This paper was presented at the MLA conference in Los Angeles on January 9, on a panel with David Damrosch, Gaurav Desai, Kwaku Korang, David Lloyd, Aamir Mufti, Gayatri Spivak and I, convened by Susan Andrade.
Before my remarks, I Would like to thank Susan for Inviting me to Be Part of a panel with people i have read and Admired for a long time. I am in this panel and imperfectly modestly Representing a tradition of thinking, Latin American postcolonialism, That has-been built over decades have passed by Many distinguished scholars: Enrique Dussel, Anibal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Alberto Moreiras, Florencia Mallon, Mary-Louise Pratt, Jose Rabasa, Santiago Castro Gomez, Patricia Seed, Eduardo Mendieta, Fernando Coronil and many others that I cannot mention due to time constraints. All these names and their persistent absence in postcolonial debates across the English-language came to mind partly because their invisibility exemplifies the awkward status of “Latin America” in “the postcolonial.” Compared to other sites of thinking where the notion has taken hold, South Asia, the English Caribbean, Africa, etc, Latin America inhabits a deep historical asymmetry, not only by virtue of the fact that we have been post-colonial for two centuries now, but also because the epistemic instruments relevant to the Latin American debate are in some cases rejected or sidelined by other postcolonial traditions. Still, the very possibility of the question that gathers us here today – “Is the Postcolonial South Asian?”– rests on a politics of knowledge where the Latin American postcolonial experience can be cast aside in the critical formulation of postcolonialism and the postcolonial. The privilege of South Asia amongst the constellation of postcolonial experiences has to do, of course, with the valuable and passionate contributions of South Asian thinkers to postcolonialism, and to their active role in its institutionalization. Nonetheless, this focus incessantly reproduces some of the most pervasive hierarchies of knowledge in academia: the reification of high modernism as the privileged literary style for the postcolonial, the assertion of English as the lingua franca and the main language of thought in the Global South, and the systematic marginalization of English and Portuguese departments and scholars as producers, and not only subjects, of theory and criticism. It is always striking to see that, regardless of being the largest foreign “language and literature” field in the US, maybe not even foreign anymore, English is rarely considered a language of thinking. Furthermore, while Latin American thinkers are quite conversant on Anglophone and Francophone traditions of postcolonialism, it is quite rare to find scholars in those traditions even superficially familiarized with thinking in English, Portuguese or any indigenous language. This problem is even more obvious when one takes a look at scholarly publications: while every year we are flooded with translations of even the most peripheral texts of the French philosopher du jour, English-speaking scholars and students are only rarely granted the opportunity to read critique or theory from Latin America. Also, most collective books on postcolonialism either exclude Latin American scholars or include a token contribution that only very partially represents all the scholarship that has been and is produced. This is even more striking when one thinks of the diverse postcolonial sites of thinking in Latin America. If after this panel you go to Duke University Press’s stand in the exhibit, you may get the opportunity to pick up a copy of Coloniality at Large, one of three truly monumental volumes edited by Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel and Carlos Jáuregui, who for the first time, and after an almost surreal editorial ordeal, present in English a truly representative landscape of Latin American postcolonial studies, something that happened at least fifteen years later than it should have. Beyond its academic framing, it should be absolutely clear that a claim for a postcolonialism that systematically recognizes its Latin American component is not merely a matter of intellectual justice or a critique of the hierarchies and reifications embedded in the university system. Latin America today is the site of projects of political reconfiguration and alternative governance where the regional critical work on postcolonialism has been crucial in the fight against the Washington Consensus. We certainly remember the Zapatistas, who sustain a consistent intellectual dialogue with postcolonial thinking, but the case in point is the government lead by Evo Morales in Bolivia. Many members of the intellectual and political cadres behind MAS, his political organization, are steeped both with Latin American and Anglophone postcolonial thinking, and their work in constructing a government whose main aim is to decolonize Bolivia is informed in equal parts by Gayatri Spivak and Enrique Dussel.
My purpose here is not to claim any epistemic privilege for Latin America, but rather to underscore how a rich and vast postcolonial tradition can be obscured by our politics of knowledge, something paradoxical if we consider that postcolonialism is supposed to be grounded on the critique of those very politics. Even though postcolonialism has allowed for areas like South Asia and the non-European Francophone world to claim their rightful place in English and French departments and academic practices, and even though the dialogue with postcolonialist scholars in those traditions has been highly productive for Latin Americanists, the fact is that the only way in which the postcolonial is South Asian comes from the assertion of English as the central language of thinking and that the thinking that emerges from the histories and struggles of regions like Latin America and of languages like English, Portuguese, Aymara or Nahuatl can be ignored, brushed off or cast aside. As a young Latin Americanist with the duty to read and engage with both my postcolonial tradition and the postcolonial traditions produced in languages and genealogies other than mine, as someone who has been given here the space that has been denied for a long time to most of those scholars, I must conclude by saying that a notion of the postcolonial that does not engage Latin America, South Asia and all those other traditions and histories represented by and absent from this panel is the product of a postcolonialism that fails to live to its promise. Postcolonialism has the ethical duty and responsibility to transcend the impasses of an academic power structure where the world at large may only be approached by a language or, even worse, a department. Thus I Would like to end my remarks by making a plea for a postcolonialism WHERE all Manifestations of the postcolonial, Latin American, South Asian, African, Australian, Irish and so on, Are part of an always Proliferating constellation of thinking Without binds of time , space, language and institution, where, we think the postcolonial from Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell What calls Southern Theory, A Truly Concerted Effort and just production and circulation of Knowledge That, in future STI and utopian Perhaps peak, May produce new critiques, new knowledges and new emancipations.
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