that is, an entangled articulation of multiplehierarchies, in which subjectivity and the social imaginary is not derivative butconstitutive of the structures of the world-system(Grosfoguel 2002). In this conceptualization, race and racism are notsuperstructural or instrumental to an overarching logic of capitalist accumulation; they are constitutive of capitalist accumulation at a world-scale. The colonial power matrix isan organizing principle involving exploitation and domination exercised in multiple dimensions of social life, from economic, sexual, or gender relations, to politic al

organizations, structures of knowledge, state institutions, and households (Quijano 2000). The old division between culture andpolitical-economy as expressed in post-colonial studies and political-economyapproaches is overcome(Grosfoguel 2002). Post-colonial studies conceptualize the capitalist world-system as being constituted primarily by culture,

while political-economy place the primary determination on economic relations.In the coloniality of power approach, what

comes first, culture or the economy, is a false dilemma, a chicken-egg dilemma that obscure the complexity of thecapitalist world-system (Grosfoguel 2002). Coloniality is not equivalent to c olonialism. It is not derivative from, or antecedent to, modernity. Coloniality and modernityconstitute two sides of a single coin. The same way as the European industrial revolution was achieved on the shoulders of the coerced forms of labor in the periphery, the newidentities, rights, laws, and institutions of modernity such as nation-states, citizenship and democracy were formed in a process of colonial interaction with, anddomination/exploitation of, non-Western people. To call capitalist the present world-system is, to say the least, misleading. Given the hegemonic Eurocentric common sense,the moment we use the word capitalism people immediately think that we are talking about the economy. However, capitalism is only one of the multiple entangledconstellations of colonial power matrix of the European modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system. It is an important one, but not the sole one. Given its

entanglement with other power relations, destroying the capitalist aspects of the world-system would not be enough to destroy the present world-system. Totransform this world-system it is crucial to destroy the historical-structuralheterogenous totality called the colonial power matrix of the world-system. Anti-capitalistdecolonization and liberationcannot be reduced to only one dimension of social life. Itrequires a broadertransformation of the sexual, gender, spiritual, epistemic, economic, political, linguisticand racial hierarchies of the modern/colonial world-system. The coloniality of powerperspective challenges us to think about social change and social transformation in a

non-reductionist way.


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This theory about 'passive revolution' - the view linking the rise offascism to the lackof a bourgeois revolution, and consequently a 'weak' national bourgeoisie and bourgeoisdemocracy, and the absence of a peasant'voice' in national politics - is wrong on anumber of counts. First,as has been argued in the preceding section, not only were peasants not excluded fromnationalism but they were projected by those on the political right as the very

embodiment of the nation itself.

Second, it is a theory which decouples capitalismfrom fascism, and thus exonerates the former from any blame for the latter: if fascismwas a feudal reaction against capitalism, then capitalism is recast as an innatelyprogressive systemic form.115 This idea, as Trotsky, showed throughout the 1930s, is nonsense: fascism was a specifically capitalist reactionagainst the working class, and thus unconnected with feudalism. The latter critique notwithstanding, it was ideas about 'passiverevolution' (fascism = feudal reaction) which lay behind the disastrous policy ofthe Popular Front, or agency which represents the epitome of 'subaltern resistance'.

Discourse is key to reshape the representations and challenge theAffirmatives instruments of powerCrow 10 - Department of Hispanic, Portuguese andLatin AmericanStudies at the University of Bristol (Joanna,Introduction: Intellectuals, Indigenous Ethnicity and the State in Latin America, 8/28/10, Latin Americanand

Caribbean Ethnic Studies Volume 5 Issue 2,www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17442221003787068#.UfwgaW15Oks)//BZ

Finally, one of the principal themes connectingall of the articles and indeed allof the discussionpointsabove, either explicitly or implicitly, is power. As Andermann and Rowe proposed in their recent

book on state iconography in the Southern Cone, there is a challenge tothink about images notsolely as representations of cultural history,but as depositories and instruments ofpower (2005, p. 3). Images matter: they are inherently political andthey tell usa great dealabout social relations.As stated at the beginning of this introduction, assumptions aboutindigenous ethnicitywhich contribute towards the creation of images, or are based on theimagesone is confronted withaffect the way that indigenous people are treated. Andermannand Rowe concentrate on the images created and propagated by the state, but intellectuals too have acritical role to play.Intellectuals As Wade has remarked, the concepts of race and ethnicity are part of anenterprise of knowledge (1997, p. 6), and knowledge is intimately related to power.As producers ofknowledgeand, in our case, enunciators of indigenous ethnicity, intellectuals are importantarbiters of power. Their discoursesand images of indigeneity may function as part of, innegotiation with, or in opposition to, the dominant representation regime, or indeed entirelyoutside the sphere of state authorities, although the latter is rare. All the intellectuals considered in this

volume have sought to lead processes of discursive transformation (like Florencia Mallon's [1995]localintellectuals inPeasant and Nation) and to influence the organization of the society in which they live.Beyond thisand the fact that most of the contributors use intellectual in the broader Gramscian sense ofthe termit becomes rather difficult to summarize them. Indeed, what stands out most clearly is the greatdiversity of intellectuality being discussed.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17442221003787068#CIT0007http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17442221003787068#CIT0007http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17442221003787068#CIT0007http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17442221003787068#CIT0007


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Link West is Evil

Critiques of Western imperialism are self-defeating they reify Westernnorms and domination over marginalized cultures by simply trying to

situate non-Western knowledge into an Western epistemic framework**Jenko, Professor PolSci National University of Singapore, 11(Leigh, Fall, Recentering PoliticalTheory: The Promise of Mobile Locality Cultural Critique, Vol 79, ProjectMuse)//JAG

Destabilizing the Local In claiming to offer a distinct approach to cross-cultural engagement thattakes historically marginalized(often coded as non-Western) traditions seriouslyas sources of theory production,my callto recenter theory implicitly criticizes existing alternatives for stopping short of this moreradical goal. In much scholarly literature on cross-cultural theorizing, solutions to the problem of Eurocentrismaim primarily to draw attention to the limits and contingency of those mastersignifiers inscribed within and by dominant(often coded as Western or Europeanized) social scientific andhumanistic discourse(e.g., Euben 2006). Thiseffort, pioneered and articulated by postcolonial studies, defines Eurocentrismas the projection of the West and its disciplinary categories as a universal measure of knowledge against which all other life -worlds or cultures must be compared (Prakash, 1475 n.1; Chakrabarty, 29, 43). Confronting Eurocentrism so understood

thus entails recognizing the closures, contingencies, and silences enacted withinEuropeanized discourse as its local categories become inscribed as universal ones. This kindof critical work seeks its basis not without but within the fissures of dominant structures (Prakash, 148687). It thus aims more to mitigate what FredDallmayr calls the bland universalism accompanying colonialism and first-world capital flows (1996, 99), than to engage foreign discourses as

potential outside replacements for the problematic categories of Europeanized knowledge. Preciselybecause this confrontationwith Eurocentrism aims at its fissures rather than its alternatives, the critical stancethat undermines the certainty of Europeanized categoriesand so enables the entry of more cosmopolitanrenderings of human life-worldsalso returns the theorist to the very audience and discourse whoseterms originally prompted the critique. Although addressing Eurocentrism on one level,

it reconstitutes it on another: the analysis chastens Europeanized categories only

insofar as it continues to inhabit them(Jenco). Those theorists who explicitly urge theinclusion of non-Western voices[End Page 30] in our debates about political life, including politicalphilosophers such as Charles Taylor as well as comparative theorists such as Roxanne Euben, ground this move in anunderstanding of knowledge as local and rooted. In contrast to an older cosmopolitanism that promotedindiscriminate tolerance or rootless eclecticism, this new cosmopolitanism is characterized by itsresistance to imperializing universalism, on the one hand, and its unwillingness to sacrifice the rootedness of individualpersons within their particular cultural backgrounds, on the other (Malcomson, 233 35). In this way they can resist both functionalist equivalences anduniversalizing ambitionsArchimedian vantage points that transform localized insight into general, universal knowledgeand instead seek a newspace for communication across cultural differences (Benhabib; Euben 1999). Many culturally sensitive political thinkers analogize this cosmopolitannegotiation of rooted selves to a conversation that takes place between differently situated interlocutors to encourage mutual transformation whetherin the form of convergence, as for Bikhu Parekh and Charles Taylor (1999), or of accommodation without strict consensus, for James Tully and Fred

Dallmayr (1996). Charles Taylor calls what emerges a language of perspicuous contrast, in which rather than imposing ourterms on them we formulateboth their way of life and ours as alternative possibilitiesin relation to human constraints at work in both (1985, 125). Hans-Georg Gadamer and those comparative politicaltheorists influenced by him such as Fred Dallmayr invoke a similar process that encourages a fusion of horizons. These dialogic,

supposedly mutually transformative encounters are conducted as often between texts asbetween people, and mean to facilitate mutual sympathy, grounded in the credibility ofdifferently situated ways of life, as a means of combating universalist hegemony andhierarchical power relations(Dallmayr 2004; Euben 1999, 13). The dialogic approach further develops the postcolonial articulationof Eurocentrism by showing how critique can flow from both cultural locales without asserting the singular dominance that characterizes more

homogenizing approaches. There are problems with this position, however, despite its important rolein correcting imperializing narratives fueled by unreflective, often Western-centricuniversalism. Pratap Mehta, speaking of the cosmopolitan viewpoint that underlies these and other approaches to [End Page 31] cultural


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difference in political theory, has insightfully pointed out that its hermeneutic potential is greater than itstransgressive possibilities (633). That is, the encounter with otherness has enhanced theinterpretive richness of our self-reflections by making us ever more aware of the silencesand contingency of our own sources of knowledge. But it has ignored possibilities forfundamental transformations in knowledge production prompted not only by the

inclusion of cases and voices that our own theories marginalize, but also from shifts inthe very audience, language, and resources assumed in the production of intellectualwork. Roxanne Eubens analysis of Muslim and Western travelers in search of knowledge, for example, gathers Muslim perspectivesnot to setpolitical theory on a new track addressed to Muslim audiences disciplined by their terms of debate, but to make a tripartite argument notablyindependent of any particular Muslim viewpoint: that the association of travel and the pursuit of knowledge is not confined to any particular culturalconstellation or epoch; that knowledge about what is familiar and unfamiliar is produced comparatively, and finally that the course and

consequences of exposures to the unfamiliar are unpredictable (2006, 1516). Farah Godrejs plea for including non-Western perspectives within a cosmopolitan political theory, similarly, does not expect toadvance political theory along non-Western lines so much as enhance the disciplinescapacity for self-reflection. She recommends an immersive interpretive understanding of texts situated in non-Western culturalframes to thereby disturb ordislocate our familiar understandings of politics, working from the assumption that the very movement of [a] Westernreader within the Western tradition of political theory . . . may allow her to find familiarity in these [Western] texts th at eludes her in the encounter

with a non-Western text (138, 139). Godrej and Euben are representative, but certainly not exhaustive, of how the attempt to unmaskWestern universalistic ambitions through localizing or rooting knowledge in culturallyspecific contexts ends up effacing the ability of historically excluded traditions ordebates to discipline our own inquiry. Despite the fact that these theoristsall recognizesuchothers astheory-producing, self-reflective beingshence their inclusion within political theory and philosophytheyparadoxically prohibit the often long-standing strains of[End Page 32] thought that lay behindtheir claims from displacing the very debates or categories in Western thoughtrecognized to be problematic. Rather, frameworks of comparison confine theoretical claimsto their communities of origin, resulting in the paradoxical insistence by cross-culturaltheorists that any project of inclusion cannot transcend its own origins in EuropeanEnlightenment thought. This is not only for the reason that European thought dominates global knowledge production a keymotivation for postcolonial theorists, whose project turns in large part on exposing the aporia of Western modernity in global settings but because

the individual Western researcher is assumed to be rooted in her local, Europeanized

categories to such an extent that his or her understanding of non-Western ideas ispermanently constrained. Indeed, this embeddedness isseen by many, including Charles Taylor, as theconstitutive problem of learning across cultures(1985, 13031; Godrej, 158, 159), on the assumptionthat the only other alternative would be a view from nowhere that reinforces existingpower relations by according the status quo a claim to neutrality(Euben 2006, 27). The startingassumption of these analyses is revealed to be precisely that we cannot transcend our ownsituated particularity radically enough to do more than, in Eubens words, negotiate theseother particulars, as we disclose commonalities in the cros s-cultural production of knowledge (45). As Anglophone political theorists,we are situated always-already within the putative tradition that constitutes politicaltheory, and always-already outside of any other possibilities.


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Link Postmodernism

Postmodernist lens skews our view of Latin AmericaSanchez and Pita 99, Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature at UC San Diego,Lecturer at UC San Diego, respectively (Rosaura, Beatrice, Mapping Cultural/Political Debates in Latin

American Studies, Cultural Studies, Volume 13:2, Pgs. 290-318, Taylor and Francis Online) ECWhat is purportedly a characteristic postmodernist feature, as previouslyindicated, isthe tendency to see everything as fragmented, heterogeneous,ephemeral andcontingent (Harvey, 1989: 285). Given the rejection of foundationalismandessentialism, there is a tendency to see everything as at and toreject not only deepstructures but the very notion of the subject. Little if anyroom is left for a notion of history, only nostalgia, pastiches of the past,expressed throughrepresentations of representations or, what is perhaps morethe case, there is now an inability to distinguish simulacra from the real.This isso since it is assumedthat there are no longer any originals, only copies, endlessreplication in an image-producing society in which cultural production becomescentral precisely because of itsquality of self-consuming artefacts and its creationof a market eager to consume moreand more products. The rei cation of thesign, the multiplicity or cannibalization of styles, the loss of boundaries betweenthe elite and popular, the notion of multiple identities orpositionalities, theabstraction of space, all are described as postmodernist traits (Harvey, 1989:284307; Jameson, 1988a: 18), along with political notions of pluralism andradical democracy, that entail alonging for collectivity and groupuscules. Theseare all cast together ahistorically by privileged fractions, who fancy, for example,that inclusion of minority or Third World literature within their literary canon

is a great equalizer, and that insertion of Third World cultural products withintheir markets makes them postmodernist.Of all of these features, only a selectfew could be said to characterize LatinAmerican cultural production, for thereundeniably remains today in LatinAmerica a modernist structure of feeling.This stage of modernityproduced byincomplete modernization,with all its incongruities and ruptures, accounts forLatin Americas still modernist (and not modernista) literature with an emphasison the divided self, an anguished

subject, a fragmented structure marked byambiguity and complexity, simultaneous time spaces, an elitist concept of art(despite allegations to the contrary),all qualities presentin modernism that haveall too often also been linked to postmodernism(Harvey, 1989: 273; Jameson,1991:666; Perloff, 1992: 158). Postmodernism cannot, as a result, be seen tobe anything other than a fuzzy concept; at best it is an ideological eld markedby overlapping and slippages of meaning. Perhaps forthis reason and citing theheterogeneous local forms produced within and sometimes against its logic,Cols, for example, takes issue with postmodernism and nds it an unsatisfactorilyhomogenizing

term (Cols, 1992: 267). It is, as we have previously indicated,and as even a cursory glance at the literature will demonstrate, a lax term,used at times to describe anything and everything. Theutilization of the label postmodernism is furthermore increasinglyunsettling as onesees minority literature in the US and Third World literaturein general grasped and inserted within the network of culturalcommodity circulationand classi ed as postmodernist examples of difference. In a timespacedimension where it is the thing to be ethnic and different,First World criticssometimes forget to examine the Third World cultural work within a peripheralcontext, eviscerating the text in the process. Menchs testimonial againserves as a good example in this regard, although equally as good, althoughlessin vogue, perhaps because her class interests are less palatable (to proponents ofnew social movements, for example) is that of Domitila Barrios de Chungara (LetMe Speak!) (1978).Yet if wefurther examine the Mench text,we are struck notonly by its mediated format, its arrangement according to the anthropologistsquestions and scheme, but alsoby its historicity,its call upon collective memory,its discourses ofresistance and social transformation, its concern with the survivalof Quich culture, itsdenunciation of the exploitation of both indigenousand Ladino farm workers and thedispossession of the Indians. Clearly there is nocrisis of historicity here and no absenceof revolutionary discourses. The wayMench and her people feel about themselves andtheir world has little to dowith identity politics in the First World or with theconsciousness of middleclassconsumers in the United States or elsewhere within

this period of postmodernity.Much as critics may attempt to force the work into newrepresentational models and into a framework of pluralism and difference, itclearlyresults in an uncomfortable t.The dimension of class and political/economicdisparity is still paramount in Menchs testimonial, and the alliances thatMench seesdeveloping with labour unions, students, peasants and a variety ofIndian groups are not modelled after the alliance politics theorized in advancedcountries but are instead a continuation of alliances forgedwithin and as a resultof both colonial and capitalist development.


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Postmodernism does not accurately depict the state of Latin AmericaSanchez and Pita 99, Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature at UC San Diego,Lecturer at UC San Diego, respectively (Rosaura, Beatrice, Mapping Cultural/Political Debates in Latin

American Studies, Cultural Studies, Volume 13:2, Pgs. 290-318, Taylor and Francis Online) ECThat the goal of hegemony is the absorption and recon guration of dissent doesnotimply that this is a fait accompli in Latin America todaynor, we would hold,does it imply that all

Latin American cultural production or lived experiencecan be reductively classi edas postmodernist. Alongside an informal sector oflabour practices, there are coexisting modes of culturalproduction, subordinatedpractices and counter-practices that need to be mapped out. It is in this regardthat most theoreticalwriting on newly developing countries is in effect caughtin a transcultural double-bind, constantly having to straddle the general and theparticular, the global and the local.The concept of postmodernism isin fact a pre-eminent example of this engagementwith categories that con gure both consent and dissent and shape identityand difference in Latin American theoretical writing, even as theorists endeavourto create a sense of themselves as separate and distinct from the centre, albeit tiedto a global economic system.Tracing the emergence and proliferation of the termsof these debates during the decade of the

1980s and early 1990s are a plethora ofpublications, including several dealing speci cally with Latin America.6At thecore of the problematicdeployment of the term postmodernism, and its attendantcorollaries, one nds, forthe most part, a collapsing of differences betweenthe postmodern period of capitalism,postmodernity, and postmodernism and, secondarily,we would venture to say, in somecases at least, an eagerness to t culturalpractices of Latin America within schemataborn in and authorized by the FirstWorld. The problem of inclusion and exclusion, as

well as frame of reference, is

clearly central to any engagement with these theoreticalcategories.

Postmodern scholars study Latin America through a structuralistperspectiveBrass, Tom (Social and Poltical Sciences Faculty at the University of Cambridge, On which side of the

barricade? Subaltern Resistance in Latin America and Elsewhere, The Journal of Peasant Studies)

9/8/10, http:/ldx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150412331311109More important than this, however, is the fact that the postmodernepistemology of the Subaltern Studiesproject is rooted in structuralism, whichin tum informed the reactionary linguistic/cultural tum of the 'New philosophers' in France,

who emerged in the mid-1970s and in tum refigured the political right."' The rightwards political trajectory of the few Philosophers', for the most part ex-Maoists whoparticipated in the ay events of 1968, is linked invariably and simply to a disillusion which sulted from the chronicling by Solzhenitsyn of prison life in the Soviet gulag, a

discovery which permitted them tu affix the institution of the concentration camp - associated hitherto solely

with fascism - firmly ithin a Marxist lineage, and thus to condemn socialism asirretrievablyinted (Marxism = the State = the Gulag).'" However, it is equally clear on the views expressed at that conjuncture by Jean-Marie Benoist, one of e'New Philosophers', that their political roots go much deeper, and are to e found in an espousal of structuralism/{postmodernism), and thus also in e theoretical objections of

such theory to Marxism. His structuralist argument is symptomatic, and anticipates all the classicoppositions of postmodem theory: on the one hand, a facile dismissiveness ofeurocentrism' coupled with an antagonism towards Marxism, historical materialism,science, development and history, and on the other anendorsement of Heidegger,Neitzsche, an innate concept of difference!'otherness', aporia and thelingnistic/cultural tum.""


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Link Postcolonialism

Postcolonial epistemology relies on assumptions about Latin Americanculture- blurs the line between fact and fiction, ruins our ability to

understand the struggle of the impoverished in Latin America and createsan imbalance of powerBrass, Tom (Social and Poltical Sciences Faculty at the University of Cambridge, On which side of the


9/8/10, http:/ldx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150412331311109Beverley attempts to get round this problem by invoking two forms ofPostmodern aporia (narrative hybridity, subaltern

unknowability). Accordingly, much of his analysis is devoted to the conceptual habilitation oftestimonio, or 'narrative ... told in the first person by a narrator who is also a realprotagonist or witness of the events he or she counts',as he applied it originally to Rigoberta MenchU, anicon of Latin merican subaltern 'otherness'." On discovering that hers was not stimonio in the sense he had defined it, however,

Beverley reverses its eaning: testimonio, he announces, no longer has to consist of a first-hand witnessaccount but can now involve 'a kind of narrative hybridity'." In there words, it is composed of a mixture of truthand non-truth.There is no merit to this kind of inflation: how long beforeone is told thattestimonio imposed entirely of falsehoods is still acceptable as testimonio?Perhaps such amoment will also mark the annexation by literary studies of social cience and history, aprocess whereby all fact finally becomes its 'other', fiction, and the litersry critic isaccordingly installed as the only true subject of struggle, which he himself constitutes inthe realm of literature, the fictional but nevertheless only 'real' world'."A second fom1 ofpostmodern aporia involves the claim that, as the subaltern is unknowable, he/she cannot be represented, in effect not onlyabolishing the intellectual accessibility of peasants and labourers but converting theminto the mysterious 'other' of conservative discourse.hose such as Spivak and Kristeva link the'unrepresentability' of subaltern ulture to the 'unknowability' of the subaltern him/herself: a subject thus efined cannot be

represented by someone 'other' (= intellectuals) than im/herself, a view that verges on the solipsistic."A consequence ofristine subaltern 'otherness' being both unknowable and intellectually accessible,

moreover, is that it is unalterable. Just such an epistemologyis voked by conservatives who clainl that, asthe subaltern likes the way he/she is, and feels empowered by his/her culture (of which the economic is erely a part), consequently

no one- and especially not intellectuals on the ft - should presume to advise bim/her otherwise. This of course leaves powerand control in the hands of the bourgeoisie,since according to thisind of argument it is impermissible for anintellectoal even to put to a ubaltern a non-subaltern idea: because the subaltern is unknowable, the atore of the subaltern andtherefore of its 'other' cannot even be posed. ven if it could, intellectuals are disbarred from this, because to do so is to privilege anon-subaltern discourse.

Postcolonial research of Latin American culture is done through a capitalistscope- leads to exclusion of important viewpoints and culturesBrass, Tom (Social and Poltical Sciences Faculty at the University of Cambridge, On which side of the


9/8/10, http:/ldx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150412331311109Many examples from Latin America, North America and elsewhere confirm that mass culture is as much a 'from above' as a 'from below' product, a pointunderlined by the depoliticization \repoliticization of much current popular culture.The caseof Disney comics demonstrates both the longevity of and the extent to which 'popular cultore' is formed not 'from below' butrather 'from above', and also how the reproduction of the agrarian myth is a centralaspect of this process, resulting in the formation of what amounts to falseconsciousness." Control exercised 'from above' over what precisely constitutes the 'from below' agenda of 'popular culture',together with its reproduction, has always been a politicalobjective pursued globally both by imperialstates and by multinational corporations. There is accordingly a remarkable overlap between what are u sually represented as being


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politically divergent processes: on the one hand, the 'natural' identity which both postmodern theory and the subaltern studies project currently insist is culturally empoweringfor those at the rural grassroots; and on the other, the similarly 'innate'/'authentic'/non-ratioual yet palpably disempowering - form of consciousness which capital has

attempted historically to create/reproduce 'from above' for its own economic and political ends. As even commentators sympathetic topost-colonial studies themselvesadmit, the burgeoning 'alterity' industry in theacademy is based on complicity: namely, between local oppositional discourses andcapitalism itself, an arrangement whereby the latter commodities the 'marginality' of the

former as 'cultural difference'. In the course of being processed as an ideological commodity, therefore

, 'non-Western'identity is rendered'exotic' (= 'other'), and literary representations of this exoticism areconsumed within Western capitalism as one more product. Nor should the role within metropolitan capitalistcontexts of travel writing - a widely read genre and hugely influential form of 'popular culture' - in reproducing the agrarian myth about rural populations in the so-called Third

World be underestimated." To claim, as Beverley does, that all one has to do in such cases is to 'resubalterni2e' the issue is to avoid this question, not to answer it. Not the least

of the difficulties is that 'resuhalternization' will amount in the majority of instances merely to thediscursive reinstatement of nationalism, and with it the enduring historical oppositionbetween a stereotypically pristine national identity on the one hand and an allembracing imperialism on the other.In other words, agency licensing struggle not between classes but between nations, and within thelatter between ethnicities.


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Link Area Studies

United States based research reinforces our flawed epistemologyCastro-Gomez 98a philosopher known for his work on colonial legacies herd in Colombia, He studied philosophy atSt. Thomas

University in Bogota, where he was a pupil of faculty members of theGroup of Bogot (Philosophy) , maindistributors in Colombia for theLatin American Philosophy . He then traveled to Germany where he graduated inphilosophy at theUniversity of Tbingen and later a doctorate in theJohann Wolfgang Goethe University inFrankfurt. On his return to Colombia was a professor atPontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota and ThinkingInstitute investigator. (Santiago, Latin American postcolonial theories, PeaceReview: A Journal of Social Justice,10:1, 27-33, http:l/dx.doi.org/10.1080/10402659808426118)

In the early 1990s, thinkersin the United States like Walter Mignolo, John Beverley, AlbertoMoreiras, Ileana Rodriguez, and Norma Alarconbegan to reflect upon the political function ofLatin American studies in the North American university and society. They adoptedIndian criticism and established a postcolonial restoration aptly named "Latin AmericanStudies." According to the aforementioned authors, "Area Studies," and "Latin AmericanStudies" in particular, h

Area Studies K - Michigan7 2013

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