“Postcolonial theorists from both Europe and the rest of the world have illustrated how ideals of emancipation, equality, freedom, and scientific and industrial development were only possible through their opposites: colonial exploitation, inequality, slavery, torture, and suffering in the Global South.”
“That’s why, during the 1990s, theorists felt it was necessary to insist that coloniality was the other face of modernity, the “dark side of the renaissance,” as Walter Mignolo famously put it.”
“Latin American postcolonial theorists have thus situated the birth of Western modernity in 1492 with the “discovery of America,” which marks the beginning of the history of international capitalism, globalization, and its intellectual production.”
“For many theorists, regardless of how postcolonial their work may be, rejecting the genealogy of the modern would involve denying any merit at all to what is still considered by many to be the West’s most precious and enduring legacy.”
“The key question then becomes: Must modernity remain a mark of the West?”
“What are the prefixes retained by modernity used for? In the following I will chart the use over time of the different prefixes attached to modernity in the Latin American context, with a special focus on Brazil. In this way, I hope to demonstrate the contemporary persistence of epistemological symptoms associated with the imperialist conception of the South as a faulty version of the North.”
“These prefixes are the result of a need on the part of the South to contest, resist, and free itself from the idea of an “Imperial South.””
“This insistence on attaching prefixes to modernity seems to show the inability of the West to let go of the notion of modernity as a reference point in historical accounts. But why this inability? Boaventura de Sousa Santos believes we still live amidst modern values—freedom, equality, solidarity, development, empowerment, etc.—and therefore he proposes reconceptualizing these values from a Southern perspective.”
“In this text I will follow Santos’s use of “the South,” signifying not a geographical location but the place of utterance of the oppressed. Similarly, the term “North” will represent here the economic and intellectual hegemony of Euro-America.”
“Hegel’s version of modernity bears, in this respect, the scars of its German origins, a heritage marked, in the words of Rebecca Comay, by a kind of “mourning sickness” regarding the legacy of the French Revolution.”
“Which is more “modern,” the French Revolution or the reaction that brought Napoleon to power?”
“In the conflict between Napoleon and Louverture—contrary to Hegel’s understanding—it is Napoleon, and the Europe that empowered him, that would seem to be the representatives of the “antimodern,” insofar as we allow “modern” to signify what the revolutionaries of France and Haiti thought it did.”
“Also contributing to Europe’s denial of Latin American historical agency was Karl Marx, who saw in Simón Bolivar just another example of “Bonapartism,” or military-led, middle-class reaction.”
“Lacking a theory of imperialism, Marx was unable to distinguish between counterrevolution and national liberation. Although Marx and Hegel disagreed about the details of the “correct” historical sequence, for both “Latin America was still ‘outside history’ for not having developed political institutions and philosophical thought that would allow it to insert itself in the progressive movement towards freedom characteristic of ‘Universal History.’””
“In both cases, the South appears in the narrative of modernity as it’s opposite, the antimodern. This soon gave way to seeing the South less as opposed to modernity than simply behind it.”
“Was there really no modernity in Latin America? Or is it that modernity has to be explained in different terms?”
“Canclini’s question was, can there be modernism without modernization?”
“In his “Cannibal Manifesto” of 1928, Oswald de Andrade explains how the Latin American “swallowing” of intellectual theories from Europe is an example of cannibalism, the ritual that frightened Europeans the most.”
“De Andrade argues that the ability to merge multiple cultures and histories is a peculiarly Brazilian intellectual strength.”
“The manifesto also satirized Latin American thinkers who owe too much to nineteenth-century European writers; de Andrade confronts these thinkers with Western myths concerning “the savage,” and cultural misunderstandings of colonization and cannibalism. As is well known, from the 1920s onwards the concept of the cannibal become one of the richest categories associated with Brazilian identity.”
“If our economy and culture has been imported from Europe, how can the South overcome this position of being a bastard copy of the North? How can we know what is or is not properly ours? What can be considered a truly Latin American art and philosophy?”
“In the midst of this debate, the category of the cannibal reemerged as a way to reclaim the mestizo and cannibalistic nature of the South’s intellectual production, and offered a means for reworking Euro-America concepts without any need to “be authentic,” and without being predestined to represent “cactus, parrots, and palm trees.””
“This vision of a late-arriving modernity, or a modernity that contradicts itself in its supposed purity, is very similar to the critique, internal to the West, that led to postmodernism in Euro-America.”
“The difference might be that in postcolonial contexts these contradictions were more visible, or even—and this was the demoralizing part—impossible to hide.”
“Homi Bhabha, who spoke of a colonial “countermodernity” when discussing India, used to say that the postcolonial contexts that shaped the “enlightened subject” in the colonies posed a threat to Western postmodern theory.”
“This is because these contexts were already multicultural, mestizo, and chronologically fragmented, and involved subjects in crisis.”
“As Foucault said, postcolonial encounters prompted continuous negotiations with insurrections of subjugated knowledges.”
“All the conditions that Latin America had historically tried to rationalize, escape from, and overcome as the aporia of the continent were now being celebrated in the late-capitalist West.”
“Jorge Luis Marzo suggests that the baroque has been used as a pretext to point out the postmodern—as well as premodern or antimodern—character of Latin America in accordance with the political interests of a particular moment:”
“To what extent has the baroque responded as an allegory of helplessness, and yet at the same time of the liberation from the modern? How much about this celebration of rhetoric veils an attempt at glorifying an alleged failure and how much about it has been used to generate a powerful political resource?”
“Inmanuel Wallerstein coined the term “modern world-system,” which reconceptualized modernity in economic terms to defend the idea that it is not a project whose authorship belongs to Europe, but rather a phenomenon that would have been impossible to carry out without the colonies and a global system of commercial networks.”
“Aníbal Quijano has added that the Latin American contribution was not restricted to the economic, but was ideological as well:”
“I suggest, then, that the discovery of Latin America generates a profound revolution in the European imaginary and from there in the imaginary of the Europeanized world through domination: there is a shift from the past, as a center of a forever lost golden age, towards the future as the golden age to be conquered or built.”
“To Wallerstein’s coinage, Walter Mignolo adds the word “colonial”: talking about the “colonial modern world-system” is a way of unearthing the darkest part of the Western-led project.”
“Another formulation comes from Enrique Dussel’s essay “Transmodernity and Interculturality.” Like Wallerstein and Mignolo, Dussel denies the existence of a unidirectional project that extends from Northern Europe towards the Southern Hemisphere. He explains modernity as a shared project that goes beyond dualist models and can be described as an incorporative solidarity: between the first and third worlds, women and men, races and classes. This amounts to saying that the story of modernity has not yet been fully told.”
“Dussel would agree with Boaventura de Sousa Santos that this reconstruction/reparation can only be done on the basis of the experiences of the victims. As W. J. T. Mitchell points out, when Marx wondered about what would happen if commodities could speak, he might as well have asked slaves, or the Haitian revolutionaries.”
“Although speculating about speaking commodities might appear to be an animist notion or a poetic exercise, as we shall see this actually carries a real political import in that it assumes an object to have a soul. When this thinking is applied to slaves, it transforms them into persons with agency, and by extension, transforms how Western subjects understood their relationship with slaves.”
“Jürgen Habermas, Bruno Latour, and de Sousa Santos have all focused their efforts on understanding one of the major features of colonial modernity: the separation between the natural and human sciences.”
“Habermas claims that modernity is an unfinished project because the separation and specialization of scientific knowledge has failed to fulfill one of modernity’s major promises, namely, the introduction of scientific knowledge into everyday practices.”
“From an anthropological perspective, Latour proclaims that “we have never been modern”; this is because, although the definitive condition of modernity was the constant mixing of genres, the intellectual basis of modernity was nonetheless constituted on the separation of humans and nonhumans.”
“Without dwelling on this matter, I would like to draw attention to the fact that Latour bases this compelling observation on the theories of anthropologist Philippe Descola, who studied animism and Amerindian cosmologies, in which the separation of nature and society does not exist.”
“These indigenous epistemologies provide us with a platform for questioning the disciplinary boundaries imposed by modern sciences—boundaries that still order our thinking today.”
“In this regard one can understand why many Western thinkers have in recent years turned to the work ofBrazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who has suggested that animism and perspectivism can be decolonizing forces.”
“In his studies of Amerindian perspectivism, Viveiros de Castro explores the social aspect of relationships between humans and nonhumans. According to his perspectivist theory, many Amerindian cosmologies endow objects with a soul because what constitutes them is the relationships that exist among them.”
“Nothing can be left out of relational processes, since these influence what we are and shape subjectivity. In Amerindian perspectivism, if something has a soul—and Amerindians believe that not only nature, but also inanimate objects have a soul—then that something must also be seen as a person.”
“If we accept the animist notion that everything is at the same time a person and a part of nature, we can do away with the division between the natural and social sciences.”
“We can also do away with the notion of human nature, according to de Sousa Santos: “There will be no human nature because all nature is human.””
“From the standpoint of Amazonian perspectivism, and contrary to our sciences, to know is not to objectivize but rather the opposite: it consists of embodying, i.e. subjectivizing, because it implies taking on the point of view of that thing which is it necessary to know.”
“Consequently, the object of study becomes an enunciating subject, which implies granting it the status of interlocutor and therefore giving it agency.”
“the concept of modernity varies according to time and political need”
“Another longstanding Western tendency is to treat alterity as a political field.”
“Oswald de Andrade’s “Cannibal Manifesto”—which he wrote shortly before joining the Communist Party—suggested that Pindorama (the original Tupi name for Brazil in precolonial, matriarchal times) was a model for how community could be built in the modern world. The counterculture of the 1970s, with its proposals for alternative lifestyles outside of capital, also placed great importance on indigenous cosmologies. Current theories of the commons likewise invoke indigenous experiences.”
“That is why a fear haunts us when we realize that Viveiros de Castro’s Amerindian perspectivism comes from anthropology: historically, anthropology in Brazil has facilitated the “incorporation” of indigenous and African texts into the country’s heritage, treating them as contributions to the national intellectual cannon.”
“John D. Kelly “hope[s] not for alternative modernities but alternatives to ‘modernity’ as a chronotope necessary for social theory.””
“In his “A Discourse About Science” written in 1988, de Sousa Santos showed how the sciences have been in crisis since the 1970s, when it was accepted that the intentions of scientists influence the results of their experiments.”
“This called into question the foundation of empiricism—which assumes that the event being studied is isolated from its context—and in turn undermined science’s universalist aspirations. De Sousa Santos insists that distinctions between subject/object and human/nature perpetuate colonialism, since these divisions separate those who have rights from those who do not.”
“This includes indigenous peoples who live in a “natural state,” but also rivers, mountains, and forms of memory that can’t be found in human rights discourse. Throughout modernity, Nature (with a capital N) was turned into an object of study so that it could be exploited.”
“Our aim, then, should be to find things that will help us break the duality of the human and natural sciences (subject/object).”
“This in turn will enable us to rethink the way we organize disciplinary boundaries. If it has been acknowledged that the organization of scientific objectivity and reason depends on capitalist exploitation, why do we continue to uncritically uphold the modern ways in which knowledge is organized?”
“To advance this aim, it is essential to search through forms of knowledge that were ignored by modernity.”
“What is the role of art in this process of transformation? Art, which is also a subalternized form of knowledge, has long made room for the nomadic way of thinking in which different disciplines dialogue with each other, heedless of borders.”
“That’s why art often precedes theory.”
“It is startling how much de Sousa Santos’s “A Discourse About Science” echoes artistic rhetoric and practice:
It will not be long before particle physics shall speak of particles playing, or biology of the molecular theatre, or astrophysics of the heavenly text, or chemistry of the biography of chemical reactions. Each of these analogies unveils a corner of the world … We might wonder whether it is possible, for example, to do a philological analysis of an urban project, to interview a bird, or to perform participant observation among computers.”
“Art has always been able to gather critical tools of action from different contexts of knowledge in order to intervene in institutions, politics, and social problems.”
“This makes it a privileged place to find new strategies for empistemodiversity. At the same time, art has always maintained a strict border between itself and popular culture, to ensure that art is on the same level as the Western sciences.”
“What if this border disappeared? How do we construct a new language that uses popular knowledge not as a theme for contemporary art, but as a spark for creating new regimes of representation and new structures of thought? How can contemporary art contribute to the learning of epistemodiversity?”