Crystallization of Power and Epistemological Questioning in Latin America

7/27/2019 Crystallization of Power and Epistemological Questioning in Latin America

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Crystallization of Power and Epistemological Questioning in

Latin America

The idea that a crystallization of universalism, the sedimentation in individual

and collective subjectivities of an artificial particular set of assumptions that,

nonetheless, are taken for granted as the only plausible truth has defined what we call

Latin America since its formation is the central point of the first part of this essay. In

order to understand how could this happen I will try to address the Latin American

coloniality situation as delineated by several key authors (Quijano and Wallerstein,

1992; Mignolo, 2001, 2005); in other words, I will try to portray the specificity and

complexity of the dynamics of colonization and domination that were established in the

territory which today is conceived as Latin America since the event regarded as the

discovery. Dynamics of power and cultural homogenization that not only determined

the character of newly born Latin American Republics, but, I will argue, continue

operating vigorously within the socio-cultural and political conceptual framework of

contemporary Latin American Nations, generating a stagnated thoughtless naturalized

idea of Latin America that prevents the identification of diverse mechanisms of

domination and oppression against native indigenous social groups and afro -

descendent populations throughout the continent.

The main task at the first part of the work would be to use relevant theories and

concepts produced in the Latin America subaltern/postcolonial scenario, such as

Americanity, coloniality of power, interstate power system (Quijano and

Wallerstein, 1992), coloniality/modernity, decolonization (Mignolo, 2001, 2005)


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and de-nationalization (Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, 1995), to present a

de-colonized reading of traditional historicisms and socio-cultural analyses of the new

continent. The process of striking back and deconstructing official histories and the

process of crystallization of oppression within Latin American histories and current

states demands more that the simple erection of another history. It demands the

epistemological analysis of conceptual frameworks, logical operations and tacit

reasonable inferences that compose the way of thinking reality within which many of

us were socialized.

Benedict Andersons Imagined Communities (1983), Naoki Sakais

Translation and Subjectivities (1997) and Dipesh Chakrabartys Provincializing

Europe (2000) presents us an extended set of clarifying epistemological reflections

about the theoretical and conceptual structures that have been constructed as a result of

the popularization, spread and establishment of the sixteenth centurys ideology of

Enlightenment, in the forms of rationalism, historicism, colonialism, republicanism,

nationalism and such regarded as european western or modern conceptual

elaborations (Chakrabarty, 2000). By addressing and offering epistemological analysis

and deconstructions such as Andersons depiction of nationalisms and the collective

processes that permits the imagination of a perennially bounded community,

Chakrabartys theoreticaland epistemological dismantling of traditional historicism or

Sakais analysis of the functioning and dangers of binary representation schemes, these

authors provide important elements to posit and reflect, in depth, about the way in

which most modern subjects conceive and think their countries and their histories in

Latin America. This epistemological confrontation is needed in order of articulate ways

to overcome the widely incapacity, within societies outlined by modern conceptual


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frameworks, to think outside a historicist, binary, nationalist and thus colonialist

structures.

Paradoxically, an epistemological questioning of our critical thought towards

Latin American colonial process, contemporary Latin American societies and Nation-

States could lead us, I would argue, to a paralyzing and passive posture about our

possibilities of concrete action and influence upon the power structure we identify and

wish to change. A humble and pragmatic analysis is then needed in order to conceive

strategically effective political actions that would allow practical palpable advances not

only in the concrete living conditions of subaltern groups within Latin American States,

but also in the very foundational instances and conceptions of what we call State. I

will close the work with the attempt of envisaging new models of thinking and

structuring what we naturalized as government areneeded in order to gradually set

goals of overcoming the exclusionary character of Latin American States.

Latin America and the socio-cultural crystallization of universalism

In their 1992 important work Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas in the

Modern-World System, Anibal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein stated that

independence crystallized the stateness of the newly born Republics, referring to the

reinforcement of the relation of power between former colonies and metropolis that

subtly took place as result of the Independence struggles in the Americas. (Quijano and

Wallerstein, 1992: 550). By crystallization I, as well as these authors, mean not only

the unquestionable naturalization with which something is tacitly accepted, but also the

strength and structurality that the accepted element in these cases stateness and


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universalismacquire in specific contextsin this case on the newly formed American

Republics.

I choose to talk about crystallization of universalism specifically, as a form of

synthesize in this word which is one of its main characteristics the whole ideology

of rationalism, scientificism, humanism and progress built out of the intellectual, moral

and political movement regarded as enlightenment, which was originated on western

nations of Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (Pagden, 2008: 315-

325) My main argument here is that the putative uniqueness and the supposed universal

validity of this spatially and temporarily particular cosmology have not only been

merely accepted, but crystallized into the invention and essence of Latin America

and later its Republics and Nation-States. The foundational characteristic of the

Americas within a global ideological project and dynamic of power regarded as

modernity determined that its idealization and invention by the elites of key

european countries as well as for the creole elites inside the American nations (Mignolo,

2005) beginning to be imagined (Anderson, 1983), were developed quite zealously,

which resulted in a strong imprint and naturalization of characteristics, values and

methods such as eurocentrism, homogeneous-linear-progressive historicism, rationalism

and racism.

The feeling, beliefs and certainties, commonly found in part of Latin American

populations common sense, in the official dominant media discourses, in the average

humanities programs within primary and secondary school, in political and scientific

agendas, that indeed Latin America is this secular, cohesive, bounded unity; that its

states, social hierarchies, white elites, racism and social inequalities are inherent and

natural elements of their realities; that the european and african descendent populations


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are as natural part of Latin America as the natives that were here; that the native

populations, their culture and own cosmological knowledge are indeed these outsider,

backward remnants of a pre-modern past that should be respected and conserved

while modernity and development must be, tacitly, pursued and achieve; this state of

acceptance and naturalization of all this artificial premises is what I call crystallization

of universalism.

In order to illustrate the automatic natural acceptation of universal values,

hierarchies and binarisms that constitute the individual and collective subjectivities of

Latin America, the following passage, extracted from Suzana Sawyer relate of an

encounter, in Ecuador, between representatives of the state, ARCO, an oil multinational

and OPIP, a native indigenous organization could be of assistance:

By expounding on the glories of liberal thought and using its frameworks to

set the rules of engagement, the ARCO executive implicitly invoked a distinction

between himself and indigenous interlocutors: modern/tribal, global/local,

cosmopolitan/insular. ARCO represented the force of modernity and reason that

would bring progress and democracy to isolated lands. Amazonian Indians

represented tradition and unreason, caught in their own parochial particulars.

(Sawyer, 2004:8).

Although this grassroots organization, as portrayed by the author along the

narrative, is not willing to accept the symbolical invocation that both representatives of

the state and multinational company display of and at them, this implicit and tacit

unbalance between these two partsstate and neo-liberal reason against a devalued and

subsumed subaltern cosmology largely constitutes the broader reality of Latin

American societies.

It is possible to track this characteristic element of Latin Americas countries,

states and social subjectivities through the theoretical model regarded as coloniality of

power or simply coloniality, idealized mainly by the Peruvian sociologist Anibal


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Quijano, although in clear relation of inspiration and contribution with American world-

system analyst and sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein. This theoretical model has also

been adopted and substantially developed by Argentinean semiotician Walter Mignolo.

In my opinion, a fundamental foundational point treated by these authors that would

give us a good starting point to the analysis, is the specificity and extent of the Native

population genocide that took place after the Spanish and Portuguese started settling

their projects of conquering and accumulation in the new continent. According to

Quijando and Wallerstein, the Iberians colonizers, in contrast with the Anglo-Saxons

had heated debates as to whether the 'Indians' were really human and had 'souls', while they

were precisely in the process of conquering and destroying highly advanced Native

American societies. (Quijano and Wallerstein, 1992: 552-553) The Latin American

natives enslavement and almost extermination prevented a possible process of

reconstruction and re-articulation of their own institutions and cosmologies after the

process of colonization, during the construction of the nationalist imaginary, as Quijano and

Wallerstein relate it happen on peripheral zones of Europe such as Poland and Sicily. (Ibid.:

550). On the contrary, according to them, in the Americas:

there was such widespread destruction of the indigenous

populations, especially among hunting and gathering populations, and

such widespread importation of a labour force, that the process of

peripheralization involved less the reconstruction of economic and

political institutions than their construction, virtually ex nihiloeverywhere (except perhaps in the Mexican and Andean zones).

(Ibid.)

Direct consequence of this radical project of colonization is the paving for the

possibility of an extremely Eurocentric and colonial nationalist process. The role of the

national, creole, euro-centered, dominant elite, which at least in Latin American


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processes can be considered the ideological and cosmological inheritor of colonial

power following Quijano and Wallerstein thesis on an interstate power system

(Ibid.) was fundamental since they adopted the European mystifying model of the

nation-state for societies whose foundation remained the colonial stratification between

the European and non-European, and the liberal model of a political system for societies

that were dominated by mercantile-seignoral strata. (Ibid.: 556) As Mignolo puts it

when comparing the Americas colonization process with the Indian one:

The very existence of a Creole elite in the Americas that went through the

process of decolonization from european colonial powers (approximately between1776 and 1831) is one of the crucial differences between coloniality in India and in

the Americas. Decolonization in the Americas was in the hands of Creoles (Anglo,

African, and Iberian), while in India it was in the hands of the indigenous

population. The diverse Creole elite in the Americas reproduced coloniality ofpower in the form of internal colonialism. Contrary to what happen in India, the

indigenous population in the Americas was not in a position to accomplish the type

of collaboration Guha analyzed for the indigenous population in India in

complicity with the officers of the British Empire (240-245). (Mignolo,2001: 439).

The Creole elitesdesire for autonomy and independence, determined by a certain

feeling of singularity and resentfulness towards the metropolis (Anderson, 1983: 52-65),

as well as for the necessity of structuring their own economic project independent of the

stagnated Iberian colonial powersin decay at that moment (Quijano and Wallerstein,

1992: 553, 555), had to idealize ways of conceptualizing and therefore controlling the

native and afro-descendent populations in the nations that were being imagined as a way

of guaranteeing the coercion, hierarchy and immobility of the social structure even after

losing the logistic support of the colonial power. (Anderson, 1983: 48). As consequence

of this conjuncture, two determinant processes to the crystallization, in Latin America,

of the universal value of enlightenments ideological heritage will happen

concomitantly. The first one, Independence, is well known in its illusory characteristic


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and in the new forms in which it will articulate power relations between the former

metropolis and colonies. While some authors elaborate this fictional characteristic of

Latin American processes of independence in a broader global approach, enhancing the

appearance of Neocolonialism, as Robert Young, for whom the system of apparently

autonomous Nation-States is in fact the means through which international capital

exercises imperialist control (Young, 2001: 46); we prefer to emphasize, with

Mignolo, Quijano and others, a viewpoint that would put subalternity and internal

colonialism at the center of the argument: The history of Latin America after

independence is the variegated history of the local elite, willingly or not, embracing

modernity while Indigenous, Afro, and poor Mestizo/a peoples get poorer and more

marginalized. The ideaof Latin America is that sad one of the elites celebrating their

dreams of becoming modern while they slide deeper and deeper into the logic of

coloniality.(Mignolo, 2005: 57-58) Following Mignolo, Independence was not only a

process that re-configured the ways of suppression, exploitation and dependence of

oppressed cosmologies within Latin America, but it was also a deceiving strategy of the

creole elite, who allegedly advocates the good of the people, the subaltern classes,

claiming altruism and self-abnegation instead of a search for class-empowerment.

(Latin American, Subaltern Studies Group, 1995:144).

Suzana Sawyer, on her empirical work within an Ecuadorian native organization

struggling for land titling and self-representation, give us an important account of these

post-independence tensions among the different groups that composeunevenly the

Nation, through the analysis of a national Ecuadorian symbol. After accompanying

the organization in a 250 km march from Pestanzathe organizations partially entitled

land to Quito, the author register and elaborates on a mix moment of contemplation,


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admiration and reflection when 100 representatives of the pilgrim group gaze at The

Discovery of the Amazon, an imposing mosaic that seemed to be welcoming them into

the domains of State by invoking the foundational time and events of discovery and

conquering:

In particular, the mosaic exemplifies a dominant cultural logic whereby one

cannot simultaneously be bothIndian andEcuadorian. Hierarchical binaries between

civilized/savage, modern/traditional, cosmopolitan/tribal, national/indigenous infuse

this origin myth of Ecuador. As a racist saying (Muestre su patria, mate un indio;

Show your patriotism, kill an indio) often heard throughout the 1990s suggests,Indian have little place in the elite notions of the Ecuadorian nation. If they are to

join the process of modernization they must renounce their identities as Indians.

Other than serving as dead markers in history, their existence vanishes from our

nation. (Sawyer, 2004: 35).

The second determinant process to the crystallization of Universalism takes part

during, and mainly after Independence. Within this fundamental moment of transition

and emancipatory illusion, the real dimension of the obscenity of the foundational

colonial genocide is felt and the absence of a heavier presence and pressure of native

populations, cosmologies and organizations allows for the mechanisms of ethnicity and

racism or what Benedict Anderson would call bound seriality to appear as

efficient mechanisms for knowing and controlling populations within the newly born

Latin Nations. (Anderson, 1998; Quijano and Wallerstein, 1992: 550-551). In The

Spectre of Comparisons, Benedict Anderson will propose two types of serialities

bound and unbound through which subjective collectivities, essential to nationalism

purposes, will be shaped and imprinted on social groups. (Anderson, 1998). His bound

seriality correspond to the statistical classification and organization of a population

body into certain conceptualizations and identity categories that seeks, first, to adapt the

political concepts, agendas and programs to these invented essentialisms and, second, to

make subjects and social groups vulnerable and maneuverable through what has


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increasingly been called identity politics (Anderson, 1998: 35-45). This second

assumption converges significantly with the analysis of Ethnicity and Racism we found

in Quijano and Wallerstein text. The authors consider Ethnicity as a creation inherent to

the invention of Americanity and Latin American national states as imagined, singular

and bounded communities (Anderson, 1983: 6-7). Within the political project of the

nationalist creole elites of Latin America, Ethnicity would not only reinforce the

singularityin relation to european former metropolisof the American Nations, but it

would alsoand mainlyoccupy a central space on the creation and maintenance of a

strict, oppressive social hierarchy (Quijano and Wallerstein, 1992: 551).

The social order and collective subjectivities of the Republics and ulterior

contemporary Nation-States, therefore, will be deeply characterized not only by the

natural grouping and categorization of the whole population within ethnicity

frameworks, but also by a fierce racism product of the politicization and

ideologization of this categorization process (Ibid.). The ideology and oppression

mechanism of racism, idealized to maintain and reinforce the artificial, supposedly

insurmountable gap between the west european world-view created during

enlightenment and other world-views existent on America and Africa, has acted

perennially on the shaping of both elite and subaltern collective and individual

subjectivities and constituted itself as one of the most blameworthy inventions of

nationalism. As analyzed genially by Quijano and Wallerstein, the coupling of racism

with currently popular ideologies such as humanism, egalitarianism and universalism,

generates the latter facet of cosmological domination; one strong and tight adjustment

of the crystallization of universalism knot:


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Ethnicity still needed to be buoyed up by racism, but racism now had to take on a

subtler face. Racism took refuge in its seeming opposite, universalism and the derived

concept of meritocracy. It is in the debates of the last 20 years that we find this latest

contribution of Americanity. Given an ethnic hierarchization, an examination system

inevitably favors disproportionately upper ethnic strata. The extra added plus is that a

meritocratic system justifies racist attitudes without the need to verbalize them. (Ibid.)

The advent of Independence, with its characteristic stateness and re-

organization of the strategies of exploitation and dominance, as well as the

establishment of ethnicity and racism as modus operandis of the new States

foundational objectives of categorize, separate, order hierarchically and oppress,

determined the unquestionable naturalization of social and political systems where

native and afro-centered cosmologies were largely excluded from the natural

composition, the temporality and the pursues of the Modern Nation. Naturalization that

has only recently begun to be efficiently questioned and deconstructed through isolated

focus of popular organization and intellectual production.

The need for epistemological deconstruction within Latin American realities

Except for subaltern activist and intellectuals, and a resistant parcel of the

cosmologically oppressed population within the Americas, this scenario of

cosmological dictatorshiphas remained untouched and even thoughtless by most of

the population living in this continent, including a big parcel of these own oppressed

social groups native indigenous, afro-descendents and peasantry. Fortunately, a

variety of scientific and empirical works has been produced among a variety of

subaltern scenarios throughout the world in order to portray and articulate resistance to

what Mignolo refers as the rearticulation of the colon ial matrix of power through neo-

liberal globalization (Mignolo, 2005: 49). While the already largely cited works of


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Quijano and Wallerstein and Mignolo are example of subaltern intellectual efforts to

deconstruct the current scenario of blindness and conformism in Latin America, there is

no better empirical manifesto than the well-known TODAY WE SAY ENOUGH IS

ENOUGH of the Zapatist armys Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle (EZLN,

1995: 311).

However, the questioning and deconstruction of the crystallized character of

power in Latin American contemporary Nation-States is not a simple task, especially

when we take into consideration the epistemological efforts needed to unveil these

oppressive realities. In this sense, I will intend to capitulate, through the theoretical and

epistemological discussions around nationalism, historicismand representation

three conceptual frameworks that not only are present in Latin American States social

and symbolical structures, but that permeates the very way in which most modern

subjects think and experience their realities the extent to which domination and

oppression ideas are incrusted in the way Latin American Nation-States have been

thought; as well as which are the epistemological turns critical thinking and common

sense must undertake in order to erode the naturalized oppressive character of our

societies.

Benedict Andersons theorization around the cultural artifact of nationalism

traces its origins on the structural need for substituting the certainties offered by secular

religions once these eroded during the eighteenth century. (Anderson, 1983: 11) His

conceptualization of nations as limited and sovereign imagined communities that

represent themselves through specific ways of apprehending time, bounded and

unbounded serializations is of singular importance in the extent that permits to visualize


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more accurately important state mechanisms of control and manipulation of social

groups and subjectivities. (Anderson, 1983, 1989)

While Latin American Independence process will produce creole-led mimetic

Nations highly marked by exclusion, racism and internal colonialism, on contemporary

Nation-States the ideology of nationalism continues to be a powerful force that, through

illusions of collective unity and singularity, spatial co-existence and solidarity masks

the power hierarchies, exclusionary processes and population manipulation within

societies. Furthermore, the bounded serialization of society that, according to Anderson,

organizes the population body in measurable categories and classes has been the base

for obscure governmental techniques and the brainwashing ideology of homogeneity,

since this seriality, as put by Partha Chatterjee: can operate only with integers. This

implies that for each category of classification, any individual can count only as one or

zero, never as a fraction, that in turn means that all partial or mixed affiliation to a

category are ruled out. (Chatterjee, 2004: 5-6).

The challenge to think the social and cultural realities in Latin America ou tside

the framework of nationalism is difficult since it has been a basic ideological resource to

think emancipation in the continent. Simn Bolvar, for example, intellectual and Latin

American symbol of the struggle for freedom and liberation nurtured homogenizing

nationalist purposes such as a strong centralized government that could re -educate

popular masses in order to inject them with the spirit of citizenry in the love of country

and law (Skurski, 1996: 379). Similarly, Jos Carlos Mariategui, Peruvian famous

intellectual who advocated insistently for indigenous social revolutions that could truly

insert the Indian in Perus idea of nation for what is considered ahead of his time

(Young, 2001: 198-199), was deeply influenced by the more naive, nationalist,


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teleological conceptions of Marxism. In considering the union, upon the homogenizing

empty idea of people, of more than 40 different Indian groups in Peru (Chirapaq,

2008: Ethno-Linguistic map) and defend their articulation in an indigenous Marxist

revolution (Mariategui, 1991: 47), Mariategui is not only misjudging the effects that

such a distant conceptionin cosmological termsas Marxism could have upon this

specific context, as is also ignoring that even if this indigenous process could be

developed successfully popular nationalist movements contain exclusionary moments

that can easily develop into oppressive official nationalist ideologies when these

movements achieve statehood. (Cheah, 1998: 31)

In order to advance on the unveiling of exclusionary and power mechanisms

within the Americas is mandatory that new intellectual productions overcome the

ideological movement of supporting and equate emancipation with nationalism. The

ideas of de-nationalization and de-territorialization proposed by the Latin American

Subaltern Studies Group, for example, permit to explore new possibilities of spatial and

symbolic social connections that globalization, migration and virtual spaces had made

visible and could erode the coercive forces of Nation-States and strength the existence

of Difference. (Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, 1995: 143).

Deeply defined by universalism, secularism and scientificism as produced within

enlightenment, what Chakrabarty defines as historicism is a specific way of

comprehending time that posit itself as universal and unique. Drawing from Guhas

ideas about the exclusionary oppressive relation between a universal political thought

and what this would consider as a prepolitical thought (Chakrabarty, 2000: 12-13),

Chakrabarty, for who historicism would be the enabling condition of modern historical

consciousness conceptualizes itas the capacity to construct a single historical context


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for everything the capacity to see the past as gone and reified into an object of

investigation(Ibid.: 243). Through this depiction of modern historicism that reveals its

anachronic element of considering time as one and cosmological and cultural

productions of non-modernsocial groups as remnants from an ancient past (Ibid.:

14, 249), Chakrabarty deconstruct the ideas of development/underdevelopment,

modernity, traditional culture, science and others that, tacitly accepted and

naturalized, collaborate to the unquestioned and stagnant cosmological hierarchy of

contemporary Latin American societies.

Historicist approaches and readings of reality in Latin America not only conforms

a-critical common sense, but come as automatic reflexes even to critical thinkers. As an

example we could argue, again on a critical approach to the advantages and solutions

Mariategui saw in socialist revolution among the Indian, that the fact of considering

that the native groups needed an external ideology that would make their organization

and political action possible, is indirectly to devaluate their own organizational capacity

and own ways of resistance, considering them as prepolitical. On the contrary, what

Rabasa and Harvey on their accounts of popular insurgent movements in Mexico come

to show is that subaltern successful political strategies, rather than being defined by

official modern concepts and guidelines, perform exactly what Guha calls the

stretching of the [official] category of the political. (Harvey, 1998: 165; Rabasa, 2001:

202-207) (Chakrabarty, 2000: 12). We can find another example of well intentioned

historicism in Nstor Garcia Canclini, who, when trying to map Latin American hybrid

modernities, fails to identify the traps of historicist discourse by expressing that From

the popular side, we should be less concerned about its becoming extinct than about its

being transformed. Never have there been so many artisans, or popular musicians, or


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such a distribution of folklore, because their products maintain traditional functions

(provide work for indigenous people and peasants) and develop other modern ones

(Canclini, 2005: 5) The clear separation between supposedly traditional and modern

functions to the cultural products and folklore produced by the entities external and

alien to Canclini (their) of artisans and popular musicians may seem dubious as

an evidence of the historicist character of Canclinis discourse. This dubiety disappears,

however, if we assess critically his assumption that the function of craftwork and music

to popular social groups in Latin America are to provide work to indigenous people

and peasants. Canclinis failure to, from a humility position, avoid to interpret,

represent and historicize a popular culture that is definitely different than his own

popular culture, represents in my opinion, an example of what to avoid within the

marshland of subalternity intellectuality.

The reflex of historicizing, specifically, should be avoided first by

acknowledging that to read and interpret practices cosmologically oriented differently

as a survival of an earlier mode of production would inexorably lead us to stagist and

elitist conceptions of history; it would take us back to a historicist framework.

(Chakrabarty, 2000: 14). Then, by understanding the need of deconstructing a linear,

unitarian and progressive way of conceiving time, according to which there would be

space for only one now (Ibid.: 249). In this respect Chakrabarty gives us Guhas

fundamental understanding: His point is that what seemed traditional in this

modernity were traditional only in so far as [their] roots could be traced back to pre-

colonial times, but [they were] by no means archaic in the sense of being outmoded.

(Ibid.: 15). Only then, according to the authors, we could finally be able to re-conceive

time as hetero-temporal and not-one, as the certainty of many actual existences in this


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precise now instead of only remnants possibilities of dead existences that we

contemplate from one actuality:

To critique historicism in all its varieties is to unlearn to think of history as adevelopment process in which that which is possible becomes actual by tending to a

future that is singular. Or, to put it differently, it is not to learn to think the present

the now that we inhabit as we speak as irreducible not-one. To take that step is to

rethink the problem of historical time and to review the relationship between the

possible and the actual. (Chakrabarty, 2000: 249)

One last epistemological approach of fundamental importance to our aim of

addressing critically ways of thought and intelligibility with reality that support and

reinforce domination dynamics in Latin America, is that of representation. Although

this thematic has been treated extensively within philosophical and anthropological

debates, we are interested here on its relevance and pertinence to analyze subaltern and

postcolonial scenarios. In this sense, the discussion established by linguistic Naoki

Sakai around Japan nationalism, language and identity brings important considerations

about the dynamics of representation within established hierarchies and power relations

between what he defines as West universalismand non-West particularisms. (Sakai,

1997: 61,154)

On his deconstructive pursuit about what would be, effectively, a truly Japanese

way of thought, Sakai reaches important conclusions not only about the way in which

nations idealize a performative transition in order to create, within an historicist

progressive and linear conception of time, the illusion of continuity of an homogeneous

bounded collectivity that would be the Japanese (Ibid.: 46). The author also construct

relevant considerations about the dynamics of imagination and co-productionwhat he

defines as schema of cofiguration in which Japan can represent its own image and

identity through its relation to the putative West: By the schema of cofiguration, I want


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to point out the essentially imaginary nature of the comparative framework of Japan

and the West In the desire to want to know Japanese thought, not only Japan but

also the West has to be figured out: Japan and the West have to be configured. (Ibid.:

52). Deeply rooted on language and representation mimetic dynamics, this schema led

him to realize the impossibility of avoiding, either to a supposedly true Japanese

culture, either to any other cultural minority or particularisms, the necessary linkage to

the also imagined modern West at the very moment of identity affirmation and self-

representation. (Ibid.). Furthermore, Sakai concludes that the illusion of

differentiating, far from establish a difference that should be respected , connects and

homogenize in a more subtle epistemological layer. To Sakai an epistemic arrangement

has come into being, according to which to insist on the particularity and autonomy of

Japan is paradoxically to worship the putative ubiquity of the idealized West. (Ibid.:

50)

We can see the relevance of these epistemological reflections to Latin American

realities when we realize, first, the radical nationalist ethos, in contraposition with the

former colonial powers, of the Latin American Nations; and second, the fierceness

which with critical intellectual production and subaltern movements had invariably

been implicated in this form of domination and have had to construct their identities in

the dynamics of assimilation and repulsion against this Occidental ethnocentrism.

(Ibid.: 61). Following Sakai analysis, when groups of non-recognized cosmologies

within Latin American States feel the necessity of, and actually seek self-representation

and identification within the oppressive and determinant conceptual frameworks and

structures of the State rights, citizenship, democracy, equality, etc, they are still

playing within the rules of a fixating oppressing identification by/through the values and


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concepts of a dominant cosmology. A truly resistance and liberation would come, then,

according to Sakai, only with the total avoidance of representation and alien definition:

Above all, resistance here is that which disturbs the possible representational

relationship between the self and its image. It is something that resists the formation of

those identities that subject people to various institutions. (Ibid.: 175). In this sense,

Sakai thesis implies, to native or afro-descendent subject, groups and political

movements within Latin America, a denial of representation that would pass through

the denial of the political, through the avoidance of manifest and claim for self-

representation and recognition, through the deep existential acknowledge of an ultimate

existent reality of freedom of spirit where external oppression and domination would

be only mundane transient illusions.

We might see, after going through these three fundamental epistemological

discussions, how, political strategies and conceptual instruments that has been used in

different moments and histories of subaltern struggles within Latin America, and that

continue to forge insurgent agendas and critical intellectual perspectives nowadays

could actually, either through camouflaging heterogeneous world-views, practices and

temporalities with nationalist homogenizing projects; or by ordering Difference within

temporality in a way to strictly determinate what can rule our modern lives; or lastly

through unconsciously support and reinforce the very chains we wish to shatter;

attaching our efforts for emancipation to the very ideology that oppress. However, are

epistemological radical deconstruction and Sakais conscious and resolute acceptance

plausible options when only few can have access to these approaches and so many live

happy within their daily illusions?


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Even apprehending the authorspositions, I would argue that the ultimate pursuit

for an emancipatory truth that would let us all freealthough has its undeniable value

is not for everybody on the one hand. There must be intellectuals and activists

committed with realistic and pragmatic thinkingalthough always acknowledging their

epistemological limitationsthat would propose and contribute to concrete changes on

power and symbolic social structures, allowing the social live contexts to change and

mutate even that limited and slowly to closer of those emancipatory horizons

glimpsed by more radical theoretical and epistemological productions. On the other

hand, this epistemological deconstructions that envisage an emancipatory truth or at

least an ideal state of social and cultural relationsas we can appreciate in Chakrabarty

and Sakai theories for example brings with it the arrogance and lack of humility that

characterizes science as a modern, enlightened ideological production. This pursuit

for answers and epistemological liescannot become a paralyzing teleological project

revolving perennially inside the walls of academic institutions, plotting comfortably

while subalternity, more than a word is the death, the burden, the injustice and tears of

millions of individuals inhabiting this exact now. Realpeople has to benefit not only

from a supposedly happy end that would emancipate everyone in the blink of an eye,

but from the hole process of looking for this ultimately set of liberating deconstructions.

We must avoid, within subaltern scientific projects of deconstruction and critical

constructive thinking, the arrogant, elitist and plastering teleological practices

characteristic of traditional philosophy, history and social sciences in the way they were

developed within the enlightenment tradition.


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Final Remarks

Due limitations of space and time I wont be able to present fully developed this

third part of the argument, that I sketch at these final remarks as one of many

possibilities of thinking and achieving, politically although not exactly in the strict,

official, modern meaning of the concept concrete advances on the current disputes

for recognition, self-representation and pluri-temporalities within fragmented societies

in Latin America. I believe that acknowledging the epistemological limitations of

subaltern political and intellectual projects could be an important strategic advantage of

struggling within limited coercive frameworks, since those involved already know what

is currently impossible of being achieved, and therefore their projects are zealously

idealized to put others in better positions to achieving it.

Hybridization within State: institutional production of third spaces

Several authors and theoretical groups concerned with the thematic of colonialism

and Postcolonialism, as well as politics, multiculturalism and subalternity within

contemporary societies, have treated the problematic of the conflictive relation between

subaltern, unrepresentable social/political movements with specific claims and

characteristics, and official governmental bodies or States. This primary concern

appears, for example, in Partha Chatterjees Political Society (Chatterje, 2004: 38-41),

Homi Bhabhas political differentiation between cultural difference and cultural

diversity (Rutherford, 1990: 207-209), Jorge Rabasas accounts on political

agreements between the Mexican State and the insurgent city of Tepoztln, (Rabasa,

2001: 206-208) and in the founding statement of the Latin American Subalter Studies

Group when is stated that:


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The subaltern, in other words, is not only acted on, despite the tendencies in

tradicional paradigms to see it as a passive or absent subject that can be mobilized

only from above; it also actsto produce social effects that are visible, if not always

predictable or understandable, by these paradigms or the state policies and research

projects they authorize. (Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, 1995: 137)

Basically these relates and theorizations converge not only to the conflictive

antagonist essence of the matter, but also to the fundamental agency of subaltern social

groups and organizations in the process and specially to the transformation the realm of

politics, the traditional structure and modus operandis of the State must undertake in

order to comport this new demands. Within this context it seems reasonable to suppose

that new key political actors, from both sides of this new configuration, not only will

emerge, as could possibly occupy key roles and develop significant functions within

governments.

In this sense, drawing from and analyzing on three different models of subjective

and collective hybridization: the one suffered by diasporic black subjects, portrayed by

Fanon and Du Bois; Bhabhas idea of hybridity as a third space formed of

incommensurable cultural codes intelligible due their symbol-forming activity

(Rutherford, 1990: 210); and Chatterjees theory of cultural resistance and corruption of

modernity by a national culture divided in inner/outer or material/spiritual spheres

(Chatterjee, 1993: 6), I would try to address how hybrid individualities and social

groups could, when obtaining political spaces and legitimacy within a specific political

body, bring hybridization, hetero-temporality and otherness into the state, corrupting

it from within and enabling, gradually, institutional third spaces.


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Documents

Crystallization of Power and Epistemological Questioning in Latin America