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DDI13 Coloniality K
Read Me
Intro & Overview
De/coloniality is a critique that operates at the intersection of studies of Western modernity (aka, euro-modernity),
colonialism, political economy, critical race studies (antiblackness), critical gender studies, and ethics. The breadth of the
topic exceeds what we have contained in this file, but the included bibliography should allow anyone interested to do
more research over the course of the year if theyre interested. The basic premise that this file operates under is that
Western modernity is constituted by colonialism and extended coloniality. If colonialism includes the direct acts of
political and economic administration of one territory by another, then coloniality is about the ways in which the
epistemic and ontological underpinnings of colonialism continue beyond those specific temporal and spatial contexts.
According to Nelson Maldonado-Torres, coloniality refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of
colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict
limits of colonial administrations. The alternative is a decoloniality that practices epistemic disobedience, delinks us
from modern/coloniality (the two are inseparable), exhibits border thinking, and shifts the locus of enunciation from the
First World to the Global South. The point is to reject the affirmatives assumptions of epistemic privilege to the
North/First World, give a preferential option to the condemned of the earth (the damn, in Fanons language), and open
the space for a multiplicity of options for decoloniality.

NEG Argument
This K is truly a generic in that it can be run against almost any case on the topic. The links are great and rest upon the aff
making claims/inferences that rely upon modern/Western epistemology (ways of thinking). That said, the K is BEST
against left/liberal/progressive cases, especially K affs, that try to take the liberal moral high ground but do so in ways that
(youll argue) reinforce the Wests epistemic privilege. The impact in the INC is monstrous: the war ethic of death. The
alternative is epistemic and semioticthe Death of American Manbut does not include a specific single option/plan
(and theres good extension evidence on why nailing down one alt is very bad). This makes the alt debate nice and
flexible/gooey. The 1NC also includes a framework preempt that stakes out the importance of acting in round. I encourage
you to look at the uniqueness and impact extensions as well as the perm answers, much of which is pretty strong.

AFF Argument
Obvi perm the heck out of it. The perm evidence is good and you can debate out the merits, especially if you are a
more liberal aff. The Grossberg evidence, which supports the perm and a number of the impact & alt arguments, is pretty
good. There are two offensive arguments: a Grossberg internal link turn that says the K reinforces euro-modernity and the
(classic) Alcoff speaking for the other turn. Honestly, more work needs to be done to mine the book reviews of Mignolo
and Maldonado-Torress work to get specific answers. Short of that, Id encourage you to make the typical K answers
(theory, cede the political, etc.) in addition to whats in this file. Also, some of the answers to the Neoliberalism K might
apply here.

Pronunciation
Mignolo: Mean-yo-lo

Quijano: Key-ha-no

Grosfoguel: Gross-foe-gull

damn: dahm-neh

1NC Coloniality
Trying to better Latin America by forging economic connections is part of a long history of US
imperialism both protectionism and free trade are two sides of the same colonial way of thinking
Grosfoguel (Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies Department at UC Berkeley) 2000
(Ramon, Developmentalism, Modernity, and Dependency Theory in Latin America Nepantla: Views from South, Volume 1, Issue 2,
pg 359-361) //DDI13
The modern idea that treated each individual as a free centered subject with rational control over his or her destiny was
extended to the nation-state level. Each nation-state was considered to be sovereign and free to rationally control its

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progressive development. The further elaboration of these ideas in classical political economy produced the grounds for the
emergence of a developmentalist ideology. Developmentalism is linked to liberal ideology and to the idea of
progress. For instance, one of the central questions addressed by political economists was how to increase the wealth of
nations. Different prescriptions were recommended by different political economists; namely, some were
free-traders and others neomercantilist. In spite of their policy discrepancies, they all believed in national

development and in the inevitable progress of the nation-state through the rational organization of
society. The main bone of contention was how to ensure more wealth for a nation-state. According to Immanuel
Wallerstein,
This tension between a basically protectionist versus a free trade stance became one of the major themes of policy-making
in the various states of the world-system in the nineteenth century. It often was the most significant issue that divided the
principal political forces of particular states. It was clear by then that a central ideological theme of the capitalist worldeconomy was that every state could, and indeed eventually probably would, reach a high level of national income and that
conscious, rational action would make it so. This fit very well with the underlying Enlightenment theme of inevitable
progress and the teleological view of human history that it incarnated. (1992a, 517)
Developmentalism became a global ideology of the capitalist world-economy. In the Latin American periphery
these ideas were appropriated in the late eighteenth century by the Spanish Creole elites, who adapted
them to their own agenda. Since most of the elites were linked to, or part of, the agrarian landowner class,
which produced goods through coerced forms of labor to sell for a profit in the world market, they were very eclectic
in their selection of which Enlightenment ideas they wished to utilize. Free trade and national sovereignty
were ideas they defended as part of their struggle against the Spanish colonial monopoly of trade. However, for racial and
class reasons, the modern ideas about individual freedom, rights of man, and equality were underplayed. There were no
major social transformations of Latin American societies after the independence revolutions of the first half of the
nineteenth century. The Creole elites left untouched the colonial noncapitalist forms of coerced labor as well as the
racial/ethnic hierarchies. White Creole elites maintained after independence a racial hierarchy where Indians, blacks,
mestizos, mulattoes and other racially oppressed groups were located at the bottom. This is what Anbal Quijano (1993)
calls coloniality of power.
During the nineteenth century, Great Britain had become the new core power and the new model of civilization. The Latin
American Creole elites established a discursive opposition between Spains backwardness, obscurantism and feudalism
and Great Britains advanced, civilized and modern nation. Leopoldo Zea, paraphrasing Jos Enrique Rod, called this
the new northernmania (nordomana), that is, the attempt by Creole elites to see new models in the North that would
stimulate develop- ment while in turn developing new forms of colonialism (Zea 1986, 1617). The subsequent nineteenthcentury characterization by the Creole elites of Latin America as feudal or in a backward stage served to justify Latin
American subordination to the new masters from the North and is part of what I call feudalmania, which would continue
throughout the twentieth century.
Feudalmania was a device of temporal distancing (Fabian 1983) to produce a knowledge that denied coevalness between
Latin America and the so-called advanced European countries. The denial of coevalness created a double ideological
mechanism. First, it concealed European responsibility in the exploitation of the Latin American
periphery. By not sharing the same historical time and existing in different geographical spaces, each regions destiny was
conceived as unrelated to each other regions. Second, living different temporalities, where Europe was said to

be at a more advanced stage of development than Latin America, reproduced a notion of European
superiority. Thus Europe was the model to imitate and the developmentalist goal was to catch
up. This is expressed in the dichotomy civilization/barbarism seen in figures such as Domingo Faustino
Sarmiento in Argentina.

The use of both neomercantilist and liberal economic ideas en- abled the nineteenth-century
Iberoamerican elites to oscillate between protectionist and free-trade positions depending on the
fluctuations of the world economy. When they were benefiting from producing agrarian or mining exports in the
international division of labor dominated at the time by British imperialism, liberal economic theories provided them with
the rational justification for their role and goals. But when foreign competition or a world economic crisis was affecting
their exports to the world market, they shifted production toward the internal markets and employed neomercantilist
arguments to justify protectionist policies. In Chile, Argentina, and Mexico there were neomercantilist and economic
nationalist arguments that anticipated many of the arguments developed one hundred years later by the Prebisch-CEPAL

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school1 and by some of the dependentistas (Potasch 1959; Frank 1970; Chiaramonte 1971). For example, the 1870s
developmentalist debate was the most important economic debate in Argentina during the nineteenth century and one of the
most important in Latin America. An industrial development plan using protectionist neomercantilist policies was proposed.
This movement was led by a profes- sor of political economy at the University of Buenos Aires and member of the Camara
de Diputados, Vicente F. Lpez. Lpezs group was supported by the agrarian landowners, artisans, peasants, and incipient
industrial capitalists. Although all of them were protectionists, not all were economic nationalists. The protectionist position
of the agrarian landowners was due to the 1866 and 1873 world economic crises, which had negatively affected export
prices on wool, Argentinas major export item at the time. Thus Lpez promoted the development of a national cloth
industry as a transitional solution to the world depression. The movement ended once the wool producers shifted to cattle
raising and meat exports.

Coloniality generates a permanent state of exception that is the root cause of the death ethics of war and
underwrites a hellish existence where death, murder, war, rape, and racism are ordinary
Nelson Maldonado-Torres, associate professor of comparative literature at Rutgers, 8 [Against War: Views from the
Underside of Modernity, p. 217-21] //DDI13
Dussel, Quijano, and Wynter lead us to the understanding that what happened in the Americas was a
transformation and naturalization of the non-ethics of war which represented a sort of exception to the ethics
that regulate normal conduct in Christian countriesinto a more stable and long-standing reality of damnation ,

and that this epistemic and material shift occurred in the colony. Damnation, life in hell, is colonialism : a
reality characterized by the naturalization of war by means of the naturalization of slavery , now justified in
relation to the very constitution of people and no longer solely or principally to their faith or belief. That human beings
become slaves when they are vanquished in a war translates in the Americas into the suspicion that the
conq uered people, and then non-European peoples in general, are constitutively inferior and that
therefore they should assume a position of slavery and serfdom . Later on, this idea would be solidified with
respect to the slavery of African peoples, achieving stability up to the present with the tragic reality of different forms of
racism. Through this process, what looked like a "state of exception" in the colonies became the rule in the modern world.
However, deviating from Giorgio Agarnben's diagnosis, one must say that the colony--long before the concentration

camp and the Nazi politics of extermination--served as the testing ground for the limits and possibilities of
modernity, thereby revealing its darkest secrets." It is race, the coloniality of power, and its concomitant
Eurocentrism (and not only national socialisms or forms of fascism) that allow the "state of exception" to
continue to define ordinary relations in this, our so-called postmodern world.
Race emerges within a permanent state of exception where forms of behavior that are legitimate in war
become a natural part of the ordinary way of life. In that world, an otherwise extraordinary affair becomes the
norm and living in it requires extraordinary effort." In the racial/ colonial world, the " hell" of war becomes a
condition that defines the reality of racialized selves, which Fanon referred to as the damnes de la terre
(condemned of the earth). The damne (condemned) is a subject who exists in a permanent "hell ," and as such,
this figure serves as the main referent or liminal other that guarantees the continued affirmation of modernity as
a paradigm of war. The hell of the condemned is not defined by the alienation of colonized productive
forces, but rather signals the dispensability of racialized subjects , that is, the idea that the world would be
fundamentally better without them. The racialized subject is ultimately a dispensable source of value, and
exploitation is conceived in this context as due torture, and not solely as the extraction of surplus value. Moreover, it is this
very same conception that gives rise to the particular erotic dynamics that characterize the relation between the master and
its slaves or racialized workers. The condemned, in short, inhabit a context in which the confrontation with
death and murder is ordinary . Their "hell" is not simply "other people," as Sartre would have put it-at least at
one point - but rather racist perceptions that are responsible for the suspension of ethical behavior toward
peoples at the bottom of the color line. Through racial conceptions that became central to the modern self,

modernity and coloniality produced a permanent state of war that racialized and colonized subjects

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cannot evade or escape .
The modern function of race and the coloniality of power, I am suggesting here, can be understood as a
radicalization and naturalization of the non-ethics of war in colonialism." This non-ethics included the
practices of eliminating and enslaving certain subjects -for example, indigenous and black-as part of the
enterprise of colonization. From here one could as well refer to them as the death ethics of war . War, however, is
not only about killing or enslaving; it also includes a particular treatment of sexuality and femininity:
rape . Coloniality is an order of things that places people of color within the murderous and rapist view of a
vigilant ego, and the primary targets of this rape are women. But men of color are also seen through these
lenses and feminized, to become fundamentally penetrable subjects for the ego conquiro. Racial- ization
functions through gender and sex, and the ego conquiro is thereby constitutively a phallic ego as well." Dussel. who
presents this thesis of the phallic character of the ego cogito, also makes links, albeit indirectly, with the reality of war.
And thus, in the beginning of modernity, before Descartes discovered ... a terrifying anthropological dualism in Europe, the
Spanish conquistadors arrived in America. The phallic conception of the European-medieval world is now added to the
forms of submission of the vanquished Indians. "Males," Bartolome de las Casas writes, are reduced through "the hardest,
most horrible, and harshest serfdom"; but this only occurs with those who have remained alive, because many of them have
died; however, "in war typically they only leave alive young men (mozos) and women.""5 The indigenous people who
survive the massacre or are left alive have to contend with a world that considers them to be dispensable. And since their
bodies have been conceived of as inherently inferior or violent, they must be constantly subdued or civilized, which
requires renewed acts of conquest and colonization. The survivors continue to live in a world defined by war, and this
situation is peculiar in the case of women. AsT. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Renee T, White put it in the preface to their
anthology Spoils oJ War: Women oJ Color, Cultures, and Revolutions: A sexist and/or racist patriarchal culture and order
posts and attempts to maintain, through violent acts of force if necessary, the subjugation and inferiority of women of color.
As Joy James notes, "its explicit, general premise constructs a conceptual framework of male [and/or white] as normative in
order to enforce a politicaljracial, economic, cultural. sexual] and intellectual mandate of male [and/or white] as superior."
The warfront has always been a "feminized" and "colored" space for women of color. Their experiences and perceptions of
war, conA ict, resistance, and struggle emerge from their specific racial-ethnic and gendered locations ... Inter arma silent
leges: in time of war the law is silent," Walzer notes. Thus, this volume operates from the premise that war has been and is
presently in our midst. The links between war, conquest, and the exploitation of women's bodies are hardly
accidental. In his study of war and gender, Joshua Goldstein argues that conquest usually proceeds through an extension
of the rape and exploitation of women in wartime." He argues that to understand conquest, one needs to examine: I) male
sexuality as a cause of aggression; 2) the feminization of enemies as symbolic domination; and 3) dependence on the
exploitation of women's labor-including reproduction." My argument is, first, that these three elements came together

in a powerful way in the idea of race that began to emerge in the conquest and colonization of the
Americas. My second point is that through the idea of race, these elements exceed the activity of conquest
and come to define what from that point on passes as the idea of a "normal" world . As a result, the
phenomenology of a racial context resembles, if it is not fundamentally identical to, the phenomenology of
war and conquest . Racism posits its targets as racialized and sexualized subjects that, once vanquished,
are said to be inherently servile and whose bodies come to form part of an economy of sexual abuse,
exploitation, and control. The coloniality of power cannot be fully understood without reference to the
transformation and naturalization of war and conquest in modern times .
Hellish existence in the colonial world carries with it both the racial and the gendered aspects of the
naturalization of the non-ethics of war. " Killability " and " rapeability " are inscribed into the images of
colonial bodies and deeply mark their ordinary existence. Lacking real authority, colonized men are permanently
feminized and simultaneously represent a constant threat for whom any amount of authority, any visible trace of the phallus
is multiplied in a symbolic hysteria that knows no lirnits.?" Mythical depiction of the black man's penis is a case in point:
the black man is depicted as an aggressive sexual beast who desires to rape women, particularly white women. The black
woman, in turn, is seen as always already sexually available to the rapist gaze of the white, and as fundamentally
promiscuous. In short, the black woman is seen as a highly erotic being whose primary function is fulfilling sexual desire
and reproduction. To be sure, any amount of "penis" in either one represents a threat, but in his most familiar and typical
forms the black man represents the act of rape- "raping" -while the black woman is seen as the most legitimate victim of
rape- "being raped." In an antiblack world black women appear as subjects who deserve to be raped and to suffer the

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consequences-in terms of a lack of protection from the legal system, sexual abuse, and lack of financial assistance to sustain
themselves and their families-just as black men deserve to be penalized for raping, even without having committed the act.
Both "raping" and "being raped" are attached to blackness as if they form part of the essence of black folk, who are seen as
a dispensable population. Black bodies are seen as excessively violent and erotic, as well as being the

legitimate recipients of excessive violence, erotic and otherwise." "Killability" and "rapeability" are part
of their essence, understood in a phenomenological way. The "essence" of blackness in a colonial anti-black
world is part of a larger context of meaning in which the death ethics of war gradually becomes a
constitutive part of an allegedly normal world. In its modern racial and colonial connotations and uses, blackness
is the invention and the projection of a social body oriented by the death ethics of war." This murderous and raping social
body projects the features that define it onto sub-Others in order to be able to legitimate the same behavior that is allegedly
descriptive of them. The same ideas that inspire perverted acts in war--particularly slavery, murder, and

rape--are legitimized in modernity through the idea of race and gradually come to be seen as more or less
normal thanks to the alleged obviousness and non-problematic character of black slavery and anti-black
racism. To be sure, those who suffer the consequences of such a system are primarily blacks and indigenous peoples, but it
also deeply affects all of those who appear as colored or close to darkness . In short, this system of symbolic
representations, the material conditions that in part produce and continue to legitimate it, and the
existential dynamics that occur therein (which are also at the same time derivative and constitutive of such a context)
are part of a process that naturalizes the non-ethics or death ethics of war . Sub-ontological difference is
the result of such naturalization and is legitimized through the idea of race. In such a world, ontology
collapses into a Manicheanism, as Fanon suggested."

Our alternative is to seek the Death of American Man.

Epistemic and semiotic struggle key must seek the Death of American Man to solve war culture and
propel decoloniality

Maldonado-Torres 5 (Nelson, associate professor of comparative literature at Rutgers Decolonization and the New
Identitarian Logics after September 11, Radical Philosophy Review 8, n. 1 (2005): 35-67) //DDI13

Inspired by these Fanonian insights l have articulated elsewhere the idea of a weak utopian project as bringing
about the Death of European Man.67 I think that the peculiar intricacies between "estadounidense"
patriotism, Eurocentrism, the propensity to war , and the continued subordination of the theoretical
contributions of peoples from the south call for a reformulation of this idea .68 Today, after the post- 1989
and post-September 11 patriotism we shall call more directly simply for the Death of American Man .6 By
American Man I mean a concept or figure, a particular way of being-in-the-world, the very subject of an
episteme that gives continuity to an imperial order of things under the rubrics of liberty and the idea of a
Manifest Destiny that needs to be accomplished. American Man and its predecessor and still companion
European Man are unified under an even more abstract concept, Imperial Man. Imperial gestures and
types of behavior are certainly not unique to Europe or "America." A radical critique and denunciation
of Latin American Man, and of ethno-class continental Man in general, is what 1 aim at in my critique.
"Man," here, refers to an ideal of humanity, and not to concrete human beings. It is that ideal which
must die in order for the human to be born .
It should be clear that what I call for and defend here is epistemological and semiotic struggle , which
takes the form of critical analysis and the invention and sharing of ideas that allow humans to preserve
their humanity. A subversive act is that which helps us to deflate imperial and continental concepts of
Man, such as referring to "Americans" in a way that designates their own particular provinciality rather
than by a concept through which they appropriate the whole extent of the so-called "New World." Popular

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culture in the u_s. has picked up on many Spanish words and phrases (such as "Ay Caramba,.. "Hasta Ia vista, baby," and
several others), but "" has failed to adopt the central one (perhaps because Latin@s have not insisted on it enough):
"estadounidense." "Estadounidense" is one of the most important words that U.S. Americans learn from
Spanish. It could be considered one of the most precious gifts (not an imperial but a decolonial one) from Spanish and
Hispanic culture to the Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture that Huntington reifies and s e e k s to protect. As I have argued
elsewhere, unfortunately, reception of gifts and hospitality are two fundamental modes of humanity that those

who occupy and assume the position of Master most resist. Indeed, the reception or resistance of
decolonizing gifts provides a measure of the presence of coloniality .
Before being a challenge, Latin@s in this country have been colonized and ra cialized subjects as well as collaborators in
different forms of racialization. Many Latin@s, especially conservative ones, desire the American and Americano
Dream most often they desire it until they realize that it turns into a nightmare, both for oth ers and for themselves. While

the culturalist-nationalist response to the Americana Dream consists in taking away the possibility of
dreaming this dream in Spanish, a decolonial response rather abandons the very idea of the American or
Americana Dream and offers as a gift the possibility for the Anglo-Saxon U . S . American to dream the
"estadounidense" dream-a dream that does not have anything to do about speaking one language or
another, but about learning from others basic ideas about how to conceive of oneself, in this case, to see
oneself as a nation-in-relation rather than as a continental being.71

The way the Aff produced knowledge comes first we have a responsibility to attack colonial thinking in
ourselves and our community or systemic violence and dehumanization are inevitable

Wanzer (Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa in Iowa City) 2012
(Darrel, Delinking Rhetoric, or Revisiting Mcgees Fragmentation Thesis Through Decoloniality Page 654, DKE) //DDI13
In short, I would submit that we all (regardless of whether we are interested in discursive con/texts explicitly marked by
colonialism or imperialism) must seek to become decolonial rhetoricians. Rather than be at the service of

Continental philosophy as so many in our ranks seem to be, we should adopt a decolonial attitude that
aids in shifting the geography of reason, by unveiling and enacting geopolitics and body-politics of
knowledge by putting our disciplinary tools in rhetoric at the service of the problem being addressed.
It is not enough, however, to leave this task to scholars of color. Such a move is dangerous insofar as it
continues to relegate these important questions to the margins of the discipline while constructing a
fction of inclusion that remains authorized by the hubris of zero point epistemology.45 We who are
colonized or function in some way Otherwise cannot be the only ones leading the charge to delink rhetoric
from modern/coloniality. An ethic of decolonial love requires those who beneft most from the epistemic
violence of the West to renounce their privilege, give the gift of hearing, and engage in forms of praxis
that can more productively negotiate the borderlands between inside and outside , in thought and in being. We
need not, as I have shown with McGee, throw out the baby with the bathwater; however, it is crucial that rhetoricians
begin to take the decolonial option seriously if we wish to do more than perpetuate a permanent state of
exception46 that dehumanizes people of color and maintains the hubris of a totalizing and exclusionary
episteme.

1NC Coloniality (One-Off)

[[[Write some kind of catchy intro that leads into the following]]
Walter Mignolo sets the stage in 2005
[The Idea of Latin America, p. 2-7] //DDI13

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Before 1492, the Americas were not on anybodys map, not even on the map of
the people inhabiting Anhuac (the territory of the Aztecs) and Tawantinsuyu (the
territory of the Incas). The Spanish and Portuguese, as the sole and diverse
European occupants in the sixteenth century, named the entire continent that
was under their control and possession . It may be hard to understand today
that the Incas and the Aztecs did not live in America or, even less, Latin
America. Until the early sixteenth century, America was not on anybodys map
simply because the word and the concept of a fourth continent had not yet
been invented . The mass of land and the people were there, but they had named their own places: Tawantinsuyu in the Andes, Anhuac in what is
today the valley of Mexico, and Abya-Yala in what is today Panama. The extension of what became America was unknown to them. People in Europe, in Asia, and in
Africa had no idea of the landmass soon to be called the Indias Occidentales and then America, or of all the people inhabiting it who would be called Indians.

America came, literally, out of the blue sky that Amerigo Vespucci was looking
at when he realized that the stars he was seeing from what is now southern Brazil were not the same stars he had seen in his familiar Mediterranean. What
is really confusing in this story is that once America was named as such in the
sixteenth century and Latin America named as such in the nineteenth, it
appeared as if they had been there forever. America, then, was never a
continent waiting to be discovered. Rather, America as we know it was an
invention forged in the process of European colonial history and the
consolidation and expansion of the Western world view and institutions.

The narratives

that described the events as discovery were told not by the inhabi- tants of Anhuac or Tawantinsuyu, but by Europeans themselves. It would be four hundred and
fifty years until a shift in the geography of knowledge would turn around what Europeans saw as a discov- ery and see it as an invention. The conceptual frame
that made possible this shift in the geography of knowledge, from discovery to invention, came from the Creoles consciousness, in the Spanish- and Portuguesespeaking world. Of course, we should briefly note that Indigenous and Afro frames of mind in continental South America had not yet inter- vened in these public
debates from their own broken histories. The idea of America and subsequently of Latin and Anglo America was an issue in the minds of European and Creoles of
European descent. Indians and Creoles of African descent (men and women) were left out of the conversation. Afro-Caribbeans had been working toward a similar and
complementary shift in the geography of knowledge, but in English and French. For Creoles of Afro descent, the European arrival in the islands that today we call
Caribbean was not of primary concern: African slaves were brought to the conti- nent that was already called America many decades after it was dis- covered or
invented. In the Indian genealogy of thought, whether America was an existing continent discovered or a non-existing entity that was invented was not a question.

Mexican historian and philosopher Edmundo OGorman strongly and

convincingly argued many years ago that the invention of America implied the
appropriation and integration of the continent into the Euro-Christian
imaginary.2 The Spanish and Portuguese, as the sole and diverse European foreign intruders in the sixteenth century, claimed for themselves a continent
and renamed it at the same time as they began a process of territorial organization as they had it in Spain and Portugal. Vespucci could pull
America out of the sky when he realized that, navigating the coasts of what is
today Brazil, he was in a New World (new for Europeans, of course), and not
in India, as Columbus thought about ten years before him . The story is well known that since
Vespucci conceptually dis- covered (in the sense of discovering for oneself or realizing) that Europeans were confronting a New World, the continent was
renamed America after Amerigo Vespucci himself, with a slight change to the ending to make it fit with the already existing non- European continents, Africa and

Discovery and invention are not just different interpretations of the same
event; they belong to two different paradigms . The line that distinguishes the
two paradigms is the line of the shift in the geo-politics of knowledge; changing
the terms and not only the content of the conversation. The first presupposes
Asia.

the triumphant European and imperial perspective on world history, an

achievement that was described as modernity , while the second reflects the
critical perspective of those who have been placed behind , who are expected to
follow the ascending progress of a history to which they have the feeling of not
belonging. Colonization of being is nothing else than producing the idea that
certain people do not belong to history that they are non-beings . Thus,
lurking beneath the European story of discovery are the histories, experiences,
and silenced conceptual narratives of those who were disqualified as human

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beings , as historical actors, and as capable of thinking and understanding. In
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the wretched of the earth (as Frantz Fanon
labeled colonized beings) were Indians and African slaves. That is why missionaries and men of letters appointed themselves to write the histories they thought Incas
and Aztecs did not have, and to write the grammar of Kechua/Kichua and Nahuatl with Latin as the model. Africans were simply left out of the picture of conversion
and taken as pure labor force. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, a new social group surfaced, and when they surfaced they were already outside of history:
the Creoles of Spanish and Portuguese descent. Although their marginalization was far from the extremes to which Indians and Africans were subjected, the Creoles,
between the limits of humanity (Indians and Africans) and humanity proper (Europeans), were also left out of history.The geo-political configuration of scales that
measured the nature of human beings in terms of an idea of history that Western Christians assumed to be the total and true one for every inhabitant of the planet led
to the establishment of a colonial matrix of power, to leave certain people out of history in order to justify violence in the name of Christianization, civilization, and,
more recently, development and market democracy. Such a geo-political configuration created a divide between a minority of people who dwell in and embrace the
Christian, civilizing, or devel- oping missions and a majority who are the outcasts and become the targets of those missions. Max Weber has been credited, after
Hegel, with having concep- tualized modernity as the direction of history that had Europe as a model and a goal. More recently, since the late 1980s,

Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano unveiled coloniality as the darker side of

modernity and as the historical perspective of the wretched, the outcasts from
history told from the perspective of modernity. From the perspective of
modernity, coloniality is difficult to see or recognize, and even a bothersome
concept. For the second set of actors, the wretched, modernity is unavoidable
although coloniality offers a shifting perspective of knowledge and history. For
the first actors, modernity is one-sided and of single density. For the second,
modernity is double-sided and of double density. To understand the coexistence of these two major paradigms is to understand how the shift in the
geography and the geo-politics of knowledge is taking place. My argument is
straightforwardly located in the second paradigm, in the double density of
modernity/coloniality .

How do these two entangled concepts, modernity and coloniality, work together as two sides of the same reality to

shape the idea of America in the sixteenth century and of Latin America in the nineteenth? Modernity has been a term in use for the past thirty or forty years. In
spite of differences in opinions and definitions, there are some basic agreements about its meaning. From the European perspective, modernity refers to a period in
world history that has been traced back either to the European Renaissance and the discovery of America (this view is common among scholars from the South of
Europe, Italy, Spain, and Portugal), or to the European Enlightenment (this view is held by scholars and intel- lectuals and assumed by the media in Anglo-Saxon
countries England, Germany, and Holland and one Latin country, France). On the other side of the colonial difference, scholars and intellectu- als in the ex-Spanish
and ex-Portuguese colonies in South America have been advancing the idea that the achievements of modernity go hand in hand with the violence of coloniality. The
difference, to reiterate, lies in which side of each local history is told. OGormans invention of America theory was a turning point that put on the table a perspective
that was absent and not recognized from the existing European and imperial narratives. Lets agree that OGorman made visible a dimension of history that was
occluded by the partial discovery narratives, and lets also agree that it is an example of how things may look from the varied experiences of coloniality.

America, as a concept, goes hand in hand with that of modernity , and both are
the self-representation of imperial projects and global designs that originated in
and were implemented by European actors and institutions. The invention of
America was one of the nodal points that contributed to create the conditions
for imperial European expansion and a lifestyle, in Europe, that served as a model for the achievements of humanity. Thus,
the discovery and conquest of America is not just one more event in some
long and linear historical chain from the creation of the world to the present,
leaving behind all those who were not attentive enough to jump onto the
bandwagon of modernity. Rather, it was a key turning point in world history: It
was the moment in which the demands of modernity as the final horizon of
salvation began to require the imposition of a specific set of values that relied
on the logic of coloniality for their implementation. The invention of America
thesis offers, instead, a perspective from coloniality and, in consequence,
reveals that the advances of modernity outside of Europe rely on a colonial
matrix of power that includes the renaming of the lands appropriated and of
the people inhabiting them, insofar as the diverse ethnic groups and civilizations in Tawantinsuyu and Anhuac, as well as those from
Africa, were reduced to Indians and Blacks.The idea of America and of Latin America could, of course, be accounted for within the philosophical framework of
European modernity, even if that account is offered by Creoles of European descent dwelling in the colonies and embracing the Spanish or Portuguese view of events.
What counts, however, is that the need for telling the part of the story that was not told requires a shift in the geography of reason and of understanding.

Coloniality, therefore, points toward and intends to unveil an embedded logic

that enforces control , domination , and exploitation disguised in the language

of salvation, progress, modernization, and being good for every one . The double register of
modernity/coloniality has, perhaps, never been as clear as it has been recently under the administration of US president George W. Bush. Pedagogically, it is important
for my argument to conceptualize modernity/coloniality as two sides of the same coin and not as two separate frames of mind: you cannot be modern without being
colonial; and if you are on the colonial side of the spectrum you have to transact with modernity you cannot ignore it. The very idea of America cannot be separated

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from coloniality: the entire continent emerged as such in the European consciousness as a massive extent of land to be appropriated and of people to be converted to
Christianity, and whose labor could be exploited. Coloniality, as a term, is much less frequently heard than moder- nity and many people tend to confuse it with
colonialism. The two words are related, of course. While colonialism refers to spe- cific historical periods and places of imperial domination (e.g., Spanish, Dutch,
British, the US since the beginning of the twentieth century), coloniality refers to the logical structure of colonial domination underlying the Spanish, Dutch, British,
and US control of the Atlantic economy and politics, and from there the control and management of almost the entire planet. In each of the particu- lar imperial
periods of colonialism whether led by Spain (mainly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) or by England (from the nineteenth century to World War II) or by
the US (from the early twentieth century until now) the same logic was maintained; only power changed hands.

AND The affirmatives attempt to better Latin America by forging

economic connections is part of a long history of US imperialism
protectionism and free trade are two sides of the same colonial way of
thinking
Grosfoguel (Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies Department at UC Berkeley) 2000
(Ramon, Developmentalism, Modernity, and Dependency Theory in Latin America Nepantla: Views from
South, Volume 1, Issue 2, pg 359-361) //DDI13
The modern idea that treated each individual as a free centered subject with rational control over his or her destiny was extended to the
nation-state level. Each nation-state was considered to be sovereign and free to rationally control its progressive development. The
further elaboration of these ideas in classical political economy produced the grounds for the emergence of a developmentalist ideology.

Developmentalism is linked to liberal ideology and to the idea of progress. For

instance, one of the central questions addressed by political economists was how to increase the wealth of nations. Different
prescriptions were recommended by different political economists ; namely, some were
free-traders and others neomercantilist. In spite of their policy discrepancies, they all believed
in national development and in the inevitable progress of the nation-state
through the rational organization of society. The main bone of contention was how to ensure more wealth
for a nation-state. According to Immanuel Wallerstein, This tension between a basically protectionist versus a free trade stance became
one of the major themes of policy-making in the various states of the world-system in the nineteenth century. It often was the most
significant issue that divided the principal political forces of particular states. It was clear by then that a central ideological theme of the
capitalist world-economy was that every state could, and indeed eventually probably would, reach a high level of national income and
that conscious, rational action would make it so. This fit very well with the underlying Enlightenment theme of inevitable progress and
the teleological view of human history that it incarnated. (1992a, 517) Developmentalism became a global ideology of the capitalist

In the Latin American periphery these ideas were appropriated in the

late eighteenth century by the Spanish Creole elites, who adapted them to their own agenda.
Since most of the elites were linked to, or part of, the agrarian landowner class, which
produced goods through coerced forms of labor to sell for a profit in the world market, they were very eclectic in
their selection of which Enlightenment ideas they wished to utilize. Free trade and
world-economy.

national sovereignty were ideas they defended as part of their struggle against the Spanish colonial monopoly of trade. However, for
racial and class reasons, the modern ideas about individual freedom, rights of man, and equality were underplayed. There were no major
social transformations of Latin American societies after the independence revolutions of the first half of the nineteenth century. The
Creole elites left untouched the colonial noncapitalist forms of coerced labor as well as the racial/ethnic hierarchies. White Creole elites
maintained after independence a racial hierarchy where Indians, blacks, mestizos, mulattoes and other racially oppressed groups were
located at the bottom.

This is

what Anbal Quijano (1993) calls

coloniality of power . During the nineteenth

century, Great Britain had become the new core power and the new model of civilization. The Latin American Creole elites established a
discursive opposition between Spains backwardness, obscurantism and feudalism and Great Britains advanced, civilized and
modern nation. Leopoldo Zea, paraphrasing Jos Enrique Rod, called this the new northernmania (nordomana), that is, the attempt
by Creole elites to see new models in the North that would stimulate develop- ment while in turn developing new forms of colonialism
(Zea 1986, 1617). The subsequent nineteenth-century characterization by the Creole elites of Latin America as feudal or in a
backward stage served to justify Latin American subordination to the new masters from the North and is part of what I call
feudalmania, which would continue throughout the twentieth century. Feudalmania was a device of temporal distancing (Fabian

The
denial of coevalness created a double ideological mechanism. First, it concealed European
responsibility in the exploitation of the Latin American periphery. By not sharing the same
1983) to produce a knowledge that denied coevalness between Latin America and the so-called advanced European countries.

historical time and existing in different geographical spaces, each regions destiny was conceived as unrelated to each other regions.

living different temporalities, where Europe was said to be at a more

advanced stage of development than Latin America, reproduced a notion of
European superiority . Thus Europe was the model to imitate and the
developmentalist goal was to catch up . This is expressed in the dichotomy
Second,

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The use of both
neomercantilist and liberal economic ideas en- abled the nineteenth-century
Iberoamerican elites to oscillate between protectionist and free-trade positions
depending on the fluctuations of the world economy. When they were benefiting from producing
civilization/barbarism

seen in figures such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento in Argentina.

agrarian or mining exports in the international division of labor dominated at the time by British imperialism, liberal economic theories
provided them with the rational justification for their role and goals. But when foreign competition or a world economic crisis was
affecting their exports to the world market, they shifted production toward the internal markets and employed neomercantilist
arguments to justify protectionist policies. In Chile, Argentina, and Mexico there were neomercantilist and economic nationalist
arguments that anticipated many of the arguments developed one hundred years later by the Prebisch-CEPAL school1 and by some of
the dependentistas (Potasch 1959; Frank 1970; Chiaramonte 1971). For example, the 1870s developmentalist debate was the most
important economic debate in Argentina during the nineteenth century and one of the most important in Latin America. An industrial
development plan using protectionist neomercantilist policies was proposed. This movement was led by a profes- sor of political
economy at the University of Buenos Aires and member of the Cmara de Diputados, Vicente F. Lpez. Lpezs group was supported by
the agrarian landowners, artisans, peasants, and incipient industrial capitalists. Although all of them were protectionists, not all were
economic nationalists. The protectionist position of the agrarian landowners was due to the 1866 and 1873 world economic crises, which
had negatively affected export prices on wool, Argentinas major export item at the time. Thus Lpez promoted the development of a
national cloth industry as a transitional solution to the world depression. The movement ended once the wool producers shifted to cattle
raising and meat exports.

FURTHERMORE Coloniality generates a permanent state of exception

that is the root cause of the death ethics of war and underwrites a
hellish existence where death, murder, war, rape, and racism are
ordinary facts of life
Nelson Maldonado-Torres, associate professor of comparative literature at Rutgers, 8 [Against
War: Views from the Underside of Modernity, p. 217-21] //DDI13

what happened in the Americas was

a transformation and naturalization of the non-ethics of war which represented a
sort of exception to the ethics that regulate normal conduct in Christian countries into a more stable and
long-standing reality of damnation , and that this epistemic and material
Dussel, Quijano, and Wynter lead us to the understanding that

shift occurred in the colony. Damnation, life in hell, is colonialism : a reality

characterized by the naturalization of war by means of the naturalization of
slavery, now justified in relation to the very constitution of people and no longer solely or principally to their faith or
belief. That human beings become slaves when they are vanquished in a war
translates in the Americas into the suspicion that the conq uered people,
and then non-European peoples in general, are constitutively inferior and
that therefore they should assume a position of slavery and serfdom . Later on,
this idea would be solidified with respect to the slavery of African peoples, achieving stability up to the present with the
tragic reality of different forms of racism. Through this process, what looked like a "state of exception" in the colonies
became the rule in the modern world. However, deviating from Giorgio Agarnben's diagnosis, one must say that

the

colony--long before the concentration camp and the Nazi politics of

extermination--served as the testing ground for the limits and possibilities
of modernity, thereby revealing its darkest secrets." It is race, the coloniality
of power, and its concomitant Eurocentrism (and not only national socialisms or forms of
fascism) that allow the "state of exception" to continue to define ordinary
relations in this, our so-called postmodern world. Race emerges within a permanent state
of exception where forms of behavior that are legitimate in war become a
natural part of the ordinary way of life. In that world, an otherwise extraordinary affair becomes
the norm and living in it requires extraordinary effort." In the racial/ colonial world, the " hell" of
war becomes a condition that defines the reality of racialized selves, which

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Fanon referred to as the damnes de la terre (condemned of the earth).

The damne (condemned) is a

subject who exists in a permanent "hell ," and as such, this figure serves as the main referent or
liminal other that guarantees the continued affirmation of modernity as a
paradigm of war. The hell of the condemned is not defined by the alienation
of colonized productive forces, but rather signals the dispensability of
racialized subjects, that is, the idea that the world would be fundamentally
better without them. The racialized subject is ultimately a dispensable source of value, and exploitation is
conceived in this context as due torture, and not solely as the extraction of surplus value. Moreover, it is this very same
conception that gives rise to the particular erotic dynamics that characterize the relation between the master and its

The condemned, in short, inhabit a context in which the

confrontation with death and murder is ordinary . Their "hell" is not simply
"other people," as Sartre would have put it-at least at one point - but rather racist perceptions
that are responsible for the suspension of ethical behavior toward peoples at
the bottom of the color line. Through racial conceptions that became central
to the modern self, modernity and coloniality produced a permanent state
slaves or racialized workers.

of war that racialized and colonized subjects cannot evade or escape . The
modern function of race and the coloniality of power, I am suggesting here, can be
understood as a radicalization and naturalization of the non-ethics of war in
colonialism." This non-ethics included the practices of eliminating and
enslaving certain subjects-for example, indigenous and black-as part of the enterprise of
colonization. From here one could as well refer to them as the death ethics of war . War,
however, is not only about killing or enslaving; it also includes a particular
treatment of sexuality and femininity: rape . Coloniality is an order of things that
places people of color within the murderous and rapist view of a vigilant ego, and
the primary targets of this rape are women. But men of color are also seen
through these lenses and feminized, to become fundamentally penetrable
subjects for the ego conquiro. Racial- ization functions through gender and sex, and the
ego conquiro is thereby constitutively a phallic ego as well." Dussel. who presents this thesis of the phallic character of
the ego cogito, also makes links, albeit indirectly, with the reality of war. And thus, in the beginning of modernity,
before Descartes discovered ... a terrifying anthropological dualism in Europe, the Spanish conquistadors arrived in
America. The phallic conception of the European-medieval world is now added to the forms of submission of the
vanquished Indians. "Males," Bartolome de las Casas writes, are reduced through "the hardest, most horrible, and
harshest serfdom"; but this only occurs with those who have remained alive, because many of them have died;
however, "in war typically they only leave alive young men (mozos) and women.""5 The indigenous people who survive
the massacre or are left alive have to contend with a world that considers them to be dispensable. And since their
bodies have been conceived of as inherently inferior or violent, they must be constantly subdued or civilized, which
requires renewed acts of conquest and colonization. The survivors continue to live in a world defined by war, and this
situation is peculiar in the case of women. AsT. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Renee T, White put it in the preface to
their anthology Spoils oJ War: Women oJ Color, Cultures, and Revolutions: A sexist and/or racist patriarchal culture and
order posts and attempts to maintain, through violent acts of force if necessary, the subjugation and inferiority of
women of color. As Joy James notes, "its explicit, general premise constructs a conceptual framework of male [and/or
white] as normative in order to enforce a politicaljracial, economic, cultural. sexual] and intellectual mandate of male
[and/or white] as superior." The warfront has always been a "feminized" and "colored" space for women of color. Their
experiences and perceptions of war, conA ict, resistance, and struggle emerge from their specific racial-ethnic and
gendered locations ... Inter arma silent leges: in time of war the law is silent," Walzer notes. Thus, this volume operates

The links between war, conquest,

and the exploitation of women's bodies are hardly accidental . In his study of war and
from the premise that war has been and is presently in our midst.

gender, Joshua Goldstein argues that conquest usually proceeds through an extension of the rape and exploitation of
women in wartime." He argues that to understand conquest, one needs to examine: I) male sexuality as a cause of
aggression; 2) the feminization of enemies as symbolic domination; and 3) dependence on the exploitation of women's

these three elements came together in a

powerful way in the idea of race that began to emerge in the conquest and
colonization of the Americas. My second point is that through the idea of race, these
elements exceed the activity of conquest and come to define what from that
labor-including reproduction." My argument is, first, that

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point on passes as the idea of a "normal" world. As a result, the phenomenology
of a racial context resembles, if it is not fundamentally identical to, the
phenomenology of war and conquest . Racism posits its targets as racialized
and sexualized subjects that, once vanquished, are said to be inherently
servile and whose bodies come to form part of an economy of sexual abuse,
exploitation, and control. The coloniality of power cannot be fully understood without reference to the
transformation and naturalization of war and conquest in modern times .
Hellish existence in the colonial world carries with it both the racial and the
gendered aspects of the naturalization of the non-ethics of war. " Killability "
and " rapeability " are inscribed into the images of colonial bodies and deeply
mark their ordinary existence. Lacking real authority, colonized men are permanently feminized and
simultaneously represent a constant threat for whom any amount of authority, any visible trace of the phallus is
multiplied in a symbolic hysteria that knows no lirnits.?" Mythical depiction of the black man's penis is a case in point:
the black man is depicted as an aggressive sexual beast who desires to rape women, particularly white women. The
black woman, in turn, is seen as always already sexually available to the rapist gaze of the white, and as fundamentally
promiscuous. In short, the black woman is seen as a highly erotic being whose primary function is fulfilling sexual
desire and reproduction. To be sure, any amount of "penis" in either one represents a threat, but in his most familiar
and typical forms the black man represents the act of rape- "raping" -while the black woman is seen as the most
legitimate victim of rape- "being raped." In an antiblack world black women appear as subjects who deserve to be
raped and to suffer the consequences-in terms of a lack of protection from the legal system, sexual abuse, and lack of
financial assistance to sustain themselves and their families-just as black men deserve to be penalized for raping, even
without having committed the act. Both "raping" and "being raped" are attached to blackness as if they form part of

Black bodies are seen as

excessively violent and erotic, as well as being the legitimate recipients of
excessive violence, erotic and otherwise." "Killability" and "rapeability" are
part of their essence, understood in a phenomenological way. The "essence" of blackness in
a colonial anti-black world is part of a larger context of meaning in which the
death ethics of war gradually becomes a constitutive part of an allegedly
normal world. In its modern racial and colonial connotations and uses, blackness is the invention and the
the essence of black folk, who are seen as a dispensable population.

projection of a social body oriented by the death ethics of war." This murderous and raping social body projects the
features that define it onto sub-Others in order to be able to legitimate the same behavior that is allegedly descriptive

The same ideas that inspire perverted acts in war--particularly slavery,

murder, and rape--are legitimized in modernity through the idea of race and
gradually come to be seen as more or less normal thanks to the alleged
obviousness and non-problematic character of black slavery and anti-black
racism. To be sure, those who suffer the consequences of such a system are primarily blacks and indigenous
peoples, but it also deeply affects all of those who appear as colored or close to
darkness. In short, this system of symbolic representations, the material
conditions that in part produce and continue to legitimate it, and the
existential dynamics that occur therein (which are also at the same time derivative and
constitutive of such a context) are part of a process that naturalizes the non-ethics or
of them.

death ethics of war . Sub-ontological difference is the result of such

naturalization and is legitimized through the idea of race. In such a world,
ontology collapses into a Manicheanism, as Fanon suggested."

OUR ALTERNATIVE is to seek the Death of European and American Man.

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Epistemic and semiotic struggle keywe must seek the Death of
American Man to solve war culture and compel decoloniality
Maldonado-Torres 5 (Nelson, associate professor of comparative literature at Rutgers
Decolonization and the New Identitarian Logics after September 11, Radical Philosophy Review 8, n. 1
(2005): 35-67) //DDI13

Inspired by these Fanonian insights l have articulated elsewhere the idea of a weak
utopian project as bringing about the Death of European Man .67 I think that the peculiar
intricacies between "estadounidense" patriotism, Eurocentrism, the
propensity to war , and the continued subordination of the theoretical
contributions of peoples from the south call for a reformulation of this idea .68
Today, after the post- 1989 and post-September 11 patriotism we shall call more
directly simply for the Death of American Man .6 By American Man I mean a concept or
figure, a particular way of being-in-the-world, the very subject of an
episteme that gives continuity to an imperial order of things under the
rubrics of liberty and the idea of a Manifest Destiny that needs to be
accomplished. American Man and its predecessor and still companion
European Man are unified under an even more abstract concept, Imperial
Man. Imperial gestures and types of behavior are certainly not unique to
Europe or "America." A radical critique and denunciation of Latin American
Man, and of ethno-class continental Man in general, is what 1 aim at in my
critique. "Man," here, refers to an ideal of humanity, and not to concrete
human beings. It is that ideal which must die in order for the human to be
born . It should be clear that what I call for and defend here is
epistemological and semiotic struggle , which takes the form of critical
analysis and the invention and sharing of ideas that allow humans to
preserve their humanity. A subversive act is that which helps us to deflate
imperial and continental concepts of Man, such as referring to "Americans"
in a way that designates their own particular provinciality rather than by a
concept through which they appropriate the whole extent of the so-called
"New World." Popular culture in the u_s. has picked up on many Spanish words and phrases (such as "Ay
Caramba,.. "Hasta Ia vista, baby," and several others), but "" has failed to adopt the central one (perhaps because
Latin@s have not insisted on it enough): "estadounidense." "Estadounidense"

is one of the most

important words that U.S. Americans learn from Spanish . It could be considered one
of the most precious gifts (not an imperial but a decolonial one) from Spanish and Hispanic culture to the
Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture that Huntington reifies and s e e k s to protect. As I have argued elsewhere,

reception of gifts and hospitality are two fundamental modes of

humanity that those who occupy and assume the position of Master most
resist. Indeed, the reception or resistance of decolonizing gifts provides a
measure of the presence of coloniality. Before being a challenge, Latin@s in this country have
been colonized and ra cialized subjects as well as collaborators in different forms of racialization. Many Latin@s,
especially conservative ones, desire the American and Americano Dream most often they desire
it until they realize that it turns into a nightmare, both for oth ers and for themselves. While the culturalistnationalist response to the Americana Dream consists in taking away the
possibility of dreaming this dream in Spanish, a decolonial response rather
abandons the very idea of the American or Americana Dream and offers as a
gift the possibility for the Anglo-Saxon U . S . American to dream the
"estadounidense" dream-a dream that does not have anything to do about
unfortunately,

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speaking one language or another, but about learning from others basic
ideas about how to conceive of oneself, in this case, to see oneself as a
nation-in-relation rather than as a continental being.71

ALSO Hold the AFF directly responsible for the 1ACs locus of enunciation
even their well meaning gesture is vampiric upon the other,
maintaining the structures of wretchedness that require ethnocidal
violence
Maldonado-Torres 2 (Nelson, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Rutgers; Postimperial Reflections on Crisis,
Knowledge, and Utopia, Review XXV, 3, p227-315) //DDI13
The European, however, is not alone in the world. Transgress topical hermeneutics and critique do not obliterate difference; rather they take difference
as a positive condition of ever new articulations that surpass the limits of ethnocentric points of view. The idea that postoccidental macronarratives
can emerge from different places does not do away with difference, since the post occidental and the trans(gress)topical can only be achieved
precisely through intense forms of interactions. Difference and otherness, however, acquire particular meanings in this context. The colonized
subaltern is an outsider-insider whose (subordinated) interaction with the colonizer allows her to be acquainted with the reason of the master in
different ways than an outsider or an insider. However, subordination makes her otherness as a human being not fully ecognized.22 More than an
other and less than an Other at the same time, the colonized is sometimes in a position to make her acquaintance with the reason of the master work in
favor of her liberation. This is a matter of perspective and experience, but only in a weak sense. Although Mignolo points to this with the notion of
"sensibility" (2000: 172), the point is not completely clear in his narrative (2000: 111). Colonial difference is inscribed in the

colonized as an ambiguous trace that marks emergent postcolonial forms of life, while it also offers the
possibility of subverting the colonizer's forms of thinking from within, using the logic of the colonizer
against him. The colonial trace also indicates, however, that coloniality can be reproduced in the space of the colonized. The path from
colonial subalterity to human alterity is a complex one, many a time collapsing into the adoption of
master-like attitudes.21 Therefore, we need macronarratives that aim to break the never
ending spell of the perverse logics of lordship and bondage . Macronarratives
must be aimed to bring about postcolonial human relations. The postcolonial, in turn, should be
conceived as he human and epistemological minimum . The effort to bring it about must
concern all involved . In this sense macronarratives take the form of macro-heteronarratives emerging from subjectivities who bear the colonial and imperial traces (overcoming the radical
difference between colonizer and colonized) and who militate against the reinscription of imperial gestures . The
postoccidental becomes in this context more an ideal than an idea, orienting the formulation of new
macro narratives while also being anticipated by the ways in which they are formulated . The focus on
colonial rela tions of power and imperial modes of being is needed to challenge the reemergence of such forces in any space, including the space of

only way in which the epistemic forms that have merged in response to the
hegemonic cosmologies in the space of the colonized will carry the promise of a truly postcolonial
condition is by engaging in an explicit and continuous evaluation of the rela tions of power
the colonized. The

that form part of new ways of life and thinking . The notion of transgresstopic critique points to the
need for this kind of self-criticism . It is necessary to associate coloniality not only with
the task of identifying the fractured forms of knowledge that arise in the space of the colonized, but
with the clear articulation of unethical modes of being that must be challenged-and one cannot be
simply identified with the other. This challenge occasions a particular kind of fracture in the
space of the colonizer : it comes to represent the crisis of the imperial system . Such
crisis emerges not so much out of an internal process going wild, but from what is left aside, from what appears excessive and is not recognized as
fully human. The colonized then becomes not only a fractured being, but a fracturing being as well as a

being who needs to be continuously fractured (from the perspective of those subjectivities who are
always left in the margins) in order to circumvent the temptation of innocence and violence (see
Bruckner, 1995).

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FINALLY, the way the Aff produced knowledge comes first in your
decision-making calculouswe have a responsibility to attack colonial
thinking in ourselves and our community of debate practitioners or
systemic violence and dehumanization are inevitable
Wanzer (Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa in Iowa City) 2012
(Darrel, Delinking Rhetoric, or Revisiting Mcgees Fragmentation Thesis Through Decoloniality Rhetoric
and Public Affairs Page 654, DKE) //DDI13
In short, I would submit that

we all

(regardless of whether we are interested in discursive con/texts explicitly

marked by colonialism or imperialism)

must seek to become decolonial rhetoricians.

Rather than be at the service of Continental philosophy as so many in our
ranks seem to be, we should adopt a decolonial attitude that aids in
shifting the geography of reason, by unveiling and enacting geopolitics and
body-politics of knowledge by putting our disciplinary tools in rhetoric at
the service of the problem being addressed. It is not enough , however, to
leave this task to scholars of color. Such a move is dangerous insofar as it
continues to relegate these important questions to the margins of the
discipline while constructing a fction of inclusion that remains authorized
by the hubris of zero point epistemology.45 We who are colonized or function
in some way Otherwise cannot be the only ones leading the charge to delink
rhetoric from modern/coloniality. An ethic of decolonial love requires those
who beneft most from the epistemic violence of the West to renounce their
privilege, give the gift of hearing, and engage in forms of praxis that can
more productively negotiate the borderlands between inside and outside , in
thought and in being. We need not, as I have shown with McGee, throw out the baby with the bathwater; however, it
is crucial that rhetoricians begin to take the decolonial option seriously if we
wish to do more than perpetuate a permanent state of exception46 that
dehumanizes people of color and maintains the hubris of a totalizing and
exclusionary episteme.

***Links to Plans***
Link America
The coloniality linked with the idea of America creates a logical structure of colonial domination that
wants to control and dominate the planet
Mignolo (Professor of Romance Languages at Duke University) 5
(Walter, The Idea of Latin America, pg 5) //DDI13
How do these two entangled concepts, modernity and coloniality, work together as two sides of the same reality

to shape the idea of America in the sixteenth century and of Latin America in the nineteenth?
Modernity has been a term in use for the past thirty or forty years. In spite of differences in opinions and denitions, there

are some basic agreements about its meaning. From the European perspective, modernity refers to a

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period in world history that has been traced back either to the European Renaissance and the discovery
of America (this view is common among scholars from the South of Europe, Italy, Spain, and Portugal), or to the
European Enlightenment (this view is held by scholars and intel-lectuals and assumed by the media in Anglo-Saxon
countries England, Germany, and Holland and one Latin country, France). On the other side of the colonial

difference, scholars and intellectu-als in the ex-Spanish and ex-Portuguese colonies in South America have
been advancing the idea that the achievements of modernity go hand in hand with the violence of
coloniality. The difference, to reiterate, lies in which side of each local history is told . OGormans invention
of America theory was a turning point that put on the table a perspective that was absent and not recognized from the
existing European and imperial narratives. Lets agree that OGorman made visible a dimension of history that was
occluded by the partial discovery narratives, and lets also agree that it is an example of how things may look from the
varied experiences of coloniality. America, as a concept, goes hand in hand with that of modernity, and both

are the self-representation of imperial projects and global designs that originated in and were
implemented by European actors and institutions. The invention of America was one of the nodal points
that contributed to create the conditions for imperial European expansion and a lifestyle, in Europe, that
served as a model for the achievements of humanity. Thus, the discovery and conquest of America is not
just one more event in some long and linear historical chain from the creation of the world to the present, leaving behind all
those who were not attentive enough to jump onto the bandwagon of modernity. Rather, it was a key turning point in world
history: It was the moment in which the demands of modernity as the nal horizon of salvation began to

require the imposition of a specic set of values that relied on the logic of coloniality for their
implementation. The invention of America thesis offers, instead, a perspective from coloniality and, in
consequence, reveals that the advances of modernity outside of Europe rely on a colonial matrix of power
that includes the renaming of the lands appropriated and of the people inhabiting them, insofar as the
diverse ethnic groups and civilizations in Tawantinsuyu and Anahuac, as well as those from Africa, were reduced to
Indians and Blacks. The idea of America and of Latin America could, of course, be accounted for
within the philosophical framework of European modernity, even if that account is offered by Creoles of
European descent dwelling in the colonies and embracing the Spanish or Portuguese view of events. What counts, however,
is that the need for telling the part of the story that was not told requires a shift in the geography of reason and of
understanding. Coloniality, therefore, points toward and intends to unveil an embedded logic that

enforces control, domina-tion, and exploitation disguised in the language of salvation, progress,
modernization, and being good for every one. The double register of modernity/coloniality has, perhaps, never
been as clear as it has been recently under the administration of US president George W. Bush. Pedagogically, it is
important for my argument to conceptualize modernity/coloniality as two sides of the same coin and
not as two separate frames of mind: you cannot be modern without being colonial; and if you are on the
colonial side of the spectrum you have to transact with modernity you cannot ignore it . The very idea of
America cannot be separated from coloniality: the entire continent emerged as such in the European consciousness
as a massive extent of land to be appropriated and of people to be converted to Christianity, and whose labor could be
exploited. Coloniality, as a term, is much less frequently heard than moder-nity and many people tend to confuse it with
colonialism. The two words are related, of course. While colonialism refers to spe-cic historical periods and places of
imperial domination (e.g., Spanish, Dutch, British, the US since the beginning of the twentieth century), coloniality

refers to the logical structure of colonial domination underlying the Spanish, Dutch, British, and US
control of the Atlantic economy and politics, and from there the control and management of almost the
entire planet. In each of the particu-lar imperial periods of colonialism whether led by Spain (mainly in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) or by England (from the nineteenth century to World War II) or by the US (from the
early twentieth century until now) the same logic was maintained; only power changed hands .

Link Development/Growth
Western forms of development lead to extinction

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Walter Mignolo, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature at Duke University, 11 [The Darker Side of Western Modernity:
Global Futures, Decolonial Options, p. 336] //DDI13
During the days in which I was f1nishing the afterword, several listserves were distributing news about, and petitions for,
condemning the killing of Indians in the Peruvian Amazon, in the north of the country. The events started in the early
morning of 5 June 2 0 0 9 , when the state Direccion Nacional de Opcraciones Especiales attacked without warning a group
of four thousand Peruvian indigenous citizens of A wanjun origin. The function of the "forces of order" was to unblock the
highway that the Awanjun Peruvian citizens had blocked to avoid being dispossessed of their lands by the government of
Alan Carda, which proposed to allow on those lands "el desarollo de industrias cxtractivas" (the development of industry
extracting natural resources, such as oil, minerals, and biofuel. The Ama- zonian movement was a peaceful and massive
event defending human rights and the participants' territory, which had for centuries provided their way of lite and
subsistence."'
Events of this kind have been common, particularly in the past sixty years . I am sure that when Amartya

Sen wrote Development as Freedom, he did not think of development as going hand in hand with
expropriation and killing, if necessary, rather than with freedom. The attitude of President Alan Garcia is
consistent with the kind of subjectivity that characterizes capitalist culture: a state politics that privileges
"development" at the cost of the lives of citizens, who are just guilty of existing. In spite of the massacre,
the historical process initiated by the political society is irreversible ; or as Quijano states, instances of the
global process could be and are defeated here and there, or perhaps life on the planet is extinguished
before, but the decolonial march of the global political society has reached the point of no return

Discourse of growth and development is rooted in universalist economic rationality with

racist/paternalistic presumption of a knowledge gap in the Global South
Elabdin (Associate Professor and Chair of Economics @ Franklin & Marshall College) 4
(Eiman, Postcolonialism Meets Economics, edited by Eiman Elabdin and S Charusheela 30-31)

The problem of knowledge has been the object of intense reflection in the past half century. Here, I am
not concerned with the nature of knowledge itself but with the role of economics (steeped in the
modernist construction of knowledge as universal truth, rational, instrumental, and, in a way, exclusive to
Western modernity) in producing the subaltern subjectivity of underdevelopment and lack of epistemic
authority.18 The question of knowledge, which underwrites both the first and second tasks of post-colonialism, is: How does the postcolonial secure
sufficient epistemic authority to write its own histories and to construct its own meanings? To begin to answer this question requires examining the very
way in which economic knowledge has been configured so far, and how knowledge as a body of human cognitive relations to the world has been
structured in ways that serve hegemonic cultural purposes. The implication of knowledge in systems of power is old, at least ever since Francis Bacon
proclaimed that [h]uman knowledge and human power meet in one, for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced (Kramnick 1995:
39). Postcolonial

critics have underscored the manner in which knowledge about certain societies was
produced and effectively deployed as instrument of dominion over them (Said 1978). Africa was invented by the
academic discourses of philosophy and anthropology that is, produced as a field of study based on European apprehensions about its place in History
recall Hegel and the cognitive characteristics of its savage mind (see Mudimbe 1988). The

contemporary exemplar of this

complex of knowledge/power is the discourse on development, which has defined the conditions of
possibility of all knowledge about former colonies since the formal end of the colonial era.
Development as discourse offers both the scientific grounds for theoretically placing postcolonial
societies in pre-modernity, and the consequent policy prescriptions for their modernization thereof.
Development not only embodies the historicist understanding of social change and the belief in the
superiority of industrial culture, it also contains knowledge as its essential component since
development, as a general phenomenon, entails a learning process. The problem of knowledge, however
stipulated in economics as literacy, the acquisition and mastery of technological skills, or simply human capital accounts for
the poverty of any given society. The cause and effect chain between knowledge and economic
growth (see Lewis 1955, Rostow 1960, Ayres 1962, Rodney 1972) provides the scientific basis for an acceptable social
theory. Accordingly, the development discourse presents knowledge as an obstacle to be surmounted by the

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less developed and, at once, produces the knowledge that becomes their frame of reference for
knowing their own selves.
Their economics and growth claims rooted in belief of modern/Western superioritysuch universalist
claims efface the geopolitics of knowledge and negate the Global South
Elabdin (Associate Professor and Chair of Economics @ Franklin & Marshall College) 4
(Eiman, Postcolonialism Meets Economics, edited by Eiman Elabdin and S Charusheela 30-31)

The place of culture in relation to economics is less visible although more complicated than that of
history, hovering nearly at the level of the unconscious. As I have argued, the idea of history played a prominent role in the
Western construction of its own identity in opposition to the peoples beyond, articulated in bold
theoretically well-developed claims that carried over almost seamlessly to economics. In contrast, the idea of culture
in economics is subject, at least since the formal end of the colonial era, to what I call a process of double erasure. First,
economics is culturally embedded in a deep-rooted perception of the ontological superiority of modern
Europeans (e.g., David Hume, see Grapard, this volume; Nassau Senior, see Dimand, this volume). Second, the dominant
presumption within economics is that the economic itself the materiality of life, habits of provisioning or accumulation
is extra cultural; it is thus disembodied from culture. One can see this presumption, if not uniformly or in equal
force, throughout the different schools of economics, for example as an innate individual tendency in neoclassical theory (Lal
1985), and a predetermined historical necessity in the Marxian tradition (Rodney 1972). As a result, the role of culture fades even as
the particular culture of European modernism is at work in formulating the pre-beginnings of the
discipline. This is the process of double erasure, that is, erasure of certain cultures by theorizing them as
inferior (less developed), and erasure of, hiding from sight, the work of cultural hegemony. The postcolonial may
counter this process by re-inscribing even seemingly matter-of-fact issues such as economic growth
within the realm of culture and social meaning. This re-inscription must write over the extensive corpus
of development economics which, broadly informed by anthropology, held up industrial society, with its base in an
accumulative principle, as the exclusive domain of modernity.15 In the neoclassical tradition,
development served as a field for confirming the universality of an economic rationality modeled after
the pattern of individual behavior associated with the expansion of markets in modern Europe. Neoclassical
economists vigorously sought to demonstrate the presence of this behavioral prerequisite for development in less developed regions. A well-known
example of this exercise is Harris and Todaros (1970) model of ruralurban migration based on their study of East Africa in which they showed that,
after careful assessment of different labor markets, migrants selected the course of action that maximized their expected pecuniary gain from migration.
This approach to rationality was summarized by Deepak Lal in his attack on development economics for straying away from the economic principle
(1985: 11), arguing that uneducated private agents be they peasants, ruralurban migrants, urban workers, private entrepreneurs, or housewives. . .
respond to changes in relative prices much as neoclassical theory would predict. The

current neoclassical discovery of culture

presents no fundamental break with this premise: culture, now granted, is a mere constraint on
optimizing rationality. Accordingly, Africas failure to industrialize (Collier and Gunning 1999: 18) can be attributed to such things as [the
problem of contract enforcement [which] makes markets, less competitive (ibid.: 11).

The drive to develop and modernize Latin America comes from a Western locus of enunciation
Grosfoguel (Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies Department at UC Berkeley) 2000
(Ramon, Developmentalism, Modernity, and Dependency Theory in Latin America Nepantla: Views from South, Volume 1, Issue 2,
pg 359-361) //DDI13
In Rostows schema, development is a five-stage process from tra- ditional to modern society. Using the metaphor of an
airplane, Rostows stages are as follows: stationary (traditional society), preconditions for take- off, takeoff, drive to
maturity, and high mass-consumption society (modern society). In terms of our topic, Rostow and Hoselitz universalized
what they considered to be the cultural features or the more advanced stages of development of the United States and
Western European countries. Thus, similar to the orthodox mode of production theory of the Communist par- ties, the
modernization theorists assumed an eternal/universal time/space notion of stages through which every society should pass.
Moreover, they assumed the superiority of the West by creating a time/space distanciation between the
advanced modern societies and the backward traditional societies.

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The struggle between the modernization and the dependentista theories was a struggle between two
geocultural locations. The locus of enunciation (Mignolo 1995) of the modernization theorists was
North America. The Cold War was a constitutive part of the formation of the modernization theory. The ahistorical
bias of the theory was an attempt to produce a universal theory from the experience and ideology of the
core of the world economy. On the other hand, the dependentistas developed a theory from the loci of enunciation of
the Latin American periphery. The attempt was not to universalize but to produce a particular theory for this region of the
world.
Five important dependentista authors developed an extensive and detailed critique to modernization theory; namely,
Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1964, chap. 2), Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto (1969, 1117), Andr Gunder
Frank (1969, part 2), Anbal Quijano (1977), and Theotonio Dos Santos (1970). These intellectuals raised the following
critiques to the modernization theory:
1. Development and underdevelopment are produced by the center-periphery relationships of the capitalist world-system.
Dependen- tistas contended that development and underdevelopment constituted each other through a relational process.
This is contrary to the modernization theories conceptualization of each country as an autonomous unit that develops
through stages.

Link Citizenship
Citizenship is a Eurocentric that props up racial hierarchiesonly delinking and abandoning
reformism can generate a new starting point to challenge coloniality
Mignolo 6 [Walter, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University,
Citizenship, Knowledge, and the Limits of Humanity American Literary History 18.2 (2006) 312-331] //DDI13
When the idea of "citizenship" came into viewand was linked to the materialization and formation of the nation-state in
secular north Europeit enforced the formation of communities of birth instead of communities of faith. But at that time,
the imperial and colonial differences were already in place, and both were recast in the new face of Western empires. The
figure of the "citizen" presupposed an idea of the "human" that had already been formed during the Renaissance and was
one of the constitutive elements of the colonial matrix of power. Henceforth, there was a close link between the concept of
Man (standing for Human Being) and the idea of "humanities" as the major branch of higher learning both in European
universities and in their branches in the colonies (the universities of Mexico and Peru were founded in the 1550s, Harvard
in 1636).1 If man stood for human being (at the expense of women, non-Christians, people of color, and homosexuals), the
humanities as high branch of learning was modeled on the concept and assumptions of the humanity which, at its turn,
was modeled on the example of man. My goal in this article is, therefore, to explore the hidden connections between the
figure of the citizen, the coloniality of being, and the coloniality of knowledge. I will describe the veiled connections as
the logic of coloniality, and the surface that covers it I will describe as the rhetoric of modernity. The rhetoric of
modernity is that of salvation, whereas the logic of coloniality is a logic of imperial oppression. They go hand in hand,
and you cannot have modernity without coloniality; the unfinished project of modernity carries over its shoulders the
unfinished project of coloniality. I will conclude by suggesting the need to decolonize "knowledge" and "being" and
advocating that the (decolonial) "humanities" shall have a fundamental role to play in this process. Truly, "global
citizenship" implies overcoming the imperial and colonial differences that have mapped and continue to map global
racism and global patriarchy. Changing the law and public policies won't be of much help in this process. What is needed
is that those who change the law and public policy change themselves. The problem is how that may take place if we
would like to avoid the missionary zeal for conversion; the liberal and neoliberal belief in the triumphal march of Western
civilization and of market democracy; and the moral imperatives and forced behavior imposed by socialism. As I do not
believe in a new abstract universal that will be good for the entire world, the question is how people can change their
belief that the world today is like it is and that it will be only through the "honest" projects of Christians, liberals, and
Marxist-socialists that the world could be better for all, and citizenship will be a benediction for all. The changes I am
thinking about are radical transformations in the naturalized assumptions of the world order. The naturalized assumptions
I am thinking about are imperialcolonial, and they have shaped the world in which we live in the past five hundred years
when Christianity and capitalism came together and created the conditions for the self-fashioned narrative of "modernity."
Hence, the transformations I am thinking about require an epistemic decolonial shift. Not a "new," a "post," or a "neo,"

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which are all changes within the same modern colonial epistemology, but a decolonial (and not either a
"deconstruction"), which means a delinking from the rules of the game (e.g., the decolonization of the mind, in Ngugi Wa
Th'iongo's vocabulary) in which deconstruction itself and all the "posts-" for sure are caught. Delinking doesn't mean to be
"outside" of either modernity or Christian, Liberal, Capitalist, and Marxist hegemony but to disengage from the
naturalized assumptions that make of these four macronarratives "une pensee unique," to use Ignacio Ramonet's
expression.2 The decolonial shift begins by unveiling the imperial presuppositions that maintain a universal idea of
humanity and of human being that serves as a model and point of arrival and by constantly underscoring the fact that
oppressed and racialized subjects do not care and are not fighting for "human rights" (based on an imperial idea of
humanity) but to regain the "human dignity" (based on a decolonial idea of humanity) that has and continues to be taken
away from them by the imperial rhetoric of modernity (e.g., white, Eurocentered, heterosexual, and Christian/secular).
The conditions for citizenship are still tied to a racialized hierarchy of human beings that depends on universal categories
of thought created and enacted from the identitarian perspectives of European Christianity and by white males. In the
Afro-Caribbean intellectual traditionfrom C. L. R. James to Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, and Lewis Gordonthe very
concepts of the human and humanity are constantly under fire.3 Would indeed a black person agree with the idea that what
"we" all have in common is our "humanity" and that we are "all equal" in being "different"? I would suspect that the
formula would rather be of the type advanced by the Zapatistas: "[B]ecause we are all equal we have the right to be
different."4 The universal idea of humanity, believe me, is not the same from the perspective of black history, Indian
memories, or the memories of the population of Central Asia. The humanities, as a branch of knowledge in the history of
the university since the European Renaissance, have always been complicitous with imperialcolonial designs celebrating
a universal idea of the human model. The moment has arrived to put the humanities at the service of decolonial projects in
their ethical, political, and epistemic dimensions; to recast the reinscription of human dignity as a decolonial project in the
hands of the damnes rather than given to them through managerial designs of NGOs and Human Rights Watch that
seldom if ever are led by actors whose human dignity is at stake. Decolonial projects imply downsizing human rights to its
real dimension: an ethical imperative internal to imperial abuses but not really a project that empowers racialized subjects
and helps them to regain the human dignity that racism and imperial projects (from the right, the left, and the center) took
away from them.

The notion of citizenship is a repressive rhetorical strategy that produces disciplinary narratives in
service to modernist history

Mignolo 2000 [Walter, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University Local
Histories/Global Designs, 203-4] //DDI13
Since Chakrabarty's argument is built on the very idea that modernity is founded on narratives of transition (in which, as
in Garcia-Canclini, tin modern presupposes the traditional, which became the necessary exteriority on which the interior
of modernity is being defined), he puts great emphasis on the narratives about the "nation" and "citizenship" as the sites
where the project of "provincializing Europe" may take place. He focuses on narratives that "celebrate the advent of the
modern state and the idea of citizenship and at the same time plays them down. Chakrabarty states that the Idea of
citizenship is the repression and violence that are instrumental in the victory of the modern as is the persuasive power of
its rhetorical strategies. . . . Nowhere is this irony more visiblethe undemocratic foundations of "democracy" than in
the history of modern medicine, public health, and personal hygiene, the discourses which have been central in locating
the body of the modern at the intersection of the public and the private. . . . The triumph of this discourse, however, has
always been dependent on the mobilization, on its behalf, of effective means of physical coercion. (Chakrabarty 1992a,
21) provincializing Europe" is, in the last analysis, a historiography that through writing and the intersection of both sides
of modernity (how the third World contributes to modernity at the same time that modernity produces the Third World or,
equivalently, inside and outside modernity) spatializes time and avoids narratives of transition, progress, development,
and point of arrivals. But if history, as a discipline, cannot do it or if history, as i discipline, kills itself by producing
narratives beyond the timing of "reason" and "temporality," this is precisely what "provincializing Europe" means: "the
politics of despair will require of such history that it lays bare to its readers the reasons why such predicament is
necessarily inescapable. this is a history that will attempt the impossible: to look toward its own death hy tracing that
which resists and escapes the best human effort at translation in toss cultural and other semiotic systems, so that the

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world may once again he imagined as radically heterogeneous. This, as I have said, is impossible within the knowledge
protocols of academic history, for the globality of .ii ademia is not independent of the globality that the European modern
has ieated"(Chakrabarty 1992a, 23; 1992b; emphasis added). If, then, ChakraI'.lily's dilemma is the fact that to write
history implies remaining under I uropean disciplinary hegemony, his proposal to go beyond it is to "provini i.ilize
Europe," and doing so implies, at its turn, going beyond the disciplines and producing a trans- instead of an
interdisciplinary knowledge. I hus the role Chakrabarty attributes to translation in his project, the death of history and the
beginning of translation as a new form of knowledge that displaces the hegemonic and subaltern locations of disciplinary
knowledge. In other words, how to provincialize Europe as a historian when historiography is declared to be bound to
Europe is Chakrabarty's dilemma.

Citizenship is rooted in modern/Western cosmopolitanism that hides its myth of genocidal violence
Mignolo 2000 [Walter, The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism
Public Culture 12.3 (2000) 721-748 ] //DDI13
In the sixteenth century, "the rights of the people" had been formulated within a planetary consciousness--the planetary
consciousness of the orbis christianus with the Occident as the frame of reference. In the eighteenth century, the "rights of
man and of the citizen" was formulated instead within the planetary consciousness of a cosmo-polis analogous to the law
of nature, with Europe--the Europe of nations, specifically--as the frame of reference. There was a change but within the
system, or, better yet, within the imaginary of the modern/colonial world system. Cosmo-polis recently has been linked to
the hidden agenda of modernity and traced back to the seventeenth century in Western Europe, north of the Iberian
Peninsula (Toulmin 1990). In the postnational historical context of the 1990s, the same issue was reformulated in terms of
national diversity and cosmopolitanism (Cheah and Robbins 1998) and by refashioning Kant's cosmopolitan ideas
(McCarthy 1999). In the same vein, but two decades earlier, cosmopolitanism was attached to the idea of the National
State and located in Germany (Meinecke 1970). What is missing from all of these approaches to cosmopolitanism,
however, is the link with the sixteenth century. This is not simply a historiographical claim, but a substantial one with
significance for the present. Multiculturalism today has its roots in the sixteenth century, in the inception of the modern/
colonial world, in the struggles of jurist/theologians like Vitoria or missionaries like Las Casas, which where at the time
similar to the struggles of postliberal thinkers such as Jrgen Habermas. If Kant needs today to be amended to include
multiculturalism in his cosmopolitan view as Thomas McCarthy (1999) suggests, we must return to the roots of the idea-that is, to the sixteenth century and the expulsion of the Moors and the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, to the "Indian
doubt" and the beginnings of the massive contingent of African slaves in the Americas. There are two historical and two
structural issues that I would like to retain from the previous section in order to understand cosmopolitan thinking in the
eighteenth century and its oblivion of sixteenth-century legacies. The two historical issues are the Thirty Years' War that
concluded with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and the French Revolution in the 1700s. The structural aspects are the
connections made at that point between the law of nature (cosmos) and the ideal society (polis). One of the consequences
of the structural aspect was to derive ius cosmopoliticum from the law of nature as a model for social organization. For
eighteenth-century intellectuals in France, England, and Germany, theirs was the beginning. 2 And such a beginning (that
is, the oblivion of Vitoria and the concern for the "inclusion of the other") was grounded in the making of the imperial
difference--shifting the Iberian Peninsula to the past and casting it as the South of Europe (Cassano 1996; Dainotto
forthcoming). By the same token, the colonial difference was rearticulated when French and German philosophy recast the
Americas (its nature and its people) in the light of the "new" ideas of the Enlightenment instead of the "old" ideas of the
Renaissance (Gerbi [1955] 1982; Mignolo 2000: 49-90). Their beginning is still reproduced today as far as the eighteenth
century is accepted as the "origin" of modernity. From this perspective, the emergence of the Atlantic commercial circuit
that created the conditions for capitalist expansion and French revolution remains relegated to a premodern world. The
imperial difference was drawn in the eighteenth century even as a cosmopolitan society was being thought out. It was
simultaneous to (and part of the same move as) the rearticulation of the colonial difference with respect to the Americas
and to the emergence of Orientalism to locate Asia and Africa in the imaginary of the modern/colonial world. This
"beginning" (that is, the South of Europe as the location of the imperial difference and the North as the heart of Europe) is
still the beginning for contemporary thinkers such as Habermas and Charles Taylor, among others. The "other" beginning
instead, that of the modern/ colonial world, is more complex and planetary. It connects the commercial circuits before
European hegemony (Abu-Lughod 1989) with the emergent Mediterranean capitalism of the period (Braudel 1979;

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Arrighi 1994) and with the displacement of capitalist expansion from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic (Dussel 1998: 331; Mignolo 2000: 3-48). Why is this historical moment of the making of the imperial difference and the rearticulation of
the colonial differences with the Americas and the emergence of Orientalism relevant to my discussion on
cosmopolitanism? Not, of course, because of national pride or historical accuracy, but because of the impediment that the
linear macronarrative constructed from the perspective of modernity (from the Greeks to the today) presents to the
macronarratives told from the perspective of coloniality (the making and rearticulation of the colonial and imperial
differences). Bearing this conceptual and historical frame in mind (that is, the modern/colonial world system), there are at
least two ways to enter critically into Kant's signal contribution to cosmopolitanism and, simultaneously, his racial
underpinning and Eurocentric bias. One would be to start with an analysis of his writings on history from a cosmopolitan
point of view and on perpetual peace (Kant [1785] 1996, [1795] 1963; McCarthy 1999). The other would be to start from
his lectures on anthropology, which he began in 1772 and published in 1797 (Van De Pitte 1996). In these lectures, Kant's
Eurocentrism enters clearly into conflict with his cosmopolitan ideals (Eze 1997: 103-40; Serequeberhan 1997: 141-61;
Dussel 1995: 65-76, 1998: 129-62). The first reading of Kant will take us to Habermas and Taylor. The second reading
will return us to the sixteenth century, to Las Casas and Vitoria, to the relations between Europe, Africa, and America, and
from there onward to Kant's racial classification of the planet by skin color and continental divides. Let me explore these
ideas by bringing into the picture the connections of cosmopolitanism with Eurocentrism. Enrique Dussel, an Argentinian
philosopher resident in Mexico and one of the founders of the philosophy of liberation in Latin America, linked modernity
with Eurocentrism and proposed the notion of "transmodernity" as a way out of the impasses of postliberal and
postmodern critiques of modernity. Dussel argues that if modernity includes a rational concept of emancipation, it also
should be pointed out that, at the same time, it developed an irrational myth, a justification for genocidal violence. While
"postmodernists criticize modern reason as a reason of terror," Dussel (1995: 66) writes, "we criticize modern reason
because of the irrational myth that it conceals." The pronoun we here precisely situates the enunciation in the colonial
difference, in the irreducible difference of the exteriority of the modern/colonial world. Much like the slave who
understands the logic of the master and of the slave while the master only understands the master's logic, Dussel's
argument reveals the limits of modernity and makes visible the possibility and the need to speak from the perspective of
coloniality. Thus, there is a need for Dussel (as there is for African philosophers--e.g., Eze 1997) to read Kant from the
perspective of coloniality (that is, from the colonial difference), and not only critically but from within modernity itself
(that is, from a universal perspective without colonial differences). Dussel observes that, Kant's answer to the question
posed by the title of his essay "What Is Enlightenment?" is now more than two centuries old. "Enlightenment is the
exodus of humanity by its own effort from the state of guilty immaturity," he wrote. "Laziness and cowardice are the
reasons why the greater part of humanity remains pleasurably in this state of immaturity." For Kant, immaturity, or
adolescence, is a culpable state, laziness and cowardice is existential ethos: the unmundig. Today, we would ask him: an
African in Africa or as a slave in the United States in the eighteenth century; an Indian in Mexico or a Latin American
mestizo: should all of these subjects be considered to reside in a state of guilty immaturity? (Dussel 1995: 68) In fact,
Kant's judgment regarding the American or Amerindian was complemented by his view of the African and the Hindu, for
to him they all shared an incapacity for moral maturity, owing to their common ineptitude and proximity to nature. African
philosopher Emmanuel Eze (1997: 117-19) provides several examples in which Kant states that the race of the Americans
cannot be educated since they lack any motivating force, they are devoid of affect and passion, and they hardly speak and
do not caress each other. Kant introduces then the race of the Negroes, who are completely opposite of the Americans: the
Negroes are full of affect and passion, very lively but vain; as such, they can be educated, but only as servants or slaves.
Kant continues, in tune with the naturalist and philosophic discourses of his time, by noting that inhabitants of the hottest
zones are, in general, idle and lazy--qualities that are only correctable by government and force (Gerbi [1955] 1982: 41418).

Link Inclusion/Geopolitics
Their proposal is a universalizaing gestureeven well-intentioned inclusion replicates the exclusion of
the other and authorizes violence

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Mignolo 2000 [Walter, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke
University Local Histories/Global Designs, 175-178] //DDI13
In 1971 Dussel, starting and departing from Levinas, conceived totality as composed by "the same" and "the other."
Describing the totality formed by "the same" and "the other," Dussel called it "the Same." And we'll see soon why.
Outside totality was the domain of "the other." The difference in Spanish was rendered between lo otro, which is the
complementary class of ihe same" and el otro relegated to the domain exterior to the system. I am tempted to translate this
view today as a "interior" and "exterior" subalternilics. Socially and ontologically, the exteriority is the domain of the
homeless, unemployed, illegal aliens cast out from education, from the economy, and the laws that regulate the system.
Metaphysically, "the other" isfrom the perspective of the totality and the "same"the unthinkable that Dussel urges us
to think. "Philosophy in Latin America, and this is a first conclusion, should begin by making a critique of Totality as
totality" (1975, 21). this conception is useful in the sense that the difference between interior and exterior subalternities is
framed in legal and economic terms. Thus, it is indeed a class difference. However, the difference is not justified in terms
of class but in terms of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and sometimes ity (i.e., if the nationality in question happens to be
"against" democracy and Western nationalistic ideals). Nobody is cast out because he or she is poor. He or she becomes
poor because he or she has been cast out. On the other hand, this difference allows us to understand that gender, ethnic and
sexual differences could be absorbed by the system and placed in the sphere of interior subalternity. This is visible today
in the United States as far as Afro-Americans, women, Hispanics, and queers (although with sensible differences between
these groups) are becoming accepted within the system as lo otro, complementary of the totality controlled by "the same."
Beyond the fact lhat Dussel used some questionable metaphors based on the structure of the Christian family to make his
argument, he also untie 1 lined very important historical dimensions: 1. A critique of modern epistemology or modern
thinking (el pensiii moderno); 2. The coloniality of power introduced by Christianity in the "dis covery" of America and in
what Dussel ( 1 9 9 6 ; 1998a) most recent I\ identified as the modern world system. Dussel placed what is known today as
Latin America in the exteriority of "the other" upon which tin modern world system constituted itself; 3. Claims that
looking at Latin America as "the olher" explain the successive constructions of exteriorities in the colonial histories of the
modern world system and, consequently, the similarity (beyond obvl ous differences in their local histories) among
regions of the "Third World" (e.g., the Arabic world, black Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and China); 4. Consequently, and
beyond the details of the geopolitical relations and the fact that these observations were made during the crucial year, of
the cold war, the geopolitical conclusions were that Europe, the United States, and the Soviet Union constitute "the
geopolitical same" while the rest constitute "the geopolitical other." At this point the lot .1 tion of Latin America as "the
other" is ambiguous. Dussel's argument tries to show the uniqueness of Latin America as the only geopolitic al and
subaltern unitwith the exception of Cubathat cannot entertain a dialogue with Europe, the United States, and the
Soviet Union at the same time, while all the other geopolitical units can, but this line ol argumentation is unconvincing.
However, I would like to retain from this issue Dussel's confrontation with Marxism in the modern world system as well
as in Latin America. His conceptualization of Totality in historical and socioeconomic and legit terms led Dussel, a serious
scholar of Marx (Dussel 1985; 1988; 1990) n I a critic of Marx and of Marxism in Latin America. Marx's unquestionable
contribution to the analysis of the functioning of capitalist economy cannot not be confused with Marx's sightless when it
came to the location ni The other" (el otro) and the exteriority of the system. That is, Marx, n Hiding to Dussel, only
thinks in terms of totality ("the same" and "the i a In i," which is the working class) but is less aware of alterity, the
exteriority ni ihe system. Hence, Marx's thinking on these issues is located within modern epistemology and ontology. In
his critical analysis about modern episteItmlogy (el pensar moderno), that term to which he attributed the conceptual .iiion
of totality I described earlier, Dussel summarizes ideas well known (nilny, although less familiar in 1971. Modern thought
since Descartes, Dus I argues, presupposed an ontology of totality that, for reasons that are quite linple, had to include a
metaphysic of alterity as negativity. The reason, he Hrues, can be found in the ontological break of modern thought with
its i iieck legacies. The modern concept of being is secular and is therefore built upon a negation of the other, which is
identified with the God of Christian totality. The same, now, is the ego, an ego without God. Totality, according In Dussel,
is no longer a fysis (in the sense of ancient Greek philosophy) hill ego; there is no longer a physic but an egotic totality. To
this egotic Inundation of totality corresponds the Kantian left denke and Marx's Ich arliflle. Hegel, for whom Knowledge
and Totality are the Absolute, installed lilmsclf, according to Dussel, at the crux of modern thought. Neither Nietzsche nor
Marx could escape from the modern paradigm. Nietzsche's mystical experience, in the Alps, where he discovered that "All
is one," napped him in the idea of an eternal return to "the Same," a Totality moved li\ "a will to power," to which Dussel

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opposes the "dominated will." He i includes by saying that: A esta modernidad pertenece tanto el capitalismo liberal, y
por lo tanto tambien el dependiente latinoamericano, como tambien el marxismo ortodoxo. Esto me parece fundamental
en este momento presente de America Latina. Puedo decir t|iie no son radicalmente opuestos siquiera, sino que son
ontologicamente "lo Mismo." Esto, evidentemente, no lo aceptarian con ninguna facilidad muchos marxistas del tipo
althuseriano, por ejemplo. (Dussel 1975, 21) in this modernity belongs both liberal capitalism, and consequently Latin
American dependent capitalism, as well as orthodox Marxism. This premise is basic for me, at this particular junction of
Latin American history. 1 can say that liberal capitalism and Marxism are not radically opposed but that they are indeed
ontologically "the Same." This conclusion may not be easily accepted, I believe, by Althusserian-Marxists. Dusscl's view
of the inadequacy of Marxism for Latin America is grounded in Ins analysis of modern thought and the place of Marxism
in this paradigm mainly, in the fact that modern thought was oblivious of colonialiiy. I mil America" in this case could
be read as the unthinkable of modernity, ni , iJ only thinkable within modernity, but not as coloniality. In his own won I El
marxismo es incompatible ontologicamente no solo con la tradicion Lalliin americana sino con la meta-fisica de la
Alteridad. No es puramente una inn i pretacion econoniico socio-politica, es tambien una ontologfa, y, como tal, n
intrinsicamente incompatible con una metafisica de la Alteridad. No es incom patible, en cambio, lo que podria llamarse
socialismo; esto ya es otra cuestion (Dussel 1975, 41) Marxism is ontologically incompatible not only with the Latin
American tradt tion but also with the metaphysic of alterity. Marxism is not only an economic and sociopolitic
interpretation but, as such, is intrinsically incompatible with the metaphysic of Alterity. It is not incompatible, on the
contrary, with something that could be called socialism. This is a different story. Here, Dussel puts his finger on an issue
and a possible debate within the I. It itself. First of all, Dussel's view of Marxism as ingrained in "modern thinking" (el
pensar moderno) and not alien to it, has been restated by others molt recently (Immanuel Wallerstein recently did so in his
discussions ol tin geoculture of the modern world system [1991a, 8 4 - 9 7 ] ) . But that is not all and perhaps not the most
interesting aspect of Dussel's position. Of more interest for the argument of this chapter is the fact that il coincides wilh tin
positions defended by Aymara intellectual and activist Fausto Reinaga. What are the grounds from which Dussel is
defending this argument? My sense is that it has to do with his view of the deopolitics of Christianity. Let me explain.

Link Trade
Trade and finance are the method of choice for dominating the Global South and cementing coloniality
breeds racism and violence and has no place in the decolonial ethics of our alt

Kanth 5 [Rajani Kannepalli, Against Eurocentrism:

A Transcendent Critique of Modernist Science, Society, and Morals 67-69]

The firearm, the printing press, paper, and the compass were to become the prime tools of Western domination of nonWestern cultures; today, in the golden era of neoliberalist finance, one might add only commerce and creditthat is, trade
and financial dependencyas the other set of allied mechanisms. The simple, if ironic, fact that all of these were
originally non-European inventions must be a sobering thought to those prone to genuflect before the putative superiority,
and originality, of modernist science. It might also be noted that the (putative) absence of a compass did not inhibit
navigation on the part of several non-European peoples who engaged in explorations not of necessity confluent with the
motives of trade and conquest. It was not a state of mind, nor a penchant for reflection, that furthered the rapid
development of European natural science (although the entire effort was located within the metaphysical matrix of
anthropocentrism) but rather dire industrial necessity in the context of desperate international, and internecine, rivalry and
war, features that have but little changed in the modern period where most research that is amply funded is still of the
strategic kind. If one but adds commercial greed, to industrial need, then we effectively sum up the driving ethosthe
colossal strengths and weaknessof European science. Salutary to note, in this regard, that neither Vedic wisdom,
wherein science and ethics were combined, nor Buddhist or Jain explorations in mathematics, were either provoked by, or
were concomitants of, conquest and accumulation but bore a purity of ardor and endeavor that has simply no modernist
European equivalent leastways in the classical period of the Enlightenment (this does not mean that the later post-Vedic
tradition did not inculcate philosophy as statecraft.. Kautilya's Arthashastra, in that regard, compares favorably with, if
long prior to, Machiavelli's ideas). However, the new scientific outlook of the Enlightenment was not engendered
unopposed and had to fight it way over the back of older traditions of science that were far more hospitable to humbler
social needs and necessities, that is, they were not driven solely by greed or power. Much as the ideas of liberalism

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triumphed over church ideology by virtue not of better argument or better evidence, contrary to modernist legend, but the
power of better organized force (as instanced in the politics of Galileo in success, and the lost crusade of the great
Paracelsus, in failure), the new sciences simply expelled the old arts and pushed them to the outer margins of existence.
Superior force, organization, and iron discipline were the redoubtable tools of European mastery, but even they, in
themselves, may not have sufficed to effect the supreme dominance that is visible today in all corners of the world
(excepting China, which remains the least Europeanized of any modernist social formation) were this force not to be
supplemented with a philosophy of domination that, to this day, has no pareil in the history of human endeavors. NonEuropean empires, faced with the European peril, had to learn the hard way that guns without arguments almost fail to fire
altogether. Somewhere in the Renaissance, Europe possessed itself of such an inexorable ideology, a veritable manifest, of
conquest of all thingsand peoples. The very spirit of the ruling European (and his North-American counterparts) today
is informed with this wantonly conquistadorean, carpetbagging, temper, still seeking gullible subjects cum consumers,
wherever possible, still seeking to take without giving, to rule without consent, ready to cheat on treaties, renege on
friends, and exact from the weak and the helpless. The craven U.S. invasion of Grenada, infamous act of state piracy
apart, where the mightiest force on earth trampled on the poorest little island imaginable, and then awarded themselves a
glittering gallery of medalsmore than one medal each for every soldier, sailor, and marine landed (and many who never
landed incidentally)can convey but a very small appreciation of just how far from even the very simplest norms of
morality European "civilization" has traversed in but a few centuries (equally linear and unbroken is the red line of infamy
that connects the atrocities of the Europeans in Africa and the technology driven savagery of Americans in Vietnam).
Indeed, the very word itself today has no readily agreed upon meaning or significance in modernist societyjust as
similarly, economics, the ruling logos of modernism, has no place for, and comprehension of, the idea of fairness or
justice, terms which are literally meaningless within that discourse. With the destruction of normative ties, the social basis
of morality erodes and becomes privatized (small wonder that the U.S. Supreme Court deems, with much relief, morality
a local, community resource subject to local adjudications and alterations of fashioris). Morality, like ethics, becomes
merely an option, among many choices, for the ordinary person, to be exercised when it involves the least cost to the
practitioner; like faith, its close country cousin, it has become effectively dispensable, and quite sub-optimal, as a
workable code for conduct. Once again, the United States (where bad guys win with a grim, degrading, monotony), the
most degenerately advanced in these directions, is living testimony to the simple rectitude of these propositions, whose
truth is confirmable by simple, direct observation alone.

Link - Democracy
Liberal democracy is a racist western fantasy that subjugates non-western peoplesconditioning aid on
democracy is directly imperialist
Conway and Singh 11 (Janet, Department of Sociology at Brock University, and Jakeet, Department of Political Science at Uni
Toronto, Radical Democracy in Global Perspective: notes from the pluriverse, Third World Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 689-706)-jn
//DDI13
In the decade since the first World Social Forum in 2001 made it famous, the rallying cry of the global justice movement
that another world is possible has undergone a significant shift. Reflecting the influence of movements like the Zapatistas,
a radical awareness of pluralism has been coupled with a widely shared desire for more popular democracy and a critique of
all forms of pensamientos unicos to propel a pluralising of alternative visions. Many other worlds are possible, and the
shared struggle is for a world in which many worlds fit. For the Zapatistas and the movements of the World Social Forum
these are visions and struggles posed against the authoritarian imposition of neoliberal globalisation on every society in the
world and against the new relations of imperialism it enacts. Arturo Escobar calls this process a new US-based form of
imperial globality, an economic militaryideological order that subordinates regions, peoples, and economies
world-wide.1 One face of this imperial globality is the US-led drive to export Western-style liberal

democracy as the only legitimate mode of governance globally and a precondition for recognition, aid and
trade with the West (albeit highly selectively applied). As James Tully argues, the dominant forms of representative
democracy, self-determination and democratisation promoted through international law are not alternatives to
imperialism, but, rather, the means through which informal imperialism operates against the wishes of the majority
of the population of the post-colonial world.2 The imbrication of democracy with the globalisation of Western capitalist
modernity has enormously complicated efforts by scholars aligned with the global justice movements to theorise democracy

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in global perspective. Many critical theories of global democracy unwittingly participate in the imperial

globality to which Escobar refers when they fail to recognise the Western capitalistmodernist
underpinnings of their proposals and knowledges, and their imbrication in furthering imperial
domination of the Third and Fourth Worlds.

The rhetoric of liberal democracy, even from the Left, is uniquely Westernreproduces epistemic
colonialty that silences the Global South
Conway and Singh 11 (Janet, Department of Sociology at Brock University, and Jakeet, Department of Political Science at Uni
Toronto, Radical Democracy in Global Perspective: notes from the pluriverse, Third World Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 689-706)-jn
//DDI13
Critical, diverse and radical discourses of democracy abound on the ground in oppositional movements around the world.
Self-sufficiency, autonomy and territory are among the latters new political demands, marking a significant sea-change in
the terms of emancipatory politics as it has been imagined by oppositional movements arising within the modern West and
contesting hegemony within the parameters of Western capitalist modernity. In this article we problematise one articulation
of radical democracy from within Western political theory and look towards alternative approaches to theorising
democracy and difference in global perspective, grounded in an appreciation of the struggle of subaltern peoples
movements to defend their life spaces, their local economies and their ways of life. Our project is theoretically informed by
the Latin American modernity/ coloniality perspective,3 which holds that coloniality has been constitutive of the modern
world system from its inception in 16th century European conquest of the Americas into the present. Coloniality is the
constitutive underside of modernity and is a condition of its possibility; there is no modernity without coloniality. Colonial
difference is that which has been invalidated, shunned, suppressed, and thus been disappeared from world history through
the global hegemony of discourses centred on Western civilisation; it is, in other words, that which has been rendered
inferior or invisible through the coloniality of power. Western-centric forms of knowledge have silenced the colonial
other through their peculiar claims to universality, their systematic rejection of their own historicalgeographical
particularity, their discrediting of other knowledges as unscientific, and their narratives of the emergence of
modernity as a process internal to Europe. This epistemic ethnocentrism, including of the left, makes inclusive
political philosophies grounded solely in Western traditions virtually impossible.4 Those working within this
framework contend that solutions to the problems created by the modern/colonial world system cannot be generated
strictly from within the traditions of Western knowledge nor, indeed, from within modernity.5 The alternative
knowledges and practices that carry some possibility of redressing conditions of coloniality are those which have been
suppressed by modernity and which expose Western cosmologies and rationalities as limited, particular and geographically
and historically specific. In this framework colonial difference is an alternative standpoint and privileged In the search for
alternative futures, for worlds and knowledges otherwise, Escobar advocates paying attention to the concrete practices of
contemporary social movements from the perspective of colonial difference and rethinking theory through the political
praxis of subaltern groups, particularly the politics of difference enacted by those who more directly and simultaneously
engage with imperial globality and global coloniality.7

Speaking under the ruse of democracy uniquely failslack of translation proves democracy has
different interpretations to different societal groups. A Western locus of enunciation has no right
to claim what is best for others
Mignolo 02 Walter D. Mignolo (Mignolo received his BA in Philosophy from the Universidad Nacional de Crdoba, Argentina in
1969. In 1974 he obtained his Ph.D. from the cole des Hautes tudes, Paris. He subsequently taught at the Universities of Toulouse,
Indiana, and Michigan. Since January 1993, Walter D. Mignolo has been the William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and
Romance Studies at Duke University, USA, and has joint appointments in Cultural Anthropology and Romance Studies. Mignolo coedits the web dossier, Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise. He is the academic director of "Duke in the Andes", an interdisciplinary
program in Latin American and Andean Studies in Quito, Ecuador, at the Universidad Politcnica Salesiana. Since 2000, he has
directed the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities, a research unit within the John Hope Franklin Center for International and
Interdisciplinary Studies. He has also been named Permanent Researcher at Large at the Universidad Andina Simn Bolvar in Quito,
Ecuador. Recently, Mignolo has ventured into what he calls "decolonial aesthetics" writing on artists Pedro Lasch, Fred Wilson
(artist), and Tanja Ostoji. He contributed to Black Mirror/Espejo Negro, a book on the works of Pedro Lasch, edited by Lasch,
published by Duke University Press.) The Zapatistas 's Theoretical Revolution: Its Historical, Ethical, and Political Consequences
2002 //DDI13
The word "democracy" used in this paragraph, very much like e word "dignity" used by the young girl in the Chiapas

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market, has double edge. The words are universally used but they no longer ave a universal meaning. "Democracy" in

the mouth of the Zapatisas doesn't have the same meaning as pronounced by functionaries of the
Mexican government or, for that matter, in the official disourse of the White House, in Washington, DC. The same
could be said about "dignity." When pronounced by a young girl in a Chiapas market, it does not have the same meaning as
when used by a proud Catholic and bourgeois family in Buenos Aires, Argentina, or in Paris, France. However, I will now
say that both "democracy" and dignity" are empty signifiers able to accommodate the different meanings

the words may acquire when pronounced in different parts of the world, by people in different sectors of
racial hierarchies or at different ranges of the social scale. What the words "democacy" and "dignity" have lost
are their "abstract universal values." If we conceive of them as empty signifiers we will indeed ratify them as abstract
universals and claim for their openness to accommodate different" conceptions of democracy or of dignity. But this is not
what is at stake here. "Democracy" and "dignity" are not conceived of as empty signifiers but as connectors. As connectors
they are the place of encounters of diverse epistemic principles underlining rules for social organization and moral codes
for collective behavior. The problem with conceiving these words as empty signifiers is that the primary meaning
attributed to these words will prevail and any other meaning would become derivative. If, instead, we conceive of these
words as connectors the primary meaning becomes one more among many, but with no claim to the privilege of being
primary. This line of argument allows the further statement that the Zapatistas's theoretical revolution resembles the notion
of Ayllu democracy discussed in Bolivia in the Aymara Research Institute Thoa (UMSA/THOA, 1995; Rivera Cusicanqui,
1990; 1993). Very similar to Oykos in Greek, the term Ayllu in Aymara encompasses family, economy, social organization,
and education. Whether the social organization implied by Ayllu would be similar to that of "democracy" as elaborated by
Western political theorists upon the legacy of Oykos and demos ( Or}J..loc; "the commons, the people" t Kpchoc; "rule,
sway, authority"-democracy) would have to be explored. However, there is a complex historical configuration to take into
account. When the French Revolution imposed the notion of democracy and built it on the concept of citizenship, the
"government of the people" was a bourgeois concept implemented against the monarchy. When the Ayllus were dismantled
in the sixteenth century, the process was rather the opposite: it was the monarch\ that, via colonization, cast as "barbarian"
a form of social organiza tion that was closer to the social organization under which the concept of "democracy" was
conceived in ancient Greece. What happened, instead, was that the population of Spanish descent ( creoles and mestizos)
that considered themselves "natives" but clearly distinguished from the "indigenous" population, used the French
Revolution to rebel against the Spanish colonial monarchy. By so doing, they took control and imposed a new form of
colonial ity, internal colonialism, as a tool for nation building in decolonized countries. One can imagine a scenario in
which, instead of creoles, the dominated population of the Ayllu would have rebelled against the colonial side of the
monarchy as well as against the would-be bourgeoisie formed by the creoles, whites, and mestizos, in Latin America. This
scenario did not occur, of course, but it is now overdue and becoming conceivable. "To rule and obey at the same time"
could be taken as the "democratic" version from the perspec tive of the indigenous communities of which the Ayllu was
not an exception. In any case, the Ayllu organization of today is not what it was before the conquest, though it remains
clearly distinct from the social organization of the Bolivian State. And you can say that not all is democracy in the Ayllu.
But the same applies to the United States, France, England and Germany, doesn't it? Currently the Ayllu is not as closed
and hierarchical as liberal and Marxist intellectuals, as well as NGOs, pretend it to be. In fact the Ayllu organization
follows "democratic" rules based on a sense of community and reciprocity among persons and the living world (Fernandez
Osco, 2000; Rivera Cusicanqui, 1990; 1993 ). It may not be perfect, but neither is the democracy in modern, Western
states. Though a modern state, whether Bolivia or, say, the United States, may be ruled according to democratic principles,
it is not surprising to see those principles violated in a social context either internally or externally. Similarly, the Ayllu
organization is not without occasional abuses, though these do not affect the principles that assure its legitimacy in the
eyes of its many practitioners. Indeed, after 500 years of external (Spain) and internal colonialism (the Bolivian state),
indigenous communities in Bolivia (in significant numbers) continue to base their social organization on principles
inherited from the ancient Aymaras and Quechuas, rather than the ancient Greeks and the European enlightenment, which
is the case for the Creole and (neo) liberal state of Bolivia. Why the ideologues of nation building in Bolivia as well as in
another similar countries acted and continue to act with their back toward the contribution indigenous politics and ethics
can offer, has no explanation. No explanation beyond the fact that coloniality of power was enacted and

continues to rule out everything that did not conform to the principles under which modernity was being
conceived. "Peripheral" or "alternative modernities" are indeed colonial and dependent versions of
modernity enacted by the high class of mestizos. A ruling class, either in Bolivia or in Mexico, which tries to
become modern, has to reproduce the silence to which Indigenous and Afro-Amerians have been reduced through
over 500 years of coloniality.

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The ideas of democracy and education under the Western nodes of thought exclude the voices of
the oppressed //DDI13
Mignolo 02 Walter D. Mignolo (Mignolo received his BA in Philosophy from the Universidad Nacional de Crdoba, Argentina in
1969. In 1974 he obtained his Ph.D. from the cole des Hautes tudes, Paris. He subsequently taught at the Universities of Toulouse,
Indiana, and Michigan. Since January 1993, Walter D. Mignolo has been the William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and
Romance Studies at Duke University, USA, and has joint appointments in Cultural Anthropology and Romance Studies. Mignolo coedits the web dossier, Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise. He is the academic director of "Duke in the Andes", an interdisciplinary
program in Latin American and Andean Studies in Quito, Ecuador, at the Universidad Politcnica Salesiana. Since 2000, he has
directed the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities, a research unit within the John Hope Franklin Center for International and
Interdisciplinary Studies. He has also been named Permanent Researcher at Large at the Universidad Andina Simn Bolvar in Quito,
Ecuador. Recently, Mignolo has ventured into what he calls "decolonial aesthetics" writing on artists Pedro Lasch, Fred Wilson
(artist), and Tanja Ostoji. He contributed to Black Mirror/Espejo Negro, a book on the works of Pedro Lasch, edited by Lasch,
published by Duke University Press.) The Zapatistas 's Theoretical Revolution: Its Historical, Ethical, and Political Consequences
2002
Paradoxically, neoliberal and Marxist intellectuals alike persist in efforts to "break up" a social organization that they see as
nondemoratic, as if democracy should be exclusively defined by the Euroean legacy and grounded in the Greek example!
Their idea of "the political proper" can be identified as the "difference" they were able to maintain for 500
years from European colonists, a difference that today is making a move forward with the Zapatista uprising,
one that is paralleled by indigenous movements in Ecuador, Colombia, Guatemala, and other states of Mexico. In

the Zapatistas's theoretial revolution we encounter the epistemic frame that indigenous communities
were unable to find either in the liberal, or the Marxist European legacies ultimately grounded in ancient Greek
political and constitutional thought. Why is it then that the Zapatista uprising stands out among numerous indigenous
uprisings? There is no doubt that Subcomandante Marcos was and still is a great mediator, and his role as successful
mediator can be explained by the political and ethical effectiveness of double translation. What is then the connection
between double translation and a nonindigenous medi ator, a mediator who was an urban intellectual? Basically, the
question is education and what is inculcated in education, both from the right and from the left. It would be
necessary at some point to trace the conditions under which, for example, Afro-American intellectu als in the French and
British Caribbean, for instance, had the possi bility of being educated and attending university. Or how similar conditions
operated for Native American intellectuals in the United States, like Vine Deloria, Jr. In Latin America these conditions
were even more restrictive for the indigenous population. Amerindian intellectuals like Fausto Reinaga, in Bolivia, do not
abound and theY saw their role more in terms of affirming a tradition rather than performing double translation. Thus,

given the sociohistorical circumstances of the indigenous population in Latin America, the difficul ties
for people of indigenous communities of having access to state education, the prejudice of the
"White/mestizo" elite toward the Indian, made it difficult for them to enter into a dialogue and to
negotiate with the state . People in official positions are predisposed toward not listening to them. In this regard, an
urban intellectual like Subcomandante Marcos was helpful and useful in these transac tions. It has been suggested, several
times, that Subcomandante Marcos was "using" the indigenous people to advance Marxist agen das. I would like to think
that the indigenous people "used" Sub comandante Marcos to advance indigenous ideas. There is indeed a wide range

of contributions in the long history of indigenous upris ings, as there is a wide range of contributions in
the long history of the White male in modern Europe. But among those contributions there are some that stand
out over others: the French Revolution in Europe, the Haitian revolution, and the Zapatistas in Latin America.

Link Nuclear War

Their war scenarios are a perfect example of the blindness of the modern/colonial epistemeemperically,
focus on nuclear wars enabled the massive destruction of indigenous peoplestheir discourse of nuclear
extinction both ignores that histories and authorizes continued genocide

KATO 93 [MASAHIDE, Dept. of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, Nuclear Globalism: Traversing Rockets,
Satellites, and Nuclear war via the Strategic Gaze, Alternatives 18, 1993, pp. 339-360]
the vigorous invasion of the logic of capitalist accumulation into the last vestige of relatively autonomous space in
the periphery under late capitalism is propelled not only by the desire for incorporating every fabric of the

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society into the division of labor but also by the desire for "pure" destruction/extermination of the
periphery." The penetration of capital into the social fabric and the destruction of nature and preexisting social
organizations by capital are not separable. However, what we have witnessed in the phase of late capitalism is a rapid
intensification of the destruction and extermination of the periphery. In this context, capital is no longer interested in
incorporating some parts of the periphery into the international division of labor. The emergence of such "pure"
destruction/extermination of the periphery can be explained, at least partially, by another problematic of late capitalism
formulated by Ernest Mandel: the mass production of the means of destruction." Particularly, the latest phase of

capitalism distinguishes itself from the earlier phases in its production of the "ultimate" means of
destruction/extermination, i.e., nuclear weapons. Let us recall our earlier discussion about the critical
historicalconjuncture where the notion of "strategy" changed its nature and became deregulated/dispersed beyond the
boundaries set by the interimperial rivalry. Herein, the perception of the ultimate means of destruction can be historically
contextualized. The only instances of real nuclear catastrophe perceived and thus given due recognition by
the First World community are the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which occurred at this conjuncture.
Beyond this historical threshold, whose meaning is relevant only to the interimperial rivalry, the nuclear catastrophe is

confined to the realm of fantasy, for instance, apocalyptic imagery. And yet how can one deny the crude
fact that nuclear war has been taking place on this earth in the name of "nuclear testing" since the first
nuclear explosion at Alamogordo in 1945? As of 1991, 1,924 nuclear explosions have occurred on earth .28 The
major perpetrators of nuclear warfare are the United States (936 times), the former Soviet Union (715 times),
France (192 times), the United Kingdom (44 times), and China (36 times). 29 The primary targets of warfare ("test
site" to use Nuke Speak terminology) have been invariably the sovereign nations of Fourth World and Indigenous
Peoples. Thus history has already witnessed the nuclear wars against the Marshall Islands (66 times), French Polynesia
(175 times), Australian Aborigines (9 times), Newe Sogobia (the Western Shoshone Nation) (814 times), the Christmas
Islands (24 times), Hawaii (Kalama Island, also known as Johnston Island) (12 times), the Republic of Kazakhstan (467
times), and Uighur (Xinjian Province, China) (36 times)." Moreover, although I focus primarily on "nuclear tests"

in this article, if we are to expand the notion of nuclear warfare to include any kind of violence accrued
from the nuclear fuel cycle (particularly uranium mining and disposition of nuclear wastes), we must enlist Japan and
the European nations as perpetrators and add the Navaho, Havasupai and other Indigenous Nations to the list of targets.
Viewed as a whole, nuclear war, albeit undeclared, has been waged against the Fourth World, and Indigenous
Nations. The dismal consequences of "intensive exploitation," "low intensity intervention," or the

"nullification of the sovereignty" in the Third World produced by the First World have taken a form of
nuclear extermination in the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations. Thus, from the perspectives of the Fourth World
and Indigenous Nations, the nuclear catastrophe has never been the "unthinkable" single catastrophe but
the real catastrophe of repetitive and ongoing nuclear explosions and exposure to radioactivity.
Nevertheless, ongoing nuclear wars have been subordinated to the imaginary grand catastrophe by
rendering them as mere preludes to the apocalypse. As a consequence, the history and ongoing processes
of nuclear explosions as war have been totally wiped out from the history and consciousness of the First
World community. Such a discursive strategy that aims to mask the "real" of nuclear warfare in the domain of imagery
of nuclear catastrophe can be observed even in Stewart Firth's Nuclear Playground, which extensively covers the history of
"nuclear testing" in the Pacific: Nuclear explosions in the atmosphere ... were global in effect. The winds and seas carried
radioactive contamination over vast areas of the fragile ecosphere on which we all depend for our survival and which we
call the earth. In preparing for war, we were poisoning our planet and going into battle against nature itself." Although
Firth's book is definitely a remarkable study of the history of "nuclear testing" in the Pacific, the problematic
division/distinction between the "nuclear explosions" and the nuclear war is kept intact. The imagery of final nuclear

war narrated with the problematic use of the subject ("we") is located higher than the "real" of nuclear
warfare in terms of discursive value. This ideological division/hierarchization is the very vehicle through
which the history and the ongoing processes of the destruction of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations
by means of nuclear violence are obliterated and hence legitimatized. The discursive
containment/obliteration of the "real" of nuclear warfare has been accomplished, ironic as it may sound,
by nuclear criticism. Nuclear criticism, with its firm commitment to global discourse, has established the
unshakable authority of the imagery of nuclear catastrophe over the real nuclear catastrophe happening
in the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations almost on a daily basis.

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Their discourse of potential nuclear explosions continues and obscures ongoing nuclear violence against
indigenous nations and the periphery

KATO 93 [MASAHIDE, Dept. of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, Nuclear Globalism: Traversing Rockets,
Satellites, and Nuclear war via the Strategic Gaze, Alternatives 18, 1993, pp. 339-360]

Nuclear war has been enclosed by two seemingly opposite yet complementary regimes of discourse:
nation-state strategic discourse (nuclear deterrence, nuclear disarmament, nuclear non-proliferation, and
so on) and extra-nation-state (or extra-territorial) discourse (antinuclearism, nuclear criticism, and so on).
The epistemology of the former is entrenched in the "possible" exchange(s) of nuclear warheads among
nation states. The latter, which emerged in reaction to the former, holds the "possibility of extinction" at
the center of its discursive production. In delineating the notion of "nuclear war," both of these discourses
share an intriguing leap: from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the "possible" nuclear explosions in
an indefinite-yet-ever-closer-to-the-present future. Thus any nuclear explosions after World War II do not
qualify as nuclear war in the cognitive grid of conventional nuclear discourse. Significantly, most nuclear
explosions after World War II took place in the sovereign territories of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations. This
critical historical fact has been contained in the domain of nuclear testing. Such obliteration of the history of undeclared
nuclear warfare by nuclear discourse does not merely posit the deficiency of the discourse. Rather, what it does is reveal the
late capitalist form of domination, whereby an ongoing extermination process of the periphery is blocked from constituting
itself as a historical fact.

Link Prolif
Description of third world use of weapons is a part of western orthodoxy

GUSTERSON 4 [Hugh, People of the Bomb, p __21-22_____]

There is a common perception in the West that nuclear weapons are most dangerous when they are in the hands of Third World
leaders. I first became interested in this perception while interviewing nuclear weapons designers for an ethnographic study
of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)one of three laboratories where U.S. nuclear weapons are de signed.1 I made a point of asking each scientist if he or she thought nuclear weapons would be used in my lifetime. Almost
all said that they thought it unlikely that the United States or the Russians would initiate the use of nuclear weapons, but
most thought that nuclear weapons would probably be usedby a Third World country.The laboratory took a similar
position as an institution. For example, using terminology with distinctly colonial overtones to argue for continued
weapons research after the end of the cold war, an official laboratory pamphlet said:Political, diplomatic, and military
experts believe that wars of the future will most likely be "tribal conflicts" between neighboring Third World countries or
between ethnic groups in the same country. While the Cold War may be over, these small disputes may be more dangerous
than a war between the superpowers, because smaller nations with deep-seated grievances against each other may lack the
restraint that has been exercised by the US and the USSR. The existence of such potential conflicts and the continued danger
of nuclear holocaust underscore the need for continued weapons research.2It is not only nuclear weapons scientists who
believe that nuclear weapons are much safer in the hands of the established nuclear powers than in those of Third World
countries. There has long been a widespread perception among U.S. defense intellectuals, politicians, and pundits
leaders of opinion on nuclear weaponsthat, while we can live with the nuclear weapons of the five official nuclear
nations for the indefinite future, the proliferation of nuclear weapons to nuclear-threshold states in the Third World, especially the Islamic world, would be enormously dangerous. This orthodoxy is so much a part of our collective common
sense that, like all common sense, it can usually be stated as simple fact without fear of contradiction.' It is widespread in
the media and in learned journals, 4 and it is shared by liberals as well as conservatives. For example, just as Kenneth
Adelman, a senior official in the Reagan administration, has said that "the real danger comes from some miserable Third
World country which decides to use these weapons either out of desperation or incivility," at the same time Hans Bethea
physicist revered by many for his work on behalf of disarmament over many decadeshas said, "There have to be nuclear
weapons in the hands of more responsible countries to deter such use" by Third World nations.'

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Images of third world nuclear powers are powerful modern/colonial metaphors that produce the identity
of countries as ignorant children and criminalsreflects the paternalistic psychology of the United States
that reproduces the us/them mentality

GUSTERSON 4 [Hugh, People of the Bomb, p ___42-43____]

These falsely obvious arguments about the political unreliability of Third World nuclear powers are part of a broader
orientalist rhetoric that seeks to bury disturbing similarities between "us" and "them" in a discourse that
systematically produces the Third World as Other . In the process, we also produce ourselves, for the Orient, one of the
West's "deepest and most recurring images of the other," is essential in defining the West "as its contrasting image, idea,
personality, experience .""The particular images and metaphors that recur in the discourse on proliferation represent
Third World nations as criminals, women, and chil dren. But these recurrent images and metaphors, all of which
pertain in some way to disorder, can also be read as telling hints about the facets of our own psychology and culture
that we find especially troubling in regard to our custodianship over nuclear weapons. The metaphors and images are
part of the ideological armor the West wears in the nuclear age, but they are also clues that suggest buried, denied, and
troubling parts of ourselves that have mysteriously surfaced in our distorted representations of the Other . As Akhil
Gupta has argued in Postcolonial Developments, his analysis of a different orientalist discourse, the discourse on
development, "within development discourse . . . lies its shadowy double . . . a virtual presence, inappropriate objects
that serve to open up the 'developed world' itself as an inappropriate object " (4).In the era of so-called rogue states,
one recurrent theme in this system of representations is that of the thief, liar, and criminal: the very attempt to
come into possession of nuclear weapons is often cast in terms of racketeering and crime . After the Indian and
Pakistani nuclear tests, one newspaper headline characterized the two countries as "nuclear outlaws,"" even
though neither had signed and hence violatedeither the Non- Proliferation Treaty or the Comprehensive Test Ban
Treaty. When British customs officers intercepted a shipment of krytrons destined for Iraq's nuclear weapons
program, one newspaper account said that Saddam Hussein was "caught red-handed trying to steal atomic
detonators"2a curious choice of words given that Iraq had paid good money to buy the krytrons from the company
EG&G. (In fact, if any nation can be accused of theft here, surely it is the United States, which took $650 million
from Pakistan for a shipment of F-16s, canceled the shipment when the Bush administra tion determined that
Pakistan was seeking to acquire nuclear weapons, but never refunded the money.) According to an article in the
New York Times, "it required more than three decades, a global network of theft and espionage, and uncounted
millions for Pakistan, one of the world's poorest countries, to explode that bomb."" Meanwhile the same paper's
editorial page lamented that "for years Pakistan has lied to the U.S. about not having a nuclear weapons program"
and insists that the United States "punish Pakistan's perfidy on the bomb."" And Representative Steven Solarz
(Democrat, New York) warns us that the bomb will give Pakistan "the nuclear equivalent of a Saturday Night
Special."" The image of the Saturday night special assimilates Pakistan symbolically to the disorderly underworld of
ghetto hoodlums who rob corner stores and fight gang wars. U.S. nuclear weapons are, presumably, more like the
"legitimate" weapons carried by the police to maintain order and keep the peace ."Reacting angrily to this system of
representations, the scientist in charge of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, said, "Anything
which we do is claimed by the West as stolen and we are never given credit except for the things like heroin. . . . You
think that we people who also got education are stupid, ignorant. Things which you could do fifty years ago, don't
you think that we cannot do them now .""

***Links to Leftists***
Link Feminism
Analysis based on patriarchy is ahistorical and reinforces colonialism the root cause of gender
oppression is solved by the alternative

Lugones, 7

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(Mara, "Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System." Hypatia 22, no. 1 (2007): 187-188, doi:10.1111/j.15272001.2007.tb01156.x.)//SDL //DDI13

In a theoretico-praxical vein, 1am offering a framework to begin thinking about heterosexism as a key part of
how gender fuses with race in the operations of colonial power. Colonialism did not impose precolonial,
European gender arrangements on the colonized. It imposed a new gender system that created very
different arrangements for colonized males and females than for white bourgeois colonizers. Thus, it
introduced many genders and gender itself as a colonial concept and mode of organization of relations of
production, property relations, of cosmologies and ways of knowing. But we cannot understand this gender system
without understanding what Anibal Quijano calls the coloni- ality of power (2000a, 2000b, 2001-2002). The reason to
historicize gender formation is that without this history, we keep on centering our analysis on the patriarchy;
that is, on a binary, hierarchical, oppressive gender formation that rests on male supremacy without any clear
understanding of the mechanisms by which heterosexuality, capitalism, and racial classification are impossible
to understand apart from each other. The heterosexualist patriarchy has been an ahistorical framework
of analysis . To understand the relation of the birth of the colonial/modem gender system to the birth of
global colonial capitalism-with the centrality of the coloniality of power to that system of global power-is
to understand our present organization of life anew.

Aff attempts to solve reinforce oppressive organizations - Feminist theory is entrenched in the colonial
gender system

Lugones, 7
(Mara, "Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System." Hypatia 22, no. 1 (2007): 187-188, doi:10.1111/j.15272001.2007.tb01156.x.)//SDL //DDI13

This attempt at historicizing gender and heterosexualism is thus an attempt to move, dislodge,
complicate what has faced me and others engaged in liberatory/decolonial projects as hard barriers that are
both conceptual and politi- cal. These are barriers to the conceptualization and enactment of liberatory possibilities as
de-colonial possibilities. Liberatory possibilities that emphasize the light side of the colonial/modem
gender system affirm rather than reject an oppressive organization of life. There has been a persistent
absence of a deep imbrication of race into the analysis that takes gender and sexuality as central in much white
feminist theory and practice, particularly feminist phi- losophy. I am cautious when I call it whitefeminist theory
and practice. One can suspect a redundancy involved in the claim: it is white because it seems unavoidably
enmeshed in a sense of gender and of gendered sexuality that issues from what I call the light side of
the modem/colonial gender system. But that is, of course, a conclusion from within an understanding of
gender that sees it as a colonial concept. Yet, I arrive at this conclusion by walking a political/ praxical/theoretical
path that has yet to become central in gender work: the path marked by taking seriously the coloniality of power. As I make
clear later in this essay, it is also politically important that many who have taken the coloniality of power

seriously have tended to naturalize gender. That position is also one that entrenches oppressivecolonial
gender arrangements, oppressive organizations of life.

Aff authors ignore colonial gender system this affirms the global system of power
Lugones, 7
(Mara, "Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System." Hypatia 22, no. 1 (2007): 187-188, doi:10.1111/j.15272001.2007.tb01156.x.)//SDL //DDI13
So, on the one hand, I am interested in investigatingthe intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality in a way that
enables me to understand the indiffer- ence that persists in much feminist analysis. Women of color and Third World

feminisms have consistently shown the way to a critique of this indifference to this deep imbrication of

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race, gender, class, and sexuality. The framework I introduce is wholly grounded in the feminisms of women of
color and women of the Third World and arises from within them. This framework enables us to ask harsh but
hopefully inspiring questions. The questions attempt to inspire resistance to oppression understood in this degree of
complexity. Two crucial questions that we can ask about heterosexualism from within it are: How do we understand

heterosexuality not merely as normative but as consistently perverse when violently exercised across the
colonial modem gender system so as to construct a worldwide system of power? Howdo we come to understand
the very meaning of heterosexualism as tied to a persistently violent domination that marks the flesh multiply by accessing
the bodies of the unfree in differential patterns devised to constitute them as the tortured materiality of power?In the work I
begin here, 1offer the first ingredients to begin to answer these questions. I do not believe any solidarity or

homoerotic loving is possible among females who affirm the colonial/modem gender system and the
coloniality of power. I also think that transnational intellectual and practical work that ignores the
imbrication of the coloniality of power and the colonial/modem gender system also affirms this global
system of power. But I have seen over and over, often in disbelief, how politically minded white theorists have
simplified gender in terms of the patriarchy. I am thus attempting to move the discussion of heterosexualism, by
changing its very terms.

The foundation of feminist theory is flawed excluded non-white colonized women and characterized
them as animals without gender

Lugones, 7.

(Mara, Argentine scholar, philosopher, feminist, and an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and
Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture and of Philosophy and of Women's Studies at Binghamton University, "Heterosexualism and
the Colonial/Modern Gender System." Hypatia 22, no. 1 (2007): 202-203, doi:10.1111/j.1527-2001.2007.tb01156.x.)//SDL //DDI13
In the development of twentieth-century feminism, the connections among gender, class, and
heterosexuality as racialized were not made explicit. That feminism centered its struggle and its ways of

knowing and theorizing against a characterization of women as fragile, weak in both body and mind ,
secluded in the private, and sexually passive. But it did not bring to consciousness that those
characteristics o nly constructed white bourgeois womanhood. Indeed, beginning from that characterization,
white bourgeois feminists theorized white womanhood as if all women were white. It is part of their history
that only white bourgeois women have consistently counted as women so described in the West. Females
excluded from that descrip- tion were not just their subordinates. They were also understood to be
animals in a sense that went further than the identification of white women with nature, infants, and small animals. They
were understood as animals in the deep sense of without gender , sexually marked as femaile, but without the
characteristics of femininity. Women racialized as inferior were turned from animals into various
modified versions of women as it fit the processes of global, Eurocen- tered capitalism . Thus,
heterosexual rape of Indian or African slave women coexisted with concubinage , as well as with the
imposition of the heterosexual understanding of gender relations among the colonized-when and as it
suited global, Eurocentered capitalism, and heterosexual domination of white women . But the work of
Oyewhmi and Allen has made clear that there was no extension of the status of white women to colonized
women even when they were turned into similes of bourgeois white women. Colonized females got the
inferior status of gendering as women, without any of the privileges accompanying that status for white
bourgeois women, although the histories O y e d m i and Allen have presented should make clear to white bourgeois
women that their status is much inferior to that of Native American or Yoruba women before colonization. Oyewhmi and
Allen have also explained that the egalitarian understanding of the relation between anafemales, anamales,and third
gender people has left neither the imagination nor the practices of Native Americans and Yoruba. But these are matters of
resistance to domination. Erasing any history, including oral history, of the relation of white to nonwhite women,
white feminism wrote white women large. Even though historically and contemporarily white bourgeois women

knew perfectly well how to orient themselves in an organization of life that pitted them for very different
treatment than nonwhite or working-class women.*White feminist struggle became one against the positions,
roles, stereotypes, traits, and desires imposed on white bourgeois womens subordination. They countenanced no one elses

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gender oppression. They understood women as inhabiting white bodies but did not bring that racial qualification to
articulation or clear aware- ness. That is, they did not understand themselves in intersectional terms, at the
intersection of race, gender, and other forceful marks of subjection or domination. Because they did not
perceive these deep differences they saw no need to create coalitions. They presumed a sisterhood, a bond given with the
subjection of gender. Historically, the characterization of white European women as fragile and sexually

passive opposed them to nonwhite, colonized women, including female slaves, who were characterized
along a gamut of sexual aggression and perversion, and as strong enough to do any sort of labor. For
example, slave women performing backbreaking work in the U.S. South were not considered fragile or
weak.

Link Postmodernism
Postmodernism is rooted in Eurocentric forms of thoughttransplanting modernist theory to the Third
World is a violent new colonialism
Walter Mignolo, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature at Duke University, 11 [The Darker Side of Western Modernity:
Global Futures, Decolonial Options, p. 128] //DDI13

Geopolitics of knowledge and of knowing was one of the responses from the Third World to the First
World. Anchored in the Third rather than in the First World the gaze changed direction . Now the First
World, the place of the humanitas, became the object of observation and the unsuspecting subject of critique by the
anthropos. There was a difference however. The gazes were not symmetrical. Looking at the First from the
Third World implies that you know you are expected to be an informant, not a thinker . Local needs in the
Third World have been shaped by both the interference of global designsexported and imported from the First World
that basically responded to the needs of the First and not the Third World. Humanitas was not interested in the anthropos,
but in having an object of investigation to fulfill their own needs and desires. Modernity has its own internal critics

(psychoanalysis, Marxism, postmodernism), but in the Third World the problems are not the same as in
the First, and therefore to transplant both the problems and methods from the First to the Third World
is no less a colonial operation than transplanting armies or factories to satisfy the needs of the First
World. What I mean is that Paris and London do not have the same colonial legacy as Mumbai, Algeria,
or La Paz. What geopolitics of knowledge is unveiling is the epistemic privilege of the First World . In the
three worlds of distribution of scientific lanor, the First World had indeed the privilege of inventing the classification and
being part of it. In this vein Hountondji contested, It seems urgent to me that the scientist in Africa, and perhaps more
generally in the Third World, question themselves on the meaning of their practices as scientists, its real function in the
economy of the entirety of scholarship, its place in the process of production of knowledge on a world-wide basis.

We must delink from European thought

Mignolo (Professor of Literature in Duke University, Joint Appointments in Cultural Anthropology and Romance Studies) 2012
Walter, Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option: A Manifesto, Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production
of the Luso-Hispanic World, 52-53, NDW //DDI13

Decolonial thinking arose and continues brewing in a conflictive dialogue with European political theory,
for Europe and from there, for the world (e.g., the emergence of neoconservatives in the United States, continuing in
America, directly and indirectly, from Schmitts theories). Border thinking, which could redundantly be called critique
(even though sometimes this is necessary to avoid confusion), sprang forth from this conflictive dialogue after reading
Waman Puma and Cugoano. In any case, if we call it critique, it would be in order to differentiate modern/postmodern
critical theory (the Frankfurt school and its effects; post-structuralism) from critical decolonial theory, whose gestation is
seen in the aforementioned authors. Decolonial thinking, upon de-linking itself from the tyranny of time as the
categorical frame of modernity, also escapes the traps of postcoloniality. Post-coloniality (post-colonial
theory or critique) was born in the trap of (post) modernity. It is from there that Michel Foucault, Jacques
Lacan, and Jacques Derrida have been the points of support for post-colonial critique (Said, Bhabha, Spivak).

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Decolonial thinking, on the contrary, builds from other palenques.15 In the case of Waman Puma, from the
indigenous languages and memories that had to confront an incipient modernity; in Cugoano from the
memories and experiences of slavery that had to confront the settlement of modernity in the economy and
in political theory. Today, decolonial thinking, upon establishing itself on the experiences and discourses
such as those of Waman Puma and Cugoano in the colonies of the Americas, also delinks (in a friendly manner)
from postcolonial critique. We will see, first, what is constitutive of these two pillars of decolonial thinking in the
colonization of the Americas and the slave trade. And, later, we will speculate about the consequences of these silences in
European political theory and philosophy. I insist on the location, if it is still necessary to remember it, since we have
already known for a long time that all thinking is located. However, in spite of knowing this, there is a general

tendency to accept thinking that is constructed by European history and that experience is de-localized.
These subtle slips can have grave consequences: in the eighteenth century, many Enlightenment intellectuals
condemned slavery, but none ceased to think of the Black African as an inferior human being. These
prejudices and blind spots continue in the geopolitics of knowledge . Decolonial thinking does a complete
turnaround. Not as the complete opposite (e.g., such as communism in the Soviet Union opposed liberalism in Western
Europe and the United States), but rather as a displaced opposition. Displaced in relation to the internal oppositions
that, in the history of modernity/coloniality were led by the theology of Bartolom de las Casas and by the political
economy of Karl Marx. That is to say: the entire planet, with the exception of Western Europe and the United States, has
one thing in common: they all have to confront invasion by Western Europe and the United States, whether as
diplomatic or war-related, beneficial or disastrous. At the same time, Western Europe and the United States have
something in common: a history of five-hundred years of invasion, whether diplomatic or armed, of the rest of the world.

Post-modernism is a Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism

Grosfoguel (Associate Professor Ethnic Studies Department, Chicano/Latino Studies) 12

(Ramn, Decolonizing Western Uni-versalisms: Decolonial Pluri-versalism from Aim Csaire to the Zapatistas 2012
http://escholarship.org/uc/item/01w7163v) //DDI13
4. Post-modernity vs. Trans-modernity? Nothing that I have said up to this point has anything to do with the postmodernist
perspective. The transmodern position is not the equivalent of postmodernist critique. Postmodernism is a Eurocentric critique
of Eurocentrism, and as a result reproduces all of the problems of modernity/coloniality . We will take the example of
the postmodernism of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and contrast this perspective with that of Zapatismo. For Laclau and
Mouffe, the processes of the formation of hegemony are constituted when a particular subject becomes an empty signifier through
which all particulars are identified and stamped with meaning, establishing chains of equivalence between themselves and
simultaneously creating chains of difference against a common enemy. This counter-hegemonic power bloc is always

hegemonized by a particular that becomes the representative of all forms of oppression against a common enemy,
but which does not incorporate each particularity into itself, instead dissolving these into the abstract universal of
the empty signifier which represents the particular subject, articulated into chains of equivalence among the
oppressed . Therefore, the shout of Viva Pern is an example of a hegemonic process (Laclau, La razn). This cry of Viva
Pern, through which all of the oppressed would identify with one another, dissolves all particular demands into an abstract
universal, in this case privileging the Peronist movement through its signifier Pern, which hegemonizes the popular power bloc
against the common enemy. The problem with the position of Laclau and Mouffe is that they cannot conceive of other forms of
universalism beyond the abstract, Eurocentered universalism in which a particular presents itself as representative of all particularities
without recognizing them in their plenitude, thereby dissolving their particularity and preventing the new universal from emerging
through the negotiation among particulars. Of course, for them there is a limit to the recognition of difference:
epistemological alterity. The epistemic alterity of non-European peoples is not recognized in their work. They recognize only those
differences internal to the horizon of meaning of Western cosmology and epistemology. For Laclau and Mouffe, there is no outside
not even a relative outsideto Western thought. Let us contrast this form of universalism to that which is proposed by the
Zapatistas and the Other Campaign. It is worth clarifying that here I am not prejudging the failure or success of a political
vision, since in political struggle nothing is guaranteed. It can win or lose, but what I want to emphasize here is an
Other understanding of politics. The Zapatistas, far from coming to the people with a pre-made and canned program as is the
case with most if not all political parties from right to left, set out from the Tojolabal Indigenous notion of walking while
asking questions. This walking while asking questions proposes an Other way of doing politics, very different from

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the walking while preaching of the Judeo-Christian, Western cosmology reproduced in equal measure by Marxists,
conservatives, and liberals. Walking while asking questions is linked to the Tojolabal understanding of democracy as commanding
while obeying, in which those who command obey, and those who obey command, which is very distinct from Western democracy,
in which those who command do not obey," and those who obey do not command. Setting out from this Other cosmology, the
Zapatistas, with their Tojolabal Marxism, begin an Other Campaign from the rearguardism that moves forward asking
questions and listening, instead of a vanguardism which preaches and convinces. (see EZLN). The idea or hope of the Other
Campaign was that after a long critical transmodern dialogue with all of the Mexican people, it will be possible to
bring together a program for struggle, a universal concrete (in the Csairean sense) which bears within it the
particular demands of all the subjects and epistemes of all oppressed Mexicans. The Zapatistas do not set out from
an abstract universal (socialism, communism, democracy, the nation, as floating or empty signifiers) in order to then preach to and
convince all Mexicans of the correctness of this view. Rather, they set out from the idea of walking while asking questions, in which
the program of struggle is a concrete universal constructed as a result, never as a starting point, of a critical transmodern

dialogue which includes within itself the epistemic diversality and the particular demands of all the oppressed
people of Mexico. Notice that this is an-Other Universal, or as Walter Mignolo (see Local Histories) would say, a pluriversal very
much different from those abstract universals of the empty signifier which characterizes the hegemonic processes of Laclau and
Mouffe, Gramscis subaltern, or Hardt and Negris multitude. The decolonization of the Eurocentered, Western

understanding of universality is a central task in order to make possible the Zapatista motto of constructing a
world in which other worlds fit.

Link Postcolonialism
Postcolonial theory takes for granted a false narrative of modernity that is particularly problematic in
the Latin American contextreinscribes racialization, domination, dependence, and euro-modernity
itself

Maldonado-Torres 4 [Nelson, ethnic studies department at UC Berkeley, The topology of being and the geopolitics of
knowledge: Modernity, empire, coloniality, City, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 21-56] //DDI13
As Walter Mignolo has pointed out, one of the most effective ways to maintain questions regarding the role of the colonial
experience in modernity at bay has been to posit the late 18th century as the birth of the modern era.35 It is true that

post-colonial studies have brought to attention questions of spatiality and coloniality to the surface. But
most often than not, post-colonial studies scholars assume the self-definition of modernity in terms of its
beginnings in the late 18th and the beginnings of the 19th century . Thus, while they are able to illustrate
the ways in which the imperial adventures of Britain and France in the 19th century were constitutive of
Western modernity, they lose from view more long-standing patterns of colonial domination and
exploitation.36 It is not possible, for instance, to understand the ties between modernity and the diffusionist
myth of emptiness that Blaut discusses without taking the so-called discovery and conquest of the Americas
into account. It is for this reason Quijano and Wallerstein give a central role to Americaneity in their account of
modernity: 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 nihilo everywhere
(except perhaps in the Mexican and Andean zones). Hence, from the beginning, the mode of cultural resistance to
oppressive conditions was less in the claims of historicity than in the flight forward to modernity. The Americas were the
New World, a badge and a burden assumed from the outset. But as the centuries went by, the New World became the
pattern, the model of the entire world-system.37 To raise the question of the relationship between modernity and

the colonial experi- ence in Latin America and other parts of the Americas, especially if done by subjects
who are sceptical of the promises of moderniza- tion and the redeeming qualities of the nation-state , is
to bring out the relevance of what Quijano and Wallerstein refer to as the long 16th century in the production of modernity.
While the imperial adventures of the 19th century certainly introduced new techniques of subordination and colonial
control, and thus, rearticulated in original ways the ties between modernity and the colonial experience, the logic that

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animated the imperial projects was not so different from the patterns that emerged in the context of the
conquest of the Americas. Indeed, it would be impossible to understand this logic without reference to
them. Awareness of the long-standing patterns of racialization , domination and dependence that were
tested and enacted in the context of the conquest of the Americas (but certainly not restricted to the American
territory) is what has led some Latin American and US Latino/a scholars, including people involved in
indigenous struggles in South America, to enter in a critical dialogue with perspectives such as those of Quijano and
Wallerstein, who iden- tify long-term patterns of relations of power in what we have come to call modernity .
While post-colonial theory has made a tre- mendous contribution to the understanding of modernity in its relation to the
colonial experience and to the dislocation of the nation-state as the unit of analysis, insights that have yet to be fully
assumed from a world-system perspective, it also risks taking for granted the narrative of modernity : with its

fixation on secularism, its critique of tradition, and its depiction of the empires of Spain and Portugal and
its multiple colonial subjects as insignificant precedents of West- ern modernity . The idea here is that while it
is true that modern Britain was produced along with modern India, it is impossible to account for the modernity of
these nations completely without making reference to a larger framework that brings into view the experiences of colonized
peoples in the Americas and elsewhere at least from the 16th century on.38 As Sylvia Wynter insists, particularly relevant is
also the relationship between southern Europe first, and northern Europe afterwards, with Africa.39 Europes relationship
with Africa is constitutive of both the first and the second modernities.

Link Deleuze
Deleuzes thinking is Eurocentric and colonial

Saldvar 2006 (Saldvar, Jos David. "Border Thinking, Minoritized Studies, and Realist Interpellations: The Coloniality of
Power From Gloria Anzalda to Arundhati Roy." In Identity Politics Reconsidered. Edited by Linda Alcoff. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006.) //DDI13
THE POLITICS OF BECOMING MINOR In a landmark 1987 conference at the University of California, Berkeley, the
literary theorists Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd called for a radical examination of the nature and
context of minority discourse.4 JanMohamed and Lloyd were specifically interested in rethinking the
relationship between a minor literature and the canonical literatures of the majority. Schematically put,
Lloyd and JanMohameds theory and practice of minority discourse involves drawing out solidarities in the

forms of similarities between modes of repression and struggles that all minorities experience separately
but precisely as minorities (1990, 9). Their project of minority discourse fundamentally supplemented
Deleuze and Guattaris Eurocentered theorizing of a minor literaturea literature so termed by its opposition
to those which define canonical writing. A minor literature entails for them the questioning or destruction of the concept
of identity and identification . . . and a profound suspicion of narratives of reconciliation and unification (1990, 381). In
other words, Lloyd and JanMohamed maintained that a minority discourse should neither fall back on

ethnicity or gender as an a priori essence nor rush into calculating some nonhumanist celebration of
diversity for its own sake (1990, 9). While some realists might take issue with Lloyd and JanMohameds partial
dismissal of the cognitive work of our identities and their overreliance on the Eurocentric work of Deleuze and
Guattari (their erasure of the cognitive aspects of U.S. and other globalized racialized minority experiences and
identities), the political project of minority discourse remains on target: Becoming minor , they write, is
not a question of essence . . . but a question of position: a subject-position that in the final analysis can be
defined only in political terms (1990, 9).

Link European Philosophy

Western philosophy is incompatible with decoloniality because it makes euro-centered History the
dominating story of the world
Mignolo (Professor of Romance Languages at Duke University) 5

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(Walter, The Idea of Latin America, pg. Preface) //DDI13

The narrative and argument of this book, then, will not be about an entity called Latin America, but on how
the idea of Latin America came about. One of the main goals is to uncouple the name of the subcontinent from the
cartographic image we all have of it. It is an excavation of the imperial/colonial foundation of the xi idea of
Latin America that will help us unravel the geo-politics of knowledge from the perspective of coloniality,
the untold and unrecognized historical counterpart of modernity. By perspective of coloniality in this case, I
mean that the center of observation will be grounded in the colonial history that shaped the idea of the Americas. I refer to
the process as an excavation rather than an archeology because it is impossible to simply uncover coloniality,
insofar as it shapes and is shaped by the processes of modernity . After all, the Americas exist today only as a
consequence of European colonial expansion and the narrative of that expansion from the European perspective, the
perspective of modernity. You can tell the story of the world in as many ways as you wish, from the perspective of
modernity, and never pay any attention to the perspective from coloniality. I am here referring to
something important and much more than a mere conflict of interpretations. To illustrate, consider that a
Christian and a Marxist analysis of a given event, say the discovery of America, would offer us different interpretations;
but both would be from the perspective of modernity. That is, the discovery of America would be seen in both cases from
the perspective of Europe. A Fanonian perspective on the discovery of America, however, would introduce a
non-European perspective, the perspective grounded on the memory of slave-trade and slavelabor
exploitation, and its psychological, historical, ethical, and theoretical consequences . In this case, it would be
a perspective from coloniality and from the Afro-Caribbean rather than from Europe . Readers will be more
familiar with Christianity and Marxism than with Fanonism a critical current of thought (parallel with and complementary
to, but not reducible to, Marxism) that is producing a decolonial shift in the domain of knowledge and action, inspired by
the twentieth-century Martinican intellectual and activist Frantz Fanon, discussed in the following chapters which should
already point to an important aspect of the issue that structures my entire argument. Of course, I could have organized
my argument from a European perspective, even if I was born and educated in South America. All I would need

to do would be to embrace the philosophical frame of reference that is already in place and locate myself
within a paradigm of knowledge that, in spite of conflicting interpretations within it, is based on the geohistorical location of Europe. Instead, I situate my argument within the decolonial paradigm of knowledge
and understanding enacted by Waman Puma de Ayala (see chapter 3), as well as other intellectuals after him belonging to
the sphere of society that anthropologist Eric Wolf identified as people without history. From the sixteenth-century
Spanish missionary Bartolom de Las Casas to G. W. F. Hegel in the nineteenth century, and from Karl Marx to the
twentieth-century British historian A. J. Toynbee, all we can read (or see in maps) about the place of the Americas
in the world order is historically located from a European perspective that passes as universal . Certainly,
every one of these authors acknowledged that there was a world, and people, outside Europe. Indeed, both people and
continents outside of Europe were overly present as objects, but they were absent as subjects and , in a
way, out of history. They were, in other words, subjects whose perspectives did not count. Eric Wolf s famous
book title, People without History, became a metaphor to describe this epistemic power differential. By people without
history, Wolf did not mean that there were people in the world who did not have memories and records of their past, which
would be an absolutely absurd claim. He meant that, according to the regional concept of history as defined in the Western
world from ancient Greece to twentieth-century France, every society that did not have alphabetic writing or wrote in a
language other than the six imperial languages of modern Europe did not have History. In this view, History is a

privilege of European modernity and in order to have History you have to let yourself be colonized, which
means allowing yourself, willingly or not, to be subsumed by a perspective of history, life, knowledge,
economy, subjectivity, family, religion, etc. that is modeled on the history of modern Europe, and that has
now been adopted, with little difference, as the official model of the US . Perspectives from coloniality,
however, emerge out of the conditions of the colonial wound, the feeling of inferiority imposed on human
beings who do not fit the predetermined model in Euro-American narratives. To excavate coloniality, then, one must
always include and analyze the project of modernity, although the reverse is not true, because coloniality points
to the absences that the narrative of modernity produces. Thus, I choose to describe the modern world order that
has emerged in the five hundred years since the discovery of America as the modern/colonial world, to indicate that
coloniality is constitutive of modernity and cannot exist without it. Indeed, the idea of Latin America cannot be dealt with
in isolation without producing turmoil in the world system. It cannot be separated from the ideas of Europe and of the US
as America that dominate even today. The Americas are the consequence of early European commercial expansion and

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the motor of capitalism, as we know it today. The discovery of America and the genocide of Indians and African slaves
are the very foundation of modernity, more so than the French or Industrial Revolutions. Better yet, they constitute the
darker and hidden face of modernity, coloniality. Thus, to excavate the idea of Latin America is, really, to understand
how the West was born and how the modern world order was founded.

Link Marxism/Starting Point Key

Benevolent leftism fails to account for its Western genealogy, the de-colonial battle is not only against
capitalism but all forms of Occidentalist epistemology. A call to the communal avoids universalizing
particular struggles that inevitably exclude and erase colonial violence.
Walter Mignolo, Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University, The communal and the de-colonial,
Turbulence: Ideas for Movement, No. 5, Decembe4 2009, pg. 30, TB //DDI13
When applied to Latin America, I would get immensely bored if we talked about the Americas specifically all the time and thats Eurocentric but I would rather talk
about Russia which is why I like the Russia DA so whatever).

This is a crucial point, as it highlights the di culty of equating the communal and the common. The latter is a
keyword in the reorientation of the European left today. And that should be no surprise: the idea of the

common is part of the imaginary of European history. Yet the communal is an-other story: it cannot
be easily subsumed by the common, the commune or communism. (Though this does not mean they cannot
be put into conversation with one another.)
It would have been mistaken, when Evo Morales was elected president of Bolivia in 2005, to simply assume that an
indianismo or an indigenous left had joined forces with the Latin left. Even vice-president Alvaro Garca Lineras wrote
about the desencuentro (mismatch) between indianismo and Marxism, two revolutionary projects. Not only would the
reverse seem a more accurate description, but one cannot assimilate what ultimately are two very diff erent

projects with a common enemy the local, pro-neoliberal elite that had been running the country since
the mid-1980s, when Gonzalo Sanchez de Losada was Minister for Planning, primarily responsible for economic aff
airs, and Jeff rey Sachs one of his advisors.
The Latin left (led by criollos and mestizos, that is, white Bolivians) is grounded in the genealogy of
European thought. Broadly speaking, however far it may have branched out, its trunk is Marxism-Leninism.

Their present recognition of, and alliances with, indigenous struggles is obviously a sign of a
convergent trajectory, but a diff erent trajectory nonetheless. Their trajectory drinks at the source of
other experiences and other genealogies of thought as is evident, for example, in their recourse to the
commons. From an indigenous perspective, however, the problem is not capitalism alone it is
Occidentalism, which includes both capitalism and Marxism. The Indian leader, Fausto Reynaga (1906
1994), was a great admirer of Marx whom he referred to as the genius Moor but he despised the Bolivian left of his
time, drawing a clear distance between his book The Indigenous Revolution and Marxs Communist Manifesto. According
to Reynaga, Marx confronted the bourgeoisie from the perspective and interests of the working class and

proposed a class struggle within Western civilisation. The indigenous revolution, however, is against
Western civilisation as such, including the left, which originated in the West. This is why I would rather
refer not to an indigenous left, but an indigenous de-colonial.
The communal is not grounded on the idea of the common, nor that of the commune, although the latter has been
taken up in Bolivia of late notably, not by Aymara and Quechua intellectuals, but by members of the criolla or mestiza
population. The communal is something else. It derives from forms of social organisation that existed prior

to the Incas and Aztecs, and also from the Incas and Aztecs experiences of their 500-year relative
survival, rst under Spanish colonial rule and later under independent nation states. To be done justice, it
must be understood not as a leftwing project (in the European sense), but as a de-colonial one.
De-coloniality is akin to de-Westernisation, which was a strong element of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and
remains an active ideological element in East and Southeast Asia. De-Westernisation is neither left nor right: it
questions Occidentalism, racism, a totalitarian and unilateral globality and an imperialist
epistemology. The diff erence is that decoloniality frontally questions the capitalist economy, whereas
de-Westernisation only questions who controls capitalism the West or emerging economies.

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Link Zizek
Zizeks epistemic racism and thorough embrace of the West must be rejectedperpetuates all
underpinnings of modern/coloniality even if its a critique of modernity from within the West

Maldonado-Torres 4 [Nelson, ethnic studies department at UC Berkeley, The topology of being and the geopolitics
of knowledge: Modernity, empire, coloniality, City, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 21-56] //DDI13
Re-rooting communist hope in Western Christianity became very important for the European left after the collapse of the
Soviet Union. Without being able to find a home in the Soviet Union or the traditional commu- nist party, there were not
too many choices opened to maintain alive the communist project. There was thus the need for a reconciliation of the
European Marxist left with Europe and with Western Christianity. By the time in which such need became urgent, the very
idea of Europe had been strongly contested by scholars who, follow- ing Fanons insight about the roots of Europe, turned
to criticize heavily the proj- ect of European civilization. Like anyone desperately in the search for roots, the left

has tended to turn increasingly reactionary, to the point of embracing orthodoxy as an emblem of
criticism.68 The Lacanian Marxist Slavoj Z iz ek represents the highest expres- sion of the anxiety for
roots that has charac- terized the leftist project in Europe and the USA as well .69 His search for roots is not
totally different from Heideggers. Like in Heidegger, there is in Z iz eks project an extreme critique of
Western modernity and an equal attempt to save the West at the same time. The difference is that where
Heidegger turned to fascism and Germancentrism, Z iz ek vindicates Marxism, Eurocentrism and an
orthodox version of Western Christian- ity.70 This difference, however, only grounds the highest
commonality between Heidegger and Z iz ek: their epistemic racism . For while Heidegger could not think
about genuine philosophy out of the German language, Z iz ek cannot see political radicalism out of the MarxistChristian diad. As he puts it in The Puppet and the Dwarf: My claim here is not merely that I am a materialist through
and through, and that the subversive kernel of Christianity is accessible also to a materialist approach; my thesis is much
stronger: this kernel is accessible only to a materialist approachand vice versa: to become a true dialectical materialist,
one should go through the Christian experience.71 Z iz eks conservatism is radical, and because of that, it

challenges the complacency of conservatives and non-conservatives alike. The radicalism, however, does
not hide the amount of epistemic racism ; just like Heideg- gers suggestive analyses of the problem of technology
and nihilism did not hide it either. This racism is evinced in the above passage. Since it does not surface in Z iz eks work
that there could be truly radical polit- ical options beyond the horizons of dialec- tical materialism then it follows that
Chris- tianity is the one and only source of true radicalism. This explains, among many other things, his view of Buddhism.
Z iz eks views about Christianity and the left gives him licence to engage in a new form of Orien- talism that knows no
boundaries. After a few pages dedicated to the analysis of the state- ments of a few Zen Buddhists and a portion of the
Bhagavad Gita, Z iz ek assumes enough authority to observe: This means that Buddhist (or Hindu, for that matter) allencompassing Compassion has to be opposed to Christian intolerance, violent Love. The Buddhist stance is ultimately one
of Indifference, of quenching all passions that strive to establish differences; while Christian love is a violent passion to
introduce Difference, a gap in the order of being, to privilege and elevate some object at expense of others.72Z iz ek
reifies Buddhism and Christianity and then assigns them intrinsic logics that help to discriminate one from the other just as
easily as Heidegger was able to differentiate between philosophical and non-philosoph- ical languages. For Z iz ek, Oriental
spiritual- ity is indifferent to the world and its logic of non-distinction leads its adherent to become complicit with military
powers, if not even openly endorse them. Monotheists, are, on the contrary, either tolerant of differences or intolerants of
love.73 The search for roots inhibits the capacity for careful examination of the ways in which that which

we call religion never operates in a vacuum. The extremism of Z iz eks epistemic racism is manifest in
that while he dismisses Oriental spirituality because of its affiliations with militarism, he keeps Hegel in
his sanctuary even though Hegel remains one of the strongest supporters of war in the Western world .74

Zizek is a Eurocentric racist

Walter Mignolo, Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University, The Many Faces of Como-polis: Border
Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism, 12(3): 721-748, Fall 2k, TB //DDI13

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The abstract universal is what hegemonic perspectives provide, be they neoliberal or neoMarxist. The
perspective from the colonial difference (illustrated in the dilemma formulated by AnNa'im and further developed
with the example of the Zapatistas) instead opens the possibility of imagining border thinking as the
necessary condition for a future critical and dialogic cosmopolitanism. Such a critical and dialogic
cosmopolitanism itself leads toward "diversality," instead of toward a new universality grounded
(again) "on the potential of democratic politicization as the true European legacy from ancient Greece onward" (Zizek
1998: 1009). A new universalism recasting the democratic potential of the European legacy is not
necessarily a solution to the vicious circle between (neo)liberal globalization and "regressive forms of
fundamentalist hatred" (Zizek 1998: 1009). It is hard to imagine that the entire planet would endorse
the democratic potential of "the European legacy from ancient Greece onward." The entire planet
could, in fact, endorse a democratic, just, and cosmopolitan project as far as democracy and justice are
detached from their "fundamental" European heritage, from Greece onward, and they are taken as connectors
around which critical cosmopolitanism would be articulated. Epistemic diversality shall be the ground for
political and ethical cosmopolitan projects. In other words, diversity as a universal project (that is,
diversality) shall be the aim instead of longing for a new abstract universal and rehearsing a new
universality grounded in the "true" Greek or Enlightenment legacy. Diversality as the horizon of
critical and dialogic cosmopolitanism presupposes border thinking or border epistemology grounded
on the critique of all possible fundamentalism (Western and non-Western, national and religious, neoliberal and
neosocialist) and on the faith in accumulation at any cost that sustains capitalist organizations of the economy (Mignolo
2000). Since diversality (or diversity as a universal project) emerges from the experience of coloniality

of power and the colonial difference, it cannot be reduced to a new form of cultural relativism but
should be thought out as new forms of projecting and imagining, ethically and politically, from
subaltern perspectives. As Manuel Castells (1997: 109) puts it, the Zapatistas, American militia, and Aum Shinrikyo
are all social movements that act politically against globalization and against the state. My preference for the Zapatistas
and not for the other two is an ethical rather than a political choice. Diversality as a universal project, then, shall be
simultaneously ethical, political, and philosophical. It cannot be identified, either, with oppositional violence beyond the
European Union and the United States. And of course, by definition, it cannot be located in the hegemonic global designs
that have been the target of critical reflections in this essay. As John Rawls would word it in his explorations on the [End
Page 743] "law (instead of the right) of peoples," diversality as a universal project shall be identified with "the

honest non-liberal people" (Rawls 1999: 90, see also 89-128). But also with "the honest nonWestern
people or people of color" that Rawls, following Kant, doesn't have in his horizon.
Critical and dialogic cosmopolitanism as a regulative principle demands yielding generously ("convivially" said Vitoria;
"friendly" said Kant) toward diversity as a universal and cosmopolitan project in which everyone participates instead of
"being participated." Such a regulative principle shall replace and displace the abstract universal cosmopolitan ideals
(Christian, liberal, socialist, neoliberal) that had helped (and continue to help) to hold together the modern/colonial world
system and to preserve the managerial role of the North Atlantic. And here is when the local histories and global designs
come into the picture. While cosmopolitanism was thought out and projected from particular local

histories (that became the local history of the modern world system) positioned to devise and enact
global designs, other local histories in the planet had to deal with those global designs that were, at the
same time, abstract universals (Christian, liberal, or socialist). For that reason, cosmopolitanism today
has to become border thinking, critical and dialogic, from the perspective of those local histories that
had to deal all along with global designs. Diversality should be the relentless practice of critical and
dialogical cosmopolitanism rather than a blueprint of a future and ideal society projected from a single
point of view (that of the abstract universal) that will return us (again!) to the Greek paradigm and to
European legacies (Zizek 1998).
Any universalizing demands inevitably exclude and contradict, subalterneity is able to question these
limits without dominating because of its position as periphery.

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Nelson Maldonado-Torres, "Decolonization and the New Identitarian Logics After September 11." Radical Philosophy Review 8,
no. 1 (2005): 35-67, TB //DDI13
The Eurocentric attitude that blinds Husser\ and Levinas has been reproduced and continues to be reproduced today, even in
the work of thinkers who challenge other aspects of their work. Indeed, as I have developed elsewhere in more detail, one
of the most unfortunate "turns" in European political philosophy is the return to Christian-centered and Eurocentric
perspectives in the conception of radical poli-tics. 26 The most clear and known example is Slavoj ZizekY In his

critical response to Levinasian ethics of alterity, deconstruction, and subaltern identity politics, among
other alleged menaces to radical politics, Zizek claims "left Eurocentrism. "28 Left Eurocentrism
consists in a convergence of a protest against capitalism and the affirmation of the universal. The ethics
of dialogue and encounter with alterity are displaced by a politics of radical political intervention
premised on the universalization of the demands of one's own group. This position is ironic, since
Zizek appears to recommend to subaltern groups, among others, to overcome the limits of subaltern
identity politics by adopting the strategy of hegemonic identity politics. But hegemonic identity
politics is ultimately even more problematic than subaltern identity politics, which can intelligently
make points about the epistemic validity and universal significance of some of its expressions without
collapsing necessarily -'into the alignment of universality and the particular.29 As I have argued elsewhere,
positions such as "transgresstopic critical hermeneutics," "transmodernity," and "radical diversality"
denote possible strategies to overcome the limits of identity politics (both hegemonic and subaltern) by
radicalizing elements that appear in the Husserlian and Levinasian interventions into modern We stern philosophy, as
well as the ideas that have been produced in the periphery of Europe.10 In the last section of this essay, I will
spell out some ideas that go in this direction. Now we should turn to the examination of the second form of hegemonic
identity politics: hegemonic identity politics based on culture.

Link Laclau andMouffe

Radical democracy is just liberal democracyits rooted squarely in the west
Conway and Singh 11 (Janet, Department of Sociology at Brock University, and Jakeet, Department of Political Science at Uni
Toronto, Radical Democracy in Global Perspective: notes from the pluriverse, Third World Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 689-706)-jn
//DDI13
In terms of this article, we want to make several overarching critiques of this project. First, it is important to note that Mouffe

and Laclaus history of the

democratic revolution and project for radical democracy is situated squarely within a history of Western
modernity, and its dominant political tradition of liberal democracy. Radical democracy actually means radical liberal democracy; that
is, a radicalisation, democratisation and deepening of the type of political regime already characteristic of the
modern West, a project that does not seek to create a completely different kind of society, but rather attempts to make
use of the symbolic resources of the liberal democratic tradition. 10 Their project, then, involves an attempt to isolate
liberal democracy as a political regime consisting of a set of institutions and a broader symbolic ordering of social relations, but distinct from any particular
economic system11and to mobilise this regime against the unequal and unfree forms of social relations spread by market
forces. They accomplish this by making an analytical separation between political and economic forms of liberalism, treating capitalism as a
phenomenon that can be contained within the economic sphere , and relying on a conventional social-democratic vision of national state regulation of the
capitalist economy, guided by a form of political liberalism. 12 Thus, Mouffe and Laclau bracket liberal democracys intertwined history with, legitimations of, and key
complicities with, capitalist rule and expansion. In many ways, then, theirs is a conservative utopia that is, a utopian project that identifies itself
with present-day reality and derives its utopian dimension from the radicalisation or complete fulfilment of the
present.13 Moreover, this history of the democratic revolution, ostensibly internal to and now diffusing from the modern
West, has a profound colonial undersid e, about which Mouffe and Laclau are silent. The unmarked state or national society of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is
located neither analytically in a hierarchically organised world system nor historically with reference to European colonial domination over most of the world. The role of
colonialism in co-producing the European contexts and subjects who become the unmarked , and thus universal ,
subjects of radical democracy is not recognised and so cannot be problematised.

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The aff overemphasizes hegemony which destroys diverse struggle
Conway and Singh 11 (Janet, Department of Sociology at Brock University, and Jakeet, Department of Political Science at Uni
Toronto, Radical Democracy in Global Perspective: notes from the pluriverse, Third World Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 689-706)-jn
//DDI13
Our second overarching critique of Mouffe

and Laclaus project is that it reifies and universalises a singular ontology of the political, that of
the struggle for hegemony. In their framework the political is understood as a moment of closure that occurs through a
necessarily conflictual and exclusionary process of constitution of a collective identity , and the differentiation of us from
them.14 Hegemony is needed in order to collectively reduce the margin of undecidability15 that characterises the radical pluralism of modernity: It is because there is no longer a
centre which binds together power, law and knowledge that it becomes possible and necessary to unify certain political spaces through hegemonic articulations.16 Hegemonic
articulations among diverse particularities are necessary, they argue, in order to establish a sufficient level of order in the midst of disorder, as
well as a common symbolic framework, the absence of which would cause an implosion of the social and the unravelling of the social fabric.17 This ontology
of the political can be characterised by what Richard Day calls the hegemony of hegemonythat is, the assumption that effective
social change can only be achieved simultaneously and en masse, across an entire national or supranational
space.18 The work of all political actors must either be hegemonic or counter-hegemonic , for in either case it must ultimately be
aimed towards the construction of a hegemony that is, a system of shared meaning, identity, and political powerthat
spans the entire political community and permeates all areas of social life. 19 By this logic diverse struggles and
movements must work to generate a common hegemonic project ; indeed, if they are not thus oriented, they should not
even be understood as properly political.

That means statism and the construction of a classical liberal nation

Conway and Singh 11 (Janet, Department of Sociology at Brock University, and Jakeet, Department of Political Science at
Uni Toronto, Radical Democracy in Global Perspective: notes from the pluriverse, Third World Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 689706)-jn //DDI13
While Mouffe and Laclaus work emphasised radical democracy as a hegemonic project, Mouffes later sole-authored
writings focus on radical democracy as a type of political regime.20 Political regimes are constitutionally bounded
political communities that are characterised by a set of institutions of decision making, regulation and enforcement over the
whole, as well as collective principles and forms of identity. Mouffe clearly reinforces a national scale and a statist ontology
here, dividing the world into discrete political units that contain subjects and provide them with the basic political
principles to which they owe allegiance. Mouffe argues both that every political regime is founded on a discrete set of
principles of legitimacy, and that no political regime can tolerate conflicting principles of legitimacy within its midst
without endangering its very survival.21 As such, all subjects of a political regime must share an allegiance to the basic
principles of legitimacy of the political associationthese are the regimes constitutional essentials or the ethicopolitical
principles that are embedded in its constitution and constitute its political grammar (emphasis in original)22and it is
these principles of legitimacy that provide the ground of articulation among the various political struggles that occur within
the political community. Against this background Mouffe explains that a radical democratic regime is one in which all
political adversaries must share an allegiance to the hegemonic principles of political legitimacy of liberal democracy
the values of freedom and equalitybut are engaged in an agonistic struggle over competing interpretations of
these values.

Link Derrida
Derrida and Habermas are blind to the colonial differencetheir advocacy perpetuates racist geo-politics
of modern/colonialityonly our alternative generates the space and radical critique to challenge
epistemic and ontological racismmust critique their complicity here and now

Maldonado-Torres 4 [Nelson, ethnic studies department at UC Berkeley, The topology of being and the geopolitics of
knowledge: Modernity, empire, coloniality, City, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 21-56] //DDI13
Bypassing the much relevant divide for German romanticism between French ideas of civilization and Germanys Kultur,
the figure that bridges France and Germany is the most renown German figure of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant.

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Kants work brings France and Germany together while also promoting global institutions of authority, which, translated
into the pres- ent, would counter US unilateralism. Hab- ermas and Derrida do not interrogate the ties of Kant

with the imperial mentality of his times or the way in which their plea for a common foreign policy,
beginning in the core of Europe has all the problematic ties with a tradition of searching for roots in
Europe.82 In a very condescending ges- ture Habermas and Derrida write that Europeans could learn
from the perspec- tive of the defeated to perceive themselves in the dubious role of victors who are called
to account for the violence of a forcible and uprooting process of moderni- zation . This could support the
rejection of Eurocentrism, and inspire the Kantian hope for a global domestic policy.83 In their reference to victors
called to account for the uprooting process of modernity it would seem that Habermas and Derrida
have more Heidegger in mind than former colonized peoples. It is also as if they are responding more to the
complaints of Ger- man romantics who were very critical of the Enlightenment, than to colonized peo- ples everywhere.
They reduce the chal- lenges of Europes imperial past to the uprooting of modernity, a process to which
Europeans, among others, have being victims. They cannot see the peculi- arity of the challenge that emerges in
the colonial world. That is why they posit the search for roots at the core of Europe as a response to the marginalization
of Europe. Fanons statement remains as significant today as it was when Heidegger was forg- ing his mythical project of
searching for roots: For centuries [Europeans] have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called
spiritual experience. Look at them today swaying between atomic and spiritual disintegration . . . Europe now lives at such
a mad, reckless pace that she has shaken off all guidance and reason . . . It is in the name of the spirit, in the name of the
spirit of Europe, that Europe has made her encroachment, has justified her crimes and legitimized the slavery in which she
holds four-fifths of humanity. Yes, the European spirit has strange roots.84 Until figures like Habermas and Derrida

come to terms with this statement, I believe that it will be impossible for them to overcome the epistemic
racism that continues today through so many different means. Habermas and Derrida at most gesture
toward a Eurocentric critique of Eurocen- trism. Instead of challenging the racist geo- politics of
knowledge that have become so central to Western discourse, they continue it by other means . Why not
engaging seri- ously Muslim intellectuals?85 Why not try- ing to understand the deeply theoretical claims that have
emerged in contexts that have known European coloniality? Why not breaking with the model of the univer- sal or global
and furthering the growth of an epistemically diverse world?86 Fanon did not do all these things, but in some ways he set a
mark below which theorists and intellectuals should not allow themselves to go. His radicalism was about a critique of the
roots, which was inspired by the need to respond to the damned of the earth. The concepts of coloniality of power, coloniality of knowledge and coloniality of being follow Fanons radicalism. Yet they also can become problematic if they do not
make space for the enunciation of non- Western cosmologies and for the expression of different cultural, political and social
memories. Radical critique should take dia- logical forms. It should also take the form of radical self-questioning and
radical dia- logue. The project of searching for roots would be, in this regard, subordinated to the project of

criticizing the roots that maintain alive the dominant topology of Being and the racist geopolitics of
knowledge . Radical diversality would involve the effective divorce and critique of the roots that inhibit
dialogue and the formulation of a decolonial and non-racist geopolitics of knowledge . Part of the challenge is
to think seriously about Fort-de-France, Quito, La Paz, Baghdad and Algiers, not only Paris, Frankfurt, Rome or New York
as possible sites of knowledge. We also need to think about those who are locked in positions of subordination,

and try to understand both the mechanisms that create the subordina- tion and those that hide their
reality from view to others. There is much in the world to learn from others who have been rendered
invisible by modernity . This moment should be more about examining our complicity with old patterns
of dom- ination and searching for invisible faces, than about searching for imperial roots; more about
radical critique than about orthodox alignments against what are per- sistently conceived as the
barbarians of knowledge.

Link Negri
Negris modernity is the worst kindignores racism, sexism, segregation, and genocide across most of the
planet

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Maldonado-Torres 4 [Nelson, ethnic studies department at UC Berkeley, The topology of being and the geopolitics of
knowledge: Modernity, empire, coloniality, City, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 21-56] //DDI13

Forgetfulness of coloniality in reflections on Being is not unique to the phenomeno- logical tradition. We
find it, as I suggested above, in many other critical accounts of modernity that tend to interpret the dialectics of enlightenment quite exclusively in terms of instrumental reason or the emer- gence of
totalitarian regimes. These inter- pretations can lead to a critique of the excesses of Being qua generally
violent or even as genocidal but not as colonizing. A passage from a recently published work in French and Spanish
by Antonio Negri shows clearly what I mean here: The Book of Job is not only a protest against the seduction of
reason, but also the phenomenological discovery and the metaphysical intimation of the disaster to which the coherence of
instrumental reason leads. Tragedy besieges Being and pain penetrates it deeply. That which cant be measured cant be
named. Reason becomes mad and confused if one tries to name it. Tragedy cant be lived and even less manipulated or
dominated. Tragedy dominates all views and blocks every possible means of escape. Tragedy demolishes any possible
means of salvation. This is what happens to Job. The obstacle that he confronts unceasingly repeats in history: how to
believe in reason after Auschwitz or Hiroshima? How to continue being a communist after Stalin?47 In consonance

with a theme that became common currency with the work of the Frankfurt School, Negri explains the
trag- edy of modernity in light of the extreme coherence of instrumental rationality . As his references to
Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Stalin at the end of the quote indicate, there is clearly a geopolitics at place in his text .
The tragedy to which Negri refers is the most evident failure (for a European) of three projects of modernity: Fascism
(Auschwitz), liberalism (US bombing of Hiroshima) and Communism (Stalin in the Soviet Union). Here Germany, the
USA and the Soviet Union appear, not as loci of salvation or menaces, like in Heidegger, but as geopolitical sites of crisis.
Negri began to write his book on Job in 198283, when he was already in jail and when he could only try to come to terms
with defeat. Just like Heidegger kept his grounding in Germany through his elaboration of the contacts between German
and Greek, Negri cultivates his roots in the West in times of crisis through reflection on Judeo-Christian
sour- ces, in this case, the Book of Job. In some ways, the crucial matter for these thinkers is to maintain
Western modernity alive. This form of hegemonic identity politics would not be so problematic if it did
not assume that the critique of instrumental reason is enough to account for the logic of colo- niality . There
is in much of critical thinking the tendency to recognize critical thought only when it uses the terms of debate that derive
from consideration of certain co- ordinates typically located in crucial spaces for the production of modern and postmodern ideologies. Negris geopolitics hardly include serious reflection on the condition of racism and
sexism as shown in the Wests relationship with its colonies . The tragedies of centuries of Western incur-

sions, genocides, impositions and segrega- tion of the greatest part of the planet seem to pass unnoticed in
his account of evil. It is as if they only take a secondary role in light of the most obviously malefic
expressions (for a European) of modern ideologies. Contrary to this gesture, Fanon attempted to come to terms with
forms of evil as they presented themselves in Auschwitz and Algiers, in Hiroshima and the French Car- ibbean, in the
Soviet Union and everywhere where the lives of some human beings appeared to others as dispensable. From this
perspective evil did not appear as an event that disturbed the tranquil waters of Being, but rather, as a symptom of Being
itself. Similar to Le vinas, Fanon intimated the idea that Being itself may have an evil side to it, that evil may itself be the
product of the excess of Being.48 Fanon made this connec- tion through attention to long-standing pro- cesses (coloniality)
that make colonized communities feel trapped in a world where even God himself sometimes appears to be an enemy.49

Link Universalism
Universalism are rooted in Eurocentric knowledge

Grosfoguel (Associate Professor Ethnic Studies Department, Chicano/Latino Studies) 12

(Ramn, Decolonizing Western Uni-versalisms: Decolonial Pluri-versalism from Aim Csaire to the Zapatistas 2012
http://escholarship.org/uc/item/01w7163v) //DDI13

Any cosmopolitanism or global proposal that is constructed through the abstract universalism of the
second type, that is, through the epistemological universalism of the egopolitics of knowledge, will not be
able to avoid becoming another global imperial/colonial design. If universal truth is constructed through

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the epistemology of a particular territory or body (whether it be Western, Christian, or Islamic), and through the
exclusion of others, then the cosmopolitanism or global proposal that is constructed through this abstract universalist
epistemology will be inherently imperialist/colonial. 2- Abstract epistemic universalism in the modern/colonial
Western philosophical tradition forms an intrinsic part of epistemological racism. Another way of saying this
is: epistemic racism is inherent to modern Western philosophy. If universal reason and truth can only emerge
through a white-European-masculine-heterosexual subject, and if the only tradition of thought with this capacity
for universality and with access to truth is the Western tradition (inferiorizing all non-Western knowledge), then there
can be no abstract universalism without epistemic racism. Epistemological racism is intrinsic to a Western
abstract universalism which conceals who speaks and from where they speak.

Link Marx
Marxism is rooted in epistemic racism

Grosfoguel (Associate Professor Ethnic Studies Department, Chicano/Latino Studies) 12

(Ramn, Decolonizing Western Uni-versalisms: Decolonial Pluri-versalism from Aim Csaire to the Zapatistas 2012
http://escholarship.org/uc/item/01w7163v) //DDI13
What Marx maintains in common with the Western Bourgeois philosophical tradition is that his universalism, despite
having emerged from a particular locationin this case, the proletariatdoes not problematize the fact that this subject is
European, masculine, heterosexual, white, Judeo-Christian, etc. Marxs proletariat is a conflictive subject internal to Europe,
which does not allow him to think outside the Eurocentric limits of Western thought. Neither cosmological and
epistemological diversality nor the multiplicity of sexual, gender, racial, and religious power relations are incorporated or
epistemically situated within his thought. Just like the Western thinkers that preceded him, Marx participates in the

epistemic racism in which there only exists a single epistemology with access to universality: the
Western tradition. In Marx, in the epistemic universalism of the second type, the subject of enunciation remains
concealed, camouflaged, hidden beneath a new abstract universal that is no longer man, the transcendental subject, the
ego, but instead the proletariat and its universal political project, communism. Hence the 20th-century communist
project was, albeit from the left, yet another Western global imperial/colonial design which under the Soviet empire
attempted to export to the rest of the world its universal abstract of communism as the solution to global problems .
Marx reproduces an epistemic racism much like that of Hegel, which does not allow him to grant to non- European
peoples and societies either temporal coevalness or the capacity to produce thought worthy of being considered part of the
philosophical legacy of humanity or world history. For Marx, non-European peoples and societies were primitive,
backwards, that is, Europes past. They had not reached either the development of the forces of production or the levels of
social evolution of European civilization. As a result, in the name of civilizing them and pulling them out of the ahistoric
stagnation of pre-capitalist modes of production, Marx would support the British invasion of India in the 18th century and
the United States invasion of Northern Mexico in the 19th century. For Marx, the Asiatic mode of production was
the Orientalist concept through which he characterized non-Western societies. This Asiatic mode of
production was characterized by its incapability of change and transformation, that is, by its always
infinite and eternal temporal reproduction. Marx participated in the linearity of time characteristic of Western
evolutionist thought. Capitalism was a more advanced system and, following Eurocentered modernitys rhetoric of salvation
(Mignolo, Local Histories), it was better for the non-European peoples to accelerate their evolutionary process toward
capitalism through imperial invasions than to continue their stagnation in antiquated forms of social production. This
economicist evolutionism would lead 20th-century Marxists down a blind alley. Marxist thought,

despite being from the left, ended up trapped in the same problems of Eurocentrism and colonialism
that had imprisoned Eurocentered thinkers of the right.

Link Wallerstein
World-systems theory reinforces Eurocentrism

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Maldonado-Torres 2 (Nelson, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Rutgers; Postimperial Reflections on Crisis,
Knowledge, and Utopia, Review XXV, 3, p227-315) //DDI13

Wallerstein's idea of judging the substantive rationality of alternative possible historical systems
clearly assumes answers to the question about the subject of knowledge (whojudges?), and to what is
consid ered to be "substantively rational." And, if the meaning of the human and rationality contain, at least
implicitly, general ideas about what humans should strive for in the process of becoming humans then we can say that
Wallerstein's "utopistics" in some sense presupposes a more general "utopia." Clearly, Wallerstein takes "utopia" in a
different sense, more aligned with ideological formations. In thi! sense the opposition between "utopistics" and
"utopia" follows the general lines of the opposition between reason and ideology (see Wallerstein, 1991: 170-84; 1998: 1).
The point here is precisely that reason has a utopian element built into it, and that, therefore, utopia cannot be simply
identified with ideology, though it serves ideological formations (see Ricoeur, 1986; 1991). We must articulate along

with "utopistics" a sort of "weak" utopia-opposed to the ideologic and stronger utopia-that clarifies the
meaning of the substantive rationality that serves as a criterion to assess and critique existentsystems of
oppression and subordination. An opposition to the ideal of the endless accumulation of capital must
therefore include a revision of the rational subject who evaluates the system. In this sense, a weak utopia
has to take the role of a critical utopia that uncovers the perversion of reason by its unconditional
appropriation by the European subject. The European subject appears behind efforts at reducing the
pluralistic character of reason, or, as Husserl revealed, at identifying reason with the universal. In this sense,
world-systems analysis must move away from a metamonological expression, and discover a position
where its interrelational approach finds an appropriate epistemological expression. I believe hat the move
from the national to the global remains limited and complicit with Eurocentrism if it does not
lead to a radical opening of theoretical activity whereby geopolitical subalterity is recognized as a
significant locus of enunciation. The goal is to make explicit and pluralize the subject of rationality,
thereby giving a consistent expression to the challenge raised by world-systems theory to the nationalcentered epistemology of Husserl. The utopia of reason may be none other than this opening to the
voices emerging from diverse perspective and locations. This view is similar in character to Walter Mignolo's
recent critique of Wallerstein in Local Histories/ Global Designs (2000).

Link Habermas
Habermas is wrongthe problem with modernity is rooted in its imperialist conceptions of space and
time
Maldonado-Torres 4 [Nelson, ethnic studies department at UC Berkeley, The topology of being and the geopolitics of
knowledge: Modernity, empire, coloniality, City, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 21-56] //DDI13

The problems of modernity surpass the excesses of instrumental rationality. Their cure, if there is any,
resides well beyond the redeeming virtue of an allegedly inherent communicative turn , like Ju rgen Habermas
recommends.33 Habermass conception of modernity, its limits, and its possibilities, has not taken into
consideration enough Euro- pean modernitys ties with what J.M. Blaut has referred to as a diffusionist myth
of emptiness. As Blaut describes it:
This proposition of emptiness makes a series of claims, each layered upon the others: (i) A non-European region is empty
or nearly empty of people (hence settlement by Europeans does not displace any native peoples). (ii) The region is empty of
settled population: the inhabitants are mobile, nomadic, wanderers (hence European settlement violates no political
sovereignty, since wanderers make no claim to territory). (iii) The cultures of this region do not possess an understanding of
private propertythat is, the region is empty of property rights and claims (hence colonial occupiers can freely give land to
settlers since no one owns it). The final layer, applied to all of the Outside sector, is an emptiness of intellectual creativity
and spiritual values, sometimes described by Europeans . . . as an absence of rationality. 34 The discourse of

modernity has not allowed its firm adherents to explore the ways in which imperial conceptions of space
have been formative of the modern experience. What are the relations between the instru- mentalist and

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monological trends of moder- nity and the myth of the emptiness of lands and of rational peoples in those lands? How can
one communicate with subjects who are a prior-ily suspected of lacking reason? In order to address these questions it is
neces- sary to introduce a concept of modernity that takes seriously into consideration its relation to geopolitical relations.
This is partly what the coloniality group in the USA and Latin America has been trying to do for a few years now.

Link Foucault
Foucault ignores history of colonialism as a foundation to relations between modernity and
postmodernity
Mignolo 2000 [Walter, (Post)Occidentalism, (Post)Coloniality, and (Post)Subaltern Rationality,
Postmodernism and the Rest of theWorld The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial studies edited by Fawzia AfzalKhan and Kalpana Seshadri 111-112] //DDI13
Bhabhas discussion of Foucaults colonial forgetting highlights a complex argument developed throughout The Location of
Culture. Bhabhas interpretation of Foucaults statement that there is a certain position in the Western ratio that was
constituted in its history and provides a foundation for the relation it can have with all other societies, even with the society
in which it historically appeared points toward the fact that, by disavowing the colonial moment as enunciative present in
the historical and epistemological condition ofWestern modernity, Foucault closes the possibility of interpretingWestern
ratio in the conflictive dialogue between the West and the colonies. Even more, according to Bhabha, Foucault disavows
precisely the colonial text as the foundation for the relation theWestern ratio can have, even with the society in which it
historically appeared. The enunciative present, in other words, is the present ofWestern time and its locus of enunciation.
Colonial loci of enunciation have been dissolved or absorbed by colonial discourse, including the production and
distribution of knowledge for their lack of contemporaneity: colonies produced culture,whilemetropolitan centers produced
intellectual discourse interpreting colonial cultural production and reinscribing themselves as the only loci of enunciation.
Bhabha contributes to relocatefinallythe dialogue between modernity and postmodernity, on the one hand, and
colonialism and postcolonial critical discourse and theorizing, on the other: Reading from the transferential perspective,
where the Western ratio returns to itself from the time-lag of the colonial relation, we see how modernity and postmodernity
are themselves constituted from the marginal perspective of cultural difference. They encounter themselves contingently at
the point at which the internal difference of their own society is reiterated in terms of the difference of the other, the alterity
of the postcolonial site. 61 By extending the concept time lag from the subject in psychoanalysis and its fracture between
the sign and the symbol to cultural differences under colonialism, Bhabha is clearly underscoring Fanons locus of
enunciation: He [Fanon] too speaks fromthe signifying time-lag of cultural difference that I have been attempting to
develop as a structure for the representation of subaltern and postcolonial agency. 62 This is not the occasion to comment
on time lag and its relation to the representation of the subaltern. I am more comfortable with time lag and postcolonial
agency. In other words, the denial of coevalness that Fabian identified as a strategy bywhich colonial discourse can
undermine other cultures, by locating them in a lower scale in the ascending march of (European) civilization and progress,
is being contested (i.e., by denying the denial of coevalness) precisely by postcolonial agencies and postcolonial theorizing.

Link Heidegger
Heideggers position is profoundly Eurocentric and racistdehumanizes other people

Maldonado-Torres 4 (Nelson, ethnic studies department at UC Berkeley, The topology of being and the geopolitics of
knowledge: Modernity, empire, coloniality, City, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 21-56)-jn //DDI13
There were antecedents to the Nazi and the Heideggerean gesture towards Europe. Through the late 16th to the 19th centuries, the French and the English had established a line between northern Europe and southern Europe.16 The difference gradually emerged through

The French and the Industrial Revolutions provided

additional justifications for the marginalization of Spain and Portugal from the story of modernity. The appearance of new
disciplines in the modern Western university in the 19th century and their continued expansion in the 20th only came to
cement the subalternized position of southern Europe. Heideggers linguistic turn repeats some of these patterns. The
difference is that where others put the north of Europe and south of Europe divide, he and other conservative German thinkers posit the metaphysics of Mitteleuropa.
For Heidegger the new beginning is in the middle. And the middle is precisely what is being threatened first by French ideals and
then by foreign forces. German conservative thinkers insisted early on the threat of Frances Zivilization to Germanys Kultur. As Bambach points out, Heidegger not only shared this position, but also called
the propagation of the Black Legend, the prestige of technological advancement, and assertion of imperial control in Africa and South-East Asia.

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attention to the threat of two emerging powers: the Soviet Union on the one hand, and the USA on the other. The Soviet Union had become
a major political force since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. After Hitler broke the Treaty of Versailles in the 1930s, France made a pact with the Soviet Union. The goal, to be sure, was to isolate Germany in the centre. Perceiving the
alliance between the rootless cosmopolitan France and the Asiatic Soviet Union Heidegger stated in 1936: Our historical
Dasein experiences with increasing distress and clarity that its future is tantamount to a naked either/or: either Europes
rescue or its destruction. The possibility of rescue, however, demands two things: 1. The preservation of the European Vlker
against the Asiatic. 2. The overcoming of their own deracination and fragmentation. Without this overcoming such
preservation cannot be realized.17 Although Heidegger maintained his Germancentrism until the end, he translated
some of the core ideas of this position into the more widespread form of Eurocentrism. His Eurocentrism, to be sure, still presupposed a strong
Germancentrism. In some way, the defence of Europe became an extension of his diatribe with French thought over who owned the
legacy of Europe. Frances pact with the Soviet Union indicated just how un-European they could be. Very disconcerting here is that it was Frances reaction to Hitlers
violation of the Treaty of Versailles, and not Hitlers anti-semitism and imperial policies, that represented the more
dangerous threat to Europe for Heidegger. Heidegger was very clear about the threat of the USA as well. In 1942, after the American entry into
the Second World War, he wrote: we know today that the Anglo- Saxon world of Americanism has resolved to annihilate Europe, that is, the homeland [Heimat], and that means: the commencement of the Western World.18 Bambach summarizes Heideggers view of

Heidegger deemed America (by which he meant the United

States) a land without history, a culture without roots, a people held in the deadening grip of total mobilization,
preoccupied by size, expansion, magnitude, and quantity . . . Read within the context of his geo-philosophical account of
Mitteleuropa, Americanism symbolizes rootlessness, deracination, the loss of autochthony and of any meaningful
connection to the earth.19 Heideggers philosophical geopolitics were ambitious, grand and racist. As Bambach notes, while
America as follows: Leaning on the staple of pronouncements from Hegel, Burckhardt, Nietzsche, Scheler, Jnger, Rilke, and others,

Heidegger opposed the biological racism of Nazi ideologues, he still sustained a form of racism nonetheless. 20 His
racism is not biological, nor cultural, but epistemic. As all forms of racism, epistemic racism is linked with politics and sociality.
Epistemic racism disregards the epistemic capacity of certain groups of people. It may be based on metaphysics or ontology but its results are nonetheless the same:
the evasion of the recognition of others as fully human beings. Heideggers racism was very clear in his perception of the Jews and the Hebraic tradition. In a letter to a colleague in
1929 Heidegger states: I would like to say more clearly what I could only hint at indirectly in my report. At stake is nothing less than the pressing consideration that we stand before a choice: either to provide our German spiritual life once more with genuine forces and

Heideggers views of the Jews were grounded on the nationalistic

ontology of the homeland (Heimat). The experience of exodus and diaspora made the Jews inherently rootless subjects for
him.22 He considered Jews to be a threat to the homeland. They have an urban, rather than a rural identity. These
wanderers defy the Athenian principle of autochthony. For this reason, even those Jews who speak German still represented a threat to the German Vlk. That Heidegger
owed gratitude to his teacher Edmund Husserl does not represent an exception from this. Heidegger was not concerned so
much about individuals per se, but about increasing Judification , which has to do, not with his relationship with any one Jew in particular, but with his attitude regarding their overall
educators rooted in the native and indigenous or to deliver it over ultimately to increasing Judification.21

collective influence in Germany. Heideggers epistemic racism certainly did not go unchallenged. One of Heideggers most virulent critics, if not the most, was a former student of Edmund Husserl in Freiburg who also attended Heideggers lectures: Emmanuel L
evinas. All of Levinass mature work attempts to subvert Heideggers thought. In his first great work, Totality and Infinity, Levinas describes ontology as a philosophy of power.23 Against Heideggerean ontology Levinas proposed ethics as first philosophy. And this
ethics was strongly based precisely in what Heidegger could not find any value: the Hebraic tradition. While Heideggers criticism of the West is based on the alleged forgetfulness of Being, Levinas criticism rather lies on the forgetfulness of the Hebraic in Western
thought. Levinas found in Jewish sources the possibility of articulating an ethical metaphysics that put limits to the Christian and liberal ideas regarding the autonomy of the subject. Jewish sources also provided Levinas clues to develop an account of corporality very
different from Nazi racial logics.24

Heideggerian philosophy ensures epistemic racial violence against all that is not European and German
we must embrace decolonial thought

Maldonado-Torres 4 (Nelson, ethnic studies department at UC Berkeley, The topology of being and the geopolitics of
knowledge: Modernity, empire, coloniality, City, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 21-56)-jn //DDI13

Levinas responds critically to Heideggers anti- Semitic views. But Heideggers epistemic
racism, as that of many European philosophers, goes well beyond that scope. It was not only Jerusalem that Heidegger was
sceptical about. As we have seen, it was also Rome, Asia Minor, Russia and America that were in question. Heidegger articulated his
philosophy in a context where European imperialism was being contested from many directions . Taking into consideration this larger
Where can one find a more radical response to Heideggers project?

geopolitical context, Bambach contrasts Heideggers efforts to find roots in the West with those of the Martiniquean psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon.25 Fanon, who fought against the Germans in the Second World
War and later on against French imperialism in the Franco-Algerian War, had in mind not only the predicament of the Jew in the Holocaust, but also that of other victims of the European racist and imperial ethos in other parts

The European game has

finally ended; we must find something different . . . For centuries [Europeans] have stifled almost the whole of
humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience. Look at them today swaying between atomic and spiritual disintegration . . . Europe now lives
at such a mad, reckless pace that she has shaken off all guidance and reason . . . It is in the name of the spirit, in the
name of the spirit of Europe, that Europe has made her encroachment , has justified her crimes and legitimized the
slavery in which she holds four-fifths of humanity. Yes, the European spirit has strange roots.26 Bambachs comment to this passage is enlightening: Like Fanon, Heidegger
understood that Europe was running headlong into the abyss. But where the former colonial understood the need for difference, Heidegger sought the way out of Europes crisis
by authorizing a more narrowly constricted form of identity.27 In the face of an encroachment that is not unique to Heideggers project of finding roots in the German
of the world, particularly the colonial world. This historical experience and political commitment led Fanon to enunciate, in remarkable contrast to Heidegger and Levinas:

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Fatherland, an encroachment and a racism that had shown themselves for centuries to colonized peoples in different regions of the globe, Fanon proposed a radical dislocation of Europe and its roots.

Modernity/nihilism appeared to Fanon as another expression of modernity/racism, the vile segregation and claim for
superiority of Europe over all the other peoples of the earth. 28 Fanons philosophical geopolitics were transgressive,
decolonial and cosmopolitan. He wanted to bring into view what had remained invisible for centuries. He was claiming the need for the recognition of difference as well as the need for decolonization
as an absolute requirement for the proper recognition of human difference and the achievement of a post-colonial and post-European form of humanism.29 Fanons decolonial cosmopolitanism was grounded on the struggle

Rather than cosmopolitanism as such perhaps his project

should be characterized as an attempt to give expression to a consistent decolonial consciousness. Decolonization is not for Fanon only about
the achievement of national liberation. Decolonization is about the creation of a new symbolic and material order that takes the full spectrum of human history, its achievements and its failures, into view. This side
of history is what neither Heidegger nor Levinas could seeor did not want to see. Their search for European roots
blinded them to this kind of decolonial geopolitics. Instead of giving primacy to the search for roots in Europe or
elsewhere, Fanons decolonial consciousness aims to dislocate the subject through the awareness of a response to those
who are locked in positions of subordination. Rather than trying to find roots in the earth, Fanon proposed
responding responsibly to the damned of the earth. Fanons decolonial geopolitics offers an alternative to
Heideggers philosophical racism and to the limited perspectives of those who like Levinas, while critical of some
aspects of this project, are still in some ways complicit with it. Heideggers racism and Levinass blindness reflect
what in their will-to-ignorance can be partly translated as the forgetfulness of damnation . The forgetfulness of the
damned is part of the veritable sickness of the West , a sickness that could be likened to a state of amnesia that leads to
murder, destruction and epistemic will to power with good conscience. The opposition to modernity/racism has to address this amnesia and the
invisibility of the damned. For this, a historical vision that combines space and time is needed. A group of scholars in Latin America and the USA has been working on a
geopolitical perspective that rescues what they refer to as the logic of coloniality. Reference to this logic allows one to refer not only to ontological oppression,
but to the coloniality of Being. In the effort to finding a more radical critical path than those opened by Heidegger and Levinass philosophical projects, I will elaborate in the next section some of
for decolonization of the Algerian people. His cosmopolitanism did not sacrifice the commitment with local struggle.

the theoretical elaborations and findings that go in this direction. They constitute an important part of what could be referred to as Fanonian meditations.30

Though Heidegger may have subordinated Europe to its own devices, his philosophy is still racist
and ideological
Maldonado-Torres 4 (Nelson, ethnic studies department at UC Berkeley, The topology of being and the geopolitics
of knowledge: Modernity, empire, coloniality, City, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 21-56)-jn //DDI13
The work of Martin Heidegger occupies a central place in the list of philosophers whose work has been influential in the creation
and propagation of the perspective commonly known as the linguistic turn, particularly in its hermeneutic and
deconstructionist variations. Heidegger first got international notoriety by shifting the grounds of philosophy from
epistemology to a form of ontological reflection that offered new perspectives to think about the subject, language and
historicity. 5 The question of the meaning of Being represented for him the rescue of a radical point of departure which came to oblivion through the tradition of Western metaphysics.
This point of departure provided the means to respond to the crisis of modernity by proposing a philosophical position that
pointed to alternative ways of being and behaving. Heidegger was not thinking particularly in ethics when he considered alternative ways of being that defied the
parameters of modernity. His writings rather sought to formulate subject positions not inspired by the primacy of the subject or the model of being human that is dominant in modernity, that of
Man. The key to evade the problematic effects of metaphysics and the modern conception of Man, which for Heidegger undergirded the ideal of modern life in terms of technological
advancement, resided in shifting philosophical reflection from epistemological to ontological questions. This

does not mean that Heidegger did not have

anything to do with epistemology; the idea is rather, that instead of positing epistemology as first philosophy, he explored
epistemological questions in terms of the horizon of questioning opened up by the question of the meaning of Being. While
Heideggers first efforts in this direction gave a central important to philosophical anthropology, his critique of epistemology and the idea of Manthe
subject of modern European epistemologyled him to shift from a perspective that took human existence as the opening
toward Being to language itself and the opening to language as the locus of ontological reflection. After Heideggers so-called Kehre,
the ontological turn decisively represented also a linguistic turn.6 Language, Heidegger came to affirm, is the house of Being, and human beings, rather than lords of it, are its shepherds. By
turning to language in this way Heidegger believed that he had found an opening that allowed him to articulate an
alternative to the metaphysically and epistemologically oriented Western philosophy which ultimately led human beings
to become prisoners of their own creations. Like other Western philosophers before him, Heidegger believed that he was confronting an
epochal moment and that philosophical perspectives played a fundamental role in sustaining the ideas and historical projects that defined that moment. The moment in question was
for him the crisis of Europe which found expression in Western nihilism and the rootless cosmopolitanism of liberal models of the nation-state designed in the context of the French
Revolution.7 Charles Bambach has examined carefully the links between Heideggers thought and the terms with which he defined and tried to respond to what he conceived to be the crisis of
Europe. A brief exploration of Bambachs theses concerning Heideggers philosophical discourse and project will give an idea of the ways in which Heideggers ontological and linguistic turn
cannot be understood completely without perceiving a geopolitical turn in his work that gave a new basis to racism. Bambachs Heideggers Roots analyses Heideggers work in the context of
intellectual and political debates concerning the crisis of Europe. The

crisis of Europe was conceived by a number of conservative thinkers in

Germany, not as the crisis of Europe per se, but as a crisis of the centre of Europe.8 At the centre of Europe there was for them Germany and the German Volk. The

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crisis of Europe came to be understood in this way as a crisis of the German Volk and the rural environment in which many of them lived. Important in this context was the Athenian myth of
authochtony according to which the founder of Athens, Erichthonius, was himself self-generated from the earth.9 Erichtonius had an indigenous relation with the Athenian land and landscape.

The vision of the myth is clear: the greatness of Athens depended on a similar intimate relation between the citizens of
Athens and its soil. Many thinkers in Germany conceived the political crisis of their country in similar terms. Only the
affirmation of roots in the land could withstand the force of nihilism and the rootless cosmopolitanism of the
French Enlightenment. And such roots were found precisely in the world of the Greeks. Bambach comments that, In an age where
German culture was developing without the framework of a unified nation state, a range of philosophers and writers asserted their own national ideals in terms borrowed from their visions of
antiquity. Within the context of this German Hellenomania, heightened by the invasion of Napoleon in 1806, Fichte, Hegel, and their contemporaries came to draw upon the myth of a singular
Graeco-German affinity rooted in both language and Heimat.10 One of Bambachs central points is that Heideggers

ontological and linguistic turn

represents an original articulation of the search for a home or homeland (Heimat).11 While Erichtonious remains as the model for the political
myth of roots in the land, Heidegger posits Pre-Socratic thinking, sprung up from the arche of being itself, as the authentic root of thinkinga way of thinking that would contrast sharply
with Western metaphysics and epistemology.12 The location of an arche in Greece stood behind the effort to make Germany (the German language and the German Volk) the new arche of
Europe. Heideggers geopolitics is, as Bambach notes, a politics based on the intimate relationship among the people, their language, and their land. Geopolitics

is both a
politics of the earth and a politics of exclusion. Germany should be protected from the French spirit of Enlightenment
and from the Latinity of both Gallic and Roman Catholic culture .13 Geopolitics also becomes for Heidegger a politics of
epistemic racism and imperialism. Epistemic racism and imperialism are not new modalities in Heideggers world.
In some ways, they formed an intrinsic part of Western modernity and precede the excesses of technology that Heidegger
found so problematic in the West. By accounting for the crisis of Europe in terms of nihilism and technology, and
not in terms of such epistemic racism, he felt justified in the adventure to do to Europe what Europe had done to
the rest of the world: epistemic subordination. His interview in Der Spiegel makes this very clear. Spiegel: It is exactly at the same place where the technological
world originated, that it must, as you think . . . Heidegger: . . .be transcended [aufgehoben] in the Hegelian sense, not pushed aside, but transcended, but not through man alone. S: You assign in
particular a special task to the Germans? H: Yes, in the sense of the dialogue with H olderlin. S: Do you believe that the Germans have a special qualification for this reversal? H: I have in
mind especially the inner relationship of the German language with the language of the Greeks and with their thought. This has been confirmed for me today again by the French. When they
begin to think, they speak German, being sure that they could not make it with their own language. S: Are you trying to tell us that that is why you have had such a strong influence on the
Romance countries, in particular the French? H: Because they see that they can no longer get by in the contemporary world with all their great rationality when it comes right down to
understanding the world in the origin of its being.14 The idea of people not being able to get by without Europes theoretical or cultural achievements is one of the most definitive tenets of
modernity. This

logic has been applied for centuries to the colonial world. Heidegger took on this tradition but shifted it
in a way that, through his Germancentrism, he could do to the rest of Europe what Europe had done to a large
portion of the globe. This epistemic turn is not surprising when one considers that not so many years before Heidegger made these assertions the Germans had taken over Paris. In
some ways, to be sure, as Aime Cesaire so aptly noted, the Germans tried to do politically with Europe what Europe had done with the
colonial world.15 Heidegger continued this project, but in more strict philosophical ways. The epistemic rendering of the project, to be sure,
does not make it any less ideological or racist.

Link Ranciere
Forget Rancierehe doesnt consider the global south

Schiwy 11 (Freya, associate professor in the UC Riverside Department of Hispanic Studies, Todos Somos Presidente/We Are All
Presidents: Democracy, culture, and radical politics, Cultural Studies, Vol. 25, No. 6, November, pp. 729-756)-jn //DDI13
Like Garca Linera, Rancieres notion of the political points to the centrality of the word, that is the struggle over epistemic
power. As Morales articulates the principal of governing by obeying and the notion of collective leadership in the context of
a national presidential inauguration, thinking and debate about the ethos of governance and alternatives to liberal
democracy that are anchored in a multipronged revival of indigenous traditions comes into a new light. A national
consensus relegated these forms to the margin, casting this thought as a non-thought, an expression of a disappearing
indigenous world anchored in inefficient face-to-face interaction. Although this opinion still holds some sway, now this
despised tradition of thought articulates itself as the majority state. With Ranciere we could say that the Bolivian election
constitutes a moment where what was once considered noise becomes discourse (Rancie`re 1995/1999, pp. 2223). This
understanding of the political conceives of democracy as a radical political struggle or transformation challenging the
principal of recognition. In Rancie`res sense, the political manifests itself as a form, the form in which confirmation of
equality is inscribed in the setting up of a dispute, of a community existing solely through being divided (p. 32). Even as
equality is claimed it unleashes a process of acting politically which is capable of shaking up the structure, as Gareth
Williams put it when thinking about the Zapatistas Other Campaign (Williams 2007, p. 142). Ranciere, nevertheless,
casts aside the relevance of the colonial difference that seems so crucial to understanding the political theory at the
heart of the Bolivian revolution.2

***Impacts***

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Impact War + Genocide
Coloniality makes war and genocide inevitable
Mignolo (Professor of Romance Languages at Duke University) 5
(Walter, The Idea of Latin America, pg. 11) //DDI13
The logic of coloniality can be understood as working through four wide domains of human experience: (1) the economic:
appropriation of land, exploitation of labor, and control of finance; (2) the political: control of authority; (3) the civic:
control of gender and sexuality; (4) the epistemic and the subjective/personal: control of knowledge and subjectivity. The

logic of coloniality has been in place from the conquest and colonization of Mexico and Peru until and
beyond the war in Iraq, despite superficial changes in the scale and agents of exploitation/control in the
past five hundred years of history. Each domain is interwoven with the others, since appropriation of land or
exploitation of labor also involves the control of finance, of authority, of gender, and of knowledge and
subjectivity.8 The operation of the colonial matrix is invisible to distracted eyes, and even when it
surfaces, it is explained through the rhetoric of modernity that the situation can be corrected with
development, democracy, a strong economy, etc. What some will see as lies from the US presidential
administration are not so much lies as part of a very well-codified rhetoric of modernity, promising salvation
for everybody in order to divert attention from the increasingly oppressive consequences of the logic of
coloniality. To implement the logic of coloniality requires the celebratory rhetoric of modernity, as the
case of Iraq has illustrated from day one. As capital and power concentrate in fewer and fewer hands and poverty
increases all over the word, the logic of coloniality becomes ever more oppressive and merciless. Since the
sixteenth century, the rhetoric of modernity has relied on the vocabulary of salvation, which was
accompanied by the massive appropriation of land in the New World and the massive exploitation of
Indian and African slave labor, justified by a belief in the dispensability of human life the lives of the
slaves. Thus, while some Christians today, for example, beat the drum of pro-life values, they reproduce a
rhetoric that diverts attention from the increasing devaluation of human life that the thousands dead in
Iraq demonstrate. Thus, it is not modernity that will overcome coloniality, because it is precisely modernity
that needs and produces coloniality.

Modernity legitimizes war under colonial connotations

Maldonado-Torres 07 Nelson Maldonado-Torres (Professor Comparative Literature Rutgers, The State University of New
Jersey, Education: Ph.D in Religious Studies, with distinction, Phi Beta Kappa, Brown University (2002). Exchange at Harvard
UniversitySpring 1996. Certificate for Outstanding Work in Africana Studies. B.A. in Philosophy, summa cum laude, University of
Puerto Rico (1994). GPA 4.00. Exchange at Hunter College, C.U.N.Y.Fall 1991) ON THE COLONIALITY OF BEING
Contributions to the development of a Concept 2007 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162548 //DDI13
While Dasein is lost in the They and achieves authenticity when it anticipates its own death, the damne confronts the
reality of its own finitude as a day to day adventure. That is why Fanon writes in Black Skin, White Masks that the black
lacks the opportunity to descend into hell.53 As Lewis Gordon puts it, the reason is because the black already lives in
hell.54 The extraordinary event of confronting mortality turns into an ordinary affair. Hellish existence in the colonial

world carries with it both the racial and the gendered aspects of the naturalization of the non-ethics of
war. Indeed, coloniality of Being primarily refers to the normalization of the extraordinary events that
take place in war. While in war there is murder and rape, in the hell of the colonial world murder and
rape become day to day occurrences and menaces. Killability and rapeability are inscribed into the
images of the colonial bodies. Lacking real authority, colonized men are permanently feminized. At the same time,
men of color represent a constant threat and any amount of authority, any visible trace of the phallus is multiplied in a
symbolic hysteria that knows no limits.55 Mythical depiction of the black mans penis is a case in point. The Black man is
depicted as an aggressive sexual beast who desires to rape women, particularly White. The Black woman, in turn, is seeing
as always already sexually available to the raping gaze of the White and as fundamentally promiscuous. The Black woman
is seeing as a highly erotic being whose primary function is fulfilling sexual desire and reproduction. To be sure, any

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amount of penis in both represents a threat. But in its most familiar and typical forms the Black man represents the act of
rape raping while the Black woman is seeing as the most legitimate victim of rape being raped. Women deserve to be
raped and to suffer the consequences in terms of lack of protection from the legal system, further sexual abuse, and lack of
financial assistance to sustain herself and her family just as black man deserve to be penalized for raping, even without
committing such an act. Both raping and being raped are attached to Blackness as if they were part of the essence of
Black folk, which is seeing as a dispensable population. Black bodies are seeing as excessively violent and erotic, as well
as the legitimate recipients of excessive violence, erotic and otherwise. Killability and rapeability are part of their
essence understood in a phenomenological way. The essence of Blackness in a colonial anti-black world is part of a
larger context of meaning in which the non-ethics of war gradually becomes a constitutive part of an alleged normal world.

In its racial and colonial connotations and uses, Blackness is an invention and a projection of a social
body oriented by the non-ethics of war. The murderous and raping social body projects the features that
define it to sub-Others, in order to be able to legitimate the same behavior that is allegedly descriptive of them.
The same ideas that inspire perverted acts in war, particularly slavery, murder and rape, are legitimized in
modernity through the idea of race and gradually are seeing as normal to a great extent thanks to the alleged
obviousness and non-problematic character of Black slavery and anti-Black racism. To be sure those who suffer the
consequences of such a system are primarily Blacks and indigenous peoples, as well as all of those who appear as colored.
In short, this system of symbolic representations, the material conditions that in part produce it and continue to legitimate
it, and the existential dynamics that occur therein, which are also at the same time derivative and constitutive of such a
context, are part of a process that naturalizes the non-ethics of war. The sub-ontological difference is the result of
such naturalization. It is legitimized through the idea of race . In such a world, ontology collapses into a
Manicheism, as Fanon suggested.56 Fanon offered the first phenomenology of the Manichean colonial world,
understood properly as a Manichean reality and not solely as ontological.57 In his analysis, he investigated not only the
relation between whites and blacks, but also those between black males and black females. Much can be added to his
discussion, but that is not my purpose here. What I wish is first to provide a way to understand the Fanonian breakthrough
in light of the articulation of sub-ontological difference and the idea of the naturalization of the non-ethics of war. This is
important because, among other things, we can see now that when Fanon called for a war against colonialism, what he was
doing was to politicize social relations which were already premised on war. Fanon was not only fighting against antiblack racism in Martinique, or French colonialism in Algeria. He was countering the force and legitimacy of a
historical system (European modernity) which utilized racism and colonialism to naturalize the non-ethics of war. He
was doing a war against war oriented by love, understood here as the desire to restore ethics and to give it a

proper place to trans-ontological and ontological difference s.58

Impact Patriarchy
Colonization reinforces a patriarchal state allows gender domination and exclusion

Lugones, 7
(Mara, "Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System." Hypatia 22, no. 1 (2007): 187-188, doi:10.1111/j.15272001.2007.tb01156.x.)//SDL //DDI13

The imposition of the European state system, with its atten- dant legal and bureaucratic machinery, is the most
enduring legacy of European colonial rule in Africa. One tradition that was exported to Africa during this period
was the exclusion of women from the newly created colonial public sphere. ...The very process by which
females were categorized and reduced to womenmade them ineligible for leadership roles . ...The
emergence of women as an identifiable category, defined by their anatomy and subordinated to men in all
situations, resulted, in part, from the imposition of a patriarchal colonial state . For females, colonization
was a twofold process of racial inferioriza- tion and gender subordination. The creation of women as a
category was one of the very first accomplishments of the colo- nial state . It is not surprising, therefore, that it

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was unthinkable for the colonial government to recognize female leaders among the peoples they
colonized, such as the Yorhbl. ...The transfor- mation of state power to male-gender power was accomplished at one level
by the exclusion of women from state structures. This was in sharp contrast toYonib state organization, in which power was
not gender-determined. (123-25)
Oyewijmi recognizes two crucial processes in colonization, the imposition of races with the accompanying inferiorization
of Africans, and the inferiorization of anafemales. The inferiorization of anafemales extended very widely-fiom
exclusion from leadership roles to loss of control over property and other important economic domains .
Oyewiimi notes that the introduction of the Western gender system was accepted by Yoruba males, who thus
colluded with the inferiorization of anafemales. So, when we think of the indifference of nonwhite men to the

violences exercised against nonwhite women, we can begin to have some sense of the collaboration
between anamales and Western colonials against anafemales. Oyewhmi makes clear that both men and women
resisted cultural changes at different levels. Thus, while in the West the challenge of feminism is how to proceed
from the gender-saturated category of women to the fullness of an unsexed humanity . For Yo&bA obinrin,
the challenge is obvi- ously different because at certain levels in the society and in some spheres, the notion of an unsexed
humanity is neither a dream to aspire to nor a memory to be realized. It exists, albeit in concatenation with the reality of
separate and hierarchical sexes imposed during the colonial period. (156)
We can see, then, that the scope of the coloniality of gender is much too narrow. Quijano assumes much of t he terms of
the modern/colonial gender systems hegemonic light side in defining the scope of gender . I have gone outside the coloniality of gender in order to examine what it hides, or disallows from consideration, about the very
scope of the gender system of Eurocentered global capitalism. So, though I think that the coloniality of gender,
as Quijano pointedly describes it, shows us very important aspects of the intersection of race and gender, it follows rather
than discloses the erasure of colonized women from most areas of social life. It accommodates rather than
disrupt the narrowing of gender domination . Oyewamfs rejection of the gender lens in characterizing the
inferiorization of anafemales in modem colonization makes clear the extent and scope of the inferiorization. Her

understanding of gender, the colonial, Euro- centered capitalist construction is much more encompassing
than Quijanos. She enables us to see the economic, political, and cognitive inferiorization as well as the
inferiorization of anafemales regarding reproductive control.

Impact Heteronormativity
Eurocentered capitalism reinforces violent and demeaning heterosexuality the impact is endless
violence

Lugones, 7.

(Mara, Argentine scholar, philosopher, feminist, and an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and
Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture and of Philosophy and of Women's Studies at Binghamton University, "Heterosexualism and
the Colonial/Modern Gender System." Hypatia 22, no. 1 (2007): 201, doi:10.1111/j.1527-2001.2007.tb01156.x.)//SDL //DDI13
Allen has not only enabled us to see how narrow Quijanos conception of gender is in terms of the
organization of the economy and of collective author- ity, but she has also revealed that the production of

knowledge is gendered , as is the very conception of reality at every level . Allen supported the question- ing of
biology in the construction of gender differences and introduces the important idea of gender roles being chosen and
dreamt. Allen also showed us that the heterosexuality characteristic of the modem/colonial construction of
gender relations is produced, mythically constructed . But heterosexuality is not just biologized in a fictional way;
it is compulsory and permeates the whole of the coloniality of gender in the renewed, large sense. In this sense,
global, Eurocentered capitalism is heterosexualist . I think it is important to see, as we understand the depth
and force of violence in the production of both the light and the dark sides of the colonial/modem gender
system, that this heterosexual- ity has been consistently perverse, violent, and demeaning , turning people
into animals and turning white women into reproducers of the (white) race and the(middle or
upper)class.Horswells and Sigals work complements Allens, particularly in understanding the presence of sodomy and
male homosexuality in colonial and precolonial America.

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The heterosexual order of coloniality is based on continual sexual violence

Schiwy, 7 (Freya, Associate Professor in the department of Hispanic Studies at the University of California, Riverside,
"Decolonization and the Question of Subjectivity: Gender, Race, and Binary Thinking." Cultural studies 21, no. 2-3
(2007): 275-276, doi:10.1080/09502380601162555.)//SDL //DDI13
The colonial imaginary has employed gender as a metaphor and means of subalternization, a metaphor
that resulted not only in the representation of territories as female virgin lands that the conquerors
penetrated with the sword in hand. The gendering of colonial imaginaries has operated as a means of
rendering European masculinity through Othering . That is, European and Caucasian men have thought
themselves in opposition to colonized (or postcolonial) men who have been represented as effeminate or as
part of an irrational nature where nature itself is also bound up with tropes of femininity (Shohat 1991, pp.
3
535).
The emasculation of indigenous men in Latin America has prefigured and paralleled that of other
colonized peoples , enacted and inscribed through rape , both real and in the imaginary of colonial texts, and later
in indigenista literature and film. The force of this tool of war has relied not only on the harm inflicted on women it
also enacts the inability of colonized men to protect their women. Rape , the founding act and trope of
mestizaje re-enforces patriarchal relations where women are reduced to objects and their abuse comes to
signify damage to male honor. It thus inscribes a heterosexual order and may lead to an urgent need to

affirm male power in the process of decolonization.

Impact Dehumanization/VTL
Coloniality denies being to those subjugated, justifying the worst forms of dehumanization
Maldonado-Torres 07 Nelson Maldonado-Torres (Professor Comparative Literature Rutgers, The State University of New
Jersey, Education: Ph.D in Religious Studies, with distinction, Phi Beta Kappa, Brown University (2002). Exchange at Harvard
UniversitySpring 1996. Certificate for Outstanding Work in Africana Studies. B.A. in Philosophy, summa cum laude, University of
Puerto Rico (1994). GPA 4.00. Exchange at Hunter College, C.U.N.Y.Fall 1991) ON THE COLONIALITY OF BEING
Contributions to the development of a Concept 2007 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162548 //DDI13
For Fanon, in the colonial context, ontological colonial difference or subontological difference profoundly marks the day to
day reality. If the most basic ontological question is why are things rather than nothing, the question that emerges in this
context and that opens up reflection on the coloniality of Being is Why go on? As Lewis Gordon has put it, why go on?
is a fundamental question in the existential philosophy of the African diaspora and it illuminates the plight of the wretched
of the earth .59 Why go on? is preceded only by one expression, which becomes the first instance that revels the
coloniality of Being, that is, the cry .60 The cry, not a word but an interjection, is a call of attention to ones own existence.
The cry is the pre-theoretical expression of the question Why go on? which for the most part drives theoretical reflection in
the peoples of the African diaspora. It is the cry that animates the birth of theory and critical thought. And the cry points to
a peculiar existential condition: that of the condemned. The damne or condemned is not a being there but a nonbeing or rather, as Ralph Ellison so eloquently elaborated, a sort of an invisible entity.61 What is invisible

about the person of color is its very humanity , and this is in fact what the cry tries to call attention to .
Invisibility and dehumanization are the primary expressions of the coloniality of Being . The coloniality of
Being indicates those aspects that produce exception from the order of Being; it is as it were, the product of the excess of
Being that in order to maintain its integrity and inhibit the interruption by what lies beyond Being produces its contrary, not
nothing, but a non-human or rather an inhuman world. The coloniality of Being refers not merely to the reduction
of the particular to the generality of the concept or any given horizon of meaning, but to the violation of
the meaning of human alterity to the point where the alter-ego becomes a sub-alter . Such a reality, typically
approximated very closely in situations of war, is transformed into an ordinary affair through the idea of race, which serves
a crucial role in the naturalization of the non-ethics of war through the practices of colonialism and (racial) slavery. The

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coloniality of Being is not therefore an inevitable moment or natural outcome of the dynamics of creation of meaning.
Although it is always present as a possibility, it shows itself forth when the preservation of Being (in any of its
determinations: national ontologies, identitarian ontologies, etc.) takes primacy over listening to the cries of those whose
humanity is being denied. The coloniality of Being appears in historical projects and ideas of civilization which advance
colonial projects of various kinds inspired or legitimized by the idea of race. The coloniality of Being is therefore
coextensive with the production of the color-line in its different expressions and dimensions. It becomes concrete in the
appearance of liminal subjects, which mark, as it were, the limit of Being, that is, the point at which Being distorts
meaning and evidence to the point of dehumanization. The coloniality of Being produces the ontological colonial
difference, deploying a series of fundamental existential characteristics and symbolic realities. I have sketched out some.
An ample discussion will require another venue. What I would like to do here is to show the relevance of the categories
that have been introduced so far for the project of decolonization, which is, ultimately, the positive dimension that inspires
this analysis. Like I did in this section, let me begin once more with what we have discovered as our radical point of
departure: the damne. Decolonization and des-gener-accion of being62 What is the meaning of damne? The damne is
the subject that emerges in a world marked by the coloniality of Being. The damne, as Fanon put it, has nonontological
resistance in the eyes of the dominant group. The damne is either invisible or excessively visible. The damne exists in the
mode of not-being there, which hints at the nearness of death, at the company of death. The damne is a concrete being but
it is also a transcendental concept. Emile Benveniste has shown that the term damne is etymologically related to the
concept of donner , which means, to give. The damne is literally the subject who cannot give because what he or she has
has been taken from him or her.63 This means that the damne is a subject from whom the capacity to have and to give
have been taken away from her and him. The coloniality of Being is thus fundamentally an ontological dynamic that aims
to obliterate in its literal sense of doing away completely so as to leave no trace gift-giving and generous reception as a
fundamental character of being-in-the-world. Emmanuel Levinas argues that gift-giving and reception are fundamental
traits of the self. Giving is first and foremost for Levinas a metaphysical act that makes possible the communication
between a self and an Other as transontological as well as the sharing of a common world. Without giving to an Other
there would be no self just as without receiving from the Other there would be no reason. In short, without a transontological moment there would be no self, no reason, and no Being. The trans-ontological is the foundation of the
ontological. For Levinas, the ontological, the realm of being, comes to exist out of the introduction of justice into the
trans-ontological relation, which introduces measure and synchronicity in the order of the fundamentally diachronic.64
The ontological comes to be at the expense of the transontological. The ontological thus carries with it the marks of both
positive achievement and betrayal of the trans-ontological relation, a relation of radical givenness and reception.
According to Levinas, ontology is a philosophy of power. It is a discourse that, when taken as foundation or
ultimate end, it gives priority to an anonymous Being over and beyond the self-Other relation it gives
priority to the ontological rather than to the trans-ontological, and to authenticity rather than to radical responsibility.

When ontology is conceived as fundamental, the self-Other relation becomes a secondary dimension of
the subject. It is also seen as a source of the potential forgetfulness of Being and thus as a departure from authenticity. Le
vinas argues precisely the contrary: it is the forgetting of the self-Other relation that characterizes the return of ontology
as fundamental, which can lead, not to lacking authenticity, but to a renunciation of responsibility and justice. That is so
because being is always already a betrayal of sorts of the trans-ontological relation (of gift and reception between self and
Other), and it tends to forgetting . That is, being presents itself as the foundation of reality when it is not. This
happens because once being is born, it tends to preserve itself and to present itself as autonomous foundation. But,
preservation and autonomy can be achieved at the expense of the transontological. Being thus aims to

eliminate the traces of the trans-ontological.

Coloniality denies the oppressed the right to being- leads to a pervasive omnipresent death
Maldonado-Torres 07 Nelson Maldonado-Torres (Professor Comparative Literature Rutgers, The State University of New
Jersey, Education: Ph.D in Religious Studies, with distinction, Phi Beta Kappa, Brown University (2002). Exchange at Harvard
UniversitySpring 1996. Certificate for Outstanding Work in Africana Studies. B.A. in Philosophy, summa cum laude, University of
Puerto Rico (1994). GPA 4.00. Exchange at Hunter College, C.U.N.Y.Fall 1991) ON THE COLONIALITY OF BEING
Contributions to the development of a Concept 2007 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162548 //DDI13
What is the coloniality of being? The concept of the coloniality of Being is best understood in light of the discussion of the ego
conquiro and Manichean misanthropic skepticism in the first section. I argued that the ego conquiro and misanthropic skepticism
remained unquestioned by Descartess formulation of the ego cogito and his methodic doubt. He could imagine an evil demon who
deceives people about their apparent certainties, but could not observe an ego conquiro at work in the consciousness of the European

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(and, if we follow Dussel and Quijano, in his own presuppositions as well) and how it made everyone to take for granted the
inhumanity of colonized peoples. How does this relate to ontology and Being? Heideggers critical response to the subjective and
epistemological turn of modern philosophy achieved by Descartes consisted in pointing out an alleged forgetfulness in Descartess
thought. Heidegger correctly suggests that Descartes and basically all of modern philosophy after him focused rather exclusively on
the question of the ego cogito . Cogito, ergo sum, I think, therefore I am, however, introduced, what was for Heidegger a more
fundamental notion than the cogito itself: the very concept of Being. I THINK, therefore I am turned for him into I think, therefore
I AM. The question of Being appears in the second part of the Cartesian formulation the I AM.48 Focusing on the second part of the
expression, Heidegger wanted to oppose the modern tradition of philosophy as epistemology with his own fundamental ontology.
Now, in light of what has been said about the ego conquiro and the misanthropic doubt that remains unquestioned in Descartess
formulation, it is possible to point out what both Descartes and Heidegger missed in their philosophical views. If the ego cogito was
built upon the foundations of the ego conquiro , the I think, therefore I am presupposes two unacknowledged dimensions. Beneath
the I think we can read others do not think, and behind the I am it is possible to locate the philosophical justification for the idea
that others are not or do not have being. In this way we are led to uncover the complexity of the Cartesian formulation. From I
think, therefore I am we are led to the more complex and both philosophically and historically accurate expression: I think (others
do not think, or do not think properly), therefore I am (others are-not, lack being, should not exist or are dispensable). The Cartesian
formulation privileges epistemology, which simultaneously hides both what could be regarded as the coloniality of knowledge (others
do not think) and the coloniality of Being (others are not). Heideggers ontological turn missed these two unacknowledged
components of Descartess formulation. Cartesian epistemology and Heideggerian ontology presuppose the coloniality of knowledge
and the coloniality of Being. In what was unmentioned and presupposed in Descartess formulation we find thus the fundamental link
between the colonialidad del saber (coloniality of knowledge) and the colonialidad del ser (coloniality of being). The absent of

rationality is articulated in modernity with the idea of the absence of Being in others. Misanthropic skepticism and
racism work together with ontological exclusion. It is in this way that we better understand Frantz Fanons idea that in a
colonial anti-black world the Black does not have ontological resistance or ontological weight in the eyes of the
white .49 He also says that when the black person is going to speak with whites, reason flees away and irrationality imposes the
terms of the conversation.50 The lack of ontological resistance is linked with the absence of rationality and viceversa.
For Fanon, the black is not a being or simply nothingness. The Black is something else. The enigma of blackness appears as the
very radical starting point to think about the coloniality of Being. While Heideggers focus on Being required reflection on
Daseins comportment and existentialia, reflection on the coloniality of Being requires elucidation of the fundamental existential
traits of the black and the colonized. In this way, from Descartess Meditations we move to the territory of Fanonian meditations.51
The Black, people of color, and the colonized become the radical points of departure for any reflection on the coloniality of Being.
Following Fanon, I will use a concept that refers to the colonial subject, equivalent in some way to Dasein but marking the aspects of
the coloniality of Being: the damne or condemned of the earth. The damne is for the coloniality of Being what Dasein is for
fundamental ontology, but, as it were, in reverse. The Damne is for European Dasein the being who is not there. I want to argue
that they are not independent of each other but that, without awareness of coloniality, reflection on Dasein and Being involve the
erasure of the damne and the coloniality of Being. If there has been a problem in modern Western civilization it has not been so
much forgetfulness of Being, as Heidegger believed, but suppression of the understanding of coloniality in all its aspects and lack of
recognition of the efforts by the damnes to overcome the imposed limits by the cruel reality of damnation or the naturalization of
war. This is part of what a project of Fanonian meditations would aim to elucidate. Fanonian meditations would articulate new
categories for philosophical disquisition. For the purpose of clarity and consistency, I will only introduce and briefly discuss some of
the elements that stand as parallels to Heideggers efforts. One of the most basic distinctions that Heidegger elaborates is that of the
ontological difference, or the difference between Being and beings. Elucidation of the coloniality of Being entails reflection on this
and other two kinds of fundamental differences: the trans-ontological difference and the sub-ontological difference. Fanonian
meditations would be guided by these three categories: Trans-ontological difference (difference between Being and what is beyond
Being; or Being and exteriority) Ontological difference (difference between Being and beings) Sub-ontological or ontological
colonial difference (difference between Being and what lies below Being or that which is negatively marked as dispensable as well as
a target of rape and murder) We owe a more or less explicit discourse about the trans-ontological difference to Emmanuel Levinas.
The sub-ontological difference has been elaborated, although implicitly, by Fanon. The coloniality of being makes reference to the
two of them since ultimately what lies beyond is what is put in a lower position but I will focus here on the second. The
ontological difference allows one to think clearly about Being and not to confuse it with beings or entitites or God. Likewise the subontological or ontological colonial difference brings into view the reality that is defined by a differentiation between selves and
subjects without ontological resistance. The sub-ontological difference relates to what Walter Mignolo has referred to as

the colonial difference. But while his notion of colonial difference is primarily epistemic, sub-ontological difference
refers primarily to being. Thus it would be best to distinguish between an epistemic colonial difference that allows

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one to perceive the contours of the coloniality of knowledge, and an ontological colonial difference which reveals
the presence of the coloniality of being. Or else, one can say that there are different aspects to the colonial difference: epistemic
and ontological, both of whom are related to power (exploitation, domination, and control). In short, sub-ontological or ontological
colonial difference relates to the coloniality of Being in a way similar to how the epistemic colonial difference is related to the
coloniality of knowledge. Colonial difference in general is indeed the first by-product of the coloniality of power, of knowledge, and
being. Ontological colonial difference is more specifically the product of the coloniality of being. Now, what kind of
questions should orient our inquiry of the coloniality of Being. While Heidegger bases his reflections on an existential analysis of
Dasein, the elucidation of the coloniality of Being requires an analysis of the existential modalities of the damne. For Heidegger
Dasein ek-sist, that is, it is thrown toward the future, and it achieves authenticity when it anticipates his own mortality, that is, the
very end of his future. This position contrasts sharply with Fanons description of the existential reality of the damne. In A Dying
Colonialism he writes, There is, first of all, the fact that the colonized person, who in this respect is like men in underdeveloped

countries or the disinherited in all parts of the world, perceives life not as a flowering or a development of an
essential productiveness, but as a permanent struggle against an omnipresent death . This ever-menacing death is
experienced as endemic famine, unemployment, a high death rate, an inferiority complex and the absence of any
hope for the future. All this gnawing at the existence of the colonized tends to make of life something resembling an
incomplete death.52

Impact Racism
The colonial power matrix organizes all structures on the basis of race and racism and is globalized and
exported to the rest of the world via coloniality

Grosfoguel (Associate Professor Ethnic Studies Department, Chicano/Latino Studies) 11

(Ramn. "Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global
Coloniality." TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1, no. 1 , 4-6) //DDI13
It is not an accident that the conceptualization of the world-system from decolonial perspectives of the South will
question its traditional conceptualizations produced by thinkers from the North. Following Peruvian Sociologist Anbal
Quijano (1991; 1998; 2000), we could conceptualize the present world-system as a historical-structural
heterogeneous totality with a specific power matrix that 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 U.S. 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 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-European patriarchies 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 than some men (of non-European origin). The idea of race organizes the worlds 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 the economic and political structures of the capitalist world-system, but an
integral, entangled and constitutive part of the broad entangled package called the European modern/colonial
capitalist/patriarchal world-system (Grosfoguel 2002). European Judeo-Christian patriarchy and European

notions of sexuality, epistemology and spirituality were globalized and exported to the rest of the world
through the colonial expansion as the hegemonic criteria to racialize, classify and pathologize the rest of

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the worlds population in a hierarchy of superior and inferior races.

Coloniality forms a basis for racism, that of which has unjustifiable impacts that must be rejected
in all instances
Maldonado-Torres 07 Nelson Maldonado-Torres (Professor Comparative Literature Rutgers, The State University of New
Jersey, Education: Ph.D in Religious Studies, with distinction, Phi Beta Kappa, Brown University (2002). Exchange at Harvard
UniversitySpring 1996. Certificate for Outstanding Work in Africana Studies. B.A. in Philosophy, summa cum laude, University of
Puerto Rico (1994). GPA 4.00. Exchange at Hunter College, C.U.N.Y.Fall 1991) ON THE COLONIALITY OF BEING
Contributions to the development of a Concept 2007 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162548 //DDI13
It is true that in 1537 the Pope declared the Amerindians as human. Yet as Quijano points out from then on, the idea that
non-Europeans have a biological structure that is not only different from that of Europeans but also inferior, was imprinted
on intersubjective relations and social practices of power.21 It is clear that the meaning of race has changed throughout
the centuries, and that raza did not mean in the sixteenth century what it came to mean at the height of the biological
revolution in the nineteenth century that produced taxonomies based on a formal biological category of race. Yet, there was
a commonality between nineteenth century racism and the attitude of the colonizers in regard to differences in degrees of
humanity. In some ways, scientific racism and the very idea of race were the most explicit expressions of a widespread and
general attitude regarding the humanity of colonized and enslaved subjects in the Americas and Africa in the sixteenth
century. Id like to suggest that what was born in the sixteenth century was something more pervasive and subtle than what
at first transpires in the concept of race: it was an attitude characterized by a permanent suspicion. Enrique Dussel states
that Hernan Cortes gave expression to an ideal of subjectivity that could be defined as the ego conquiro , which predates
Rene Descartess articulation of the ego cogito .22 This means that the significance of the Cartesian cogito for modern
European identity has to be understood against the backdrop of an unquestioned ideal of self expressed in the notion of the
ego conquiro . The certainty of the self as a conqueror, of its tasks and missions, preceded Descartess certainty about the
self as a thinking substance (res cogitans ) and provided a way to interpret it. I am suggesting that the practical conquering
self and the theoretical thinking substance are parallel in terms of their certainty. The ego conquiro is not questioned, but
rather provides the ground for the articulation of the ego cogito . Dussel suggests as much: The barbarian was the
obligatory context of all reflection on subjectivity, reason, the cogito .23 But the true context was marked not only
by the existence of the barbarian, or else, the barbarian had acquired new connotations in modernity. The

barbarian was a racialized self, and what characterized this racialization was a radical questioning or
permanent suspicion regarding the humanity of the self in question. Thus, the certainty of the project of
colonization and the foundation of the ego conquiro stand, just like Descartess certainty about the cogito , on doubt or
skepticism. Skepticism becomes the means to reach certainty and provide a solid foundation to the self. The role of
skepticism is central for European modernity. And just like the ego conquiro predates and precedes the ego cogito , a
certain skepticism regarding the humanity of the enslaved and colonized sub-others stands at the background of the
Cartesian certainties and his methodic doubt. Thus, before Cartesian methodic skepticism (the procedure that introduced
the heuristic device of the evil demon and which ultimately led to the finding of the cogito itself) became central for
modern understandings of self and world, there was another kind of skepticism in modernity which became constitutive of
it. Instead of the methodical attitude that leads to the ego cogito , this form of skepticism defines the attitude that sustains
the ego conquiro . I characterize this attitude as racist/ imperial Manichean misanthropic skepticism. It could also be
rendered as the imperial attitude , which gives definition to modern Imperial Man.24 Unlike Descartess methodical doubt,
Manichean misanthropic skepticism is not skeptical about the existence of the world or the normative status of logics and
mathematics. It is rather a form of questioning the very humanity of colonized peoples. The Cartesian idea about the
division between res cogitans and res extensa (consciousness and matter) which translates itself into a divide between the
mind and the body or between the human and nature is preceded and even, one has the temptation to say, to some extent
built upon an anthropological colonial difference between the ego conquistador and the ego conquistado . The very
relationship between colonizer and colonized provided a new model to understand the relationship between the soul or
mind and the body; and likewise, modern articulations of the mind/body are used as models to conceive the
colonizer/colonized relation, as well as the relation between man and woman, particularly the woman of color.25 This
difference translates itself into European and non-European and into lighter and darker peoples, or what W.E.B. Du Bois
refers to as the color-line.26 If the ego conquiro anticipates in some ways the subjective turn and solipsism of the ego
cogito , then Manichean skepticism in some ways opens the door and shapes the reception of Cartesian skepticism. This
point of view also leads to the idea that it would be impossible to provide an adequate account of the crisis of modern
Europe without reference, not only to the limits of a Cartesian view of the world, but also to the traumatic effects of
Manichean misanthropic skepticism and its imperial ethos. Misanthropic skepticism doubts in a way the most obvious.

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Statements like you are a human take the form of cynical rhetorical questions: Are you completely human? You have
rights becomes why do you think that you have rights? Likewise You are a rational being takes the form of the
question are you really rational? Misanthropic skepticism is like a worm at the very heart of modernity. The
achievements of the ego cogito and instrumental rationality operate within the logic that misanthropic skepticism helped to
established. That is why the idea of progress always meant in modernity progress for a few and why the Rights of Man do
not apply equally to all, among many other such apparent contradictions. Misanthropic skepticism provides the basis for
the preferential option for the ego conquiro , which explains why security for some can conceivably be obtained at the
expense of the lives of others.27 The imperial attitude promotes a fundamentally genocidal attitude in respect to colonized
and racialized people. Through it colonial and racial subjects are marked as dispensable. Ideas of war, conquest, and
genocide here bring up another fundamental aspect of coloniality.28 The question about whether the indigenous peoples of
the Americas had soul or not was framed around the question of just war. In the debates that took place in Valladolid in the
sixteenth century Sepulveda argued against Las Casas that the Spanish had the obligation to engage in a just war against
subjects who, in their inferiority, would not adopt by themselves the superior Christian religion and culture.29 Once more,
just like it happens in respect to the question about the humanity of the so called Amerindians, the outcome of the
discussion is not as important as the question itself. The discovery and conquest of the Americas was no less than an
ontological event with many implications, the most dramatic of which were established by the attitudes and questions that
emerged in the context. By the time when the question about engaging in a just war against the Amerindians was answered
the conquerors had already established a particular way of relating to the peoples that they encountered. And the way in
which they pursued such relations did not correspond to the ethical standards that were followed in their countries of
origin. Indeed, as Sylvia Wynter argues, Columbuss redefinition of the purpose of land as being one for us , whereby for
us meant for us who belong to the realm of Man vis-a`-vis those outside the human oecumene, already introduces the
exceptional character that ethics is going to take in the New World.30 As we know, such exceptional situation gradually
lost its exceptionality and became normative in the modern world. But before it gained such a widespread acceptance and
became constitutive of a new reigning episteme, the exceptionality was shown in the way in which colonizers behaved in
relation to the indigenous peoples and black slaves. And this behavior coincided more with the kind of actions shown at
war, than with the ethics that regulated live with other European Christians. When the conquerors came to the Americas
they did not follow the code of ethics that regulated behavior among subjects of the crown in their kingdom.31 Their
actions were regulated by the ethics or rather the non-ethics of war. One cannot forget that while early Christians criticized
slavery in the Roman Empire, later Christians considered that vanquished enemies in war could legitimately be
enslaved.32 Indeed, in the Ancient world and the Middle Ages it was for the most part legitimate to enslaved some people,
particularly prisoners of war and the vanquished. What happens in the Americas is a transformation and naturalization of
the non-ethics of war, which represented a sort of exception to the ethics that regulate normal conduct in Christian
countries, to a more stable and long-standing reality of damnation. Damnation, life in hell, refers here to modern forms
of colonialism which constitute a reality characterized by the naturalization of war by means of the

naturalization of slavery, now justified in relation to the very physical and ontological constitution of
people by virtue of race and not to their faith or belief.33 That human beings become slaves when they are
vanquished in a war translates in the Americas to the suspicion that the conquered people, and then non- European
peoples in general, are constitutively inferior and that therefore they should assume a position of slavery
and serfdom. Sepulveda draws on Aristotle to justify this position, but he was more than anything translating into
categories ideas that were already becoming common sense. Later the idea was going to be solidified in respect to the
slavery of people from Africa and become stable until today under the tragic reality of different forms of racism.
Coloniality, I am suggesting here, can be understood as a radicalization and naturalization of the non-ethics of war. This
non-ethics included the practices of eliminating and slaving certain subjects e.g., indigenous and black as part of the
enterprise of colonization. The hyperbolic expression of coloniality includes genocide, which is the paroxysm of
the ego cogito a world in which the ego cogito exists alone. War, however, is not only about killing or enslaving. War
includes a particular treatment of sexuality and of feminity: rape. Coloniality is an order of things that put people
of color under the murderous and rapist sight of a vigilant ego. And the primary targets of rape are women. But
men of color are also seeing through these lenses. Men of color are feminized and become for the ego conquiro
fundamentally penetrable subjects.34 I will expand more on the several dimensions of murder and rape when I elaborate
the existential aspect of the analytics of the coloniality of Being. The point that I want to make here is that racialization
works through gender and sex and that the ego conquiro is constitutively a phallic ego as well.35 Enrique Dussel, who
submits the thesis of the phallic character of the ego cogito, also makes links, albeit indirectly, with the reality of war. And
thus, in the beginning of modernity, before Descartes discovered . . . a terrifying anthropological dualism in Europe, the
Spanish conquistadors arrived in America. The phallic conception of the European-medieval world is now added to the

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forms of submission of the vanquished Indians. Males, Bartolome de las Casas writes, are reduced through the hardest,
most horrible, and harshest serfdom; but this only occurs with those who have remained alive, because many of them
have died; however, in war typically they only leave alive young men (mozos) and women.36 Joshua Goldstein
complements this account by depicting conquest as an extension of the rape and exploitation of women in wartime.37 He
argues that to understand conquest one needs to examine: (1) male sexuality as a cause of aggression; (2) the feminization
of enemies as symbolic domination, and (3) dependence on exploiting womens labor. My argument is that these three
things come together in the idea of race that began to emerge in the conquest and colonization of the Americas.
Misanthropic skepticism posits its targets as racialized and sexualized subjects. Once vanquished, they are said to be
inherently servants and their bodies come to form part of an economy of sexual abuse, exploitation, and control. The ethics
of the ego conquiro ceased to be only a special code of behavior for periods of war and becomes in the Americas and
gradually the modern world by virtue of misanthropic skepticism, the idea of race, and the coloniality of power, a standard
of conduct that reflects the way things are a way of things whose naturalization reaches its climax with the use of natural
science to validate racism in the nineteenth century. The way things supposedly are emerge from the idea of how a world is
conceived to be in conditions of war and the code of behavior that is part of it. What happens in modernity is that

such a view of the world and code of conduct is transformed through the idea of race and becomes
naturalized . Thus, the treatment of vanquished peoples in conditions of war is perceived as legitimate long after war is
over. Later on, it wont be their aggression or opposition, but their race which justifies continued serfdom, slavery, and
rape. This represents a break with the European medieval tradition and its ethical codes. With the initial exploitation of
Africa and the colonization of the Americas in the fifteenth century, the emerging modernity comes to be shaped by a
paradigm of war.38 Building on the work of Dussel, Gordon, Quijano, and Wynter I articulated in this section what I see as
three contributions to the understanding of coloniality and race: (1) the understanding of race as misanthropic skepticism,
(2) the interrelation of race and gender, and (3) the understanding of race and gender conceptions in modernity as the result
of the naturalization of the ethics of war. The lived experience of racialized people is deeply touched by the

encounter with misanthropic skepticism and by the constant encounter with violence and death. The
language that they use has also already being shaped by understanding of the world as a battle field in
which they are permanently vanquished. Now that we have an idea about the basic conditions of life in the colonial
side of the modern world or in the dark side of the color-line we can try to find a more precise philosophical articulation of
these experiences and thus to lay out the fundamentals for a discourse about the coloniality of being. But, while we have
explored to some extent the meaning of the idea of coloniality, we havent done the same with the idea of being. We shall
do that next.

Racialized subjects have death normalized due to the ontological difference

Maldonado-Torres 07 Nelson Maldonado-Torres (Professor Comparative Literature Rutgers, The State University of New
Jersey, Education: Ph.D in Religious Studies, with distinction, Phi Beta Kappa, Brown University (2002). Exchange at Harvard
UniversitySpring 1996. Certificate for Outstanding Work in Africana Studies. B.A. in Philosophy, summa cum laude, University of
Puerto Rico (1994). GPA 4.00. Exchange at Hunter College, C.U.N.Y.Fall 1991) ON THE COLONIALITY OF BEING
Contributions to the development of a Concept 2007 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162548 //DDI13
What is being? As I made clear at the outset, Heideggers fundamental ontology informs the conception of Being that I
want to elaborate here. His work, particularly his 1927 magnus opus, Being and Time is not the point of departure to think
about the coloniality of Being but it is, at least when spelled out in the context of the phenomenological tradition and its
heretic expressions, an inescapable reference point. I do not think that Heideggers conception of ontology and the
primacy that he gives to the question of being necessarily provide the best basis for the understanding of coloniality or
decolonization, but his analyses of being-in-the-world serve as a starting point to understanding some key

elements of existential thought, a tradition that has made important insights into the lived experience of
colonized and racialized peoples.39 Returning to Heidegger can provide new clues about how to articulate a discourse
on the colonial aspects of world making and lived experience. Heideggers ontology is characterized by the idea
that Being is not a being, an entity, or a thing, but the Being of beings, that is, something like the general
horizon of understanding for all beings.40 He refers to the distinction between Being and beings as the
ontological difference .41 According to Heidegger, Western philosophy, particularly Western metaphysics, is
characterized by the forgetfulness of Being and by a denial of the ontological difference . Western
metaphysics has equally betrayed the understanding of Being by conceiving Being in terms of the godhead or divinity. He
calls this tendency ontotheology, which is for him what fundamental ontology needs to overcome.42 In addition to arguing
for the crucial importance of the ontological difference, Heidegger makes the point that the answer to the question of

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the meaning of Being necessitates a new radical point of departure. God cannot stand as the beginning of
ontology anymore. Things as such are of not much help either, since their meaning is partly independent of them, and
surely they do not grasp their own meaning. In fact there is only one being for whom the question of Being is significant:
the human being. Since Heideggers aim is to begin philosophy anew, he does not want to use Man or any known concept
to refer to human beings. They all carry the trace of metaphysics and of epistemologically-centered philosophy, which
would vitiate his efforts to escape from them. The concept that he uses to refer to human beings-quabeings for whom their
own being is in question is Dasein. Dasein literally means being there. Thus, Dasein is simply the being who is there. For
Heidegger, fundamental ontology needs to elucidate the meaning of being there and through that, articulate ideas about
Being itself. Heideggers first reflection about Dasein is that it ek-sist, which means that it is projected to the future.43 But
Dasein is also thrown there. Dasein ek-sist in a context which is defined by a history and where there are laws and
established conceptions about social interaction, subjectivity, the world, and so on. Now, through the analysis of Dasein,
Heidegger discovers that for the most time its subjectivity takes the shape of a collective anonymous figure: the One or the
They. The They could be compared to what Nietzsche referred to as the herd or the mass of people.44 Once Heidegger has
elaborated his view of the They the rest of part I of Being and Time takes on the question of how can Dasein relate
authentically to itself by projecting its ownmost possibilities not those defined by the They. Heideggers response is that
authenticity can only be achieved by resoluteness, and that resoluteness can only emerge in an encounter with the
possibility which is inescapably ones own, that is, death. In death one is fully irreplaceable: no one can die for one, or one
for another. Death is a singular individualizing factor. The anticipation of the death and the accompanying anxiety allow
the subject to detach herself from the They, to determine her ownmost possibilities, and to resolutely define her own project
of ek-sistence.45 While the anticipation of death provides the means for the achievement of authenticity at an individual
level, a Fuhrer or leader became for Heidegger the means to achieve authenticity at a collective level. Resoluteness at a
collective level could only emerge by virtue of a leader. From here that Heidegger came to praise Hitlers role in Germany
and became an enthusiastic participant in the Nazi administration. War in some way provided a way to connect these two
ideas: the wars of the volk (people) in the name of their leader provide the context for a confrontation with death, and thus,
to individual authenticity. The possibility of dying for the country in a war becomes a means for individual and collective
authenticity.46 This picture, to be sure, seems to reflect more the point of view of the victor in war, than that of the
vanquished. But it could be said that the vanquished can also achieve authenticity through the confrontation with death in
war. Anybody can. Yet, the missing factor here is the following: if the previous account of coloniality in relation to the
nonethics of war is plausible then it must be admitted that the encounter with death is no extra-ordinary affair, but a
constitutive feature of the reality of colonized and racialized subjects. The colonized is thus not ordinary Dasein,

and the encounter with the possibility of death does not have the same impact or results than for someone
whose mode of alienation is that of depersonalization by the One or They. Racialized subjects are
constituted in different ways than those that form selves, others, and peoples. Death is not so much an
individualizing factor as a constitituve feature of their reality . It is the encounter with daily forms of
death, not the They, which afflicts them. The encounter with death always comes too late, as it were, since death is
already beside them. For this reason, decolonization, deracialization, and des-generaccio n (in sum, decoloniality) emerge
not through an encounter with ones own mortality, but from a desire to evade death, ones own but even more
fundamentally that of others. In short, while a vanquished people in war could achieve authenticity, for subjects who are
not considered to be part of the people the situation is different. For some subjects modernity changed the way of
achieving authenticity: they already live with death and are not even people. What Heidegger forgot is that in

modernity Being has a colonial side, and that this has far-reaching consequences. The colonial aspect of
Being, that is, its tendency to submit everything to the light of understanding and signification, reaches
an extreme pathological point in war and its naturalization through the idea of race in modernity. The
colonial side of Being sustains the color-line. Heidegger, however, looses from view the particular predicament of
subjects in the darker side of this line and the significance of their lived experience for theorization of Being and the
pathologies of modernity. Ironically, Heidegger recognizes the existence of what he calls primitive Dasein, but in no way
he connected it with colonized Dasein.47 Instead, he took European Man as his model of Dasein, and thus the colonized
appeared as a primitive. He forgot that if the concept of Man is a problem, is not only because it is metaphysical, but also
because it does away with the idea that, in modernity, what one finds is not a single model of human being, but relations of
power that create a world with masters and slaves. He needed to break with the idea of Europe and the European as models,
in order to uncover the complex dynamics of Dasein in the modern period both of European and colonized Dasein, to
which we will refer here as the damne. But we are already in the territory of discourse on the coloniality of being.

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Impact Laundry List
The affirmatives locus of enunciation is rooted in European Colonialism which has been the source of
numerous forms of oppression in the Americas that comes from the powers structure instituted in
Western forms of thought

Grosfoguel (Associate Professor Ethnic Studies Department, Chicano/Latino Studies) 11

(Ramn. "Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global
Coloniality." TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1, no. 1 , 4-6) //DDI13

What arrived in the Americas was a broader and wider 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
in the Americas, what arrived was a more complex world-system than what political-economy paradigms and world-system analysis portrait. A
European/capitalist/military/Christian/patriarchal/white/heterosexual/ male arrived in the Americas and established simultaneously in time and space
several entangled global hierarchies that for purposes of clarity in this exposition I will list below as if they were separate from each other: 1) a

particular global class formation where a diversity of forms of labor (slavery, semi-serfdom, wage labor, pettycommodity production, etc.) are going to coexist 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; 2) an international division of labor of core and periphery where capital
organized labor in the periphery around coerced and authoritarian forms (Wallerstein 1974); 3) an inter-state system of politico-military organizations
controlled by European males and institutionalized in colonial administrations (Wallerstein 1979); 4) a global racial/ethnic

hierarchy that privileges European people over non- European people (Quijano 1993; 2000); 5) a global gender hierarchy
that privileges males over females and European Judeo-Christian patriarchy over other forms of gender relations (Spivak 1988;
Enloe 1990); 6) 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 pathological behavior and had no homophobic ideology); 7) a spiritual
hierarchy that privileges Christians over non-Christian/non-Western spiritualities institutionalized in the globalization of the
Christian (Catholic and later, Protestant) church; 8) 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); 9) a linguistic
hierarchy between European languages and non-European languages that privileges 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); 10) an aesthetic hierarchy of high art vs.
nave or primitive art where the West is considered superior high art and the non-West is considered as producers of inferior expressions of art
institutionalized in Museums, Art Galleries and global art markets; 11) a pedagogical hierarchy where the Cartesian western forms of

pedagogy are considered superior over non-Westerm concepts and practices of pedagogy; 12) a media/informational
hierarchy where the West has the control over the means of global media production and information technology
while the non-West do not have the means to make their points of view enter the global media networks; 13) an age hierarchy where the Western
conception of productive life (ages between 15 and 65 years old) making disposable people above 65 years old are
considered superior over non-Western forms of age classification, where the older the person, the more authority and respect he/she
receives from the community; 14) an ecological hierarchy where the Western conceptions of nature (as an object that is a means towards
an end) with its destruction of life (human and nonhuman) is privileged and considered superior over non-Western conceptions
of the ecology such as Pachamama, Tawhid, or Tao (ecology or cosmos as subject that is an end in itself), which considers in its rationality the
reproduction of life; 15) a spatial hierarchy that privileges the urban over the rural with the consequent destruction of rural
communities, peasants and agrarian production at the worldscale.

Impact Ethnocide
Their politics authorizes genocidal violence based on myths of modernity. Our alt redistributes geopolitics
of knowledge and pursues an ethical way of thinking that is continually in process and marginal. This is
the best way to avoid ethnocidal thinking.

Mignolo 2000 [Walter, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University Local
Histories/Global Designs,68-69]
The second opposition Khatibi attempts to undo (after the opposition between the Christian West and the Islamic East), and
I would say the very foundation of his need for a double critique, is the postcolonial situation in the Maghreb. "What did we
do," asks Khatibi, reflecting on Maghrebian intellectuals' attitude in the process of decolonization, "other than reproduce a
rather simplistic version of Marx's thought, on the one hand, and the ideological theology of Arabic nationalism, on the

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other?" ( 1 9 8 3 , 16). A way out of these dichotomies presupposes a double critique and the search for "an other thinking"
that will go beyond certain limitations of Marxist thinking, which maintains a geopolitics of knowledge according to the
knowing subject in the First World (the Occident) and the known subject in the dogmatism and Arabic nationalism: "An
other thinking is formulated as a response to the large questions and issues that are shaking the world today, to the questions
emerging from the places where the planetarization of science, of technique and of strategies are being disclosed" (13).
What emerges from this formulation is that "an other thinking" is no longer located in either of the two alternatives into
which Orientalism, and later area studies, organized the distribution of scholarly labor from the eighteenth century to the
cold war. "An other thinking" implies a redistribution of the geopolitics of knowledge as organized by both Occidentalism
(as the overarching imagi nary and self-definition of the modern world system) and Orientalism (one particular instance in
which the difference from the same was located), along with area studies and the triumph of the social sciences in the
geopolitics of knowledge. It also entails an effort to escape the domain of Western metaphysics and its equivalent, the
theological realm of Islamic thought. "An other thinking" locates itself in all of these, and in none, in their borderland (as
Gloria Anzaldua frames it). The potential of "an other thinking" is epistemological and also ethical epistemological because
it is constructed on a critique of the limitations of two metaphysical traditionsthe Christian/secular Western and the
Islamic Two historical moments are relevant here: one, the sixteenth century and the rearticulation ol the conflict between
Christianity and Islam, through the "purity of blood" principle (see the introduction); two, the eighteenth century and the
secularization of philosophy and knowledge, the formation of capitalism, and the rise of French colonialism. Thus, a
consequent de scription of "an other thinking" is the following: a way of thinking that is not inspired in its own limitations
and is not intended to dominate and to humiliate; a way of thinking that is universally marginal, fragmentary, and
unachieved; and, as such, a way of thinking that, because universally marginal and fragmentary, is not ethnocidal (Khatibi
1983, 19). Thus, the ethical potential of an other thinking. Dussel, independently of Khatibi, has characterized modern,
instrumental reason by its genocidal bent. He tries to reveal this in his concept of the "myth of modernity": "Modernity
includes a rational "concept" of emancipation that we affirm and subsume. But, at the same lime, it develops an irrational
myth, a justification for genocidal violence. the postmodernists criticize modern reason as a reason of terror; we criticize
modern reason because of the irrational myth it conceals" (Dussel [1993] 1995, 67). Interestingly, Khatibi and Dussel not
only coincide in their critique of modernity without knowing each other, but both define their enterprise in relation to
modernity and to European philosophers (Nietzsche, I leidcgger, Foucault, Derrida for Khatibi; Apple, Marx, Habermas,
Levinas II ii Dussel). The consequences of coloniality of power and subalternization i'I knowledge can be perceived at
work from the colonial difference nourishing, Khatibi's and Dussel's ethical and epistemic reflections. And this is the
situation that "an other thinking" addresses at the same time that it opens i new perspective for a geopolitical order of
knowledge production.

Impact Genocide
Their modernist politics privilege the West and underwrite violence and genocide in the name of
civilization, rationality, science, and philosophythe West is cast as the hero of the world, justifying the
redemptive sacrifice of all others

Mignolo 2000 [Walter, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University Local
Histories/Global Designs, p. 115-117]
enrique Dussel, an Argentinian philosopher associated with the philosophy of liberation, has been articulating a strong
countermodern argument. I quote from the beginning of his Frankfurt lectures: Modernity is, for many (for Jurgen
Habermas or Charles Taylor, for example), in essentially or exclusively European phenomenon. In these lectures, I will
argue that modernity is, in fact, a European phenomenon, but one constituted in dialectical relation with a non-European
alterity that is its ultimate content. Modernity appears when Europe affirms itself as the "center" of a World history that it
inaugurates; the "periphery" that surrounds this center is consequently part of its self-definition. The occlusion of this
periphery (and of the role of Spain and Portugal in the formation of the modern world system from the late fifteenth to the
mid-seventeenth centuries) leads the major contemporary thinkers of the "center" into a Eurocentric fallacy in their
understanding of modernity. If their understanding of the genealogy of modernity is thus partial and provincial, their
attempts at a critique or defense of it are likewise unilateral and, in part, false. (Dussel [19931 1995, 65) The construction
of the idea of modernity linked to European expansion, as forged by European intellectuals, was powerful enough to last
almost five hundred years. Postcolonial discourses and theories began effectively to question that hegemony, a challenge
that was unthinkable (and perhaps unexpected) by those who constructed and presupposed the idea of modernity as a
historical period and implicitly as the locus of enunciationa locus of enunciation that in the name of rationality, science,

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and philosophy as serted its own privilege over other forms of rationality or over what, from the perspective of modern
reason, was nonrational. I would submit, conse quently, that postcolonial literature and postcolonial theories are
constructing a new concept of reason as differential loci of enunciation. What does "differential" mean? Differential here
first means a displacement of the concept and practice of the notions of knowledge, science, theory, and understanding
articulated during the modern period. Thus, Dussel's region alization of modernity could be compared with Homi
Bhabha's, both speak ing from different colonial legacies (Spanish and English respectively): "Driven by the subaltern
history of the margins of modernityrather than by the failures of logocentrismI have tried, in some small measure, In
revise the known, to rename the postmodern from the position of the postcolo nial" (Bhabha 1994, 175; emphasis added). I
find a noteworthy coincidence between Dussel and Bhabha, albeit with some significant differences in accent. The
coincidence lies in the very iui portant fact that the task of postcolonial reasoning (i.e., theorizing) is not only linked to the
immediate political needs of decolonization (in Asia, Al rica, and the Caribbean) but also to the rereading of the paradigm
of modi i n reason. This task is performed by Dussel and Bhabha in different, although complementary ways. After a
detailed analysis of Kant's and Hegel's construction of the idea of I nlightenment in European history, Dussel summarizes
the elements that i onstitute the myth of modernity: (1) Modern (European) civilization understands itself as the most
developed, the superior, civilization; (2) This sense of superiority obliges it, in the form of a categorical imperative, as it
were, to "develop" (civilize, uplift, educate) the more primitive, barbarous, underdeveloped civilizations; (3) The path of
such development should be that followed by Europe in its own development out of antiquity and the Middle Ages; (4)
Where the barbarians or the primitive opposes the civilizing process, the praxis of modernity must, in the last instance, have
recourse to the violence necessary to remove the obstacles to modernization; (5) This violence, which produces in many
different ways, victims, takes on an almost ritualistic character: the civilizing hero invests his victims (the colonized, the
slave, the woman, the ecological destruction of the earth, etc.) with the character of being participants in a process of
redemptive sacrifice; (6) from the point of view of modernity, the barbarian or primitive is in a state of guilt (for, among
other things, opposing the civilizing process). This allows modernity to present itself not only as innocent but also as a
force that will emancipate or redeem its victims from their guilt; (7) Given this "civilizing" and redemptive character of
modernity, the suffering and sacrifices (the costs) of modernization imposed on "immature" peoples, slaves, races, the
"weaker" sex, el cetera, are inevitable and necessary. (Dussel 119931 1995, 75) the myth of modernity is laid out by Dussel
to confront alternative interpietations. While Horkheimer and Adorno, as well as postmodernist think is such as Lyotard,
Rorty, or Vattimo, all propose a critique of reason (a v iolent, coercive, and genocidal reason), Dussel proposes a critique of
the enlightenment's irrational moments as sacrificial myth not by negating reason but by asserting the reason of the other
thai is, by identifying postcolonial reason as differential locus of enunciation. The intersection between tbi idea of a selfcentered modernity grounded in its own appropriation of greco-Roman (classical) legacies and an emerging idea of
modernity from the margins (or countermodernity) makes clear that history does not begin in Greece, and that different
historical beginnings are, at the same time, anchored to diverse loci of enunciation. This simple axiom is, 1 submit, a
bind.internal one for and of postsubaltern reason. Finally, Bhabha's project in lename the postmodern from the position of
the postcolonial also finds lis niche in postsubaltern reason as a differential locus of enunciation.

Modern/coloniality is root cause of genocidespeaking from the colonial difference key to resistance
Mignolo 2000 [Walter, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke
University Local Histories/Global Designs, 97-98]
I'ostcolonial theorizing in the United States, as Dirlik noted, found its liinise in the academy among intellectual immigrants
from the Third World (|nlin 1996). But, of course, postcolonial theorizing is not an invention of third World intellectuals
migrating to the United States and should not be limited to this enclave. On the other hand, there is nothing wrong with tin
fuel lhat migrating Third World intellectuals found themselves comfortiihli m the space of postcolonality. What Third
World intellectuals and "i Inilars in the United States (and I am one of them) contributed to was tin marketing of
postcoloniality among an array of available theories and a >t i Hum of "post" possibilities. On the other hand, AfroAmerican studies in 11 ii United States, whose emergence is parallel to postmodern and postcoI'11.11 theories, is deeply
rooted in the African diaspora and, consequently, in ihr history of colonialism and slavery (Eze 1997a; 1997b). Dirlik has a |
mhit il we interpret his dictum as the marketization of postcolonial theory Within the U.S academy. His point loses its poise
when we consider, for in lance, Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy in England, or we go beyond the U.S. iii aili iny and take
seriously Ruth Frankenberg's dictum that in the United 'iiaii ihe question is not the postcolonial (as it is, e.g., for England
and linli.i) hut civil rights (Frankenberg and Mani 1993). In this sense, the con111'i nl i ivil rights has not been used to
claim an identity and, similarly, civil H^lir. in ihe United States will have more similarities with post-dictatorships in the
Southern Cone: neither of them is the locus of subjectivity and identity formation, although both are extremely helpful to
understand the political landscape in the United States and the Southern Cone, contemporary with the movement of

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decolonization in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Once more, the bottom line is the subaltern reason in the geopolitical
distribution of knowledge that could be explained by colonial legacies and local critical histories. Subaltern reason, or
whatever you want to call it, nourishes and is nourished by a theoretical practice prompted by movements of decolonization
after World War II, which at its inception had little to do with academic enterprises (Cesaire, Atnilcar Cabral, Fanon) and
had at its core the question of race. If Marxist thinking could be described as having class at its core, postcolonial theorizing
could be described as having race at its core. Two of the three major genocides of modernity (the Amerindian and the
African diaspora in the early modern period; the Holocaust as closing European modernity and the crisis of the civilizing
mission) are, in my understanding, at the root of colonial and imperial historieswhich is to say, at the root ol the very
constitution of modernity. The subaltern reason is what arises as a response to the need of rethinking and reconceptualizing
the stories that have been told and the conceptualization that has been put into place to divide the world between Christians
and pagans, civilized and barbarians, modern and premodern, and developed and underdeveloped regions and people, all
global designs mapping the colonial difference.

Impact Slavery
All aspects of life infected by the colonial viruscoloniality robs us of our humanity and cant be
explained by liberal theorists, psychoanalysis, or other methods from the First Worldthe impact is
slavery
Nelson Maldonado-Torres, associate professor of comparative literature at Rutgers, 8 [Against War: Views from the
Underside of Modernity, p. 217-21] //DDI13
Fanon differs from Honneth precisely at the points in which Honneth relies on Foucault and on Habermas, Fanon, like
Foucault and Honneth, is interested in questions of power-and not only in questions of identity and

multiculturalism. But Fanon is concerned about a particular form of power : the imperial power that
creates the colonial condition. Honneth argues that recognition takes place in three spheres: love, rights, and
social esteem. Demands for recognition arise, for him, as feelings of disrespect in relation to the negation of rights or social
esteem. Love relationships remain at the level of the private and the intimate. In the colonial condition, or so Fanon
would argue, it is not possible to make these distinctions. Indeed, one of the most fundamental lessons of
Black Skin, White Masks is that in the colonial context what happens at the level of the private and the

intimate is fundamentally linked to social structures and to colonial cultural formations and forms of
value. That is the ultimate reason why Fanon believed that psychoanalysis would fail to explain and to
provide an adequate diagnosis of the pathology of subjects in colonial territories -unless it took the form of a
sociogeny." Ordinary life is infected by the colonial virus . Communication, loving relationships, and even
the proper recognition of the self are distorted by a social system and by cultural forms that take
blackness and other forms of sub-alterity as markers of the absence of values . Ultimately, as Lewis Gordon
puts it, it is an extraordinary affair for a black person to be ordinary." For Fanon, the colonial condition
approximates a systematic and systemic reality of human failure. And one of the distincti ve features of this
reality is that dehumanization reaches stages in which feelings of disrespect gradually become either muted
or transformed into desires for identification or participation with the dominant culture ." This is what the
colonial configuration intends and what makes it so powerful : instead of taking anything in particular
away from colonized subjects, it attempts to rob them of any notion of self-worth and, ultimately, of the
very idea of having any rights." This resembles the condition of slavery in that it involves not the stealing
away of someones property but the collapse of one's humanity into a category of property. To feel
disrespect (in a way that makes reference to the lack or denial of rights or social esteem) one should have been respected
first or at least know that one should be so respected." But in the colonial context experiences of liberty remain

buried in stories about the precolonial past, and theoretical conceptions of equality are articulated
abstractly enough to easily allow or even help to promote or sustain the perversity of concrete domination .
As Fanon puts it:
The white man. in the capacity of master, said to the Negro, "From now on you are free."

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But the Negro knows nothing of the cost of freedom. for he has not fought for it. From time to time he has fought for
Liberty and Justice, but these were always white liberty and white justice; that is, values secreted by his masters. The
former slave, who can find in his memory no trace of the struggle for liberty or of that anguish of liberty of which
Kierkegaard speaks, sits unmoved before the young white man singing and dancing on the tightrope of existence. (BSWM
220-2I)
The point here is that in the day-to-day ordinary life of the colonized these experiences and ideas are not

completely effective as producers of feelings of disrespect. That is why ultimately Fanon finds black
subjects wearing white masks. To be sure, this does not mean that racialized and colonized people do not confront
dilemmas of freedom." What it means is that these dilemmas cannot be properly thematized in relation to
spheres of culture and value that have not emerged or in which certain subjects have not been allowed to
participate. Fanon has thus no other way to proceed than by raising the question of desire: what does man want, what
does the black man want? This is a demand for a philosophical anthropology from the perspective of the slave. Here we
may very well find a radical point of departure to pursue the project of articulating a postliberal conception of the human.

***Alternatives***
Alt Epistemic Disobedience
Acts of epistemic disobedience uncover the invisible violence of modernity and create the space for the
perspective of the Global South

Mignolo (Professor of Literature in Duke University, Joint Appointments in Cultural Anthropology and Romance Studies) 2012
Walter, Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option: A Manifesto, Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production
of the Luso-Hispanic World, 45-46, NDW //DDI13
But the basic formulation of decolonial delinking (e.g., desprendimiento) was advanced by Anbal Quijano in his groundbreaking article Colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad (1991) [Coloniality and modernity/rationality]. The argument
was that, on the one hand, an analytic of the limits of Eurocentrism (as a hegemonic structure of knowledge and
beliefs) is needed. But that analytic was considered necessary rather than sufficient. It was necessary, Quijano asserted,
desprenderse de las vinculaciones de la racionalidad-modernidad con la colonialidad, en primer trmino, y en definitiva
con todo poder no constituido en la decisin libre de gentes libres [It is necessary to extricate oneself from the
linkages between rationality/modernity and coloniality, first of all, and definitely from all power which is not
constituted by free decisions made by free people].4 Desprenderse means epistemic de-linking or, in other
words, epistemic disobedience. Epistemic disobedience leads us to decolonial options as a set of projects that

have in common the effects experienced by all the inhabitants of the globe that were at the receiving end
of global designs to colonize the economy (appropriation of land and natural resources), authority (management by
the Monarch, the State, or the Church), and police and military enforcement (coloniality of power), to colonize
knowledges (languages, categories of thoughts, belief systems, etc.) and beings (subjectivity). Delinking is then
necessary because there is no way out of the coloniality of power from within Western (Greek and Latin)
categories of thought. Consequently, de-linking implies epistemic disobedience rather than the constant search for
newness (e.g., as if Michel Foucaults concept of racism and power were better or more appropriate because they are
newerthat is, post-modernwithin the chronological history or archaeology of European ideas). Epistemic
disobedience takes us to a different place, to a different beginning (not in Greece, but in the responses to the
conquest and colonization of America and the massive trade of enslaved Africans), to spatial sites of struggles and
building rather than to a new temporality within the same space (from Greece, to Rome, to Paris, to London, to
Washington DC). I will explore the opening up of these spacesthe spatial paradigmatic breaks of epistemic disobedience
in Waman Puma de Ayala and Ottabah Cugoano. The basic argument (almost a syllogism) that I will develop here is the
following: if coloniality is constitutive of modernity since the salvationist rhetoric of modernity presupposes the
oppressive and condemnatory logic of coloniality (from there come the damns of Fanon), then this oppressive logic

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produces an energy of discontent, of distrust, of release within those who react against imperial violence.
This energy is translated into decolonial projects that, as a last resort, are also constitutive of modernity.
Modernity is a three-headed hydra, even though it only reveals one head: the rhetoric of salvation and
progress. Coloniality, one of whose facets is poverty and the propagation of AIDS in Africa, does not appear in
the rhetoric of modernity as its necessary counterpart, but rather as something that emanates from it. For
example, the Millennium Plan of the United Nations headed by Kofi Anan, and the Earth Institute at Columbia
University headed by Jeffrey Sachs, work in collaboration to end poverty (as the title of Sachs book announces).5
But, while they question the unfortunate consequences of modernity , never for a moment is the ideology of
modernity or the black pits that hide its rhetoric ever questioned : the consequences of the very nature of the
capitalist economyby which such ideology is supportedin its various facets since the mercantilism of the sixteenth
century, free trade of the following centuries, the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, and the technological
revolution of the twentieth century. On the other hand, despite all the debate in the media about the war against terrorism,
on one side, and all types of uprisings, of protests and social movements, it is never suggested that the logic of
coloniality that hides beneath the rhetoric of modernity necessarily generates the irreducible energy of
humiliated, vilified, forgotten, or marginalized human beings. Decoloniality is therefore the energy that

does not allow the operation of the logic of coloniality nor believes the fairy tales of the rhetoric of
modernity. Therefore, decoloniality has a varied range of manifestationssome undesirable, such as those that
Washington today describes as terroristsand decolonial thinking is, then, thinking that de-links and opens
(de-linking and opening in the title come from here) to the possibilities hidden (colonized and discredited, such as the
traditional, barbarian, primitive, mystic, etc.) by the modern rationality that is mounted and enclosed by categories
of Greek, Latin, and the six modern imperial European languages.

Scattered instances of coloniality demand every instance be explored and approached with decolonial
thinking

Mignolo (Professor of Literature in Duke University, Joint Appointments in Cultural Anthropology and Romance Studies) 2012
Walter, Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option: A Manifesto, Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production
of the Luso-Hispanic World, 62-63, NDW //DDI13
We could continue the argument by including Mahatma Gandhi among the figures who are central to the decolonial turn. To
mention him here is important for the following reason: Cugoano and Gandhi are united, at distinct points on the planet, by
the British Empire. Waman Puma and Cugoano are united by the continuity of Western European imperialisms in America.
We could continue with Frantz Fanon, and connect him to Cugoano through the imperial wound of the Africans and also
through the imperial complicity between Spain, England, and France (in spite of their imperial conflicts). With this, I would
like to highlight the following: the genealogy of decolonial thinking is structured in the planetary space of
colonial/imperial expansion, contrary to the genealogy of European modernity that is structured in the
temporal trajectory of a reduced space, from Greece to Rome, to Western Europe and to the United States. The

common element between Waman Puma, Cugoano, Gandhi, and Fanon is the wound inflicted by the
colonial difference (e.g., the colonial wound). The decolonial turn (i.e., the epistemic disobedience) of
Waman Puma and of Cugoano took place on the horizon of monarchies, prior to the emergence of the modern
(bourgeois) state and the emergence of the three secular imperial ideologies: conservatism, liberalism, and
socialism/Marxism.27 They opened up the decolonial option, and on the horizon of both, theology was the
queen of knowledge. A second part of this manifesto (in progress) explores the decolonial horizon (Gandhi, Cabral, Du
Bois, Fanon, Anzalda, Indigenous social movements in Bolivia and Ecuador, Afro social movements in Colombia and
Ecuador, the World Social Forum and the Social Forum of the Americas, etc.) on the horizon of the imperial modern state.
The genealogy of decolonial thinking is pluri-versal (not uni-versal). As such, each knot on the web of this

genealogy is a point of de-linking and opening that re-introduces languages, memories, economies, social
organizations, and at least double subjectivities: the splendor and the miseries of the imperial legacy, and
the indelible footprint of what existed that has been converted into the colonial wound; in the degradation
of humanity, in the inferiority of the pagans, the primitives, the under-developed, the non-democratic.
Our present situation asks, demands a decolonial thinking that articulates genealogies scattered
throughout the planet and offers other economic, political, social, subjective modalities . This process is in

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progress and we see it every day, in spite of the bad news that arrives from the Middle East, from Indonesia, from Katrina,
and from the interior war in Washington.

Alt Border Thinking

Border thinking is a necessary tool to create decoloniality

Saldvar 2006 (Saldvar, Jos David. "Border Thinking, Minoritized Studies, and Realist Interpellations: The Coloniality of
Power From Gloria Anzalda to Arundhati Roy." In Identity Politics Reconsidered. Edited by Linda Alcoff. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006.) //DDI13
This essay has a somewhat sweeping character. It is a preliminary attempt to link pensamiento fronterizo (border thinking)
in Chicano/a Studies and realist interpellations of the subject and the politics of reclaiming identity of this volume. Border

thinking emerges from the critical reflections of (undocumented) immigrants, migrants, bracero/a
workers, refugees, campesinos, women, and children on the major structures of dominance and
subordination of our times. Thus envisaged, border thinking is the name for a new geopolitically located
thinking or epistemology from both the internal and external borders of the modern (colonial) worldsystem.1 Border thinking is a necessary tool for thinking what the Peruvian historical social scientist
Anbal Quijano calls the coloniality of power and identity at the intersections (los intersticios) of our
local histories and global designs. Quijanos coloniality of power, I argue, can help us begin to account for the
entangled relations of power between the global division of labor, racial and ethnic hierarchy, identity
formation, and Eurocentric epistemologies. Moreover, the coloniality of power can help us trace the continuous
forms of hegemonic dominance produced by colonial cultures and structures. As I use it, the coloniality of power
is fundamentally a structuring process of racial identity, experience, and racial knowledge production
articulating geostrategic locations and subaltern (minor) inscriptions.

Alt Anti-development
Our alternative is to reject the affirmatives notions of development as salvation, recognizing alternative
modes of living collectively. Only a reconception of what living well is and can be frees us from
calculations of utility that prevent meaningful engagements and experiences.
Walter Mignolo, Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University, The communal and the de-colonial,
Turbulence: Ideas for Movement, No. 5, Decembe4 2009, pg. 31, TB //DDI13
But what exactly, then, is the communal? Patzi

Paco refers to collective rights to the use and management of

resources, at the same time as he speaks of the rights of groups, families and individuals to share in the
bene ts of what is collectively produced. He makes clear that, while the communal has its ancestral foundation
in agrarian societies in the Andes, these characteristics have survived and adapted well to contemporary conditions. The
communal system is open to persons, indigenous or not, as well as to diff erent types of work: in a
communal system the distinction between owner and waged worker, as well as boss and employee in
administrative organisations (banks, state organs, etc.), vanishes. To understand the scope of this proposal, it
is necessary to clear our heads of the indigenous = peasants equation that the coloniality of
knowledge has imposed upon us, alongside the rhetoric of salvation. Moreover, the notion of
property is meaningless in a vision of society in which the goal is working to live and not living to
work. It is in this context that Evo Morales has been promoting the concept of the good living (sumaj kamaa in
Quechua, sumak kawsay in Quichua, allin kausaw in Aymara or buen vivir in Spanish). The good living or to
live in harmony is an alternative to development. While development puts life at the service of
growth and accumulation, buen vivir places life rst, with institutions at the service of life. That is
what living in harmony (and not in competition) means.

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Alt Death of the European Man Ext.
Even leftist Americanism and Eurocentrism is badoffers a false, venomous gift that holds humanity
backonly the decolonial attitude shatters imperial identitywe must engage in radical suspension of
privilege and enact an ethics of risk and generosity

Maldonado-Torres 5 (Nelson, associate professor of comparative literature at Rutgers Decolonization and the New
Identitarian Logics after September 11, Radical Philosophy Review 8, n. 1 (2005): 35-67) //DDI13
Both Fanon and Anzalda, colonized subjects of the French and estadounidense" empires, help define decolonization as a
project and further strengthen what Chela Sandoval has referred to as the "methodology of the oppressed."73 This meth
odology has decolonization or decoloniality as its expressed goal and orientation. Decoloniality is based on the

introduction of a " decolonial attitude " that takes us beyond the Eurocentric and "'estadounidense"
myths that put limits to the elaboration of theory. The "decolonial attitude" stands behind the efforts to
elaborate new philosophies, critical theories, and forms of science that break away from the Euro centric
attitude and its avatars in the United States, Latin America, and elsewhere.74 The decolonial attitude is the
cornerstone of the unfinished project of decolonization and the main inspiration for the construction of a
transmodern world.71
In light of the work of Anzaldua and Fanon, decolonization can be understood as the attempt to reintroduce a
certain logic of the gift that takes us beyond the horizons of Eurocentrism and Americanism .76 The
"decolonial attitude" has a generous and receptive subject as its basis. I mentioned before that
imperialism also enacts a certain logic of the gift. But the gift of the master works like a venom that
shatters a number of possibilities for the colonized to become a mature human being. The master is also a
privileged giver: he gives and takes but never receives .77 Both Americanism and Eurocentrism, leftist or
not, work according to this logic.7H That is why it is necessary to find some impenetrable core in culture, or some
unique radical element that can penetrate other cultures but which can't be penetrated. Like the impe rial gift, the
decolonial gift is a venom too, but in this case what it kills or attempts to kill is imperial identity itself . The
decolonial gift is a gift of death.79 Decolonial gifts (like those of Anzaldua and Fanon) seek to undermine projects that rest
on the usurpation of goods and their redeployment in perverse imperial logics of concentra tion of power/capital/property
and the monopolization of gifts. Imperial subjectivity affords certain kind of privileges to subjects who fit the racial profile
of non-black ness and non-darkness in the modern/colonial world. The radical suspension of this privilege is what

I have in mind when I call for the Death of Imperial Man, both in its European and American
expressions. Calling for the Death of European and American Man means to divorce ourselves from the
ideas, feelings, and actions that inhibit the generous transaction of gifts. This is a call to engage in a praxis
of libera tion which is also an ethics of risk and of generous encounter articulated from the position of
the damne. The damne, as a generous and receptive self that emerges from the ashes of colonization, is
proposed here as the subject of radical transformations and acts of creation that leads us beyond the
horizon of Eurocentrism and Americanism today.

Alt Love
Anti-black epistemological claims are best explained under a decolonial reduction of phenomenology and
psychoanalysis
Malonado-Torres (Prof @ Rutgers) 2008
(Nelson, Is assistant professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Against War: Views from the underside of
modernity page 102) G.L. //DDI13

The recognition of the constitutive character for human identity of a social realm that maintains
structures of domination akin to the relation between a master and a slave is perhaps the main, or at least
the most patent, contribution of Black Skin. White Masks, Fanon performs what in our terms ma y be

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rendered as a de-colonial reduction of phenomenology and psychoanalysis, He brings out the relevance of
colonial Manichean hierarchies for the understanding of the psyche and lived experience of modern subjects such as black
and white, The black Antillean is the slave of this cultural imposition. After having been the slave of the

white man, he enslaves himself. The Negro is in every sense of the word a victim of white civilization, the
Antillean has recognized himself as a Negro. But, by virtue of an ethical transit. He, also feels, 'that one is
Negro to the degree to which one is wicked, sloppy malicious, instinctual everything that is the opposite of
these Negro modes of behavior is white, (SSWM 192) The implications of the cultural imposition that
Fanon describes are deep, The Negro is comparison, there is the first truth, he is comparison: that is, he is constantly
preoccupied with self-evaluation and with the ego-ideal. Whenever he comes into contact with someone else, the question
of value, of merit arises, The Antilles have no inherent values of their own, they are always contingent on the presence of
the other. (SSWM 2II) The "governing fiction" of the black. Fanon concludes. is not personal but social (BSWM 2I5),

Fanon examines forms of life radically affected by a configuration of power that obeys the logic of the
relation between master and slave, The question of the relation between the master and the slave may
indeed very well be the central axis of his reflections, The de-colonial reduction consists precisely in a critical
interpretation and elucidation of phenomena that brings to light the constitutive force of this binary, It is thus not
fortuitous that Fanon decides to dedicate the last chapter of Black Skin. White Masks to a consideration
of the problem of recognition and to conclude the chapter with an examination of Hegel's influential
conception of the dialectics of lord and bondsman,

The imperial man as God is best combated through an ethics of love not hate
Malonado-Torres (Prof @ Rutgers) 2008
(Nelson, Is assistant professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Against War: Views from the underside of
modernity page 102)G.L //DDI13

The notion of the desire to be God brings a paradoxical element in view: while the master wants to be
God he still needs God as an other who can recognize him as master. This means that, at least under the basic
initial conditions of recognition, the master can never truly occupy the position of God, Lewis Gordon raises a similar
point in his phenomenological study of human postures and attitudes in an anti-black world : "Since
whiteness is the ideal, the white man is either God or as close to God as anyone can be on earth. Therefore
he needs a transcendent God simultaneously to deny his hubris and affirm his whiteness, Can he, as it were, have his cake
and eat it toO?"S8 It is apparent then that while God allows the master to take the form of "God in the flesh," he

signifies a purity that the master will never really be able to represent If the master ever attempts to
declare himself God, then he will not be able to obtain recognition, The process of recognition of Imperial
Man leads him to confront a dilemma in which the very possibility of the future sustenance of his identity
as master is at stake, For Gordon, it is precisely at this point that we find some prospects regarding the possibility of
overcoming the imperial mode of reality and process of recognition: "The only alternatives are that whiteness or
God itself is so ideal that no actual white man can ever achieve an identity relation with it, or that God or
whiteness must be rejected, which makes humanity-Freedom-the ideal toward whom both whites and
blacks aim. This freedom must, however, be approached through love, not hate, which requires respect for
this freedom as Other.'?" For Gordon, the dilemma of the master presents the opportunity for him to finally aim toward
the construction of a truly human world. Feuerbach embraced a similar idea, For him, the rejection of God would
lead humanity to an unprecedented self-reconciliation, thus bringing an authentic reizn of love, There is,
however. a fundamental difference between Feuerbach's and Gordon's approaches, While the former
treats God as a general category (as the essence of man), the latter examines and critiques the God that appears and
sustains a strictly anti-black world, This is the reason why "God" is said to represent pure whiteness, and why
his rejection opens the possibility for an anti-racist world of love where a non-imperial divinity could find
a place, But, as Gordon indicates, there is also the possibility for those who wish to further empire of making
God/whiteness absolutely transcendent to continue deriving the benefits of imperial recognition , Yet such a
possibility introduces a paradoxical element: radicalizing God's transcendence increases the tension between God's lordship
and the ambitions of Imperial Man, With God in a position of absolute transcendence, Imperial Man appears

less as a master and more as a servant to the true transcendental master. Such is the paradox of imperial

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recognition: its affirmation leads to its failure, unless, that is, there is a way to achieve recognition and
affirm the value of whiteness without Cod.

Alt Zapatismo
The Zapatistas work against the structure of colonial power in favor of human dignity through
double translation
Mignolo 02 Walter D. Mignolo (Mignolo received his BA in Philosophy from the Universidad Nacional de Crdoba, Argentina in
1969. In 1974 he obtained his Ph.D. from the cole des Hautes tudes, Paris. He subsequently taught at the Universities of Toulouse,
Indiana, and Michigan. Since January 1993, Walter D. Mignolo has been the William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and
Romance Studies at Duke University, USA, and has joint appointments in Cultural Anthropology and Romance Studies. Mignolo coedits the web dossier, Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise. He is the academic director of "Duke in the Andes", an interdisciplinary
program in Latin American and Andean Studies in Quito, Ecuador, at the Universidad Politcnica Salesiana. Since 2000, he has
directed the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities, a research unit within the John Hope Franklin Center for International and
Interdisciplinary Studies. He has also been named Permanent Researcher at Large at the Universidad Andina Simn Bolvar in Quito,
Ecuador. Recently, Mignolo has ventured into what he calls "decolonial aesthetics" writing on artists Pedro Lasch, Fred Wilson
(artist), and Tanja Ostoji. He contributed to Black Mirror/Espejo Negro, a book on the works of Pedro Lasch, edited by Lasch,
published by Duke University Press.) The Zapatistas 's Theoretical Revolution: Its Historical, Ethical, and Political Consequences
2002 //DDI13
In a Chiapas market, shortly after the insurrection of 1994, a young Indian girl was heard to say: "Los Zapatistas nos
devolvieron la dignidad" ("The Zapatistas have given us back our dignity"). Who took the dignity away from the Mayan
peoples of Chiapas? It is easy to identify specific collective agents, like the Spaniards in the case of the colonization of
Meso-America or the Creoles who built nations (Mexico and Guatemala in this case) after decolonization. The same loss
of dignity occurred, however, elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as in North America, Australasia, and
other regions where there was no direct Spanish intervention. I propose, therefore, the more general formulation; that the

dignity of indigenous people was taken away by the coloniality of power enacted in the making of the
modern/ colonial world, since about 1500 until today (Mignolo, 2000a). In the world-making process we identify today
as modernity/ coloniality, the term modernity does not stand by itself, since it cannot exist without its darker side:
coloniality. As I conceive it here, the modern/ colonial world goes together with the mercantile, industrial, and
technological capitalism centered in the North Atlantic, both of which carry out the epistemic mechanism of coloniality of
power: classifying people around the world by color and territory, and managing the distribution of labor and organization
of society (Quijano, 1997; Mignolo, 2000b). Accordingly, the statement of the young girl in the Chiapas market has
significance far beyond the local history of indigenous people in Mexico. Nevertheless, her words draw meaning from an
intense local history, as described in the Zapatistas's first declaration from the Lacandon Forest, in January of 1994:

We are the product of five hundred years of struggle: first against slavery; then in the insurgent-led war
of Independence against Spain; later in the fight to avoid being absorbed by North American expansion;
next to proclaim our Constitution; next to proclaim our Constitution and expel the French from our soil;
and finally, after the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz refused to fairly apply the reform law, in the rebellion
where the people created their own leaders. In that rebellion Villa and Zapata emerged-poor men, like us
(First Declaration from the LacandonJungle, 1994). The girl's reference to "human dignity" takes its full meaning, on the
one hand, not only within and as a consequence of this local history, but also through its connection to similar colonial
experi ences, although arising from different colonial histories. (I develop this idea below in terms of diversality as a
universal project). In other words, "human dignity" should not be taken, under any circumstances (even those of the French
Revolution), as an abstract univer sal. Rather, it is a connector of similar colonial experiences in different colonial
histories, whether in the rest of the Americas, in Asia, or in Africa. The idea of "human dignity" illuminates, on the other
hand, a particular ethical dimension in the Zapatista uprising, outlined by Subcomandante Marcos as follows: All of a

sudden the revolution transformed itself into something essentially moral, ethical. More than the
distribution of wealth or the expropriation of the means of production, the revolution is becoming the possibility
for carving a space of human dignity . Dignity becomes a very strong word. But it is not our contribution, a
contribution of the urban component, but a contribution from and by indigenous communities. They want the revolution to
be the warranty for the respect of human dignity (Subcomandante Marcos, 1997: 146). This emphasis on the ethical
problem does not imply that the economic question has been forgotten, that land claims, exploitation of labor, and

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economic marginalization do not count. On the con trary, bringing ethics to the foreground is a reminder that, after ~1,
Karl Marx did not study the logic of capital to make an economiC, but rather an ethical claim about the adulation of money
and commodity at the expense of human life. In what follows I explore the Zapatistas's theoretical revolution, the
introduction of a historical macro narrative from the perspective of coloniality that supports their ethical and political
claims. DOUBLE TRANSLATION AND THE ZAPATISTAS'S NARRATIVE OF THE THEORETICAL REVOLUTION
Subcomandante Marcos's narrative of his encounter with "old man Antonio," an encounter in which Rafael Guillen, the
Marxist urban intellectual, began the process of becoming Subcomandante Marcos, the double translator, is a key concept.
The wisdom of the elders is what characterizes Amerindian intellectuals (e.g., persons whose role in a given community is
to transform knowledge into wisdom). Marcos became the translator, on the one hand, of Amerindian discourses to the
Mexican nation and the world beyond Mexico, and on the other hand, of Marxism to Amerindian intellectuals. As a double
translator he displaced the model implanted by missionaries at the beginning of the colonial world. Missionaries, , whether
translating to or from their native Spanish and any indigenous language, never put themselves at risk; this sort of
translation, in ideological terms, was always unidirectional. The missionaries were the only translators, and they never
changed their conceptual frames. As conceived and practiced by Subcomandante Marcos, however, translation was
bidirectional and involved risk. Indeed, Rafael Guillen became Subcomandante Marcos at the moment of his recognition
that Amerindian intellectuals and political leaders could use him in the same way he could use them. He realized that his
Marxist ideology needed to be infected by Amerindian cosmology, and that Amerindians had their own equivalent of what
Marx meant to Rafael Guillen and the urban intellectuals who went to the Lacandon Forest in the 1980's with the hope of
propagating revolution. In contrast to sixteenth-century missionaries who never doubted that converting people to
Christianity was the right thing to do, Subcomandante Marcos may have understood that aiming to convert Amerindians to
Marxism was just a reproduction of the same logic of salvation, albeit with a different content. The character of
Subcomandante Marcos's transformation is particularly evident in his reflections on the merging of Amerindian and
Marxist cosmology in the process I call double translation: The end result was that we were not talking to an indigenous
movement waiting for a savior but with an indigenous movement with a long tradition of struggle, with a significant
experience, and very intelligent: a movement that was using us as its armed man (Subcomandate Marcos, 1997: 147).
Rafael Guillen's conceptual transformation emerged from his first encounter with "old man Antonio" in 1984, ten years
before the latter's death. According to Subcomandante Marcos's own narrative, written in 1997, a group of urban
intellectuals (a Marxist-Leninist group with a profile similar to the guerrilla movements in Central and South America)
joined a group of politically oriented indigenous leaders and intellectuals (Tacho, David, Moises, Ana Maria) to work with
indigenous communities in Mexico. When Guillen sat down to talk to Antonio, a respected elder of an indigenous group,
the topic of Emiliano Zapata soon came up. Guillen told the story of Mexico from a Marxist perspective and situated
Zapata in that history. Then Old Man Antonio told the story of the Amerindian communities from a Mayan perspective,
and situated Zapata, indeed, Votan/Zapata 1 within that story. After this exchange of narratives, in which Zapata became a
connectoroftwo stories embedded in different cosmologies, old man Antonio extended to Guillen a photograph
ofVotan/Zapata standing up, with his right hand on the handle of a sword hanging at his right side. Antonio then asked
Guillen whether Zapata was drawing or sheathing the sword. As Guillen understood Antonio's question, the old man
wished to emphasize that both histories have their reasons, and that only an unconscious structure of power can decide
which one is history and which is myth. This is not, to meet possible objections, to adopt a position of cultural relativism.
Rather, I interpret Guillen's encounter with the old man and the latter's question in terms of colonial difference. "Culture"
is a term that acquired its current meaning in the eighteenth century, replacing "religion" in a Western secular world,
embarking 1 "Votan" and "Zapata" are two different names to identify the same person. on a new discourse of colonial
expansion (Dirks, 1992). Communities of birth began to be conceptualized as national communities, replacing
communities of believers, defined in religious terms. The notion of "cultural relativism" changed the question of

coloniality and coloniality of power to a semantic problem that engendered a new discourse of political
and ethnic tolerance. If we accept, for instance, that actions, objects, beliefs, languages, or ideas are
culturerelative, we then hide the coloniality of power through which different "cultures" came into being
in the first place. "Cultures" have not been "there" all the time, but have been forced into what they
"are" today in the making of the modern/ colonial world. There were no "Indians" in the Americas until
the arrival of the Spaniards. Of course there were different groups of people that identified themselves with names,
but they were not "Indians" (Silverblatt, 1995). And there was no America either until Northern European
colonialism began to map the world and to include "America" within the Christian trinity of Europe, Asia, and Africa.
The world was organized and divided into continents and the people identified by their color, their culture, and the
continent they inhabited. Coloniality of power originated at this junction as an epistemic principle for the classification of
people and continents. The modern/ colonial world emerged as the locus of enunciation of such an epistemic principle. The
issue, then, is not whether to see old man Antonio and Guillen's discourse in the frame of cultural relativism, but rather to

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dissolve cultural relativism into the making and reproduction of the colonial difference. The exercise of the coloniality of
power in "cultures" in the classification of people by religion, color, and continents (that is, the making of the colonial
difference) created the conditions for the conceptualization of both cultural differences and cultural relativIsm. We can

now further explicate the key role of double translation in the Zapatistas's theoretical revolution. Double
translation enables the dissolution of cultural relativism into colonial differences, and the unmasking of
the colonial structure of power (i.e., the coloniality of power) in the production and reproduction of the colonial
difference.

Alt solves- double translation effectively gives indigenous voices a right to respect as intellectuals
Mignolo 02 Walter D. Mignolo (Mignolo received his BA in Philosophy from the Universidad Nacional de Crdoba, Argentina in
1969. In 1974 he obtained his Ph.D. from the cole des Hautes tudes, Paris. He subsequently taught at the Universities of Toulouse,
Indiana, and Michigan. Since January 1993, Walter D. Mignolo has been the William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and
Romance Studies at Duke University, USA, and has joint appointments in Cultural Anthropology and Romance Studies. Mignolo coedits the web dossier, Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise. He is the academic director of "Duke in the Andes", an interdisciplinary
program in Latin American and Andean Studies in Quito, Ecuador, at the Universidad Politcnica Salesiana. Since 2000, he has
directed the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities, a research unit within the John Hope Franklin Center for International and
Interdisciplinary Studies. He has also been named Permanent Researcher at Large at the Universidad Andina Simn Bolvar in Quito,
Ecuador. Recently, Mignolo has ventured into what he calls "decolonial aesthetics" writing on artists Pedro Lasch, Fred Wilson
(artist), and Tanja Ostoji. He contributed to Black Mirror/Espejo Negro, a book on the works of Pedro Lasch, edited by Lasch,
published by Duke University Press.) The Zapatistas 's Theoretical Revolution: Its Historical, Ethical, and Political Consequences
2002 //DDI13

We can now further explicate the key role of double translation in the Zapatistas's theoretical revolution.
Double translation enables the dissolution of cultural relativism into colonial differences, and the
unmasking of the colonial structure of power (i.e., the coloniality of power) in the production and reproduction of
the colonial difference. From the perspective of double translation emerges an ethical and political
imaginary that opens up the possibility of conceiving possible futures beyond the limits imposed by two
hegemonic abstract universals, ( neo) liberalism and ( neo) Marxism. The theoretical revolution of the Zapatistas is
rooted in the double translation-or rather, double infection-that makes possible a double epistemic movement. Forms of
knowledge that had been discredited from the beginning of modernity/ coloniality enter into a double movement

of "getting in/letting in" that is allowed by the reversal of coloniality of power opened up by double
translation. The theoretical revol~tion grounded in double translation makes it possible to imagine
epistemic diversality (or pluriversality) and to understand the limits of the abstract-universals that have
dominated the imaginary of the modern/ colonial world from Christianity to liberalism and Marxism. The Zapatistas's
theoretical revolution allows us to understand that, in terms of the logic of abstract universals, the difference between, say,
the Shining Path and Alberto Fujimori was relatively insignificant; it was the same logic with different content. Perhaps,
moreover, it was the tyranny of a logic grounded in abstract universals that misguided Che Guevara in Bolivia and the
Sandinistas in Nicara gua in interactions with indigenous populations, and in their blindness to the theoretical, ethical, and
political potential in Amerindian communities. The epistemic potential of double translation and double infec tion
(i.e., the "getting in/letting in") is indeed the strength of the Zapatista discourse and the grounding of their
theoretical revolu tion. Subcomandante Marcos "was born" in the process I am here calling the double translation. As
he articulated it: We [the urban intellectuals] went through a process of reeducation. As if they [the indigenous intellectuals
and indigenous communities] were undoing the tools we had; that is Marxism, Leninism, urban culture, poetry, literature
every thing that was part of ourselves. At the same time, they showed us things we did not know we had .... They undid us
and then remade us again. The EZLN was born the very moment in which it was ready to confront a new reality for which
some of its members had no answer and to which they [the urban intellectuals] subordinated themselves in order to
survive (Subcomandante Marcos, 1997: 149-51). Marcos describes old man Antonio as a translator between the urban and
the indigenous intellectuals and communities, and him self as a translator whose audience was the world at large, beyond
indigenous communities in Latin America or local power structures. Indeed, the Internet proved to be crucial in the
Zapatistas's theoreti cal "uprising." In contrast with the model of translation implanted by missionaries in the sixteenth
century and around the world in subsequent centuries, however, Marcos's translation gave indigenous voices a
place similar to that which a translator from Greek into, say, German would give to Aristotle. Indigenous intellectuals

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were no longer seen as a curiosity or an object of anthropology, but as critical thinkers in their own
right . One could venture to say that "we, the nothing not counted in the order, are the people, we are all against others
who stand only for their particular privileged interests," as Zizek would say to underline the emergence of the political
proper in ancient Greece (see below) (1998: 998). Such change in the directionality of translation contributed to
the opening up of Marxism to the colonial difference and, consequently, to understanding racism in relation
to labor in the global order of the modern colonial world. It contributed also to the underscoring of the limits of the
Western notion of democracy, showing the way for displacing the concept from its current abstract universal meaning, as
well as taking it as a connector for the diversity of universal projects ( diversality) that can be imagined in the name of
democracy. In the next section I explore these two points further.

Zapatismo fails to be one universal thought, but rather an epistemic mixture to uncover true
politics
Mignolo 02 Walter D. Mignolo (Mignolo received his BA in Philosophy from the Universidad Nacional de Crdoba, Argentina in
1969. In 1974 he obtained his Ph.D. from the cole des Hautes tudes, Paris. He subsequently taught at the Universities of Toulouse,
Indiana, and Michigan. Since January 1993, Walter D. Mignolo has been the William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and
Romance Studies at Duke University, USA, and has joint appointments in Cultural Anthropology and Romance Studies. Mignolo coedits the web dossier, Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise. He is the academic director of "Duke in the Andes", an interdisciplinary
program in Latin American and Andean Studies in Quito, Ecuador, at the Universidad Politcnica Salesiana. Since 2000, he has
directed the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities, a research unit within the John Hope Franklin Center for International and
Interdisciplinary Studies. He has also been named Permanent Researcher at Large at the Universidad Andina Simn Bolvar in Quito,
Ecuador. Recently, Mignolo has ventured into what he calls "decolonial aesthetics" writing on artists Pedro Lasch, Fred Wilson
(artist), and Tanja Ostoji. He contributed to Black Mirror/Espejo Negro, a book on the works of Pedro Lasch, edited by Lasch,
published by Duke University Press.) The Zapatistas 's Theoretical Revolution: Its Historical, Ethical, and Political Consequences
2002 //DDI13
MARXISM AND THE COLONIAL DIFFERENCE Regarding the first aspect, we may once more listen to
Subcomandante Marcos: Zapatismo is and is not Marxist-Leninist. Zapatismo is not fundamentalist or

millennarist indigenous thinking; and it is not indigenous resistance either. It is a mixture of all of that,
materialized in the EZLN. The regular group, the insurgents, that is Mayor Mario, Capitan Maribel, Major Ana Maria,
all of us who lived in the mountains during the late 80's and 90's are product of that cultural shock (Subcomandante
Marcos, 1997: 99). Because of all of this, Zapatism cannot attempt to become a universal doctrine, a doctrine

of homogenization, like the (neo) liberal and (neo) socialist goals and ideals. It is important that
Zapatism remains undefined (Subcomandante Marcos, 1997: 261). This is why, also, the true creators of Zapatism are
the translators such as Mayor Mario, Mayor Moises, Major Ana Maria, and all who bridged the distance between dialects
(Marcos is referring here to indigenous languages] for those such as Tacho, David, Zevedeo. They are indeed the Zapatist
theoreticians . . . they built, they are building a new way for looking at the world (Subcomandante Marcos, 1997: 338-39,
emphasis added). It is important at this point to insist that in my various references to Subcomandante Marcos, I have not
been constructing him-or have sought not to construct him-as a modern subject. The argument I have been advancing
should help us understand that the French journalist of Le Monde, Bertrand de la Grange, and Spanish journalist Maite
Rico insist, however, in interpreting Marcos under the frame of the biographical conception and moral code of the modern
individual (de la Grange & Rico, 1998). This "study" is a biography of Subcomandante Marcos following the traditional
Western pattern of biography. They missed the point that both in Maya and other indigenous cosmologies, contrary to the
European and North Atlantic, the community, not the individual, is the center and the final goaL While both indigenous
cosmology and the very practice of Subcomandante Marcos affirm a different conception of the person and society, de la
Grange and Rico insist in judging him according to the Eurocentric patterns of Western biography! De Ia Grange and Rico,
like sixteenth-century missionaries, are incapable of changing their conceptual frames and had no better option than to
frame Subcomandante Marcos as they are used to conceiving of the individual, a conception stemming from Rousseau, and
still obviously in use nowadays. To interpret Subcomandante Marcos in the familiar frame of biographical narrative, to see
him as an "impostura" (imposture) centered on the subject (even though it is condescendingly recognized as "genial"), is to
miss the point of the Zapatistas's theoretical revolution. Even worse, it is to frame Zapatism under the colonial epistemic
model that the Zapatista revolution seeks to overcome. Indeed, an interpretation of Marcos's role in terms of a philosophy
of the modern subject implicitly characterizes indigenous communities as silenced and unconscious victims, rather than as
initiators of a theoretical revolution in which Marcos operated as mediator/translator. It is surely not modesty nor even a
show of modesty when Marcos says that the theoreticians of the Zapatista movement as well as those building

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a new way of looking at the world are the indigenous intellectuals, not he himself. Such an interpretation
requires that we accept the changes in the directionality of translation and, further, that the ethical and
political consequences I have been stressing can only come from a theoretical subject no longer located in Western
cultures of scholarship. Neither is this theoretical revolution located in the indigenous intellectuals, which would celebrate
a kind of original indigenous knowledge; rather, it is located in the double process of translation in which Western (e.g.,
Marxist epistemology) is appropriated by Amerindian epistemology, but then transformed and returned. In this process,
formerly subaltern Am- . erindian knowledges enter the debate piggy-backing on Marxism and :Western epistemology.
DEMOCRACY BEYOND ENLIGHTENMENT LEGACIES As I have defined them, double translation and the

Zapatistas's theoretical revolution can be described as border thinking conceived as the epistemic
potential of subaltern knowledges (for an extended discussion of border gnosis or border epistemology, see Mignolo,
2000a; 2000c). The idea receives succinct and powerful clarification in the text of a speech delivered by Major Ana Maria
at the inauguration of the Intercontinental Encounter in the Lacandon Forest in August of 1996: For power, the one that
today is globally dressed with the name of neo-liberalism, we neither counted nor produced, did not buy or sell. We were
an idle number in the accounts of Big Capital. Here in the highlands of the Mexican Southeast, our dead ones are alive.
Our dead ones who live in the mountains know many things. Their death talked to us and we listened. The mountain talked
to us and we listened. The mountain talked to us, the macehualo, we then common and ordinary people, we the simple
people as we are called by the powerful. We were born war (sic) with the white year, and we began to trace the path that
took us to the heart of yours, the same that 254 Walter D. Mignol~ today took you to our heart. That's who we are. The
EZLN. The voice which arms itself so that it can make itself heard. The face which hides itself so it can be shown. The red
star that calls to humanity and the world, so that they will listen, so that they will see, so that they will nominate. The
tomorrow that is harvested in the yesterday. Behind our black face, behind our armed voice, behind our unspeakable name,
behind the we that you see, behind we are (at you) ( detras estamos ustedes) (Major Ana Maria, 1997). There is indeed a
strange disjunction between the first sentence, which could have been written by a French intellectual in Le Monde
Diplomatique, and the rest of the paragraph, with its invocation of a dialogue with death. In the Spanish text, moreover, ser
is confused with the other stative verb estar, a distinction lost in English, in which "to be" is the only possibility. And,
finally, a discourse that began with an epistemic (we know the world is such) and political claim (this is it shall be done
from our perspective) ends in a "poetical" note. Perhaps the most distinctive epistemic features of Ana Maria's discourse
are the displacement of the subject-object correlation and, consequently, the semantic effect that this displacement
produces. The displacement is obvious, since Ana Maria is thinking from the 1 structure of her own language, Tojolabal,
and not from Greek, Latin, or French. It is obvious also in the sense that Ana Maria is not implementing a discourse
"against" an individual thinker recognized by a proper name and located in the pantheon of the "great thinkers" of Western
civilization. Unlike any European vernacular/ colonial language, Tojolabal features an intersubjective correlation between
first and third persons, that is: a code devoid of direct and indirect object, instead structured in the correlation between
subjects (Lenkersdorf, 1996 ). This has important consequences. If, for instance, a given language lacks a subject/

object correlation as a basis for the elaboration of epistemic principles and the structuring of knowledge,
the speakers of such a language do not engage in acts of "representa tion," but engage instead in
"intersubjective enactements." Consequently, "nature" in the Tojolaballanguage and social consciousness is not an
"it." Further, acts of enunciation in Tojolabal not only in volve the co-presence of "I" and "you" but also the presence of
the "absent" third person, "she" or "they." A simple sentence in English or Spanish consisting of a subject, verb, and object
is expressed in e, le a d h bal by two subjects with two different verbs. For instance, the that in Spanish would be
expressed as "Les dije (a ustedes o a )" and in English as "I told you (or them)" would be expressed Tojolabal as something
like "(lo) dije, ustedes/ellos (lo) escucha, or in English "I said (it), you/they heard (it)." What is imporhere is that the
indirect object, in Spanish or English, is the subject with another verb of agency in Tojolabal, in this case tedes/you." As
articulated for the first time by the French linguist and philosEmile Benveniste, in modern Western languages the
pronomistructure has only two persons, "I" and "you" (Benveniste, 1966: 25-66). When thinking from the perspective of
the subject-object dominant in these languages, then, the rest of the pro- ( she, he, it, them, they) lie beyond in the
further horizon of non-person, since the object is the "it." Benveniste's theory, of , doesn't apply to Tojolabal. But, better
yet, Benveniste's theory not be formulated by anyone thinking from Tojolabal. And this is the missionaries who wrote
grammars of Amerindian Iannever understood, which now can be corrected thanks to the uu~JalJ.,>Lol;:,'S theoretical
reVOlUtiOn. That is not all. From T ojolabal it would have been impossible to come up with a universal principle such as
"the right of the people" (later on the "rights of man and of the citizen," and more recently human rights") by which those
whose "rights" are "defended" are in a third-person role, effectively a nonperson. Additionally, thinking from Tojolabal,
instead of German, French, English, or Spanish, would make it difficult or impossible to conceive of people as other" and
to develop an idea of justice and equality by defending "inclusion of the other" (Habermas, 1999: 129-54; 203-38), in this
language there is no object, only interacting subjects. or, of course, is there a concept similar to the European "nationtate"

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that is presupposed in legal and politic theories about "inclu. n" and citizenship. We can now return to the young

girl's dictum, "the Zapatistas have given us back our dignity," and make an effort to understand it from
an indigenous perspective. In particular, we can see it now as an ethical claim that impinges on the
Zapatistas 's reworking of the idea of "democracy." It may sound strange, like bringing back all of those
beliefs that have been discarded in the name of the "reason" of science and knowledge; from Bacon,
Descartes, and Kant to Aris totle, and forward to our time. Indeed, how can one conceive of democracy beyond the
foundation of the "political proper" (see below for a discussion of this concept) in Greece, then rehearsed and recast
by the philosophers of the European enlightenment? How can we imagine democracy from a Tojolabal perspective, a
perspectire that has been and continues to be enacted by the Zapatistas? Cer tainly, the Zapatistas have produced no
treatise on government or legal/ philosophical speculations about cosmopolitanism and univer sal peace, such as those
written in Germany, France, and England in response to the religious wars of the seventeenth century and the Peace
ofWestphalia. Nevertheless, there is a principle from Amerin dian wisdom among the Zapatistas that is both

engrained in the intersubjective structure of their language and in their correspond ing conception of
social relations (Lenkersdorf, 1996 ). In Spanish this principle reads: "Mandar obedeciendo" (in English: "To rule and
obey at the same time"). This political principal is also engrainedin the intersubjective logic of the Tojolaballanguage.
"Mandar obedeciendo" is the title of a declaration of FebruaJ1' 26, 1994, signed by the EZLN and addressed to all the
people of Mexico, as well as to journalists in Mexico and the world. The crucial two paragraphs read: When the EZLN
was only a shadow creeping between the fog and darkness of the mountain, when the words justice, free dom and
democracy were just words; merely a dream that elders of our communities, the real custodians of the words of our
ancestors, had given us at the moment they give way to night, when hatred and death were beginning to grow in our hearts,
when there was only despair. When the times turned back over their own selves, with no way out ... the authentic men
talked, the faceless, the ones who walk the night, those who are mountain, so they said: It is the reason a will of good men
and women to search and to find the best way to govern and self-govern, what is good for most is good for all. But not to
silence the voices of the few, rather for them to remain in their place, hoping that mind and heart will come together in the
will of the most and the inspi ' ration of the few, thus the nations composed of real men and women grow inward and grow
big, so that there could be no exterior force capable of breaking them or of deviating their steps toward different roads ....
In this way our strength was born in the mountain, where the ruler obeys, when she or he is unquestionable, and the one
who obeys command with the common heart of the genuine men and women. Another word came from far away for this
government to be named, and this word, called "democracy", this road of us who moved forward before words were able
to walk ... (EZLN, 1994: 176-77).

The Zapatistass framing is k2 ethics in the contextualization of plurality

Mignolo 02 Walter D. Mignolo (Mignolo received his BA in Philosophy from the Universidad Nacional de Crdoba, Argentina in
1969. In 1974 he obtained his Ph.D. from the cole des Hautes tudes, Paris. He subsequently taught at the Universities of Toulouse,
Indiana, and Michigan. Since January 1993, Walter D. Mignolo has been the William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and
Romance Studies at Duke University, USA, and has joint appointments in Cultural Anthropology and Romance Studies. Mignolo coedits the web dossier, Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise. He is the academic director of "Duke in the Andes", an interdisciplinary
program in Latin American and Andean Studies in Quito, Ecuador, at the Universidad Politcnica Salesiana. Since 2000, he has
directed the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities, a research unit within the John Hope Franklin Center for International and
Interdisciplinary Studies. He has also been named Permanent Researcher at Large at the Universidad Andina Simn Bolvar in Quito,
Ecuador. Recently, Mignolo has ventured into what he calls "decolonial aesthetics" writing on artists Pedro Lasch, Fred Wilson
(artist), and Tanja Ostoji. He contributed to Black Mirror/Espejo Negro, a book on the works of Pedro Lasch, edited by Lasch,
published by Duke University Press.) The Zapatistas 's Theoretical Revolution: Its Historical, Ethical, and Political Consequences
2002 //DDI13

In the Zapatistas's theoretical revolution, border thinking emerges from the double translation across the
colonial difference; indeed, their theoretical revolution can be explained and its political and ethical
consequences derived from the conceptualization of border thinking (Mignolo, 2000a: 49-90; 2000b ).
ETHICS OF LIBERATION AND DIVERSALITY: THE THEORETICAL CONSEQUENCES The noted liberation
theolof:,ri.an Franz Hinkelamrnert first recognized the Zapatista uprising as an emerging project with a distinct lof:,ri.C, a
lof:,ri.C that no longer reproduces the need for abstract universals (Hinkelammert, 1996: 238-40). We must be clear:

diversality is not the rejection of universal claims, but the rejection of universalitv understood as an
abstract universal grounded in a mono-logic. A universal principle grounded on the idea of the eli-versa! is not a
contradiction in terms, but rather a displacement of conceptual structures. According to Hinkelammert, the Zapatistas

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are claiming diversity as a universal project: a world composed of multiple worlds, the right to be
different because we are all equals, to obey and rule at the same time. In such a world composed of
multiple worlds we do not need abstract universal and empty signifiers but connectors to link the
Zapatistas's theoretical revolution and its ethical consequences with similar projects around the world
emerging from the colonial difference (either as "external" or "internal," i.e., national forms of colonialism). A
world interconnected by diversality instead of by universality, in which translation is always at least
bidirectional, is very different from a world encapsulated in one abstract universal, even if that abstract
universal, wherever it originated, is the best one anyone can imagine. The problem is that for "the best one anyone can
imagine," no matter its origin (the Islamic world, the Quechua people, etc.) to be finally universally consensual is difficult
to imagine. Connectors are nodes where interactions take place. Empty magnifiers are spaces in which what has been
excluded can be included. But those who are included would have to pay the price of being the included and being denied
the possibility of being those who include. Connectors eliminate the possibility of some actors play the role of includer and
some other actors the role of the included. Connectors are the places where negotiation takes place and Where the final
destination is not being included or being successful Is an includer. Inclusion as a final goal and the empty signifier as the
Form of inclusion, is the position being defended, in different ways, By Jurgen Habermas and Ernesto Laclau. Diversality
as a universal project and connectors as the place of negotiations are the positions defended in different ways, by
Hinkelammert, Dussel, and myself, and successfully theorized in the Zapatistas's discourses and enacted by their uprising.
Subcomandante Marcos describes Zapatism as a phenomenon That depends on the indigenous question. He also underlines
that His local problem tends to find values that are valid for Japanese, kurds, Australians, Catalans, Chicano/a, or
Mapuches (Subcomandante Marcos, 1997: 259-60). He is not talking here about exporting the content of the Zapatista
uprising and theoretical revolution (as global designs such as Christianity, civilizing mission, modernity, and development
intended to do), but instead connecting through the logic of double translation and the colonial difference. Diversality as

a universal project emerges, precisely, as a project of interconnec. tions from a subaltern perspective and
beyond the managerial power and monotopic inspiration of any abstract universals, from the right or
from the left. Though the idea of "diversality" aptly describes Hinkelammert\ position, I owe the term not to him but to
the Martinican thinker and writer Edouard Glissant. His thinking and consciousness i! based on Creole and Afro-Caribbean
linguistic and cultural heritage. in contradistinction to Spanish and German in Hinkelammert's case. or Tojolabal and
Spanish in the case of the Zapatistas's collective imagination. We find a commonality in the diversity of Hinkelam mert's,
Glissant's, and the Zapatistas's experience of the colonial difference. A commonality that transforms groups into political
col lectivities united by the exteriority of their epistemology and the colonial history that shaped the exteriority in
question: Afro-Amer ican diaspora, indigenous people and the critical and dissident po!i tion of a creole-mestizos (like
Quijano), and immigrants, like Dussel and Hinkelammert, in Latin America. It is also centrally important in the
articulation of an ethic of liberation by Enrique Dussel, for whom the Zapatistas as well as the Maya-Quiche activist,
Rigoberta Menchu, constitute important paradigms (Dussel, 1994; 1998). This theoretical scenario opens up new avenues
for the conce~ tion of democratic projects beyond human rights. Let's explore the Zapati~tas's theoretical revolution in
relation to what Hannah Arendt ( 1976) and Giorgio Agamben ( 1996) identified as the "figure of the refugee." The
refugee, Agamben states, is "perhaps the only thinkable figure for the people of our time and the only category in which
one may see today-at least until the process of dissolution of the Nation-State and its sovereignty has achieved full comple
tion-the forms and limits of a coming political community" (1996: 160). He goes on to suggest: It is even possible that, if

we want to be equal to the absolutely new tasks ahead, we will have to abandon, without reserve, the
fundamental concepts through which we have so far repre sented the subjects of the political (Man, the
Citizen and its rights, but also the sovereign, people, the worker, and so forth) (Agamben, 1996: 160). It seems obvious
that the crisis of the nation-state brings together the crisis of its major symbols; especially the complicity

between citizen, Man, and human rights. One of the consequences of the crisis is that the conditions of
citizenship and the concepts of "Man" and of "human rights" can no longer be taken for granted. The
very conncept of "rights of the people" in the sixteenth century was grounded in the Renaissance and humanistic
conceptualizations of man that were still valid in the eighteenth century, both of which brought to light the need for
international conviviality. The citizen and the foreigner became the figure of the nation-state under which Europe
organized itself. The figure of the refugee appears in Europe, indeed, after the first symptom of the breakdown of the
nation-state and of course one of its main figures, the citizen. The first appearance of the refugee as a mass phenomenon,
says Agamben, "took place at the end of WWI" (1996: 30). He further elaborates on the argument presented by Hannah
Arendt ( 1976) in her book Totalitarnism, particularly in the chapter titled "The Decline of the Nation State and the End of
the Rights of Man." These historical references allow Agamben to propose that: The refugee should be considered for what
it is, namely, nothing less than a limit-concept that at once brings a radical crisis to the principles of the Nation-State and

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clears the way for a renewal of categories that can no longer be delayed (1996: 162). Agamben's argument pushes my
point that the Zapatistas's theoretical revolution brought a different kind of figure into the picture. Like the figure of the
refugee that closes the cycle of the nation-state forged since the end of the eighteenth century in Westrn Europe, the
Zapatistas close the cycle of the colonial world, a world enforced since the sixteenth century by Christian and South' ern
Europe. To consider the refugee "as the only thinkable figure for : he people of our time and the only category in which one
may see today ... , the forms and limits of a coming political community" jl996: 159; emphasis added) is both short-sighted
and Eurocentric. the "return of human dignity" brings to the foreground another figure, the figure of the
Indigenous, Aboriginal, or First Nations (but also Afro-Americans from Brazil to the United States through Cuba
and Martinique, for instance) that has been placed on the margin of , humanity and beyond the possibilities of

producing knowledge, or having ethical principles and political drives. The indigenous figure, unlike that
of the refugee, had to be educated, managed, and either included or totally excluded from the human
community. This general perspective, initiated in the sixteenth century, reproduced itself in the colonial experiences after
the nineteenth century in Asia and Africa, and in the internal colonialism of nation builders in Latin America. This is the
historical context of the Zapatistas's the oretical revolution. Although the intellectuals of the Renaissance school of
Salamanca recognized the rights of peoples and discussed them with great seriousness, the people whose
rights were being discussed did not have the right to participate in the discussion. The Zapatistas, on the
other hand, rose in arms in order to reclaim the letter, in effect reversing the modern (sixteenth-century) ideal of the man of
arms and letters. To reclaim the letter was to reclaim the voice that had been taken away, which explains why a young ~rl
would say that dignity had been returned to Amerindians. Indeed, the Amerindian emerged in Western consciousness as a
figure that was questionable as Man, never having been, nor with the potenti~ to be a "citizen." As the Haitian revolution
of 1804 bore witness, the figures of the colonized, especially those of color, were not eligible for the "rights of Man and of
the citizen." I am not reaching these conclusions via Agamben, i.e., applyin! Agamben's figure of the refugee to the
Zapatistas; rather I am trying to reverse the process. Enrique Dussel, in 1994, and Maurice Najman, in "Ala conquete de la
societe Mexicaine," published inLe Monde Diplomatique, January 1, 1997, perceived the theoretid. ethical, and political
implications of the Zapatista uprising (Dussel. 1994 ). However, intellectual legitimization of their accounts still
depends on the implicit sanction of North Atlantic scholarship . For this reason I have brought the figure of the
refugee and the figure of the Amerindian together within the frame of diversity as a universal project (or diversality).
Epistemic, ethical, and political diversality imply that projects are anchored in local histories (like Europe
aftel the Second World War and the refugee or indigenous movementsH Latin America), with the consequence of also
implying the undesira bility of an abstract universal (be it Christian, Liberal, or Marxist that would unite the
diverse and bring it together within a uni-versa frame that is good for those who designed it. This scenario may ge us into
the "good" empty universal that opposes the "bad" neoliberi ones. If the "end ofhistory" has any meaning, it could be the
"endc history of abstract universals, Christian, liberals or Marxists." Mofl over, the Zapatistas's theoretical revolution
provides a means c from Hegelian (temporal) dialectics, i.e., the sense of lineal sion. A crucial element of the abstract
universal of modern inherently complicit with the coloniality of power-is conceptualization of "newness" in a temporal
rather than spatial In such a theoretical model, the "new" would be either Hegelian synthesis or the "next" step in an
already planned det, progression, modernization, or revolution. From the per nP/-Tl\,,,_. of coloniality, "epistemic breaks"
(to use Focault's term) are rather than temporal. Epistemic breaks are not, then, paradigchanges in the chronology of
Western knowledge but paradigchanges in the spatial dimension of coloniality, from the ective of subaltern and
marginalized knowledges. The theoretrevolution of the Zapatistas is a paradigmatic break in the spatial tion of modernity/
coloniality. Regarding Agamben, it is possible to infer that the political task of time consists in "selecting in the new
planetary humanity those tics that allow for its survival, removing the thin diathat separated bad mediatized advertising
from the perfect ty that communicates only itself' ( 1993: section xvi). But the to start from a different place might imply,
for instance, the 'tion that the selection would be made by social actors in local histories and that the theorization would
also be d in experiences similar to but different from the refugees. claims and actions would neither expect a universal
design nor to install a "new," singular one. Indeed, the only singularity be the connector, that is: diversality as a universal
project. In this context, I wish to return to a claim in Dussel's argument connects with a statement by Subcomandante
Marcos, in which underlines the ethical turn taken by the Zapatista uprising. While took advantage ofthe Zapatistas's
theoretical revoluto formulate the need of diversality as a universal project oflooking for new abstract universals, Dussel
took advantage it to postulate his distinction between "ethics of discourse" and of liberation." In a nutshell, an ethics of
discourse argues for "recognition of the difference" and the "inclusion of the other"; benevolent recognition and inclusion,
however, leave those to included with little say in how they are recognized or included. In it assumes an abstract universal
space in which to recognize and to include, the ethics of discourse is, in essence, the standard n of multiculturalism, and, as
such, is common, in spite of the 268 Walter D. Mignolo obvious differences, to such thinkers as Charles Taylor and Jiirgen

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Habermas. The idea of an "ethics ofliberation," on the other hand, thinks, as it were, from the thinking of the excluded, like
Rigoberta Menchu or the Zapatistas. Whereas an "ethics of discourse" allows only the tolerance of diversity within a
refashioning of existing and hegemonic abstract universals, an "ethics of liberation" proposes diversality as a universal
project. But this can only be pursued as long as the theoretical revolution, with its double translation, creates the conditions
for new ways of thinking "at the borders," i.e., over coming frameworks of thought structured by the coloniality of power
in the making of the modern/ colonial world. In this way, ethics, politics, and epistemology come together next to an
alreadv existing framework that will continue to exist and that has been the legacy of the modern/ colonial world. Just as
the figure of the Amerindian is complementary to that of the refugee (and vice versa), the Zapatistas's conception of
democ racy is complementary (and vice versa) to democracy as conceived and enacted within the hegemonic tradition of
the Greco-Enlighten ment legacy. They are, however, irreducible to each other sociohis torically as well as logically.
Sociohistorically, refugees are people expelled from their territories while Amerindians have been dispos sessed and
marginalized in their own territories. Both, however, are "victims" of global designs. The word democracy in its Greco-En
lightenment root is displaced when appropriated by antiglobal movements like that of the Zapatistas, and reconfigured to
imagine a just social order that is not the invocation of "freedom" defended v.~th an entire army. Sociohistorically, the
Zapatistas's use of democracy displaces the idea of "original property rights" that the word democ racy implies in the
Enlightenment tradition. In response to the consolidation of identity politics in the United States and to the impasse in
which both the Left and Right find themselves in the fight against globalization, Slavoj Zizek has made the case for a
univers~ concept of democracy rooted in the Greek-European legacy, in contrast to the particular implied in identity
politics. In Zizek's view the emergence of identity politics announces the end of what he calli "the political proper," as
constituted within the Greek legacy. In a highly polemical discussion, Zizek himself posits the necessity of "Eurocentrism
from the left" (Zizek, 1998; 1999: 171-244). He offers the following definition of the "political proper." APATISTAS'S
THEORETICAL REVOLUTION 269 It is a phenomenon that appeared for the first time in ancient Greece when the
members of the demos (those with no firmly determined place in the hierarchical social edifice) presented themselves as
the representatives, the stand-ins, for the whole of society, for the true universality ("we-the 'nothing,' not counted in the
order-are the people, we are all, against others who stand only for their particular privileged interest"). Political conflict
proper thus involves the tension between the structured social body, where each part has its place, and the part of no-part,
which unsettles this order on account of the empty principle of universality, of the principled equality of all men qua
speaking beings, what Etienne Balibar calls egaliberte (1998: 988). Zizek implicitly makes two claims here, although the
structure of he paragraph gives the impression that there is only one. On the ne hand, he offers a definition of the
"political proper"; on the other hand, he specifies its place of origin as ancient Greece. The ormer is a logical move, while
the latter is geopolitical. In other vords, Zizek introduces a geopolitics of knowledge disguised as the universality of the
political proper. This disguise becomes crucial in his argument when he calls for the "fundamental European legacy" on
the basis of the distinction of globalization and universalism ( 1998: 1006). With the term "globalization,'' Zizek refers to
the "emerging global market" (new world order), and by "universalism" he refers to the "properly political domain of
universalizing one's particular fate as representative of global injustice" ( 1998: 1 007). This is important because: This
difference between globalization and universalism becomes more and more palpable today, when capital, in the name of
penetrating new markets, quickly renounces requests for democracy in order not to lose access to new trade partners. This
shameful retreat is then, of course, legitimized as respect for cultural difference, as the right of the (ethnic/ religious/
cultural) Other to choose the way oflife that suits it best-as long as it does not disturb the free circulation of capital (1998:
1007). Few would disagree. Contrary to the Christian, the Civilizing, and . the Modernizing projects that formed the
successive (and today 270 Walter D. Migno/o coexistent), ideologies of capitalism, the Market project has ceased
converting, civilizing, or modernizing. In today's world, those who were targeted for improvement or salvation in earlier
phases of capitalism do not count as believers or citizens, but only as "consum. ers" (Garcia Canclini, 1995 ). Zizek
substantiates this with several examples, including one involving Singapore's "wise" (Zizek's quota tion marks) ruler Lee
Kuan Yew, who has been playing on the differences between East and West to justify capitalism in the Asian way (Kuan
Yew, 1994). Following Zizek's argument, it becomes clear that Singapore is a case of globalization without universalism,
global ization in which the political proper has been suspended. On the other hand, one can also say, even if in
disagreement with Kuan Yew's policies, that the only alternative to his system would have been to accept capitalism in the
Western way, i.e., to accept both an economic system and a (neo) liberal ideology. Kuan Yew is not operating at the level
of the Zapatistas, however, since his position, like that of the Mexican government, has been defined by the character and
requirements of the neocolonial state. I am not certain that the "political proper" was suspended in the Singapore of Kuan
Yew, despite the fact that both the U.S. perspec tive (Zakaria, 1994; cf. Kuan Yew, 1994), as well as that of Zizek, suspects
just that. Kuan Yew's political strategy was "conservative" in the sense that it conserved a certain sense of Singapore's past.
There also was no interest in constituting the population of Singapore as the equivalent of the demos, as defined in ancient
Greece, although even in ancient Greece, slaves and foreigners were not part of the demos. However, given Kuan Yew's
subaltern position in a world order managed by the G8, it could be said of him that "we the 'nothing' ... we are all, against

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others who stand only for their par ticular privileged interest" (Zizek, 1998: 988). Indeed, Zizek makes a similar move
when he insists "on the potential of democratic politicization as the true European legacy from ancient Greece Oilwards"
(1998: 1009). But there is a remarkable difference between Zizek and Kuan Yew: the former proposes a return to the past
to generate a transformative future, while the latter would preserve the past. Is it not possible to imagine a transformative
future stemming from the very past that Kuan Yew proposed to preserve? According to Zizek's argument this is not the
case, since the "political proper has been linked to Greece and appropriated as a "European Leg acy," forcing the rest of
the world to bend, whether toward the right ATISTAS'S THEORETICAL REVOLUTION 271 toward the left, to a
universal standard geopolitically defined as "true European legacy." The Zapatista dictum, "because we are all

equal we have the right difference," opens up other avenues for thinking about the ethical political
proper when imagining possible futures. That is, to difference" beyond the market and capitalist designs, or
to beyond the process of capitalist subsumption that allows and ourages subaltern differences while maintaining a
hegemonic of management. The difference the Zapatistas are claiming at the level of social management, not only at that
of civil society. move this "difference" to the level of management means also to uce the distinction between civil and
political society (Chatter, ee, 1999a; 1999b ). At the level of the civil society we encounter r"''"r'n and dialogic
negotiation, as Zizek himself will have it ( 1998: 1009). At the level of the political society (the self-organization of
collectives that have been left out of the civil society tituted by the legal community of citizens) we encounter strug gle
and demands for participation in managerial transformation, as the Zapatistas have it. Their goal is not to take power but to
participate in opening up the space for the political society, indeed in the 'sense of "the political" as defined by Zizek, if we
dispense with his implicit geopolitics: ancient Greece and the European legacy! It is precisely at the level of the political
society that the second Zapatista dictum: "to rule and obey at the same time" is the necessary corollary of
the first ("the right to be different because we are all equal"). Two issues remain to be clarified. One is the
conception of the political in the local history of imperial differences. The imperial difference is the connector of
"differences" between imperial coun- tries in which a conception of the political is linked, in fact, to ancient Greece, to
Rome, and Christianity, to the Italian city-states . of the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries (Venice, Florence, . Genoa),
and to the bourgeois republics of the early modern Netherlands and England. This "North Atlantic legacy" has paralleled
the . history of capitalism until the end of the twentieth century (i.e., before capitalism began to locate itself in Asia, rather
than merely using Asia as a source of natural resources and a place to colonize from afar). Zizek's argument can be
understood against this histori- . cal background.

The Zapatistas construct definitions of democracy through macro-narratives that fail to exclude
others
Mignolo 02 Walter D. Mignolo (Mignolo received his BA in Philosophy from the Universidad Nacional de Crdoba, Argentina in
1969. In 1974 he obtained his Ph.D. from the cole des Hautes tudes, Paris. He subsequently taught at the Universities of Toulouse,
Indiana, and Michigan. Since January 1993, Walter D. Mignolo has been the William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and
Romance Studies at Duke University, USA, and has joint appointments in Cultural Anthropology and Romance Studies. Mignolo coedits the web dossier, Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise. He is the academic director of "Duke in the Andes", an interdisciplinary
program in Latin American and Andean Studies in Quito, Ecuador, at the Universidad Politcnica Salesiana. Since 2000, he has
directed the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities, a research unit within the John Hope Franklin Center for International and
Interdisciplinary Studies. He has also been named Permanent Researcher at Large at the Universidad Andina Simn Bolvar in Quito,
Ecuador. Recently, Mignolo has ventured into what he calls "decolonial aesthetics" writing on artists Pedro Lasch, Fred Wilson
(artist), and Tanja Ostoji. He contributed to Black Mirror/Espejo Negro, a book on the works of Pedro Lasch, edited by Lasch,
published by Duke University Press.) The Zapatistas 's Theoretical Revolution: Its Historical, Ethical, and Political Consequences
2002 //DDI13

We are now in a position to explore the current concept of "democracy" further, as affected by the
Zapatista uprising and the ore tical revolution. The belief remains widespread that democracy is a Greek
invention, rehearsed during the Enlightenment, modified in its socialist version, and capable and deserving of diffusion all
over the planet. To question this macro-narrative of"democracy" (written from the perspective of Western civilization and
modernity) and to open new avenues to imagine democratic futures is precisely what the Zapatistas's theoretical revolution
has achieved. It has detached de mocracy from its "original" meaning, i.e., as a Western construct that
originated in ancient Greece. No longer does any community or civil ization own the rights over its

imposition or exportation; instead, it is shared by all those people around the world who care for equity
and social justice, and especially by those who have been or are victims of injustice and inequities.
Instead of ancient Greece, the Zapatistas have postulated another origin for democracy, i.e., the beginning of the

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modern/ colonial world and the making of the colonial difference, thereby making possible the construction of new

macro-narratives from the perspective of coloniality. As we have seen, mandar obedeciendo is a principle
grounded within the intersubjective structure of the Tojolabal language, a language in which neither "nature" nor the
"other" can be conceptualized as objects; or better yet, a language in which it is unthinkable that there could be "nature"
and "others" as well as nature as other. Even though Tojolabal intellectuals, as well as ancient Greek or eighteenth-century
philosophers all have or had a sense of social organization for the common good, I do not want to idealize either of them;
neither the Tojolabal notion of "to rule and obey at the same time," nor Greek-derived European concepts of "democracy"
and "socialism," notions that, significantly enough, became abstract universal correctives parallel to the global expansion
of capitalism. However, in my view, there are people-"non-liberal honest people," as Rawls (1999:1-54) would
like to say-all over the planet able to entertain a dialogue of equals with liberal notions of democracy and
Marxist notions of socialism. Among those people are the Zapatistas, both Amerindians like Major Ana Maria and
Comandante Tacho, or Latin Americans (Creoles, mestizos, or immigrants) like Subcomandante Marcos, who have been
making political and ethical claims grounded in new epistemological principles derived from the double translation of
Amerindian cosmology into Marxism and Marxist cosmology into Amerindian cosmology. We are now back to "double
translation," a term that is still difficult to understand, even for an enlightened French journalist like Yvon Le Bot, who has
shown himself to be totally supportive of the Zapatistas, yet completely blind to the colonial difference. Le Bot
interviewed the l.eaders of the Zapatista uprising (Major Moises, Comandante Tacho, Subcomandante Marcos), but did not
feel comfortable with the concept of "democracy" introduced in the letter signed by the EZLN, and discussed above. In his
introduction to the series of interviews, Le Bot offers a definition of "democracy" by Subcomandante Marcos published in
La jornada (December 31, 262 Walter D. Migno/o 199~). For Le Bot this is a "better definition of democracy, Jess poetic,
perhaps more simplistic but more satisfactory (sic!)" (Le Bot 1997: 83). He writes: ' Democracy is the situation in
which thoughts reach an agreement. Not necessarily that everybody thinks in the same way, but that all thoughts or
the majority of thoughts look for and reach an agreement which will be good for the majority, without
marginalizing or eliminating the minority; t hat the word of the ruler obey the word of the majority of the people;
that the baton of command be supported by a collective voice rather than by one only will (1987: 83). Without the
previous discourse by the EZLN or of Major Ana Maria, this "satisfactory" definition of democracy by Subcomandante
Marcos either makes little sense or lends itself to be interpreted as common, and therefore meaningless. However, what
matters about this definition is not that it is more "clear" and "satisfactory" for the logic of Spanish and French readers and
their corresponding con cepts of democracy, but that Subcomandante Marcos's definition follows Tojolaballogic even
while it is expressed in Spanish syntax and semantics. Elsewhere I elaborate the notions of "border thinking" and "border
gnosis" to characterize the epistemology that emerges from the subaltern appropriation of mainstream Western
epistemology.

Alt Now Key

A new world is inevitable and existence is at stakemust seize the opportunitythe role of this ballot is
key
Lewis R. Gordon, The Laura Carnell University Professor of Philosophy, Temple University, 4
[Fanon and Development: A Philosophical Look Africa Development, Vol. XXIX, No. 1, 2004, pp. 71-93] //DDI13

Each epoch is a living reality. This is so because they are functions of living human communities, which, too, are
functions of the social world. As living realities, they come into being and will go out of being. What this means
is that societies go through processes of birth and decay . An erroneous feature of most civilizations that achieve
imperial status is the silly belief that such an achievement would assure their immortality. But we know that no living
community lasts forever, save, perhaps, through historical memory of other communities. Decay comes.
The task faced by each subordinated community, however, is how prepared it is for the moment in which
conditions for its liberation are ripe . When the people are ready, the crucial question will be of how many ideas are
available for the reorganization of social life. The ideas, many of which will unfold through years of engaged political
work, need not be perfect, for in the end, it will be the hard, creative work of the communities that take
them on. That work is the concrete manifestation of political imagination.

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Fanon described this goal as setting afoot a new humanity . He knew how terrifying such an effort is, for
we do live in times where such a radical break appears as no less than the end of the world . In the
meantime, the task of building infrastructures for something new must be planned, and where there is
some room, attempted, as we all no doubt already know, because given the sociogenic dimension of the problem, we
have no other option but to build the options on which the future of our species rest.

Alt Uniqueness
Movements exist now we must align ourselves with a decolonial form of thought
Walter Mignolo, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature at Duke University, 11 [The Darker Side of Western Modernity:
Global Futures, Decolonial Options, p. 306] //DDI13
However, a turning point--a conceptual Pachakuti--took place with the affirmation of indigenous political society and
its reshaping of Western political theory and political economy. There are various examples of this in the past
thirty years that have been expressed by different indigenous organizations , including the Indigenous Leaders
Summit of the Americas, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (coN A 1E), Amawtay Wasi University,
also in Ecuador, etc.; however, the impact has been achieved primarily through various declarations,
discourses, open letters, and interviews with Evo Morales. More recently, the impact of indigenous concepts
of "to live in fullness, to live in plenitude" (surnak kawsay, suma karnana) has the virtue of re-directing a

previously Marxist/socialist/theology of liberation, and critiquing development and turning it into a

radical decolonial option. The revolution is not announced for next week . However, it is an undeniable
and unstoppable decolonial epistemic, political, economic, and ethical march to the future . And
remember, it is not an abstract universal destiny to overcome all existing ones. It is one option, the
decolonial option, with many avenues.

The time is now! Conditions for border thinking emerging because globalization and neoliberalisms
failureborder thinking key to post-civilizational worldthis is comparatively better than Marxism and
liberalism
Mignolo 2000 [Walter, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke
University Local Histories/Global Designs, 309-310]
In summary, it is my contention that globalization is creating the conditions for the spatialization of the civilizational
processes and, by so doing, denying the denial of coevalness as one of the main epistemological strategies of
colonial/imperial expansion. This process is creating the conditions for "bar barian theorizing": theorizing from/of the
Third World (the expression used metaphorically here) for the (First/Third) entire planet. This chapter idcnti fies some of
the instances (social movements and language rights, emergence of new sites of thinking in between disciplines and in
between languages, e.g., the self-restitution of barbarism as a theoretical locus, and a progressive force offering valuable
correctives to the abuses of post-Enlightenment rea son, science, and disciplinarity), in which the denial of the denial of co
evalness materializes itself by redressing and implementing long-lasting forces, sensibilities, and rationalities repressed by
the one-sided ideology ol the "civilizing mission/process," and its complicity in the subalternization of knowledges and
cultural production throughout the planet. Remapping new world order implies remapping cultures of scholarship and the
schol arly loci of enunciation from where the world has been mapped. The crisis of "area studies" is the crisis of old
borders, be they nation borders or civili zation borders. It is also the crisis of the distinction between hegemonic
(discipline-based knowledges) and subaltern (area-based knowledges), as if discipline-based knowledges are
geographically disincorporated. Border thinking allows us to remap cultures of scholarship in terms of "area-based
disciplinary knowledge," bringing together and erasing the borders between knowing about and knowing from. Border
gnosis will help in imagining a world without rigid frontiers (national or civilizational) or a world in which civilizations
will have to defend their unity and their purity; that knowledge, in the last analysis, did not begin with the Greeks but
simply with life. In the last analysis, border thinking is located at the intersection of local histories enacting global designs

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and local histories dealing with them. That is why border thinking can only be so from a subaltern perspective, since the
enactment of global designs is driven by the desire for homogeneity and the implicit need of hegemony. Marxism
provided an alternative to the hegemonic force and ideology of liberalism. But it was also a global design oppositional
and alternative, but global design nonetheless. Border thinking points toward a different kind of hegemony, a multiple
one, as in a New medievalism (Tanaka 1997) in which a world of multiple centers would be dominated by none. In other
words, diversity as a universal project allows us to imagine alternatives to universalism. The "West and the rest" in
Huntington's phrase provides the model to overcome, as the "rest" becomes the sites where border thinking emerges in its
diversity, where "mundializacion" creates new local histories remaking and readapting Western global designs (Christian,
liberal, and neoliberal development, modernization and market, Marxist-Socialists ascendance of the working class) and
transforming local (European) histories from where such designs emerged. Globalization/ "mundializacion" is reenacting
old local histories and projecting them toward a future in which border thinking will be prominent in creating what
Glissant ( 1 9 9 8 ) calls "La diversalite de la mondialization" interacting with the "homogeneity of globalization." The fall
of communism and the crisis of Marxism may be a way of understanding the "end of history" not in the sense that Francis
Fukuyama ( 1 9 9 2) understands it but as the "end" of the modern/colonial world system as reconverted in the nineteenth
century. The fall of communism does not imply the victory of (neo)liberalism but the symptom of the crisis of the
philosophical and epistemological principles that subtended both, liberali sm and Marxism, as two sides of the same coin.
In this sense, the crisis is the crisis of the modern/colonial modern world system and not of one of its aspects. Leonard
Woolf could say in 1 9 2 8 that between 1 8 0 0 and 1 9 0 0 "Europe passed through a revolution that was both internal and
external" and that "this tremendous change in the internal constitution of Europe and in the fabric of its civilization was
accompanied . . . by an equally important change in relation of Europe to the rest of the world" (Woolf 1928, 7 - 8 ). Samir
Amin, at the end of the twentieth century, would say instead that "Never more than today has humanity shared the feeling
that the Earth is one and indivisible and that all peoples of the planet belong to a sole system, notwithstanding the
extremely divergent positions they occupy within it: an integrated natural system, as illustrated by ecological
interdependence; an integrated economic system to the extent that the Eastern bloc countries have abandoned their
tradition of relative autarky; even an integrated cultural system following the extraordinary intensification of
communications which has resulted in the most advanced forms of Western technology being transferred lo the most
remote village of the planet" (Amin 1996, 10; 1995a; 1995b; Gonzalez Casanova 1996, 10). "Interdependence" may be
the word that summarizes the break away from the idea of totality and brings about the idea of networks whose
articulation will require epistemological principles I called in this book "border thinking" and "border gnosis," as a
rearticulation of the colonial difference: "diversality as a universal project," which means that people and communities
have the right to be different precisely because "we" are all equals.

Alt Solves War

Decoloniality counters euro-modernity, dehumanization, and colonization through loverole of the
ballot is keywe must become epistemological and social revolutionaries
Nelson Maldonado-Torres, associate professor of comparative literature at Rutgers, 8 [Against War: Views from the
Underside of Modernity, p. 221-2] //DDI13

Fanon offered the first phenomenology of the Manichean colonial world, understood properly as
Manichean and not as ontological reality." In this analysis, he investigated not only the relations between
whites and blacks, but also those between black males and black females . Much can be added to his discussion,
but to do so is not my purpose here. What I wish to do is firstly to provide a way to understand the Fanonian
breakthrough in light of the articulation of sub-ontological difference and the idea of the naturalization of
the non-ethics of war. This is important because, among other things, we can now see that when Fanon called for
a war against colonialism, what he was doing was politicizing social relations that were already premised
upon war. Fanon was not only fighting against anti-black racism in Martinique, or against French
colonialism in Algeria. He was simultaneously countering the force and legitimacy of a historical system
( European modernity ) that utilized racism and colonialism to naturalize the non-ethics of war . He was

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engaging in a war against war, oriented by " love ," which is understood here as the desire to restore
ethics to its place and to locate properly transontological and ontological differences ." The de-colonial
attitude is thus a simultaneously ethical, theoretical, and political form of consciousness . It stands behind
efforts to restore the ethical through theoretical and political means , leading Fanon to pursue opposition to
racism and colonization as a citizen, a doctor, and, finally, a revolutionary. From here the philosopher appears in
Fanon's work not so much as a "functionary of mankind" in the service of a Eurocentrically defined
conception of reason and communication (Husserl), but as someone who fights with the condemned
against the forces of dehumanization and colonization in the modern world- in short, an epistemological
and social revolutionary . This conception of intellectual activity is also different from the analyst in psychoanalysis,
with which Fanon was also acquainted but which he ultimately left aside as well."

Alt A2: Doesnt Function

Our proposal seeks out options not an alternative roadmap
Walter Mignolo, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature at Duke University, 11 [The Darker Side of Western Modernity:
Global Futures, Decolonial Options, p. xxvii-xxviii] //DDI13

Decoloniality means decolonial options confronting and delinking from coloniality , or the colonial matrix
of power. While the decolonial option is not proposed as the option, it is an option claiming its legitimacy
among existing ones in the sphere of the political, in the same way that Christianity, Marxism, or liberalism house
many options under the same umbrella (I will come back to this point in more detail in chapter 1). And it is an option
claiming its legitimacy among existing academic projects, such as postcoloniality, ethnic studies, gender studies, the social
sciences and the humanities, and the professional schools; but also it is an option among options offered by macronarratives such as Christianity, liberalism, and Marxism. '!he decolonial option also doesn't mean "decolonialmission(s)."

Missions implied projects of conversion of achieving and end programmed in the blueprint. Options are
the antithesis of missions. We--decolonial intellectuals--are not missionaries going to the field to convert
and promote our form of salvation. What we-and by "we" I refer here to all those who share decolonial
projects-put on the table is an option to be embraced by all those who find in the option(s) a response to
his or her concern and who will actively engage, politically and epistcmically, to advance proj- ects of
epistemic and subjective decolonization and in building communal futures .
That is why my argument is built on "options" and not on "alternatives." If you look for alternatives you
accept a point of reference instead of a set of existing options among which the decolonial enters claiming
its legitimacy to sit at the table when global futures are being discussed. For that reason, the first
dccolonial step is delinking from coloniality and not looking for alternative modernities but for
alternatives to modernity . Not only arc postcoloniality and decoloniality two different options within the same set
(like it happens within Christianity, Marxism, lslamism, Buddhism, and the like, where the names encompass unity in
diversity), having modern/ colonial histories and experiences in common, but both are options offered in diverse universes
of discourse and sensing. Postcoloniality, f()r example, emerged as an option to poststructuralism and postmodernity, but
decolo- niality emerged as an option to the rhetoric of modernity and to the com- bined rhetoric of "development and
modernization" (from 1950 to 1970), re-converted to "globalism" during the Reagan years. Decoloniality came to light also
as an option to the discourse of decolonization during the Cold War and as a critical option in relation to Marxist-dialectical
materialism.

***Framework***

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FW Rhetorical Theory
Critical rhetorical theory must practice epistemic disobedience

Wanzer (Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa in Iowa City) 2012
(Darrel, Delinking Rhetoric, or Revisiting Mcgees Fragmentation Thesis Through Decoloniality Page 654, DKE) //DDI13
In this essay, I seek to delink McGees fragmentation thesis from modern/ coloniality by rethinking the

problematic of text/context circulation from a global perspective attentive to coloniality. I argue that
critical rhetorical theory must better address epistemic coloniality (not merely colonialism as an economicpolitical system) to (1) deal more productively with situated public discourses as they circulate in the world
and (2) enact more robustly its antisystemic functions/aims.Mydesire is not to debunk McGee, but to
radicalize himto enable his well-intentioned impulse to hear and be heard by different audiences.
Following Chela Sandoval, my aim is to contribute to a decolonizing theory and method in approaching
the problems and possibilities of fragmentation Otherwise.8 Framed in this way, the question becomes
how better to situate us as rhetoricians to engage in our critical rhetorical praxis in the face of
fragmentation. I contend that the answer has to go beyond McGee to draw from those for whom survival
itself has depended on productively and creatively negotiating fragmentation. In what follows, I briefly review
McGees argument and examine its similarities to and differences from Jamesons argument about fragmentation. I also
expand on some of the problems with McGees and rhetorical studies position vis-a`-vis fragmentation, particularly with
regard to questions of modern/coloniality. Finally, I turn to a corrective that may start critical rhetorical studies

on a path toward delinking from modern/coloniality. In essence, I call for rhetorical studies to practice
some degree of what Mignolo calls epistemic disobedience 9 so that we might all become decolonial
rhetoricians.

FW Epistemology First
Epistemology must be the focus of debate questioning Western knowledge production if the only way to
end its privileging that creates hierarchies between nations and races

Mignolo (Professor of Literature in Duke University, Joint Appointments in Cultural Anthropology and Romance Studies) 2009
Walter, Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom, Theory, Culture, & Society, 161-163, NDW
//DDI13

ONCE UPON a time scholars assumed that the knowing subject in the disciplines is transparent,
disincorporated from the known and untouched by the geo-political configuration of the world in which
people are racially ranked and regions are racially configured. From a detached and neutral point of observation (that
Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gmez (2007) describes as the hubris of the zero point), the knowing subject maps the world
and its problems, classifies people and projects into what is good for them. Today that assumption is no
longer tenable, although there are still many believers. At stake is indeed the question of racism and epistemology
(Chukwudi Eze, 1997; Mignolo, forthcoming). And once upon a time scholars assumed that if you come from Latin America you have to talk about
Latin America; that in such a case you have to be a token of your culture. Such expectation will not arise if the author comes from Germany, France,
England or the US. In such cases it is not assumed that you have to be talking about your culture but can function as a theoretically minded person. As we
know: the first world has knowledge, the third world has culture; Native Americans have wisdom, Anglo Americans have science. The need for

political and epistemic delinking here comes to the fore, as well as decolonializing and decolonial
knowledges, necessary steps for imagining and building democratic, just, and non-imperial/colonial
societies. Geo-politics of knowledge goes hand in hand with geo-politics of knowing . Who and when, why
and where is knowledge generated (rather than produced, like cars or cell phones)? Asking these questions means to shift
the attention from the enunciated to the enunciation. And by so doing, turning Descartess dictum inside out: rather than assuming
that thinking comes before being, one assumes instead that it is a racially marked body in a geo-historical marked space that
feels the urge or get the call to speak, to articulate, in whatever semiotic system, the urge that makes of living organisms human beings. By
setting the scenario in terms of geo- and body-politics I am starting and departing from already familiar notions of situated knowledges. Sure, all
knowledges are situated and every knowledge is constructed. But that is just the beginning. The question is: who, when, why is constructing

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knowledges (Mignolo, 1999, 2005 [1995])? Why did eurocentered epistemology conceal its own geo-historical and
bio-graphical locations and succeed in creating the idea of universal knowledge as if the knowing subjects
were also universal? This illusion is pervasive today in the social sciences, the humanities, the natural sciences and the professional schools.
Epistemic disobedience means to delink from the illusion of the zero point epistemology . The shift I am indicating
is the anchor (constructed of course, located of course, not just anchored by nature or by God) of the argument that follows. It is the beginning of any
epistemic decolonial de-linking with all its historical, political and ethical consequences. Why? Because geo-historical and bio-graphic loci

of enunciation have been located by and through the making and transformation of the colonial matrix of
power: a racial system of social classification that invented Occidentalism (e.g. Indias Occidentales), that created
the conditions for Orientalism; distinguished the South of Europe from its center (Hegel) and, on that long history,
remapped the world as first, second and third during the Cold War. Places of nonthought (of myth, nonwestern religions, folklore, underdevelopment involving regions and people) today have been waking up from the long
process of westernization. The anthropos inhabiting non-European places discovered that s/he had been invented, as anthropos, by a locus of
enunciations self-defined as humanitas. Now, there are currently two kinds or directions advanced by the former anthropos who are no longer claiming
recognition by or inclusion in the humanitas, but engaging in epistemic disobedience and de-linking from the magic of the Western idea of modernity,
ideals of humanity and promises of economic growth and financial prosperity (Wall Street dixit). One direction unfolds within the globalization of a type
of economy that in both liberal and Marxist vocabulary is defined as capitalism. One of the strongest advocates of this is the Singaporean scholar,
intellectual and politician Kishore Mahbubani, to which I will return later. One of his earlier book titles carries the unmistakable and irreverent message:
Can Asians Think?: Understanding the Divide between East and West (2001). Following Mahbubanis own terminology, this direction could be identified
as de-westernization. Dewesternization means, within a capitalist economy, that the rules of the game and the shots are no longer called by Western
players and institutions. The seventh Doha round is a signal example of de-westernizing options. The second direction is being advanced by what I
describe as the decolonial option. The decolonial option is the singular connector of a diversity of decolonials . The

decolonial paths have one thing in common: the colonial wound, the fact that regions and people around
the world have been classified as underdeveloped economically and mentally . Racism not only affects people but also
regions or, better yet, the conjunction of natural resources needed by humanitas in places inhabited by anthropos. De - colonial options have
one aspect in common with de-westernizing arguments: the definitive rejection of being told from the epistemic privileges
of the zero point what we are, what our ranking is in relation to the ideal of humanitas and what we
have to do to be recognized as such. However, decolonial and de-westernizing options diverge in one crucial and in - disputable point:
while the latter do not question the civilization of death hidden under the rhetoric of modernization and prosperity, of the improvement of modern
institutions (e.g. liberal democracy and an economy propelled by the principle of growth and prosperity), decolonial options start from the principle that
the regeneration of life shall prevail over primacy of the production and reproduction of goods at the cost of life (life in general and of humanitas and
anthropos alike!). I illustrate this direction, below, commenting on Partha Chatterjees re-orienting eurocentered modernity toward the future in which
our modernity (in India, in Central Asia and the Caucasus, in South America, briefly, in all regions of the world upon which eurocentered modernity was
either imposed or adopted by local actors assimilating to local histories inventing and enacting global designs) becomes the statement of interconnected
dispersal in which decolonial futures are being played out. Last but not least, my argument doesnt claim originality (originality is one of the basic
expectations of modern control of subjectivity) but aims to make a contribution to growing processes of decoloniality around the world. My humble claim
is that geo- and body-politics of knowledge has been hidden from the self-serving interests of Western

epistemology and that a task of decolonial thinking is the unveiling of epistemic silences of Western
epistemology and affirming the epistemic rights of the racially devalued, and decolonial options to allow
the silences to build arguments to confront those who take originality as the ultimate criterion for the
final judgment.

We must change the terms of discussion to cause concrete change - focusing on the enunciated conceals
inherent injustice while focus on the enunciation has the ability to break down racism and patriarchy by
changing what it means to be human

Mignolo (Professor of Literature in Duke University, Joint Appointments in Cultural Anthropology and Romance Studies) 2009
Walter, Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom, Theory, Culture, & Society, 163-166, NDW
//DDI13
The introduction of geo-historical and bio-graphical configurations in processes of knowing and understanding allows for a
radical re-framing (e.g. decolonization) of the original formal apparatus of enunciation.2 I have supported in the past those
who maintain that it is not enough to change the content of the conversation, that it is of the essence to change
the terms of the conversation. Changing the terms of the conversation implies going beyond disciplinary or
interdisciplinary controversies and the conflict of interpretations. As far as controversies and interpretations
remain within the same rules of the game (terms of the conversation), the control of knowledge is not called
into question. And in order to call into question the modern/colonial foundation of the control of

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knowledge, it is necessary to focus on the knower rather than on the known . It means to go to the very
assumptions that sustain locus enunciations. In what follows I revisit the formal apparatus of enunciation from the
perspective of geo- and bio-graphic politics of knowledge. My revisiting is epistemic rather than linguistic,
although focusing on the enunciation is unavoidable if we aim at changing the terms and not only the content of the
conversation. The basic assumption is that the knower is always implicated, geo- and body-politically, in the known,
although modern epistemology (e.g. the hubris of the zero point) managed to conceal both and created the

figure of the detached observer, a neutral seeker of truth and objectivity who at the same time controls the
disciplinary rules and puts himself or herself in a privileged position to evaluate and dictate. The argument
is structured as follows. Sections I and II lay out the ground for the politics of knowledge geo-historically and biographically, contesting the hegemony of zero point epistemology. In Section III, I explore three cases in which geo- and
body-politics of knowledge comes forcefully to the fore: one from Africa, one from India and the third from New Zealand.
These three cases are complemented by a fourth from Latin America: my argument is here. It is not the report of a

detached observer but the intervention of a decolonial project that comes from South America, the
Caribbean and Latinidad in the US. Understanding the argument implies that the reader will shift his or
her geography of reasoning and of evaluating arguments. In Section IV, I come back to geo- and body-politics of
knowledge and their epistemic, ethical and political consequences. In Section V, I attempt to pull the strings together and
weave my argument with the three cases explored, hoping that what I say will not be taken as the report of a detached
observer but as the intervention of a decolonial thinker. In semiotics, a basic distinction has been made (Emile
Benveniste) between the enunciation and the enunciated. The distinction was necessary, for Benveniste, to ground
the floating sign central to Ferdinand de Saussures semiology and its development in French structuralism. Benveniste
turned to the enunciation and, by doing so, to the subject producing and manipulating signs, rather than the structure of the
sign itself (the enunciated). With this distinction in mind, I would venture to say that the interrelated spheres of the

colonial matrix of power (economy, authority, gender and sexuality, and knowledge/subjectivity) operate
at the level of the enunciated while patriarchy and racism are grounded in the enunciation . Lets explore it
in more detail (Benveniste, 1970; Todorov, 1970). Benveniste laid out the formal apparatus of enunciation that he
described on the bases of the pronominal system of any language (although his examples were mainly European
languages), plus the temporal and spatial deitics or markers. The pronominal system is activated in each verbal (that is, oral
or written) enunciation. The enunciator is of necessity located in the first person pronoun (I). If the enunciator says we,
the first person pronoun is presupposed in such a way that we could refer to either the enunciator and the person or
persons being addressed, or by we the enunciator could mean he or she and someone else, not including the addressee.
The remaining pronouns are activated around the I/we of the enunciation. The same happens with temporal and spatial
markers. The enunciator can only enunciate in the present. The past and the future are meaningful only in relation to the
present of the enunciation. And the enunciator can only enunciate here, that is, wherever she is located at the moment of
enunciation. Thus, there, behind, next to, left and right etc., are meaningful only in reference to the enunciators
here. Now lets take a second step. The extension of linguistic theory and analysis from the sentence to discourse
prompted the introduction of discursive frame or conversation frame. Indeed, engaging in conversation, letter writing,
meetings of various kinds, etc., requires more than the formal apparatus of enunciation: it requires a frame, that is, a context
familiar to all participants, be it in business meetings, casual conversations, internet messages, etc. While in everyday life
frames are not regulated but rather operate through consensual agreements, disciplinary knowledge requires more complex
and regulated frames known today as scholarly disciplines. In the European Renaissance, the disciplines were classified
into the trivium and the cuadrivium, while Christian theology was the ceiling under which both the trivium and the
cuadrivium were housed. Beyond that ceiling was the world of pagans, gentiles and Saracens. In 18th-century Europe, the
movement toward secularization brought with it a radical transformation of the frame of mind and the organization of
knowledge, the disciplines and the institutions (e.g. the university). The Kantian-Humboldtian model3 displaced the goals
and the format of the Renaissance university and instead promoted the secularization of the university founded on secular
science (from Galileo to Newton) and on secular philosophy, and both declared war against Christian theology (Kant, 1991
[1798]). During the first quarter of the 19th century, the reorganization of knowledge and the formation of new disciplines
(biology, economy, psychology) left behind the trivium and the cuadrivium and marched toward the new organization
between human sciences (social sciences and the humanities) and natural sciences.4 Wilhelm Dilthey (1991) came up with
his ground-breaking epistemic distinction between ideographic and nomothetic sciences, the first concerned with meaning
and interpretations, the second with laws and explanations.5 These are still distinctions that hold true today, even if there
have been, at the surface, disciplines that have crossed lines in one or other direction and pushed toward interdisciplinarity
that more often than not is based on these distinctions, although not addressing them. So then we have moved from the
formal apparatus of enunciation to frames of conversations, to disciplines and to something that is above the discipline, a

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super-frame that I would name cosmology. The history of knowledge-making in modern Western history from
the Renaissance on will have, then, theology and philosophy-science as the two cosmological frames ,
competing with each other at one level, but collaborating with each other when the matter is to disqualify forms

of knowledge beyond these two frames. Both frames are institutionally and linguistically anchored in
Western Europe. They are anchored in institutions, chiefly the history of European universities and in the
six modern (e.g. vernacular) European and imperial languages: Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, dominant from the
Renaissance to the Enlightenment, and German, French and English, dominant from the Enlightenment onward. Behind the
six modern European languages of knowledge lay its foundation: Greek and Latin not Arabic or Mandarin, Hindi or Urdu,
Aymara or Nahuatl. The six mentioned languages based on Greek and Latin provided the tool to create a
given conception of knowledge that was then extended to the increasing, through time, European colonies from
the Americas to Asia and Africa. In the Americas, notably, we encounter something that is alien to Asian and African
regions: the colonial European university, such as the University of Santo Domingo (1538), the University of Mexico
(1551), the University of San Marcos, Lima (1551) and Harvard University (1636). The linguistic, institutional foundation,
management and practices that knowledge-making brings allow me to extend Benvenistes formal apparatus of enunciation
and to elaborate on enunciation and knowledge-making focusing on the borders between the Western (in the precise
linguistic and institutional sense I defined above) foundation of knowledge and understanding (epistemology and
hermeneutics) and its confrontation with knowledge- making in non-European languages and institutions in China,6 in the
Islamic Caliphate, or education in the institutions of the Maya, Aztecs and Incas that the Encyclopaedia Britannica has
deigned to describe as education in primitive and early civilizations.7 Perhaps Frantz Fanon conceptualized better than
anyone else what I have in mind for extending Benvenistes formal apparatus of enunciation. In Black Skin, White Masks
(1967 [1952]) Fanon made an epistemic foundational statement about language that no one in the heated atmosphere of
structuralism and post-structuralism picked up in the 1960s. And it was still ignored by the most semantic and philological
orientation of Emile Benvenistes approaches to language. This is what Fanon (pp. 1718) said: To speak means to be in
a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to
assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization . . . The problem that we confront in this chapter is this:
The Negro of the Antilles will be proportionally whiter that is, he will come closer to being a real human being in direct
ratio to his mastery of the French language.8 Fanons dictum applies to the disciplines but also to the sphere of
knowledge in general: the Negro of the Antilles, the Indian from India and from the Americas or New
Zealand and Australia, the Negro from sub-Saharan Africa, the Muslim from the Middle East or
Indonesia, etc., will come closer to being a real human being in direct ratio to his or her mastery of
disciplinary norms. Obviously, Fanons point is not to be recognized or accepted in the club of real

human beings defined on the basis of white knowledge and white history, but to take away the
imperial/colonial idea of what it means to be human. This is a case, precisely, in which the assault to the
imperiality of modern/colonial loci of enunciations (disciplines and institutions) is called into question. A case
in point was the question asked by many philosophers in Africa and South America during the Cold War,
and is being asked today by Latino and Latina philosophers in the United States.

We must evaluate the epistemology preference of this debate from the space of coloniality, from the
colonial difference as this is the space where occidental power is put into question
Mignolo 2000 [Walter, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke
University Local Histories/Global Designs, ix-xi]
The colonial difference is the space where coloniality of power is enacted. It is also the space where the restitution of
subaltern knowledge is taking place and where border thinking is emerging. The colonial difference is the space where
local histories inventing and implementing global designs meet local histories, the space in which global designs have to
be adapted, adopted, rejected, integrated, or ignored. The colonial difference is, finally, the physical as well as imaginary
location where the coloniality of power is at work in the confrontation of two kinds of local histories displayed in different
spaces and times across the planet. If Western cosmology is the historically unavoidable reference point, the multiple
confrontations of two kinds of local histories defy dichotomies. Christian and Native American cosmologies, Christian
and Amerindian cosmologies, Christian and Islamic cosmologies, and Christian and Confucian cosmologies among others
only enact dichotomies when you look at them one at a time, not when you compare them in the geohistorical confines of

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the modern/colonial world system. The colonial difference in/of the modern/colonial world is also the place where
"Occidentalism," as the overarching imaginary of the modern/ colonial world, was articulated. Orientalism later and area
studies more recently are complementary aspects of such overarching imaginary. The end of the cold war and,
consequently, the demise of area studies correspond to the moment in which a new form of colonialism, a global
colonialism, keeps on reproducing (he colonial difference on a world scale, although without being located in one
particular nation-state. Global colonialism reveals (he colonial difference on a world scale when "Occidentalism" meets
the East (hat was precisely its very condition of possibilityin the same way that, paradoxically, Occidentalism in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was ihe condition of possibility of Orientalism. Border thinking (or "border gnosis" as
I explain soon) is a logical consequence of the colonial difference. It could be traced back to the initial moment of Spanish
colonialism in the Andes and Mesoamerica. In the Andes, the by now classic critical narrative in images by Amerindian
Guaman Poma (Waman Puma), Nueva cordnicay buen gobierno, at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the
seventeenth century (Murra and Adorno 1980), is an outstanding exemplar. As I already analyzed in The Darker Side of
the Renaissance (1995a, 247-56; 303-11), the fractured locus of enunciation from a subaltern perspective defines border
thinking as a response to the colonial difference. "Nepantla," a word coined by Nahuatl speaker in the second half of the
sixteenth century, is another exemplar. "To be or feel in between," as the word could be translated into English, was
possible in the mouth of an Amerindian, not of a Spaniard (see Mignolo 1995b). The colonial difference creates the
conditions for dialogic situations in which a fractured enunciation is enacted from the subaltern perspective as a response
to the hegemonic discourse and perspective. Thus, border thinking is more than a hybrid enunciation. It is a fractured
enunciation in dialogic situations with the territorial and hegemonic cosmology (e.g., ideology, perspective). In the
sixteenth century, border thinking remained under the control of hegemonic colonial discourses. That is why Waman
Puma's narrative remained unpublished until 1936 whereas hegemonic colonial discourses (even when such discourses
were critical of the Spanish hegemony, like Bartolome de las Casas) were published, translated, and highly distributed,
taking advantage of the emerging printing press. At the end of the twentieth century, border thinking can no longer be
controlled and it offers new critical horizons to the limitations of critical discourses within hegemonic cosmologies (such
as Marxism, deconstruction, world system analysis, or postmodern theories). The decision to frame my argument in the
modern/colonial world model rather than in the linear chronology ascending from the early modern to the modern to the
late modern was prompted by the need to think beyond the linearity in the geohistorical mapping of Western modernity.
The geohistori cal density of the modern/colonial world system, its interior (conflicts between empires) and exterior
(conflicts between cosmologies) borders, cannot be perceived and theorized from a perspective inside modernity itself (as
is the case for world system analysis, deconstruction, and different postmodern perspectives). On the other hand, the
current and available production under the name of "postcolonial" studies or theories or criticism starts from the
eighteenth century leaving aside a crucial and constitutive moment of modernity/coloniality that was the sixteenth century.

Epistemology is keyneoliberal European thinking has become so predominant because of its ability to
create arbitrary categories of objective versus subjective knowledge-the first task of any alternative
to neoliberalism is to acknowledge epistemic problems.

Grosfoguel 5 (Ramon, associate professor in the department of ethnic studies at the university of California at Berkeley, Critical
Globalization Studies, ed. Richard Appelbaum and William Robinson 283-84]
The first point to be examined is the contribution of ethnic studies to epistemological questions. The hegemonic Eurocentric
paradigm that has informed Western philosophy and sciences in the moderncolonial capitalist, patriarchal world-system
for the last 500 years assumes a universalistic, neutral, objective point of view. Chicana and black feminist scholars
(Moraga and Anzaldua, 1983) as well as Third World scholars inside and outside the United States (Mignolo, 2000)
reminded us that we always speak from a particular location in the power structures. Nobody escapes the class, sexual,
gender, spiritual, geographical, and racial hierarchies of the moderncolonial capitalist world-system. As feminist scholar
Donna Haraways (1988) states, our knowledges are always situated. Black feminist scholars called this perspective
standpoint epistemology (Collins, 1990), whereas Latin American philosopher of liberation Enrique Dussel called it the
"geopolitics of knowledge" (Dussel, 1977). 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 geopolitical location
of the subject that speaks. In Western philosophy and sciences, the subject that speaks is always hidden, concealed, erased
from the analysis. Ethnic location and epistemic location are always decoupled. By delinking ethnic location from
epistemic location, Western philosophy and sciences are able to produce a myth about universalist knowledge that covers

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up, that is, conceals who is speaking, as well as the geopolitical location in the structures of power from which the subject
speaks. 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 and conceals itself as being beyond a
particular point of view, that is, the point of view that represents itself as being without a point of view. It is this god's-eye
view that always hides its local and particular perspective under a universal perspective. Historically, this has allowed
Western man (the gendered term is intentionally used here) to represent his knowledge as the only knowledge capable of
achieving a universal consciousness, and to dismiss non-Western knowledge as particularistic and, thus, unable to achieve
universality. This strategy has been crucial for Western global designs. By hiding the location of the subject of enunciation,
European/Euro-American colonial expansion and domination 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," then to
the twentieth-century characterization of "people without development." We went from the sixteenth-century "rights of
people" to the eighteenth-century "rights of man," 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 the global racialethnic hierarchy of European and non-European. What is the implication of
this epistemological critique to our knowledge production and to our concept of capitalism?

FW Locus of Enunciation
Epistemic location must come first

Grosfoguel (Associate Professor Ethnic Studies Department, Chicano/Latino Studies) 12

(Ramn, Decolonizing Western Universalisms: Decolonial Pluri-versalism from Aim Csaire to the Zapatistas 2012
http://escholarship.org/uc/item/01w7163v) //DDI13
The purpose of this article is to show the limits of Western male concept of uni-versal and to show a different concept of
universal produced from a different geopolitics and body-politics of knowledge. While the Western Male philosophical
tradition uses a Uni-versal notion that is imperialist and authoritarian, there are critical notions that are pluri-versal or
multi-versal developed from the Global South that represent a truly democratic decolonial alternative to the former. I
tried to argue that the Western male philosophical tradition uses a concept of Universality that is inherently epistemically
sexist and racist. I tried to show how Csaire, Dussel and the Zapatistas are examples of an-Other way of thinking about the
Universal that is open to epistemic diversity and inter-epistemic dialogues. The call for epistemic diversity here is not an
epistemic liberal multiculturalism where every subalternized epistemic identity is represented leaving intact the epistemic
racist/sexist privilege of Western males. On the contrary, this is a call to overcome the provincialism of

Western male epistemology and the invisibility it produces on the social-historical experience of
subjects that have been submitted to gender, sexual and racial oppression. The idea here is to
produce a more comprehensive and rigourous critical thought beyond epistemic racism/sexism .
However, in order to have a more rigorous concept of Human Dignity, Democracy, Women Liberation, etc., we need to
overcome the hegemonic temptation of defining these concepts in a Western-centric provincial way.
The latter is the epistemology that leads to imperialist, patriarchal and colonial paternalism where one (Western Man)
defines what is good for the rest (Women, Third World people, gay/lesbians, etc.). To move beyond this schema

would imply to take seriously the critical thinking produced from other genealogies of thought
that have been historically subalternized and considered inferior to the West. This is neither a
relativism of everything goes nor an epistemic populism where everything said by a subalternized subject is already
equivalent to critical thinking. If I do not belong or do not know anything about a non- Western tradition of thought, I
need a minimum rationality to decide with whom I will establish critical inter-epistemic dialogues. The criteria for me is
political. In order to build dialogues and coalitions, we need to look for alliances and inter-

epistemic conversations with those subjects that reunite in their epistemic-ethic-political projects
a combination of two or more of the following negative universality: anti-patriarchal, anti-capitalist, anticolonial and anti-imperialist. This negative universality leads to conversations within the Muslim world with Islamic
Feminist and not with Al-Queda, or within the Aymara world with Evo Morales and not with Victor Hugo Cardenas, or
within the African-American world with Angela Davis and not with Condoleeza Rice, or within the Western world with
Boaventura de Sousa Santos and not with Nicolas Sarkozy. Since not every subalternized subject or thinker from an

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inferiorized epistemology is already a critical thinker, epistemic populism should be refused. The success of the system
is precisely to make those who are socially below to think epistemically like those who are socially above. So, we cannot

use social location as the only criteria. Epistemic location is crucial here. What I am calling for is to
take seriously the critical thinking produced by subalternized subjects from below as a point
of departure to a radical critique of the hegemonic power structures and knowledge structures.
The West does not have a monopoly over critical thinking . The Westernized Left falls into a
coloniality of knowledge from the left that is as epistemically racist and sexist as the Westernized right wing
discourses. There are critical thinkers from other traditions of thought that have to be taken seriously not due to a liberal
multiculturalism or a particularistic identity politics, but because of their important contributions to a better
understanding of the power and knowledge structures of the system we inhabit for the past 520 years. To ignore them or to
not take them seriously, is a lost to the struggles for a more humane future. What we need to avoid is the kind of

positive universality about solutions where one defines for the rest what is the Solution
(socialism, communism, radical democracy, etc.). We need a negative universality to identify friends and enemies but we
should not have a positive universality about solutions. There will be as many solutions as ethic-epistemic-political
projects exist in the world. How to solve the problems of patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism and coloniality should be open
to the diverse local imperial/colonial histories, diverse epistemic perspectives and diverse contexts faced by resistance
movements. The important thing is that we are all struggling for a more egalitarian, democratic,
transmodern world beyond capitalism, patriarchy, imperialism and coloniality . Positive
Universality would imply to reproduce from the left once again the problematic Western-centric concept of universal
discussed in this article. The pluri as opposed to the uni is not to support everything said by a subaltern subject from
below, but a call to produce critical decolonial knowledge that is rigorous, comprehensive, with a worldly-scope and nonprovincial.

FW View From Nowhere Bad

Speaking from a zero-point perspective is one rooted in Western philosophies that attempt to conceal
and hide ethnic, racial, gendered, and sexual epistemic locations through a universalizing knowledge that
leads to domination and hierarchy

Grosfoguel (Associate Professor Ethnic Studies Department, Chicano/Latino Studies) 11

(Ramn. "Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global
Coloniality." TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1, no. 1 , 4-6) //DDI13
The first point achieving a universal consciousness, and to dismiss non-Western knowledge as particularistic and, thus,
unable to achieve universality.t to discuss is the contribution of racial/ethnic and feminist subaltern perspectives to
epistemological questions. The hegemonic Eurocentric paradigms that have informed western philosophy
and sciences in the modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system (Grosfoguel 2005; 2006b) for the
last 500 hundred years assume a universalistic, neutral, objective point of view . Chicana and black feminist
scholars (Moraga and Anzalda 1983; Collins 1990) as well as Third World scholars inside and outside the United States
(Dussel 1977) reminded us that we always speak from a particular location in the power structures. Nobody

escapes the class, sexual, gender, spiritual, linguistic, geographical, and racial hierarchies of the
modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system. As feminist scholar Donna Haraway (1988) states, our
knowledges are 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 sciences the subject that speaks is always
hidden, concealed, erased from the analysis. The ego-politics of knowledge of Western philosophy has always
privilege the myth of a non-situated Ego. Ethnic/racial/gender/sexual epistemic location and the subject that

speaks are always decoupled. By delinking ethnic/racial/gender/sexual epistemic location from the subject

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that speaks, Western philosophy and sciences are able to produce a myth about a Truthful universal
knowledge that covers up, that is, conceals who is speaking as well as the geo-political and body-political
epistemic location in the structures of colonial power/knowledge from which the subject speaks. It is important 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 worldsystem consists in making subjects that are socially located in the
oppressed side of the colonial difference, to think epistemically like the ones on the dominant positions. Subaltern epistemic
perspectives are knowledge coming from below that produces a critical perspective of hegemonic knowledge in the power
relations involved. I am not claiming an epistemic populism where knowledge produced from below is automatically an
epistemic subaltern knowledge. What I am claiming is that all knowledges are epistemically located in the

dominant or the subaltern side of the power relations and that this is related to the geo- and body-politics
of knowledge. The disembodied and unlocated neutrality and objectivity of the ego-politics of knowledge
is a Western myth. Ren Descartes, the founder of Modern Western Philosophy, inaugurates a new moment 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 Truth beyond time and space privileges access to the laws of the
Universe, and the capacity to produce scientific knowledge and theory is now placed in the mind of Western Man. The
Cartesian Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) is 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,
Godeyed view knowledge. This is what the Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro- Gmez called the point zero
perspective of Eurocentric philosophies (Castro-Gmez 2003). The point zero is the point of view that hides

and conceals itself as being beyond a particular point of view, that is, the point of view that represents
itself as being without a point of view. It is this god-eye view that always hides its local and particular perspective
under an abstract universalism. Western philosophy privileges ego politics of knowledge over the geopolitics of
knowledge and the body-politics of knowledge. Historically, this has allowed Western man (the gendered term is
intentionally used here) to represent his knowledge as the only one capable of achieving a universal

consciousness, and to dismiss non-Western knowledge as particularistic and, thus, unable to achieve
universality. This epistemic strategy has been crucial for Western global designs. By hiding the location of the
subject of enunciation, European/Euro-American colonial expansion and domination 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 development and more recently, to the early twenty-first-century of people
without democracy. We went from the sixteenth-century rights of people (Seplveda versus de las Casas debate in
the University of Salamanca in the mid-sixteenth century), to the eighteenth-century rights of man (Enlightenment
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 the global racial/ethnic hierarchy of Europeans/non-Europeans. However, as Enrique
Dussel (1994) has reminded us, the Cartesian Cogito ergo sum 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 the arrogance of
becoming God-like and put himself as the foundation of all Truthful knowledge was the Imperial Being ,
that is, the subjectivity of those who are at the center of the world because they have already conquered it. What are the
decolonial implications of this epistemological critique to our knowledge production and to our concept of world-system?

***Answers To***
A2: Perm Decoloniality First

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Decolonial projects must exist separate from discussions rooted in the genealogy of the North and West
a combination reinscribes projects in a European model and crushes the alt

Mignolo (Professor of Literature in Duke University, Joint Appointments in Cultural Anthropology and Romance Studies) 2012
Walter, Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option: A Manifesto, Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production
of the Luso-Hispanic World, 47-49, NDW //DDI13

The de-colonial epistemic shift is a consequence of the formation and founding of the
colonial matrix of power, a point that Anbal Quijano pioneered in an article in which he summarizes the platform of the modernity/coloniality
project: The critique of the European paradigm of rationality/modernity is indispensable even more, urgent. But it is doubtful if the criticism consists of a
simple negation of all its categories; of the dissolution of reality in discourse; of the pure negation of the idea and the perspective of totality in cognition .

It is necessary to extricate oneself from all the linkages between rationality/modernity and coloniality,
first of all, and definitely from all power which is not constituted by free decisions made by free people . It
is the instrumentalisation of the reasons for power, of colonial power in the first place, which produced
distorted paradigms of knowledge and spoiled the liberating promises of modernity . The alternative, then, is
clear: the destruction of the coloniality of world power .6 Even though the meta-reflection about the decolonial epistemic shift is a
recent development, epistemic decolonial practice arose naturally as a consequence of the formation and implementation of structures of domination
the colonial matrix of power or the coloniality of powerwhich Anbal Quijano revealed towards the end of the 80s and continues to work on. Therefore,
it is not surprising that the genealogy of decolonial thinking (that is, the thinking that arose from the decolonial turn) is found in the

colony or in the colonial period, in the canonical jargon of the historiography of the Americas. That period of formation in the sixteenth century
still does not include the English colonies in either the North or in the Caribbean; nor does it include those of the French. However, the decolonial turn reappears in Asia and Africa as a consequence of the changes, adaptations, and new modalities of modernity/coloniality generated by the British and French
imperial expansion starting from the end of the eighteenth century and continuing through to the beginning of the nineteenth century. As a result, we

find the first manifestations of the decolonial turn in the Hispanic viceroyalties , those of Anahuac and Tawantinsuyu,
in the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. We also find it in the English colonies and metropolis in the eighteenth century. Waman
Puma de Ayala is the first case of the decolonial turn in the viceroyalty of Peru (as seen in his work New Chronicle and Good Government, sent to Phillip
III in 1616); the second case being that of Otabbah Cugoano, an emancipated slave who was able to publish his Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of
Slavery in London in 1787 (ten years after the Independence of the United States and the publication of The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith). Both
works are decolonial political treatises that, thanks to the coloniality of knowledge, were not able to share the table of

discussion with the likes of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke. To reinscribe them today in the genealogy of
decolonial thinking is an urgent project. Without this genealogy, decolonial thinking would be nothing
more than a gesture whose logic would depend on some of the various genealogies founded by Greece and
Rome, and be re-inscribed in the European imperial modernity after the Renaissance, in some of the six imperial languages
already mentioned: Italian, Castilian, and Portuguese during the Renaissance; French, English, German during the Enlightenment. Waman Puma
and Cugoano thought and opened a space for the unthinkable in the imperial genealogy of modernity , as much in
their rightist aspects as in their leftist aspects. That is to say, the imperial genealogy of the Christian, Liberal, and
Socialist/Marxist modernity. Waman Puma and Cugoano opened the doors to an other thinking, to a border
thinking, by way of the experience and memory of Tawantinsuyu in the former; and of the experience and
memory of the brutal African slavery of the Atlantic in the latter . None of those who defended the
indigenous peoples in the sixteenth century, nor those who protested against slavery in the eighteenth century initiated a
mode of thinking from the space and the experiences of the colonial wound infringed upon the Indians
and the Blacks, such as the imperial epistemology that classified the diversity of the New World (see Quijano in this same issue).7 European
political theory (from Niccol Machiavelli to Carl Schmitt, continuing with Thomas Hobbes and John Locke) was constructed on the
basis of the experiences and the memory of kingdoms and principalities (Machiavelli), the formation of free
states (Hobbes, Locke), and the crisis of the liberal state (Schmitt). How does one interpret the metaphor of the previous paragraph,
opened the doors to an other thinking? As de-linking and opening.8 Perhaps with another metaphor that cooperates with the intelligibility of
the type of doors which I speak of in this case. It does not deal with the doors that lead towards the truth (aletheia), but
rather to other places; to the places of colonial memory; to the footprints of the colonial wound from where
decolonial thinking is weaved.9 Doors that lead to other types of truths whose basis is not being but the
coloniality of being, the colonial wound. Decolonial thinking presupposes, always, the colonial difference (and in certain cases that I am
not going to analyze here, the imperial difference). That is, exteriority in the precise sense of the outside (barbaric, colonial) that is constructed by the
inside (civilized, imperial); an inside founded upon what Castro-Gmez revealed as the hubris of the starting point, 10 the presumed totality (totalization)
of the gnosis of the Occident, we remember once again, in Greek and Latin and the six modern languages of imperial Europe. The decolonial turn

is the opening and the freedom from the thinking and the forms of living (economies-other, political theories-other), the

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cleansing of the coloniality of being and of knowledge; the de-linking from the spell of the rhetoric of
modernity, from its imperial imaginary articulated in the rhetoric of democracy. In dialogue with imperial critical
reason, I would state the following: Martin Heidegger translated aletheia (truth) as The open and free space of the clearing of being.11 Given that
empowerment is the horizon of decolonial thinking (and not the truth), it is the open and free in the decoloniality of being. It

does not matter how many critiques we make of imperialism or of empire. These are all shifts that go
right around in a circle, biting us in the tail. Critics of the language of empire continue hiding the door, the
opening and the freedom that point towards decolonial thinking. Metaphors such as a world in which many worlds fit and
another world is possible are

metaphors that reveal where this door is.

Only the pluraversality of decolonial thought challenges the privilege of Western thought - critiques
within the system only maintain exploitation of the poor and manifest in terrorism and violence

Mignolo (Professor of Literature in Duke University, Joint Appointments in Cultural Anthropology and Romance Studies) 2012
Walter, Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option: A Manifesto, Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production
of the Luso-Hispanic World, 48-50, NDW //DDI13

Decolonial thinking has as its reason of being and its objective the decoloniality of power (that is to say, of
the matrix of colonial power). As noted in the previously cited article, Quijano also designed this program: First of all,
epistemological decolonization is needed to clear the way for new intercultural communication , for an

interchange of experiences and meanings, as the basis of another rationality which may legitimately
pretend to some universality. Nothing is less rational, finally, than the pretension that the specific cosmic
vision of a particular ethnie should be taken as universal rationality, even if such an ethnie is called
Western Europe because this is actually to impose universalism on provincialism.12 Where, in the daily life
of civil/political society, of the state and the market, do the signs of the rhetoric of modernity appear, hiding the logic of
coloniality in the totalizing bubble of imperial modernity (or the universalizing cosmovision of a particular ethnic group)?
These three spheres (civil/political society, state, market, or if it is preferred, daily life, government regulations, and
production, distribution, and consumption of goods) are certainly not autonomous. The state and the market
depend on the citizens and the consumers, which form civil and political society. The state and the market
also need a segment of non-citizens (illegal immigrants and other forms of illegality) and of non-consumers
(the growing segment of poverty all over the globe and in each country, particularly those of the ex-Third World and
the ex-colonies of the ex-Second World). The citizens need the state and the market needs the consumers. But this is not all,
since the state, citizens, consumers, and markets are all related via the national configuration of the state on one level, and
they also interact with the market in a conflictive way. And it is here that the limits of the nation-state are opened onto the
transnational level. On the level of civil society, the opening to the transnational today is manifested in migrations.
Migrations generate a double effect: in the country of departure, and in the country of arrival. The events in France in
November of 2005 are a paradigmatic case in the transnational sphere of economic and state consequences in the sphere of
civil/political society in industrialized countries (particularly in the G7 in which the economic power is concentrated). At
the level of the market (and with that I refer to economic control of urban and rural land; to the exploitation of labor and to
production and consumption), the massive burning of automobiles in France reveals a place where the garden of civil
society within the bubble of modernity meets with the invisible consequences of coloniality. Where, then, do the
symptoms of the unresolved tension between the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of coloniality ,
constitutive of two heads from the same body, emerge in daily life? Where does decolonial energy emerge and how is it
manifested? These uprisings in France reveal a point of articulation between the sphere and the illusion of a
world that is similarly thought of and constructed as THE world (rhetoric of modernity) and the
consequences underlying this rhetoric (logic of coloniality). Within and from this world, what is apparent

is the cruelty, irrationality, youth, and immigration that must be controlled by police and military power,
imprisoning and using cases such as these in order to sustain the rhetoric of modernity . The liberal
tendency will propose education, the conservative tendency expulsion, and the leftist tendency inclusion.
All of these solutions leave intact the logic of coloniality : in the industrialized countries, developing countries, the
ex-First World, the G-7in the long run, the logic of coloniality returns like a boomerang, in a movement that
began in the sixteenth century. In developing countries, the ex-Third World, the logic of coloniality continues its
climbing march (today, literally, in the zone of the Amazon and in the West of Colombia, where the

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presence of yellow bulldozers are set up together with the The boomerang returned from the outside the
borders of the G7: the boomerang returned within (the Twin towers in New York, the train in Madrid, the bus
and subway in London), but it also returned outside (Moscow, Nalchik, Indonesia, Lebanon). The fact that
we condemn the violence of these actsin which one never knows where the limits are between the agents of civil
and political society, the states and the marketdoes not mean that we should close our eyes and keep on
understanding these acts as they are presented to us by the rhetoric of modernity, in the mass media and
in the official discourses of the state! In general, the media hides under a pretense of information. In particular, there
are corners of the media where the dissenting analyses fight to make themselves heard. But these analyses disagree on the
content but not the terms of the conversation. Decolonial thinking does not appear yet, not even in the most
extreme leftist publications. And the reason is that decolonial thinking is not leftist, but rather another thing

entirely: it is a de-linking from the modern, political episteme articulated as right, center, and left; it is an
opening towards another thing, on the march, searching for itself in the difference. To condemn terrorist
violence does not mean that we yield to that thinking. That luxury can be given to persons with particular
interests (and in certain cases, with limitations in their understanding of the global situation), such as former President
George W. Bush and former Prime Minister Tony Blair. On the other hand, to understand this violence within
the interpretive frame common to that of the Cold War (that is, an Occidental liberal, capitalist, and Protestant Christian
against an Occidental-Oriental (i.e., Eurasian) Socialist in politics, Communist in economics and Orthodox
Christian in religion, makes invisible again the opening towards a freedom that exists elsewhere and not
in the confrontation between opposites in the same ideological system: liberalism vs. socialism. Where? For
example, in the political decolonization movements that existed approximately between 1947 and 1970. Without a doubt,
these movements failed; in a manner similar to the failure of socialism/communism in Russia. But both left footprints. I
must mention two exceptions before going forward in order to, in reality, go towards the past.

The Alt must come first only then is a horizontal, genuine dialogue possible

Grosfoguel (Associate Professor Ethnic Studies Department, Chicano/Latino Studies) 12

(Ramn, Decolonizing Western Uni-versalisms: Decolonial Pluri-versalism from Aim Csaire to the Zapatistas 2012
http://escholarship.org/uc/item/01w7163v) //DDI13

A horizontal, liberatory dialogue as opposed to a vertical, Western monologue requires the

decolonization of global power relations . We cannot assume a Habermasian consensus (see Habermas) or
horizontal relations of equality between cultures and peoples when these are divided on the global level into
the two poles of the colonial difference. However, we can begin to imagine alter-ative worlds beyond the dilemma
of Eurocentric fundamentalism versus Third World fundamentalisms. I will focus here on the concept of transmodernity as
conceived by Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel.ii His particular use of the concept is an utopian project meant to
transcend the Eurocentric version of modernity. In opposition to the project of Habermas, which sees as its central task the
need to complete the unfinished and incomplete project of modernity, Dussels transmodernity is a project that seeks
through a long process to complete the unfinished project of decolonization. Transmodernity would represent the
concretization at the level of a political project of the concrete universalism that Csaires philosophical intuition invites us
to construct. Instead of a modernity centered on Europe/Euro-North-America and imposed on the rest of the world as an
imperial/colonial global design, Dussel argues for a multiplicity of critical, decolonizing perspectives against

and beyond Eurocentered modernity , from the various epistemic locations of the colonized people of the
world. Just as there is no absolute outside of this worldsystem, there is not an absolute inside. Alternative epistemologies
can provide what Caribbean cultural critic douard Glissant proposes as a diversality of responses to the problems of the
actually existing modernity (see particularly his Poetics of Relation). The philosophy of liberation can only come from the
critical thinkers of each culture in dialogue with other cultures. Womens liberation, democracy, civil rights, and those forms
of economic organization that represent alternatives to the current system can only emerge from the creative responses of
local ethicoepistemic projects. As a number of Third World women have pointed out, Western women cannot impose their
understanding of liberation on women from the Islamic or Indigenous world (see Mohanty, Feminism; Lamrabet, El Coran).
Similarly, Western men cannot impose their understanding of democracy on non-European peoples. This does not

represent a call to seek fundamentalist or nationalist solutions to the global coloniality of power. It is a call
to seek in epistemic diversality and transmodernity a strategy or an epistemic mechanism towards a decolonized,

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transmodern world that moves us beyond both the Eurocentric First-Worldist and Eurocentric ThirdWorldist fundamentalisms. During the last 520 years of the European/Euro-North-American capitalist/patriarchal
modern/colonial world-system we went from convert to Christianity or Ill kill you in the 16th century, to civilize or Ill
kill you in the 18th and 19th centuries, to develop or Ill kill you in the 20th century, and more recently, the
democratize or Ill kill you at the beginning of the 21st century. We have never seen respect or recognition of Indigenous,
Islamic, or African forms of democracy as a systematic and consistent Western policy. Forms of democratic alterity are
rejected a priori. The Western liberal form is the only one that is considered legitimate and accepted,
provided that it does not begin to infringe upon hegemonic Western interests. If the non-European populations
do not accept the terms of liberal democracy, it is imposed on them by force in the name of progress and civilization .

Democracy must be reconceptualized in a transmodern form in order to decolonize itself of its Western,
liberal form, that is, from the racialized and capitalist form of Western democracy. By radicalizing
Emmanuel Levinass notion of exteriority, Dussel sees the epistemic potential of those relatively external spaces that have
not been completely colonized by European modernity. These external spaces are neither pure nor absolute, but rather they
have been produced and affected by the modernity/coloniality of the world-system. It is from the geopolitics and
bodypolitics of knowledge of this exteriority or relative marginality that decolonial thinking emerges as a critique of
modernity, towards a transmodern, pluriversal, decolonized world of multiple and diverse ethico-political projects in which
there can exist a truly equal and horizontal communication and dialogue between the peoples of the world that goes beyond
the logics and practices of domination and exploitation characteristic of the eurocentered world-system. However, in order
to achieve this utopian project it is fundamental to transform the system of domination and exploitation of
the colonial power matrix within the current European/Euro-North-American capitalist/patriarchal
modern/colonial world-system (see Grosfoguel).

A2: Perm Moratorium on the West

Perm cant solvenothing less than a moratorium on the West can work to undercut the logic driving
toward the elimination of the human species

Maldonado-Torres 2 (Nelson, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Rutgers; Postimperial Reflections on Crisis,
Knowledge, and Utopia, Review XXV, 3, p227-315) //DDI13
It must be clear now that my critique of Mignolo does not merge from a particular interest in defending the European from
n unjustifiable dismissal of his epistemic capacities, as my critique f the "epistemic segregation" implied in the notion of
colonial difference would appear. If the notion of colonial difference is suspect to me it is not so much because it leaves the
European aside, but because it still carries the idea of there being a European in the first place. This idea reduces the
effectiveness of a transgresstopic critique , which requires a questioning of any such isolated point of view

and demands nothing less than a radical transformation in the European's way to see himself and the
world. The costs of the postoccidental radical turn announced and partly enacted by the notion of "colonial difference"
may be simply too high, since its articulation entails the survival and legitimization of a now local but still ethnocentric
epistemological conception (the European). I suggest, in line with the concept of transgresstopic critical
hermeneutics announced here, that the focus of attention be expanded from the space of the colonized and

the effects of the coloniality of power in that space, to the colonial and imperial forces that sustain a
regime of power in which both colonized and colonizer come into being . This partly includes a more decisive
emphasis on the "colonial" side of the equation represented by the notion of "colonial difference ." It is true
that the forms of knowledge that appear in colonized context are as much a result as a response to the colonial and imperial
powers that I refer to here. Yet it is still necessary to make explicit the critical implications of the uncovering of coloniality
as a constitutive force in the formation of subjects and life-worlds. These are, among others, (1) that the European is as

much a product of coloniality as the colonized-to which one may add that the European monological
attitude hides a more profound "internal" pluritopicality (see Estermann, 1998: 22), (2) that the European
must aspire to articulate a postimperial point of view , and (3) that the articulation of such a point of view
implies a radical questioning of the mode of living and knowing implicated in the very idea of an
"European." In short, the European cannot simply continue existing as we have known him .18 The

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relativization of his point of view is only the negative side of a most difficult task at " unlearning imperial
privileged " and at fomenting postimperial forms of life . Perhaps the first step in this direction consists in
hearing what the colonized subaltern has to say about colonization and about the privileged imperial
subject, the European. Unlearning imperial privilege, however, cannot simply consist in adopting a
generous epistemological attitude toward the subaltern . This unlearning is to be the place where ethics
and knowledge meet since the promotion of a postimperial form of life and the possibility of generating an
authentic "dialogue" with the subaltern cannot dispense with a praxis that aims to bring about the
collapse of the segregating walls created by imperial violence . All those sublime thoughts that most of us
share, those institutions so sacred to the West, and those nationalist projects that take their force from
the backs of segregated populations concen trated in ghettos or living in reservations need to be
revaluated as part of this unlearning. Nothing less than a moratorium on the West is required for this
unlearning to take place . Unexpected narratives may then begin to emerge in different locations-as they have merged
from peripheral subjectivities. Insofar as these narratives and subsequent macronarratives are informed by interactions with
subjects from different places they will not respond uniquely to the horizons provided by spatial location.
Transgresstopical in character, breaking the horizon of the local and overcoming the logic of the imperial
reproduction (or rather, elimination) of the species , these macronarratives announce a postcolonial
future and the possibility of forging a postoccidental world. This is to be achieved both by ceasing to take
the West as the global, and by attempting to articu late and promote the idea of a postimperial West. This
is the chal lenge of will and imagination for the West at the beginnings of the twenty-first century. The
only "burden" of European Man and his American successor is to deal with themselves .

Perm Cant Solvesegregating our epistemology reinforces coloniality and guts our alternatives solvency
must strive for Death of European Manthe role of the ballot is key

Maldonado-Torres 2 (Nelson, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Rutgers; Postimperial Reflections on Crisis,
Knowledge, and Utopia, Review XXV, 3, p227-315) //DDI13
Mignolo, in contrast, tends to glorify and in some way romanticize the intellectual production of the colonized, erasing to
some extent what may be described in his own terms as the darker side of colonized life. The romantic picture of the
colonized will raise violent resistance, reactionary behavior, and ultimately also ressentiment -- particularly from those
who would rather leave things as they are. One must not be deceived by the emergence of those anti Mignoloian characters
who will certainly appear. It may be that what they want most is to go back rather than to go forward. Behind a critique

of epistemic segregation may remain a hidden proclamation of an ontological and existential divide
needed to maintain European identity untouched and to avoid the gaze of the Other over the self . When
the eyes of the other no longer reflect the desired image, when a disturbance in the pond makes
Narcissus's semblance appear shattered and ugly, one goes back to one's place and avoids any
information about oneself that emanates from the Other . The danger with the notion of colonial difference is
then that it may ultimately offer resources for the European to legitimize this withdrawal and thus inhibit a radical critique
of unethical modes of life. If the European has indeed been formed by the subalterization of the non-

European, it is clear that when the non-European gains a voice, what the European would want most is to
remain at peace in his place, if possible disappearing behind the curtains of the theatre of violence to
reappear on the stage of plurality and tolerance. "Lets cooperate, but mind your own business." "Let's
work together, but don't look at me directly in the eyes." "Don't exclude me either, because if you do you
will be doing me violence." How ironic everything becomes! In the twenty-first century, our efforts must
be directed to the radical critique of these attitudes . A consistent opposition demands no less than

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making the " death of European Man " the explicit utopia of all our macronarratives and epistemological
conceptions.

A2: Perm Cant Solve

Perm cant solvemust deny epistemic privilege and remain transgressive

Maldonado-Torres 2 (Nelson, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Rutgers; Postimperial Reflections on Crisis,
Knowledge, and Utopia, Review XXV, 3, p227-315) //DDI13
If Mignolo finds in the colonized context an innovative epistemological modality that he labels pluritopic hermeneutics, I
would argue that his work advances a peculiar critical vision that radicalizes the "pluri" in pluritopics; This view may be
termed transtopic or trans(gress)topic critical hermeneutics.14 Transgresstopic is to be taken here not in the

sense of a radical independence and transcen-dence from any locus of enunciation, but in the sense of a
funda mental impulse to transgress the space of the other and even one's own space. It involves Nietzsche's
notion of being a traitor even to one's fatherland (1966: 52). This is the denial of epistemic privi leged,
ultimately, both to colonizer and colonized. The concept also includes the idea that spaces are not fixed
epistemological grounds, and that transactions between spaces function as enabling conditions for selfunderstanding and (self)-critique.15

Perm continues the modern/colonial frame of thinking. Minor adjustments maintain epistemic privilege
need radical epistemological re-evaluation.

Deloria 99 [Vine, For this land p 101]

But this replacement only begins the task ofliberation. For the history ofWestern thinking in the past eight centuries has
been one of replacement ofideas within a framework that has remainedbasically unchanged for nearly two millenia.
Challenging this framework of interpretation means a rearrangement of our manner of perceiving the world, and it
involves a reexamination of the body ofhuman knowledge and its structural reconstruction into a new format. Such a task
appears to be far from the struggles ofthe present. It seems abstract and meaningless in the face of contemporary suffering.
And it suggests that people can be made to change their oppressive activity by intellectual reorientation alone. All these
questions arise, however, because ofthe fundamental orientation ofWestern peoples toward the world. We assume that we
know the structure of reality and must only make certain minor adjustments in the machinery that operates it in order to
bring our institutions into line. Immediate suffering is thus placed in juxtaposition with abstract metaphYSical
conceptions of the world and, because we can see immediate Suffering, we feel impelled to change conditions quickly to
relieve tenSions, never coming to understand how the basic attitude toward life and its derivative attitudes toward
minority groups continues to dominate the goals and activities that appear designed to create reforms.

A2: Perm Cooption

Perm inevitably coopted by the celebratory logic of the affirmativereinforces mechanisms and interests
of colonialism
Jacqueline M. Martnez, associate professor of communication studies, 3 [On the possibility of the latino postcolonial
intellectual Nepantla 4.2 253-256] //DDI13
As a collectivity, Latinas/os carry the markings of colonialism and its many manifestations as they have morphed over
centuries. We carry these markings on and in our familial bodies, our social bodies, and our geographical bodies. To direct
our conscious awareness toward those very configurations of family, social world, and geography that we have lived
provides an instant topography, however sketchy, of the political and economic mechanisms of colonialism. It is not enough
to simply map the terrain of our familial, social, and geographical bodies, however, because colonialism, by its very nature,
diminishes the strength and resources of the indigenous culture. By their very nature, and by virtue of thetransna-tional

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capitalism they have fostered, colonial interests have so dominated the world that many Latinas/os simply accept those
interests as the nor-mal and correct way things should be. This is certainly the case in many communities within
the United States where Latinas/os have assimilated enough into the American culture that we have come

to believe in the American Dream as the one true avenue for progress. When we come to such a belief,
our capacity for critical reflection on the mechanisms by which colonial interests continue to dominate
and harm Latino people and cultures is severely diminished. A call for critical self-reflection in this
circumstance will likely result in a reiteration of the mechanisms and interests of colonialism as it has
insinuated itself into the totality of our life-world . I offer this example of the internalization of colonialist interests
because it speaks to my own history (Martinez 2000), one that I share with many Latinas and Latinos in the United States.

A2: Perm State DA

The permutations inclusion of the state as part of the solution guts the alt.

Grosfoguel, Ramn. "Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial
Thinking, and Global Coloniality." TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1,
no. 1 (2011): 21-22 //DDI13
In the present world-system, a peripheral nation-state may experience transformations in its form of incorporation to the
capitalist world-economy, a minority of which might even move to a semi-peripheral position. However, to break with,

or transform, the whole system from a nation-state level is completely beyond their range of possibilities
(Wallerstein, 1992a; 1992b). Therefore, a global problem cannot have a national solution. This is not to deny the
importance of political interventions at the nation-state level. The point here is not to reify the nation-state and to
understand the limits of political interventions at this level for the long-term transformation of a system that operates at a
world-scale. The nation-state, although still an important institution of Historical Capitalism, is a limited but important
space for radical political and social transformations. Collective agencies in the periphery need a global scope in
order to make an effective political intervention in the capitalist world-system. Social struggles below and above the

nation-state are strategic spaces of political intervention that are frequently ignored when the focus of the
movements privileges the nation-state. Social movements local and global connections are crucial for effective
political interventions. The dependentistas overlooked this due, in part, to their tendency to privilege the
nation-state as the unit of analysis and to the economic reductionist emphasis of their approaches. This had terrible
political consequences for the Latin American left and the credibility of the dependentista political
project.

A2: Perm Starting Point DA

Hold the AFF directly responsible for the 1ACs locus of enunciationeven their well meaning gesture is
vampiric upon the other, maintaining the structures of wretchedness that require ethnocidal violence

Maldonado-Torres 2 (Nelson, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Rutgers; Postimperial Reflections on Crisis,
Knowledge, and Utopia, Review XXV, 3, p227-315) //DDI13
The European, however, is not alone in the world. Transgress topical hermeneutics and critique do not obliterate difference;
rather they take difference as a positive condition of ever new articulations that surpass the limits of ethnocentric points of
view. The idea that postoccidental macronarratives can emerge from different places does not do away with difference,
since the post occidental and the trans(gress)topical can only be achieved precisely through intense forms of interactions.
Difference and otherness, however, acquire particular meanings in this context. The colonized subaltern is an outsiderinsider whose (subordinated) interaction with the colonizer allows her to be acquainted with the reason of the master in
different ways than an outsider or an insider. However, subordination makes her otherness as a human being not fully
ecognized.22 More than an other and less than an Other at the same time, the colonized is sometimes in a position to make
her acquaintance with the reason of the master work in favor of her liberation. This is a matter of perspective and
experience, but only in a weak sense. Although Mignolo points to this with the notion of "sensibility" (2000: 172), the point
is not completely clear in his narrative (2000: 111). Colonial difference is inscribed in the colonized as an

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ambiguous trace that marks emergent postcolonial forms of life, while it also offers the possibility of
subverting the colonizer's forms of thinking from within, using the logic of the colonizer against him . The
colonial trace also indicates, however, that coloniality can be reproduced in the space of the colonized. The path from
colonial subalterity to human alterity is a complex one, many a time collapsing into the adoption of
master-like attitudes.21 Therefore, we need macronarratives that aim to break the never ending spell of
the perverse logics of lordship and bondage .
Macronarratives must be aimed to bring about postcolonial human relations. The postcolonial, in turn,
should be conceived as he human and epistemological minimum . The effort to bring it about must
concern all involved . In this sense macronarratives take the form of macro-hetero-narratives emerging
from subjectivities who bear the colonial and imperial traces (overcoming the radical difference between
colonizer and colonized) and who militate against the reinscription of imperial gestures . The postoccidental
becomes in this context more an ideal than an idea, orienting the formulation of new macro narratives
while also being anticipated by the ways in which they are formulated . The focus on colonial rela tions of power
and imperial modes of being is needed to challenge the reemergence of such forces in any space, including the space of the
colonized. The only way in which the epistemic forms that have merged in response to the hegemonic

cosmologies in the space of the colonized will carry the promise of a truly postcolonial condition is by
engaging in an explicit and continuous evaluation of the rela tions of power that form part of new ways
of life and thinking. The notion of transgresstopic critique points to the need for this kind of self-criticism . It is
necessary to associate coloniality not only with the task of identifying the fractured forms of knowledge
that arise in the space of the colonized, but with the clear articulation of unethical modes of being that
must be challenged-and one cannot be simply identified with the other. This challenge occasions a
particular kind of fracture in the space of the colonizer : it comes to represent the crisis of the imperial
system . Such crisis emerges not so much out of an internal process going wild, but from what is left aside, from what
appears excessive and is not recognized as fully human. The colonized then becomes not only a fractured being,
but a fracturing being as well as a being who needs to be continuously fractured (from the perspective of
those subjectivities who are always left in the margins) in order to circumvent the temptation of innocence
and violence (see Bruckner, 1995).

A2: Leftist Affs Solve Invisible Violence

Movements that fail to de-link from the West inevitably fail because they dont create an opening for the
freedom of other thinking only the pluriversality of decoloniality can end the permanent and invisible
violence produced by modernity

Mignolo (Professor of Literature in Duke University, Joint Appointments in Cultural Anthropology and Romance Studies) 2012
Walter, Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option: A Manifesto, Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production
of the Luso-Hispanic World, 50-52, NDW //DDI13

One of the reasons for the failure of the decolonization movements is that , as in socialism/communism, they
changed the content but not the terms of the conversation, and maintained the very idea of the state
within a global capitalist economy. The appropriation of the state by native elites in Asia and in Africa (as
before in the Americas, Haiti being a particular case, which we cannot analyze here, the construction of the colonial states by Creole elites of Iberian
descendents in the south and British in the north), remained linked to and dependent from global imperial politics and

economy. So much so that in certain cases, the decolonial states followed the same rules of the liberal game, as in India;
in other cases, they attempted an approximation towards Marxism, as in the case of Patrice Lumumba (Prime Minister of the
Democratic Republic of the Congo). The enormous contribution of decolonization (or independence), as much in the first wave from 1776 to 1830 in the
Americas as in the second in Asia and Africa, has been to plant the flag of decolonial pluri-versality against the flag and the tanks of imperial uni-versality .

The limits of all these movements were those of not having found an opening and a freedom of an other

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thinking: that is, of a decolonization that would carry them, in the Zapatistas terms, towards a world that would
fit many worlds (e.g., pluri-versality), that would reaffirm the conviction that another world is possible in the
World Social Forum. This includes not only the Zapatistas and the World Social Forum, but also Hugo Chavez. The epistemic-political platform
of Hugo Chavez (metaphorically, the Bolivarian revolution) is not the same platform as that used by Fidel Castro (metaphorically, the Socialist revolution).
The rules of the game that are being proposed by Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia are different from those of past movements. By 2010, it
is clear also that Lula da Silva went engaged in the route of dewesternization, joining East Asian countries that, while maintaining capitalist economy,
reject to be told by the IMF or by the European Union what is the correct course of action. If China had followed the IMF instructions, we can be sure
that it would not be what it is now. It was their epistemic disobedience in economic theory first and political theory now that made possible the
miracle.13 What I wish to say is that that other world that we begin to imagine cannot merely be liberal, Christian,

or Marxist or a mix of the three, which would assure that the modern/colonial bubble, capitalistic and
imperial, would triumph and that this triumph would assure what Francis Fukuyama celebrated as the end of
history.14 Thus, I imagine what Fukuyama would think: that the entire population of China, the entire Islamic population from the Middle East to
Central Asia and from Central Asia to Indonesia; all the Indigenous peoples of the Americas from Chile to Canada to Australia and New Zealand; the
entire African population from south of the Sahara, and including the Diaspora in the Americas; all the Latino/as and other minorities in the USA; alas,
that all those millions of peoples that quadruple or quintuple the population of the European Atlantic and

North America, would yield at their masters feet and to a way of life that is a paradise on earth that
Western capitalism and the Democratic liberal state maintained by a television and music industry without
comparison; mummified by a technology that creates a new trick of fascination and jubilee each minute is
projected as a success without limits, an excellence without borders and as techno-industrial-genetic growth that assures paradise for all mortals. In this
panorama, Marxism would continue as the opposition necessary in order to maintain the system . The end of

history would thus be the triumph of liberalism, seconded by conservative Christianity against the constant protest of the Marxist
Left and the Philosophy of Liberation. Thus it would be, until the end of time . Whether we like it or not, after the end of history came
Afghanistan, Iraq, Katrina, and France 2005. Literally, an-other history is coming to the forefront in which planetary and
pluri-versal decolonial thinking, growing since the foundational moment sixteenth centurywould lead the
way toward a non-capitalist and imperial/colonial future. Let us rethink from the position that we just arrived at the
interpretation to which the decolonizing independence movements were reduced. They were interpreted as processes of imperial liberation: in the
nineteenth century, England and France supported the decolonization of the Spanish and Portuguese
colonies; in the twentieth century, the United States supported the decolonization of the French and English
colonies. In reality, it was a liberation from one empire only to fall into the hands of another , and was supported
by independence movements in the name of freedom. The possibility of decolonial thinking was silenced by official
interpretations. The complains of Amlcar Cabral, of Aim Csaire, of Frantz Fanon, were admired in order to be disqualified; just as the
achievements of Patrice Lumumba were celebrated after cutting his body into pieces. To rethink the decolonizing independence
movements (in their two historic moments, in America and in Asia-Africa) means to think of them as moments of de-linking
and opening within the processes of de-colonizing knowledge and being; moments that were veiled by the
interpretative mechanism of the rhetoric of modernity, the concealment of coloniality and, in
consequence, the invisibilization of the seed of decolonial thinking . In other words, the decolonizing independence
movements were interpreted within the same revolutionary logic of modernity, according to the model of the Glorious Revolution in England, the
French Revolution, and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. To rethink means to de-link the logic of decolonizing

independence movements from the bourgeois and socialist revolutions.

A2: Govt wont only be Southern/AT Youre not from the South(?)
The alternative is intercultural coexistence initial location doesnt matter as long as those in
government think from the South

Mignolo (Professor of Literature in Duke University, Joint Appointments in Cultural Anthropology and Romance Studies) 2012
Walter, Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option: A Manifesto, Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production
of the Luso-Hispanic World, 55-57, NDW //DDI13
What did Waman Puma propose? A good government based on a new chronicle. This was natural. The
Catalonian historian Josep Fontana at one moment said that to do so does not take much time; there are as many histories as
political projects (heard by those who listened during a conference during which he expressed this; if Fontana had not
stated this, it must be stated). The diversity of the political projects of the Castilians centered around a concept of history
whose source was in Greece and Rome (Herodotus, Titus Livius, Tasso). The political project issued by Waman Puma or

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Taqi Onkoy was not linked to this concept. They were not supported by the memory of Greece and Rome (that is to say,
there was no reason for them to seek such support, but not doing so added another element to the inferiority of these Indians
that did not know the Bible nor the Greco-Roman thinkers). How did Waman Puma propose this good
government? In the first place, he structured the historical account according to a constant and coherent
ethical-political critique. He equally criticized the Castilians, the Indians, the Black, the Moors, and the Jews. During
the second half of the sixteeenth century, the zone of Cuzco was without a doubt a multicultural society (as we would say
today). But it was not a multicultural society within the empire, but rather within the colony. Is there a difference?
Multiculturalism is multiculturalism, it does not matter if we argue from an un-incorporated and de-localized
epistemology. As a simple correlation, one can think about the multicultural society of the Peninsula: Christians, Moors,
Jews, and converts that put into movement the three religious categories. On the other hand, in the colonies the pillars were
made from Indians, Castilians, and Africans, especially from the end of the sixteenth century and forward. Furthermore,
categories of mestizaje (racial mixing) and the three basic mixes appeared in the colonies as a result of the three pillars of
the ethno-racial triangle: mestizo/a mulatto/a, and zambo/a (half Amerindian and half African). Waman Pumas political
theory is articulated via two principles: First, the critique of all identifiable human groups in the colonies, according to the
classificatory categories of the moment. Nobody was safe from Waman Pumas critiques. But, what is the criteria that
Waman employs in order to establish his criticism? Christianity. How?asked a student in my third class about Waman
PumaHow can it be decolonial thinking if he embraced Christianity? But he did. Let us reflect upon this. At the end of
the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century, there was no Diderot, nor Rousseau, nor Kant, nor
Spinoza, nor Marx, nor Freud. That is to say, secular criticism did not yet exist. Waman Puma historically and ethically
adopted Christianity. This argument has two levels. One is the historical one. Superficially, Waman Puma would be a liar
since there was no Christianity before the arrival of the Castilians. The other level is epistemic-logical. In this reading,
Christianity in Europe would not be anything but a regional version of certain principles that affect human conduct and that
establish criteria for coexistence, for good government. Waman Pumas argument should be read at this second level and
not at the first. To read at the first level is Eurocentric and grants Western European Christianity (that which expanded to
America) the possession of universal principles below the name of Christianity. In Waman Pumas argument, Christianity is
equivalent to that of the democracy of the pen and the word of the Zapatistas: democracy is not the private property of
Western thought and political theory, but rather one of the principles of coexistence, of good living, that has no owner.
Waman Puma seized upon Christian principles in spite of and against harmful Christians, just as the Zapatistas seize upon
democracy in spite of and against a Mexican government that is complicit with the commercialization of democracy in
Washingtons market. This analogy has a dual function: pedagogically, to familiarize us with Waman Pumas situation of
four and a half centuries ago; and politically and epistemically, to remind us of the continuity and the various
manifestations of decolonial thinking throughout the centuries. Second, once having carried out his critique of all human
groups and also having identified the virtues of all human groups, Waman Puma proposes a good government

composed of righteous individuals, regardless of their identity as Indian, Castilian, Moorish, or Black
African. In other words, the good government is proposed as a space of coexistence and of the
overcoming of colonial difference. The two powerful groupspolitically and demographicallywere without a doubt
the Castilians and the Indians, and it is a logical possibility that Waman Puma does not hide his identification with the
Indians, even though he could have opted to identify himself with the Castilians, assuming that subjectively he could never
be a Castilian even though legally he was. As a result of the geo and bio-political shift that arises from
decolonial thinking and counters the theopolitical shift (de-incorporated and de-localized or, better yet, localized
in the non-place that separates God and its representatives on earth), the starting point of the epistemology is

congruent with decolonial thinking: the starting point of epistemology founds and sustains imperial
reason (theo- and geo-politically).18 Waman Puma constructed the idea of good government within Tawantinsuyu.
Contrary to the Occidental modern utopias that Thomas More initiated a century before, Waman Pumas utopia is not
located in a non-place of time (Occidental modern utopias being settled within the non-space of a secular future), but rather
within the reinscription of a space displaced by the Castilians. To be honest, what Waman Puma proposes is a topia of
border reason and of decolonial thinking. This is border reason because his topia is structured within Tawantinsuyu. As it
is known, Tawantinsuyu approximately means the four sides or corners of the world. For the person that is not familiar
with the diagram of Tawantinsuyu, imagine the diagonals of a square (without the four sides, only the diagonals). The four
spaces formed by the diagonals are its own four spaces, significant spaces within the structure and the social hierarchies.
The center, the Incan period, was occupied by Cuzco, and in the zones and towns of the Incan period, all those that were
organized within Tawantinsuyu occupied the town in question. It is within this schema that Waman Puma situated Phillip III
in the center of Tawantinsuyu, since it was demonstrated by the Pontifical World, and Phillip III occupied the throne as
much in Castile as in Tawantinsuyu. Later, Waman Puma distributed the four spaces to each of the aforementioned groups.
In one he situated the Indians, in another the Castilians, in another the Moors, and in yet another the Africans. As a result of

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Tawantinsuyu being a hierarchical structure, Waman Puma maintained that hierarchy via the distribution of the four spaces
(details are not found here since our objective is to locate the emergence of colonial thinking and not to enter into an
analysis of its organization). However, the good government was, on the one hand, proposed as a space of coexistence with Castile, and on the other hand, as one of co-existence between various communities (or
nations) within Tawantinsuyu. That is to say, trans-national co-existence and inter-cultural co-existence.
Intercultural and not multi-cultural, because in Waman Pumas proposal, Phillip III is not the sovereign of a
Hispanic political structure within Tawantinsuyu, but is rather the sovereign of Tawantinsuyu. Phillip III thus remains unlocated within his memory, tradition, language formation, and political thinking. This political theory of Waman
Puma is a product of critical border thinking, and therefore of decolonial thinking.19 The last, most extensive
section of good government is dedicated to the description of labors and days within Tawantinsuyu. The rhythm
of the seasons, the coexistence in and with the natural world (the sun, moon, earth, fertility, water, runas [e.g., living
beings who, in the West, are described as human beings]) coexist in harmony with good living. This harmony is
significant at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the formation of capitalism was already
demonstrating a disregard for disposable human lives (fundamentally, Indians and Blacks), subjected to the
exploitation of labor, expropriated from their dwellings (the land in which they were), and their dwellings
transformed into land as individual property. It was a moment in which the Europeans, in their economic
projects, did not contemplate the harmony of life and the movement of the seasons, but rather concentrated all
their efforts on the growth of production (gold, silver, coffee, sugar, etc.), no matter who died. The political

theory of Waman Puma opposes European political theory; it is an alternative TO the monarchic regime
and the capitalistic market. The triumph (up until today) of the imperial model relegated the model of
Tawantinsuyu to a world of fantasies of the disoriented and uneducated Indian: an exemplary case of the
colonization of being by means of the colonization of knowledge, to which Waman Puma responds with a
(historically) fundamental project of decolonial thinking.

A2: Identity Politics

Must embrace subaltern epistemologies outside a statist frameworksole focus on identity
politics fails because identities are rooted in eurocentrism
Grosfoguel 5 [Ramon, associate professor in the department of ethnic studies at the university of California at Berkeley, Critical
Globalization Studies, edited by Richard Appelbaum and William Robinson 291]

The perspective articulated here is not a defense of "identity politics." Subaltern identities could serve as an epistemic
point of departure for a radical critique of Eurocentric paradigms and ways of thinking. However, identity politics is not
equivalent to epistemological alterity. The scope of "identity politics" is limited and cannot achieve a radical
transformation of the system and its colonial power matrix. Because most modern identities are a construction of the
coloniality of power in the moderncolonial world, their defense is not as subversive as it might seem at first sight.
Black, Indian, African, or national identities such as Colombian, Kenyan, or French are colonial constructions. Defending
these identities could serve some progressive purposes depending on what is at stake in certain contexts. For example, in
the struggles against an imperialist invasion or antiracist struggles against white supremacy. But such a politics only
addresses the goals of a single group or demands equality within the system rather than developing a radical anticapitalist
struggle against the system. The system of exploitation is a crucial space of intervention that requires broader alliances
along not only racial, gender, and class lines but also among a diversity of oppressed groups around the notion of social
equality. But instead of Eurocentric modernity's limited and formal notion of equality, the idea here is to extend the notion
of equality to every relation of oppression such as racial, class, sexual, or gender. The new universe of meaning or new
imaginary of liberation needs a common language despite the diversity of cultures and forms of oppression. This common
language could be provided by radicalizing the liberatory notions arising from the old colonial pattern of power, such as
freedom (press, religion, and speech), individual liberties or social equality, and linking these to the radical
democratization of the political and economic power hierarchies. Quijano's (2000) proposal for a socialization of power as
opposed to a statist nationalization of production is crucial here. Instead of state socialist or state capitalist projects

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centered in the administration of the state and in hierarchical power structures, the strategy of socialization of power in all
spheres of social existence privileges global and local struggles for collective forms of public authority.

A2: Essentialism
Their critique of essentialism is blind to the colonial differenceneed border thinkingalternatives to
modernity will not come from the modern episteme
Mignolo 2000 [Walter, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke
University Local Histories/Global Designs, 7-9]
If Confucianism offers the possibility of desubalternizing knowledges and expanding the horizon of human knowledge
beyond the academy and beyond the Western concept of knowledge and rationality, this possibility is also open to forms of
knowledge that were hit harder by the colonial tempest, including the knowledge of Amerindians and Native Americans.
Vine Deloria Jr., as intellectual and activist has been insisting (since the 1970s) on the cracks (or the colonial difference)
between Native American knowledge and the structure of power in the hands of Anglo-Americans. Deloria has been
criticized for essentializing the difference by presenting it in dichotomous terms. I do not have the time here to dispel a
form of criticism when it comes from a postmodern leftist position that is just blind to the colonial difference. Of course,
America is not a two-sided struggle between Anglo and Native Americans. The force of the national ideology in scholarship
and, as a consequence, the lack of comparative works (that will place Native Americans in the context of Amerindians in
Latin America, Aborigines in New Zealand and Australia, but also in comparison with Islam and Hinduism) hide the fact
that what really matters is the colonial difference. As Deloria (1978) argues, "world views in collision" have been a fact of
the past five hundred years and they have been in collision in the sixteenth century and today. However, neither of the
world views in collision remained the same and they were not just between Anglos and Native Americans. World views in
collision have been many, at different times around the planet. That is precisely the geohistorical density of the
modern/colonial world system and the diachronic contradictions of its internal (conflicts between empires within the same
world view) and external borders (world views in collision). In chapter 7 I return to this topic by a different route: the future
of a diverse planetary civilization beyond the universalisation of either Western neoliberalism or Western neo-Marxism.
However, I need to state now that my references to Wei-ming and Deloria were not done with the intention of proposing
that Confucianism or Native American religions are alternatives to Protestantism. They were made to suggest, quite to the
contrary, that Protestant ethics was not necessarily an alternative to neither Confucianism or Native American religions
(Deloria, 1999; Churchill 1997), and, above all, to stress one of this book's main arguments. If nation-states are no longer
conceived in their homogeneity, if production of commodity is no longer attached to one country (e.g., think of the many
places involved in the car industry), then we should no longer conceive Confucian or Protestant ethics or Native American
religions as homogeneous systems either. Therefore, the relationships between faith and knowledge, a distinction we owe to
the modern and secular conception of epistemology, needs to be rethought. That is mainly the reason I compared Tu Weiming and Deloria with Weber. Although 1 would enroll myself among the second possibility if I had no other choice. The
good news is that we have other choices, even the possibility of choosing to think in and from the borders, to engage in
border thinking as a future epistemological breakthrough. Tu Wei-ming and Deloria are not interpreting, translating from
the Western hegemonic perspective, or transmitting knowledge from the perspective of area studies I heir analytic and
critical reflections (rather than "religious studies") are engaged in a powerful exercise of border thinking from the
perspective of epistemological subalternity. Alternatives to modern epistemology can hardly come only from modern
(Western) epistemology itself.

No impact our inside/outside claim is crucial to the alternative and new ways of thinking decolonially

Mignolo 2000 [Walter, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University Local
Histories/Global Designs, 338]
Historically, and in the frame of the modern/colonial world system, I hear today assertions equivalent to the logico
metaphysical "there is no outside and inside." It so happens that such an assertion is pronounced by colleagues who are
clearly placing themselves "inside" and, by so doing, being oblivious to the "outside." I have heard, on the other hand,
colleagues (more clearly colleagues in some corner of the Third World) who do believe in the inside/outside distinctions.
Now, one could explain this fact by saying that, it is unfortunate, but they are theoretically behind, underdeveloped, as they
do not know yet that the last discovery in the humanities in the metropolitan research centers is that truly there is no such
thing as inside and outside. It would be nice to have such an explanation, except that it counters the facts. Colleagues in the
Third World asserting vehemently the distinction between inside and outside (which is made in the form of center and

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periphery, or center and margin, or First and Third World) are the ones who are most theoretically sophisticated and
"developed." I also know colleagues in the Third World who will no doubt emphatically assert that there is no inside and
outside. It may be that they are the less theoretically sophisticated and the most intellectually colonized, repeating and
rehearsing dominant propositions coming from an academic avant-garde intelligentsia, and responding to local histories
"interior" to the modern/colonial world. Inside and outside, center and periphery are double metaphors that are more telling
about the loci of enunciation than to the ontology of the world. There are and there aren't inside and outside, center and
periphery. What really is is the saying of agents affirming or denying these oppositions within the coloniality of power, the
subalternization of knowledge, and the colonial difference. The last horizon of border thinking is not only working toward a
critique of colonial categories; it is also working toward redressing the subalternization of knowledges and the coloniality
of power. It also points toward a new way of thinking in which dichotomies can be replaced by the complementarity of
apparently contradictory terms. Border thinking could open up the doors to an other tongue, an other thinking, an other
logic superseding the long history of the modern/colonial world, the coloniality of power, the subalternization of
knowledges and the colonial difference.

A2: Anti-Blackness
Fanonian scholars miss what is essential about the schism of oppression Reductionist methodology has
little philosophical basis and reinforces the status quo
Malonado-Torres (Prof @ Rutgers) 2008
(Nelson, Is assistant professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Against War: Views from the underside of
modernity page 98-99) G.L. //DDI13

Fanon did not believe in methods. He left methods to the botanists and the mathematicians (BSWM 12). For someone
who studied human reality le found them to be of little value. Human reality is incomplete, and, as a result, it forever
escapes the strictures of any one method. Methods are generally useful, but they simply cannot provide
complete explanations of phenomena, at least where human beings are concerned . This is a basic
phenomenological point. One of the more remarkable features of Black Skin, White Masks is the way in
which Fanon. Pursues what Lewis Gordon calls demonstration by failure.^ An example of demonstration by
failure is the way in which Fanon shows shows that psychoanalysis cannot explain the black by
attempting to explain the black psychoanalytically (BSWM 76). Fanon systematically does this by taking

on Freud, Lacan, Hegel, and Sartre. Fanon seems to put forward a sort of proto-deconstructionism. I
would rather argue that it is a particular form of the reduction. Fanon challenges the universality of
dominant theories by testing them against the backdrop of realities marked by systematic
dehumanization. A colonial and racist context represents for Fanon no less than a metaphysical transformation of the
world. The methods used in one part of the world are not necessarily applicable in another. This position
seems to lead to a radical relativism. But Fanon had little patience for relativist games. He was mainly
concerned I about relations of power that distort or pervert the life-world of human communities. And, in
the colonial relation, it is clear that one group of people, a nation, or a group of nations is responsible for the condition of
another people. There is more than a relativist upsurge when Fanon takes on Hegel, Sartre, or Lacan. They are European
thinkers. Europe is the place where the imperial enterprise has been forged. Fanon is not satisfied with only

indieating that what these thinkers say may be valid there in the territory of the colonizer and not
here in the territory of the colonized. He wants to show that what happens here is related to what happens
there, and conversely as well. This conceptualization demands new and more sophisticated theories and critical ventures.

The colonial reality and the racist legacy of Europe appear to Fanon as the greatest crimes and
pathologies of Europe. Dominant European approaches are generally mistaken not only because they do not apply in the
colonies, but also, and more fundamentally, because they cannot even see or register how the very condition of
coloniality reveals another side of themselves. Their methods simply do not appear to be radical enough.
Their criticism leaves intact and sometimes even becomes complicit with configurations of power that
extend the reign of the pathological and the inhuman. This means that cultural or philosophical criticism,
even in the form of skepsis or doubt, is not in itself a progressive force that advances what Levinas calls the
radical reduction of the world of the said. Skepticism itself is ambiguous, sometimes resisting
totalization and opening the path of critique, other times sustaining the status quo. Fanon alerts us to the

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possibility that the pre-original saying can be betrayed not only in the said of culture, legal institutions, and ideology,
but in the discursive formation of critique as well. His critique of European approaches seems to apply a reduction of
seemingly critical and ethical reductions, which appear to be insufficiently critical or ethical.

Fanonian analyzes is slim to none in a race to solve for colonial differences as the Anti-ethical world
cannot produce a logic of the structure of the world that they impose is fallacious
Malonado-Torres (Prof @ Rutgers) 2008(Nelson, Is assistant professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California,
Berkeley. Against War: Views from the underside of modernity page 100-102) G.L //DDI13

Fanon introduces a way of thinking that shows the ethical limitations of dominant forms of critique, For
him, the colonial condition serves as an axis of reflection through which it is possible to examine the ethical limitations of
law, reason, and critique, The ethical reduction takes the form in Fanon's work of what may be termed a de-

colonial reduction, With the term de-colonial reduction I refer to the introduction of coloniality as a
fundamental axis of reflection in the analysis of ideologies and of the critique of ideologies, Since the colonial
condition represents for Fanon one of the insurmountable limits of the human, a condition wherein humanity itself
produces its opposite, the inhuman, it serves as a referent to test the radicalism of ways of thinking and
behaving that aim to give expression to what is most distinctively human, The colonial conditions also appears
in Fanon's writings as a world of anti-human disorder that betrays the ethical meaning of intersubjectively
constituted human reality. Fanon was decisive, "There will be an authentic disalienation only to the
degree to which things, in the most materialistic meaning of the word, will have been restored to their
proper places" (BSWM 11-12, italics mine). Colonialism is a world turned upside down, It represents, in its
intentionality, a radically anti-human, anti-ethical world." Fanon 's main concern is not whether ethics is a nonsense. His project rather consists in analyzing the ways in which ethics is betrayed, and in articulating forms
of critique and practices that aim to make possible and viable the existence of basic ethical relations, the
colonial world. Which includes the imperial project, is the anti-ethical par excellence. It is a world where the
allegedly extraordinary event of anticipating one's own death cannot be achieved, not because the
individual is lost in an anonymous "mass," but simply because death (the death of the slave, or of the
indigenous population for instance) is already part and parcel of ordinary life." In the colonial condition
the human reaches its limits, it represents the point where humanity is made to face inhuman situations as
part of ordinary life. The colonial death-world becomes the ethical limit of human reality." It is a context
in which violence and war are no longer extraordinary, but become instead ordinary features of human
existence, This perverse expression of the conversion of the extraordinary into the ordinary represents a "limit" situation,
or perhaps even a post-limit situation in the sense that the excess of abnormality goes beyond its climax and begets another
reality in which it comes to define the normal. Thinking from the limits or beyond the limits becomes, in this

way, a practice of de-colonial "reduction" through which the colonizing dimensions of practices, ways of
thinking, and critique come to light
One of the tasks of the de-colonial reduction is to show how, at different particular moments, there is a series
of phenomena which cannot be explained except by bringing into light what Walter Mignolo has referred
to as the colonial difference. I have discussed elsewhere different possible meanings of this concept, as well as problems
with some versions of it." Here, with "colonial difference" I refer to the interpretive transformation that
occurs when coloniality is introduced as an axis of reflection in the analysis and evaluation of diverse
cultural forms of life, institutions, or critical discourses. The colonial difference is what is left out by
approaches that ignore their own role in the dynamics of power that sustain an imperial world. The
colonial difference emerges when one interprets or analyzes a problem in terms of how it contributes to or
challenges a reality dominated by colonial and imperial features , It refers to the difference between
traditional dominant accounts that do not take into consideration the Manichean structure of the world and
those that do, It brings to light the image of the world that is left out in the effort to sustain the ideological
justification of an imperial world, The de-colonial reduction leads to the recognition of the colonial
difference, making explicit in the process important epistemological limitations of dominant interpretive
approaches, The recognition of these limitations demands epistemological transformation, This
transformation is only one side of the transgressive praxis needed to effectively oppose the forces that sustain an

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imperial world. The de-colonial reduction makes explicit the challenges posed by the colonial condition to
theories that assume a unified world where humans live and coexist The colonial condition represents for
Fanon a veritable reversal of the world, Due to the modern and racial imperial enterprise the world takes
the form of a divide between white and black, between good and evil, and between master and slave
among similar Manichean hierarchies, With colonialism the world takes the form of a divide be-tween a
master and a slave. Processes of identity formation and basic structures of the life-world take unique forms under the
shadow of this perverted mode of relationality. The paradigm of the relation between master and slave thus
becomes a variable that Fanon introduces to clarify different sorts of phenomena, "Though Sartre's
speculations on the existence of the Other may be correct (to the extent, we must remember, to which Being and
Nothingness describes an alienated consciousness), their application to a black consciousness proves fallacious.
That is because the white man is not only the other but also the master. Whether real or imaginary"
(BSWM I38).

Fanonian scholars reading of the black as the slave is correct the antidote has no ontological bases
Fanon is better deconstructed through a De-Colonialist reduction that rearticulates an Anti-Black world
Malonado-Torres (Prof @ Rutgers) 2008
(Nelson, Is assistant professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Against War: Views from the underside of
modernity page 102-105)G.L //DDI13

Fanon knows that "since the Negro was once a slave" and since his lived existence is marked by an
institutional framework, a social imaginary, and a peculiar economy of desire that locates the black in the
position of the slave. he cannot avoid taking seriously Hegel's account of the dialectic between master and slave, The
condition of the black. however. is hardly a matter of serious consideration for the dominant European
scholar. If one were to follow the premises of Hegel's own thinking, paying attention to the predicament of the black
would entail getting lost in the particular and contingent when the idea is rather to focus on the truly universal. But Fanon
had a different perception of philosophy and of critical thinking. For him "the urgent thing is to
rediscover what is important beneath what is [or appears to be 1 contingent.' ?" Fanon takes the key of his
investigation from what is considered unimportant, for what seems to be also de trop. This approach puts
him at odds with Hegel's ontology, which seeks, in contrast, to find the eternal in the temporal, and the
idea in multiple and varied representations, While Hegel attempts to delineate the eternal figure of Spirit
in time, Fanon takes the opposite road: situated in time he focuses on the ruptures with what presents itself as the universal
or eternal. Employing the de-colonial reduction, Fanon "reduces" the imperial "said" and reveals its
perverse unethical transformations, He does this by showing the insurmountable limitations of Hegelian
ontology in the colonial context in light of a phenomenological investigation into the "lived experience of
the black." To be sure, the epistemological act of recognizing "lived experience" in subjects who, by virtue of a racist
perspective, are considered to lack one is a central element of the de-colonial reduction, In an anti-black
world such acts are not only epistemological but ethical and political as well The turn to lived experience
leads Fanon away from Hegelian ontology:
As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to
experience his being through others, There is of course the moment of "being for others," of which Hegel speaks, but
every ontology is made unattainable in a colonized and civilized society, It would seem that this fact has
not been given sufficient attention by those who have discussed the question. In the Weltanschauung of a
colonized people there is an impurity, a flaw that outlaws any ontological explanation, someone may object that this is
the case with every individual, but such an objection merely conceals a basic problem. Ontology-once it is
finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside - does not permit us to understand the being of the
black man, For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man,
(SSWM IlO. italics mine) If civilization itself had imperial dimensions or were premised in an ontology of
war. This idea would make his argument take more general forms than often thought about, becoming at
the same time a general critique of ontology and a theory about the constitution of the most cherished
ideals of sociality predicated by Western man,
The Fanonian critique of ontology gives expression to a most fascinating reversal: while for Hegel the

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dialectic of master and slave becomes a moment in the development of Spirit and cannot be properly
understood without reference to it, for Fanon, it is precisely the existence of relations of subordination
akin to this dialectic that makes reference to Spirit and subordination to its logic inadequate , For Fanon, the
concrete existence of the master/slave relation transforms the structures of Being and meaning to such an extent
that ontology does not make any sense if it does not change its tune and turn to the description of "lived
existence"-rather than insisting in portraying and revealing the meaning and destiny of Spirit." Nonexistential ontology appears in this light not only inadequate to spell out the specificity of imperial,
colonial, and civilized contexts, but also extremely conservative, if not even oppressive, as it, in its
blindness, tends to mask or hide the significance of the existential tensions and the power relations that
operate in empire and in contexts with imperial traces , It is for this reason that, for Fanon, beyond a "science
of being" we must engage in a science of the relations between being and non-being, describing how the
exclusion from being is performed and how non-beingness is lived or experienced." This "science"
-sociogeny-is deeply connected with a philosophy whose "bracketing" of the universal and attention to the
contingent (in terms of what cannot be assimilated into the totality and also in terms of what is produced as contingent by
the totality) manifests a strong relation with love, Attention to the contingent is a response to the cry of the condemned,
Such attention defines a peculiar attitude, which I will refer to here as the de-colonial attitude, The de-colonial attitude,

different from the natural racist attitude of an anti-black and colonial world and from the theoretical
attitude that often serves to justify it, mobilizes de-colonial theory and critique as well as a
phenomenological investigation characterized by the use of the de-colonial reduction, Fanon's Black Skin,
White Masks can thus be read as a unique contribution to discourses on philosophy, critical theory, and
"reduction."

A2: Cede the Political

Our epistemic focus is key to political engagement

Mignolo 1 [Walter, with L. Elena Delgado and Rolando J. Robero Local Histories and Global Designs: An Interview with Walter
Mignolo Discourse, 22.3, Fall 2000, pp. 733]
Am I diluting the political problems and practices that the theory itself was attempting to address? I do not think so. We
cannot, in my opinion, think of the border as an object of study from a territorial epistemology, not infected by the
border. A dilution would be to think that a different political effectiveness could be achieved by changing the content and
not the terms of the conversation. Changing the content only would, of course, allow for certain victories, say, in
Proposition 127 or other similar social conflicts. This is the level of reform, which of course shall remain open. But my
argument moves, simultaneously, toward a complementary end: that of transformation, of changing the terms, and not only
the content, of the conversation. The political and the ethical are at this point in need of a new epistemology, epistemologies
that come from the borders and from the perspectives of subaltern coloniality. And one final note: the border
epistemologies I amclaiming are not intended to replace the existing ones. It wont happen like that even if we want it to.
Existing macro-narratives are well entrenched. What I amclaiming is the space for an epistemology that comes from the
border and aims toward political and ethical transformations.

Our study of knowledge has practical historical effects. This is a key site for the opening up of practical
space to challenge colonial power
Mignolo 2000 [Walter, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke
University Local Histories/Global Designs, 11-13]
Following the previous configuration of the field of knowledge in Western memory, 1 will use gnoseology as the discourse
about gnosis and I will understand by gnosis knowledge in general, including doxa and episteme. Border gnosis as
knowledge from a subaltern perspective is knowledge conceived from the exterior borders of the modern/colonial world
system, and border gnoseology as a discourse about colonial knowledge is conceived at the conflictive intersection of the
knowledge produced from the perspective of modern colonialisms (rhetoric, philosophy, science) and knowledge produced
from the perspective of colonial modernities in Asia, Africa, and the Americas/Caribbean. Border gnoseology is a critical
reflection on knowledge production from both the interior borders of the modern/colonial world system (imperial conflicts,

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hegemonic languages, directionality of translations, etc.) and its exterior borders (imperial conflicts with cultures being
colonized, as well as the subsequent stages of independence or decolonization). By interior borders I mean, for instance, the
displacement of Spain Irom hegemonic position by England, in the seventeenth century, or the entry of the United States, in
the concert of imperial nations in 1898. By exterior borders I mean the borders between Spain and the Islamic world, along
with the Inca or Aztec people in the sixteenth century, or those between the British and the Indians in the nineteenth
century, or the memories of slavery in the concert of imperial histories. Finally, border gnoseology could be contrasted with
territorial gnoseology or epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge, as we know it today (from Descartes, to Kant, to
Husserl and all its ramifications in analytic philosophy of languages and philosophy of science): a conception and a
reflection on knowledge articulated in concert with the cohesion of national languages and the formation of the nationMale
(see chapter 6). "Gnosticism," said Hans Jonas (1958, 32), was the name for numerous doctrines "within and around
Christianity during its critical first century." I lie emphasis was on knowledge (gnosis) with salvation as the final goal. As
lor the kind of knowledge gnostic knowledge is, Jonas observes that the term by itself is a formal term that doesn't specify
what is to be known or the subjective aspect of possessing knowledge. The difference with the gnostic context can be
located in the concept of reason. As for what the knowledge is about, the associations of the term most familiar to the
classically trained reader point to rational objects, and accordingly to natural reason as the organ for acquiring and
possessing knowledge. In the gnostic context, however, "knowledge" has an emphatically religious or supranatural meaning
and refers to objects which we nowadays should call those o( faith rather than of reason. . . . Gnosis meant pre-eminently
knowledge of God, and from what we have said about the radical transcendence of the deity it follows that "knowledge of
God" is the knowledge of something naturally unknowable and therefore itself not a natural condition. . . . On the one hand
it is closely bound up with revelationary experience, so that reception of the truth either through sacred and secret lore or
through inner illumination replaces rational argument and theory. . . . on the other hand, being concerned with the secrets of
salvation, "knowledge" is not just theoretical information about certain things but is itself, as a modification of the human
condition, charged with performing a function in the bringing about of salvation. Thus gnostic "knowledge" has an
eminently practical object. (Jonas 1958, 34) We are obviously no longer at the beginning of the Christian era and salvation
is not a proper term to define the practicality of knowledge, and neither is its claim to truth. But we need to open up the
space that epistemology took over from gnoseology, and aim it not at God but at the uncertainties of the borders. Our goals
are not salvation but decolonization, and transformations of the rigidity of epistemic and territorial frontiers established and
controlled by the coloniality of power in the process of building the modern/ colonial world system.

A2: Speaking for the Other

Wrong argumentthe un-underlined part of their Alcoff evidence makes clear that the argument only
applies when the locus of enunciation is off our locus of enunciation is clear and squarely within the
Global South
Speaking key to change, retreating undercuts political effectivenessempirically proven
Linda Martn Alcoff (Department of Philosophy at Syracuse University. The Problem of Speaking For Others Cultural Critique
Winter 1991-92, pp. 5-32.) [Gunnarsdottir] This evidence has been gender modified
While the "Charge of Reductionism" response has been popular among academic theorists, what I call the "Retreat" response has been popular
among some sections of the U.S. feminist movement. This response is simply to retreat from all practices of speaking for; it asserts that one can only
know one's own narrow individual experience and one's "own truth" and thus that one can never make claims beyond this. This response is motivated
in part by the desire to recognize difference and different priorities, without organizing these differences into hierarchies.
Now, sometimes I think this is the proper response to the problem of speaking for others, depending on who is making it. We certainly want to
encourage a more receptive listening on the part of the discursively privileged and to discourage presumptuous and oppressive practices of speaking
for. And the desire to retreat sometimes results from the desire to engage in political work but without practicing what might be called discursive
imperialism. But a retreat from speaking for will not result in an increase in receptive listening in all cases; it may result merely in a

retreat into a narcissistic yuppie lifestyle in which a privileged person takes no responsibility for her society whatsoever. She [they]
may even feel justified in exploiting her [their] privileged capacity for personal happiness at the expense of others on the grounds that
she [they] has no alternative. The major problem with such a retreat is that it significantly undercuts the possibility of political
effectivity. There are numerous examples of the practice of speaking for others which have been politically efficacious in advancing
the needs of those spoken for, from Rigoberta Menchu to Edward Said and Steven Biko. Menchu's efforts to speak for the 33 Indian
communities facing genocide in Guatemala have helped to raise money for the revolution and bring pressure against the Guatemalan
and U.S. governments who have committed the massacres in collusion. The point is not that for some speakers the danger of speaking
for others does not arise, but that in some cases certain political effects can be garnered in no other way. Joyce Trebilcot's version of the

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retreat response, which I mentioned at the outset of this essay, raises other issues. She agrees that an absolute prohibition of speaking for would
undermine political effectiveness, and therefore says that she will avoid speaking for others only within her lesbian feminist community. So it might
be argued that the retreat from speaking for others can be maintained without sacrificing political effectivity if it is restricted to particular discursive
spaces. Why might one advocate such a partial retreat? Given that interpretations and meanings are discursive constructions made by embodied
speakers, Trebilcot worries that attempting to persuade or speak for another will cut off that person's ability or willingness to engage in the
constructive act of developing meaning. Since no embodied speaker can produce more than a partial account, and since the process of producing
meaning is necessarily collective, everyone's account within a specified community needs to be encouraged. I agree with a great deal of Trebilcot's
argument. I certainly agree that in some instances speaking for others constitutes a violence and should be stopped. But Trebilcot's position, as well as

a more general retreat position, presumes an ontological configuration of the discursive context that simply does not obtain. In
particular, it assumes that one can retreat into one's discrete location and make claims entirely and singularly within that location that
do not range over others, and therefore that one can disentangle oneself from the implicating networks between one's discursive
practices and others' locations, situations, and practices. In other words, the claim that I can speak only for myself assumes the autonomous
conception of the self in Classical Liberal theory--that I am unconnected to others in my authentic self or that I can achieve an autonomy from others
given certain conditions. But there is no neutral place to stand free and clear in which one's words do not prescriptively affect or mediate the
experience of others, nor is there a way to demarcate decisively a boundary between one's location and all others. Even a complete retreat from

speech is of course not neutral since it allows the continued dominance of current discourses and acts by omission to reenforce their
dominance. As my practices are made possible by events spatially far away from my body so too my own practices make possible or impossible
practices of others. The declaration that I "speak only for myself" has the sole effect of allowing me to avoid responsibility and accountability for my
effects on others; it cannot literally erase those effects.

Even if speech is not liberatorythe act of speech challenge knowledge and imperialist discourse
Linda Martn Alcoff (Department of Philosophy at Syracuse University. The Problem of Speaking For Others Cultural Critique
Winter 1991-92, pp. 5-32.) [Gunnarsdottir]
The final response to the problem of speaking for others that I will consider occurs in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's rich essay "Can
the Subaltern Speak?"14 Spivak rejects a total retreat from speaking for others, and she criticizes the "self-abnegating intellectual" pose
that Foucault and Deleuze adopt when they reject speaking for others on the grounds that their position assumes the oppressed can
transparently represent their own true interests. According to Spivak, Foucault and Deleuze's self-abnegation serves only to conceal
the actual authorizing power of the retreating intellectuals, who in their very retreat help to consolidate a particular conception of
experience (as transparent and self-knowing). Thus, to promote "listening to" as opposed to speaking for essentializes the oppressed as
non-ideologically constructed subjects. But Spivak is also critical of speaking for which engages in dangerous re-presentations. In the
end Spivak prefers a "speaking to," in which the intellectual neither abnegates his or her discursive role nor presumes an authenticity
of the oppressed, but still allows for the possibility that the oppressed will produce a "countersentence" that can then suggest a new
historical narrative. Spivak's arguments show that a simple solution can not be found in for the oppressed or less privileged being able
to speak for themselves, since their speech will not necessarily be either liberatory or reflective of their "true interests", if
such exist. I agree with her on this point but I would emphasize also that ignoring the subaltern's or oppressed person's speech
is, as she herself notes, "to continue the imperialist project."15 Even if the oppressed person's speech is not liberatory in its content, it
remains the case that the very act of speaking itself constitutes a subject that challenges and subverts the opposition between the
knowing agent and the object of knowledge, an opposition which has served as a key player in the reproduction of imperialist modes
of discourse. Thus, the problem with speaking for others exists in the very structure of discursive practice, irrespective of

its content, and subverting the hierarchical rituals of speaking will always have some liberatory effects.

No Way Out: search for dialogue can be continued however speaking for others remains the ONLY
current means for political accountability
Linda Martn Alcoff (Department of Philosophy at Syracuse University. The Problem of Speaking For Others Cultural Critique
Winter 1991-92, pp. 5-32.) [Gunnarsdottir]
I agree, then, that we should strive to create wherever possible the conditions for dialogue and the practice of speaking with and to
rather than speaking for others. Often the possibility of dialogue is left unexplored or inadequately pursued by more privileged
persons. Spaces in which it may seem as if it is impossible to engage in dialogic encounters need to be transformed in order to do so,
such as classrooms, hospitals, workplaces, welfare agencies, universities, institutions for international development and aid, and
governments. It has long been noted that existing communication technologies have the potential to produce these kinds of interaction
even though research and development teams have not found it advantageous under capitalism to do so.

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However, while there is much theoretical and practical work to be done to develop such alternatives, the practice of speaking for
others remains the best option in some existing situations. An absolute retreat weakens political effectivity, is based on a metaphysical
illusion, and often effects only an obscuring of the intellectual's power. There can be no complete or definitive solution to the problem
of speaking for others, but there is a possibility that its dangers can be decreased. The remainder of this paper will try to contribute
toward developing that possibility.

Speaking for others is inevitablewe cannot speak without speaking for others
Lauren Marino (published author in the Malacester Journal of Philosophy, Volume 14, Issue 1, Spring 2005. Speaking for Others)
[Gunnarsdottir]
If the self is located within language games the there is a commonality between those who share language games. This
removes some of the barriers between selves and I do have access to the experience of those with whom I share language
games. Sharing language games means sharing experience. I am able to speak for those who language games I play. There
are some problems with this understanding. Alcoff thinks membership in a group is not precise or determinate. It is unclear
which groups I could belong to and which of those groups I should single out to affiliate myself. More importantly,
membership in a group doesnt necessarily mean an authority to speak for the whole group. However, if we accept that the
self is constituted within language, then those who share language games with me have direct access to my experience in
away that no one can ever have access to a Cartesian mind. We do not need to ask for absolute identity, language and
experience between speakers but just a commonality. Furthermore, Bernstein argues that we cannot speak without

speaking for other people. The speakers location is necessarily a location in relation to other people.
The relationship cannot be removed, and we cannot avoid it. Speaking at all makes speaking for others
inevitable.

***Aff Answers***
Perm Do Both
PERM: No single solutiontesting multiple options is key
Lewis R. Gordon, The Laura Carnell University Professor of Philosophy, Temple University, 4 [Fanon and Development: A
Philosophical Look Africa Development, Vol. XXIX, No. 1, 2004, pp. 71-93] //DDI13
That the context of this discussion is philosophical presents the role of the intellectual. Given the nature of the problems at
hand, it would be folly to presume a single role for intellectuals to take . The Africana intellectual tradition has,
nfor instance, been guided by a healthy tension between concerns of identity and liberationbetween questions of being and
1becoming (cf. Gordon 2000: chapters 14). It is the task of some intellectuals to work out questions of being,

questions
twy
of what and how. And then there are those who focus on why and other questions of
purpose. Some do both . All should consider their work, I here submit, with the following considerations in mind.

Perm Multiple Modernities

Perm: embrace plan in context of alternative modernities and decolonization of knowledgeTheir eitheror is a false dichotomy can seek alternative modernities that arent eurocentric
Grossberg (Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies and Cultural Studies, and Adjunct Distinguished Professor of
American Studies, Anthropology, and Geography at the University of North Carolina) 10
(Lawrence, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, pg. 264) //DDI13
The M/C project, focused on the possibility of radical alterity, seeks to find "an other way of thinking ... [and] talking about
'worlds and knowledges otherwise (Escobar 2007, 179). They too agree that what I have called the alternative modernities
model, in the last instance . . . end[s] up being a reflection of a euro-centered social order, under the assumption that
modernity is now everywhere" (183). There is, however, fundamental conceptual disagreement that separates our projects

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without, I hope, closing off the conversation. They assume that there is no modernity without coloniality. Or, in

slightly different terms, colonialism and the making of the capitalist world system [is] constitutive of
modernity" (183). That is, they equate modernity with euro-modernity, and this guarantees that they see
their project not as looking for other modernities, but, rather for alternatives to modernity . As I have said
previously, I do not disagree that some of the struggles over modernity in the world today are actually struggles against any
moder- nity, propelled by a desire to find alternatives to modernity, and that such struggles have to be supported on their
own terms, but I do not think these are the only two choices . Additionally, I do agree that the possibility of

other modernities, or for that matter, of alternatives to modernity, will require a decolonization of
knowledge itself

Alternative and multiple modernities goodoffers a more nuanced understand than is captured by their
alt
Grossberg (Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies and Cultural Studies, and Adjunct Distinguished Professor of
American Studies, Anthropology, and Geography at the University of North Carolina) 10
(Lawrence, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, pg. 267-8) //DDI13

The question is not when or where modernity belongs, but what it is to belong to modernity . I am not
concerned with the contradictions within modernity, but with the possibilities of contradictions among
modernities. What would it mean to see modernity as multiple, to think that there are always radically
other modernities? It would mean refusing to assume a single narrative of modernity, or even a fractured
linear narrative through which modernity moves, whether smoothly or rupturally, in a series of states. It
is not a matter of variations, however great, around a set of themes, nor a continuing process of the
hybridization of some originary formation. We must "unlearn to think of history as a developmental
process in which that which is possible becomes actual ... to learn to think the present---the now that we
inhabit as we speak---as irreducibly not one" (Chakrabarty 2000, 249). We must ask, with Gilroy (2ooo~ 56-57),
''in what sense does modernity belong to a closed entity, a geo-body' named Europe? " We must wonder
whether C. L. R. James (1989) was right to think that modernity was invented in the "periphery'" of the world system, in the
Caribbean. This is to think "modernity elsewhere" (Gilroy zooo~ 76) and, I might add, "else when"; it is to
offer "an altogether different, a-centered understanding of European history'' (80).

No Impact
Their interpretation of modernity is wrongthe modern is never actual, only virtualmeans their
impacts based on false assumptions
Grossberg (Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies and Cultural Studies, and Adjunct Distinguished Professor of
American Studies, Anthropology, and Geography at the University of North Carolina) 10
(Lawrence, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, pg. 260) //DDI13

The question is neither empirical nor conceptual, but conjunctural and discursive. To theorize the
problematic of the modern requires us to inves- tigate the production of the discourses of the modernwhat are its condi- tions of possibility, its effectivitics, and its dispersions. Or to put it differ- ently, it
involves questions of what might be called conjunctural and epochal ontologies . What are we saying about a
context when we call it modern, or when we deny it such a description? What was it that was brought into existence under
the sign of euro-modernity that is what we refer to as "the modern"? What sort of answer would not simply condemn the
modern to forever becoming euro-modern? I offer a somewhat speculative analysis of fractions of a spatially and
historically dispersed conversation on modernity. What can possibly be signaled by the complexity of the

contexts and claims made about and for modernity? The analysis does not seek to define either an essence
or a simple unity; rather, it points to the virtuality of modern , to a reality that has effects but is never
fully actualized, because it can be actualized in multiple ways .

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No Warrant for all modernity being European or for the chance of alternatives
Grossberg (Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies and Cultural Studies, and Adjunct Distinguished Professor of
American Studies, Anthropology, and Geography at the University of North Carolina) 10
(Lawrence, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, pg. 264) //DDI13
However, there are ambivalences within the project. First, the M/C group is attempting to decenter modernity

from its apparent European origins, proposing instead to adopt "a world perspective in the explanation of
modernity, in lieu of a view of modernity as an intra-European phenomenon" (Escobar 2007, r84). Yet they
continue to identify modernity with Europe, even as they double it: the first modernity begins in 1492
with the Spanish colonization of the Americas, followed by a second (n1ore con1monly rec- ognized)
modernity of northern Europe, which did not replace the former but "overlaps with it. They limit
modernity to Europe, but suggest it is the product of global relations ; yet it is unclear why all modernity
is euro-modernity, and therefore inescapably involved in coloniality. Could one imagine a modernity without
coloniality? If such imagination is not possible, then how is it possible to imagine other elements that are
similarly intimately connected to modernity but without the contamination of euro-modernity? For
exrunple, if it is necessary to give up any notion of moder-nity, why are we not compelled to give up notions of democracy?
VVhy can democracy be reconceived but modernity cannot?

Their notion of colonial difference is inconsistent and ambiguous creates a moving target that we can
never meet AND takes out their alts solvency
Grossberg (Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies and Cultural Studies, and Adjunct Distinguished Professor of
American Studies, Anthropology, and Geography at the University of North Carolina) 10
(Lawrence, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, pg. 265) //DDI13

This key notion of the colonial difference is described in different ways, although it is centrally articulated
as the exteriority of the other. This is, for the various authors, the necessary conclusion of the fact that
their critique of modernity is undertaken from the perspective of coloniality" (Escobar 2007, 188), "from its
underside, from the perspective of the excluded other" (187). Nevertheless, the notion of the colonial difference is
elaborated in a number of different ways. Maldonado-Torres's (1997) notion of the "coloniality of power seems to
suggest that the difference is an ontological "excess." Dussel's (1996; 2000) notion of "transmodernity" suggests a
different kind of modernity itself. But the dominant position seems to be what can be described as an "interior
exteriority," a kind of hybridity, which stands both within and outside of modernity .4 One can imagine
Maldonado-Torres agreeing with Escobar that "In no way should this exteriority be thought of as a pure
outside, untouched by the modern" (2007, 186). But he might be less confident with a move that seems to
me to involve reading that ex- teriority back into a decidedly poststructuralist, or even Hegelian, logic of
negativity: "The notion of exteriority does not entail an ontological outside; it refers to an outside that is
precisely constituted as difference by a hegemonic discourse'' (186). And it is not clear how this can be
reconciled with the further claim that "By appealing from the exteriority in which s/he is lo- cated, the
Other becomes the original source of an ethical discourse vis a vis a hegemonic totality. This interpellation
of the Other comes from outside or beyond the system's institutional and normative frame"

Link Turn Multiple Modernities

Turn: their fixation on euro-modernity ignores multiple modernities, which negates alternatives now
challenging the NorthREJECT their narrow reification euro-modernity that effectively excludes the
wills of real people who want modernity
Grossberg (Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies and Cultural Studies, and Adjunct Distinguished Professor of
American Studies, Anthropology, and Geography at the University of North Carolina) 10
(Lawrence, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, pg. 286-7) //DDI13

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Before ending this discussion of multiple modernities, I want to address one final challenge. One might, confronted with
the claim of other modernities, ask why I call them modern instead of something else, perhaps even alternatives to
modernity. This question deserves a serious answer, although I want to reiterate that I do not think that other modernities
are the only possibilities that are being struggled over. There are certainly alternatives to modernity even in the
broad sense that I am using it, but there are also some possibilities better thought of as modernities. I have
no doubt that at least one reason for this conclusion lies in the "origins" of this investigation, in any effort to find a better
way of understanding the contemporary conjunc- ture of the United States. This led me to a story about struggles over the
"coming American modernity." As happens too often, having "discovered" modernity as the definition of a problem-space, I
discovered that many oth- ers have been addressing the question of (and demand for) modernity in other- both
geographically and historically-conjunctures.
A second reason is tl1at I want to avoid paradoxically reproducing the negative logic of euro-modernity. The

question, are these other possibilities not outside of, or other to, modernity itself?, can too quickly become
a euro- modern negative difference. Perhaps, by thinking about multiple moderni- ties, we can move our
interrogation onto other topologies; the effort to find other ways of thinking relationality is itself a part of
the effort to think beyond euro-modernity, but without the analytic work, it can easily remain an imaginary logic.
But the most important reason is what Gaonkar (2oor, 21) describes as the "rage for modernity" and what Lisa Rofel (1999,
xi) captures, describing her fieldwork conversations: "'Modernity' was something that many people from all
walks of lite felt passionately moved to talk about and debate." Rofel (cited in Deeb 2006, r89) continues: "In

the end, despite its messiness, the attempt to redefine the terms of discourse around being modern was
really an attempt to posit a way of being that is neither West nor East, and that is both 'modern and
'authentic." '38 Of course, I could have chosen to invent another term for other modernities, given the
power of euro- modernity over our imagination of modernity itself, but I want to resist such a temptation
to give in to the power of euro-modernity . We cannot start by denying people's desire to be modern , nor
should we underestimate their ability to imagine the possibility of being modern without following in the
path of the North Atlantic nation-states. Nor can we take for granted that we understand what it is they
are reaching for in this desire.
Gyekye (1997, 263) asserts that modernity "has in fact assumed or rather gained a normative status, in that
all societies in the world without exception aspire to become modern, to exhibit in their social, cultural
and political lives features said to characterize modernity---whatever this notion means or those features
are." He is clearly not suggesting that the whole world is try- ing to become Europe; in fact, he similarly describes a
number of writers
in the Middle Ages (269): "In characterizing themselves and their times as modern, both Arabic and Latin scholars were
expressing their sense of cul- tural difference from tl1e ancients. . . . But not only tl1at: tl1ey must surely have considered
tl1eir own times as advanced (or more advanced) in most, if riot all, spheres of human endeavor." On what ground<> do we
deny such claims or judgments of modernity? Even Lefebvre (I995, r85) acknowledges that the "'modern' is a prestigious
word, a talisman, an open sesame, and it comes with a lifelong guarantee." Admittedly, tl1e relations to discourses of the
modern are often extraordinarily complex and contradictmy. Deeb's research with Shi'ites leads her to conclude: 1'The
concept of modern-ness is used as a value-laden comparison in relation to people's ideas about themselves, others" (2006,
229), and "Incompatible desires come together here -- tile desire to undermine dominant western discourses about being
modern and the desire to be modern (or to be seen as modern)" (233). I want to suggest that at least a part of the

complexity of these discourses is precisely the thinness of our vocabulary --- and understanding --- of
modernity.
Thus, the answer to why I want to think through and with the concept of a multiplicity of modernities is because the
contest over modernity is already being waged, because it has real consequences, and because we need to
seek a new ground, of possibility and hope, and of a new imagination for future ways of being modern .
Cultural studies has always taught that any successful struggle for political transformation has to start where

people are; the choice of where to begin the discourses of change cannot be defined simply by the desires,
or even the politics, of intellectuals . Of course, there is another perspective on such matters that we also have to take
account of: Blaser (2009), for example, has suggested that I am taking people's desire to be modern too literally, and failing

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to consider that their use of the term may be an adaptation to or the equivocation of a demand. That is, might not the
demand for modernity also be the product of the political positioning of such populations? I have no doubt that such
questions need to be raised in specific conjunctural struggles, and for specific actors. I have no doubt that there are, as Deeb
(zoo6, r89) declares, "other stories to be told.''
(186).

No Alt Solvency Fatalism

No alt solvency: their explanation of modern/coloniality locks subjects in with NO ESCAPEat the same
time, theres warrant for their assertions about colonial subjectivity
Grossberg (Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies and Cultural Studies, and Adjunct Distinguished Professor of
American Studies, Anthropology, and Geography at the University of North Carolina) 10
(Lawrence, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, pg. 265-66) //DDI13
This exteriority is, it seems to me, further compromised by the assumption that the other is constituted as a
subject. Thus, the argument moves from coloniality as a complex political relation to the colonial
difference as a matter of subjectivity.5 The colonial difference slides between a space of productive

possibility, a notion of a prior indigenous way of living/subject, and a wounded yet celebrated
identity/subject position occupied by spe- cific people who have been the ''victims" of colonization. On
the one hand , that position offers a vision of a hybridized colonial subject , which is, in its very extremity, the
very inescapability of its violent subordination, and therefore offers a clearer experience---and critique---of modernity from
its extremity. And on the other hand , the position also offers the possibility of alternatives to modernity.

Presumably, the assumption is that the colo- nial subject is more than just the colonized subject, that their
very hybridity points to another space-time of their existence (in another place, another time) that opens the
possibilities not of going back but of imagining new futures.
But the excluded, subalternized other is never outside of modernity, since it is a necessary aspect of
modernity' itself, since modernity cannot be sepa- rated from coloniality . There must be something more,
for the critique of modernity is also ''from the exterior of the modern/colonial world ." There seems to be
no reason why that exteriority which, as quoted above, interpellates the Other, must always and only be
located within modernity/coloniality or as subjectivity . While it is important to recognize that there are vibrant
alternatives to modernity, might such alternatives not also come from other spaces of social possibility and political
imagination? Might they not also open up the possibility of other modernities? Might not the possibility that the
M/C group seeks a ''positive affirmation of the alternative ordering of the world" (Escobar 2 0 0 7 , r88) open up the

multiplicity of modernities as well as alternatives to modernity?

No Link Oversimplified
Their take on modernity oversimplifies modernity is spatially and temporally multiple, making them
wrong on history reject the premise of their critique as flawed
Grossberg (Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies and Cultural Studies, and Adjunct Distinguished Professor of
American Studies, Anthropology, and Geography at the University of North Carolina) 10
(Lawrence, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, pg. 266-67) //DDI13

After all, modernity has always been spatially multiple; it differed in dif-ferent places, even in Europe (and
certainly across colonial empires). Western common sense for the most part identifies modernity with the
Reformation and Protestantism, giving rise to the scientific revolution. But what about Catholic France, where
modernity was primarily articulated in politi- cal terms, and articulated by a Jansenist antipathy to Rome and the Jesuits?
And why not a Catholic Iberian modernity, which maintained a positive attitude toward its own multicultural and
medieval traditions and refused the absolute distinction between religion and science, leaving only a narrow space for euromodern notions of empirical demonstration? (Dmningues 2001). Or what about the various modernities that were

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created in the colo- nized regions of the globe? Are these all simply hybrids of the West?
Modernity has also been temporally multiple. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, euro-modernity
was characterized by an absolutist state linked to colonialism (primarily for financial reasons), which provided
the conditions for the emergence of capitalism (which then reappropriated colonialism for other purposes). In the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, modernity linked capitalism to the emergence of the democratic nation-state
and the rise of the liberal subject, which was also nationalized, racialized, and
economized, as it were. Could there not have been other significant variations? Could there not also be more

temporal variations? After all, if western scholars cannot even agree about in which century modernity
emerged in Europe,' why should we not agree with the Brazilian philosopher Vaz (cited in Domingues 2001),
who distinguishes Greek modernity, the theoretical- rational modernity of the late Middle Ages (connected
perhaps to the commercial revolution of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Europe), and European capitalist
modernity?

No Impact: the critique is too general and the literature hasnt specified the forms of othering and
coloniality with any precision prefer our argumentative precision
Grossberg (Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies and Cultural Studies, and Adjunct Distinguished Professor of
American Studies, Anthropology, and Geography at the University of North Carolina) 10
(Lawrence, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, pg. 264-65) //DDI13
The second ambivalence involves the space within which the challenge to euro-modernity is located: "it is impossible to
think about transcending or overcoming modernity without approaching it from the perspective of the colonial difference"
(Escobar 2007, 186). The group advocates a "border thinking" that stands opposed to (or at least is cognizant

of the limits of) the "various eurocentric critiques of euro-centrism," "the modern critiques of
modernity," including deconstruction, postmodern theory, and much of postcolonial theory. Their particular
framing of "border thinking" advocates thinking about and from an alterity that is always an exteriority. This is the
colonial difference as a privileged epistemological and political space" that takes place at the exterior
borders of the modern/colonial system (185). This is crucial work, although I am not sure if the group has
yet adequately specified the forms of coloniality and othering: in what ways, for example, is their analysis
specific to Latin America, and why? But this is certainly an ongoing project.

No Link A2: Your Theorist is Eurocentric

NO LINK: cant be held to the assumptions of our authorsour citations are rearticulations that links
them to new political and social contexts which generate new epistemologies.
Homi Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language, and the Director of the
Humanities Center at Harvard University, 94 [The Location of Culture, p. 18-28] //DDI13

The temporality of negotiation or translation, as I have sketched it, has two main advantages. First , it
acknowledges the historical connectedness between the subject and object of critique so that there can be
no simplistic, essentialist opposition between ideological miscognition and revolutionary truth . The
progressive reading is crucially determined by the adversarial or agonistic situation itself; it is effective because it uses the
subversive, messy mask of camouflage and does not come like a pure avenging angel speaking the truth of
a radical historicity and pure oppositionality. If one is aware of this heterogeneous emergence (not origin) of radical
critique, then - and this is my second point - the function of theory within the political process becomes
double-edged. It makes us aware that our political referents and priorities - the people, the community,
class struggle, anti-racism, gender difference, the assertion of an anti-imperialist, black or third
perspective - are not there in some primordial, naturalistic sense . Nor do they reflect a unitary or
homogeneous political object. They make sense as they come to be constructed in the discourses of

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feminism or Marxism or the Third Cinema or whatever, whose objects of priority - class or sexuality or 'the new
ethnicity' - are always in historical and philosophical tension, or cross-reference with other objectives .
Indeed, the whole history of socialist thought which seeks to 'make it new and better' seems to be a different process of articulating priorities whose
political objects can be recalcitrant and contradictory. Within contemporary Marxism, for example, witness the continual tension between the English,
humanist, labourist faction and the 'theoreticist', structuralist, new left tendencies. Within feminism, there is again a marked difference of emphasis
between the psychoanalytic/semiotic tradition and the Marxist articulation of gender and class through a theory of cultural and ideological interpellation. I
have presented these differences in broad brush-strokes, often using the language of polemic, to suggest that each position is always a process of
translation and transference of meaning. Each objective is constructed on the trace of that perspective that it puts under erasure; each political object is
determined in relation to the other, and displaced in that critical act. Too often these theoretical issues are peremptorily transposed into organizational
terms and represented as sectarianism. I am suggesting that such contradictions and conflicts, which often thwart political intentions and make the question
of commitment complex and difficult, are rooted in the process of translation and displacement in which the object of politics is inscribed. The effect is not
stasis or a sapping of the will. It is, on the contrary, the spur of the negotiation of socialist democratic politics and policies which demand that questions of
organization are theorized and socialist theory is 'organized', because there is no given community or body of the people whose inherent, radical historicity
emits the right signs.

This emphasis on the representation of the political, on the construction of discourse, is the radical
contribution of the translation of theory. Its conceptual vigilance never allows a simple identity between
the political objective and its means of representation. This emphasis on the necessity of heterogeneity and the
double inscription of the political objective is not merely the repetition of a general truth about discourse introduced into
the political field. Denying an essentialist logic and a mimetic referent to political representation is a strong, principled
argument against political separatism of any colour, and cuts through the moralism that usually accompanies such claims.
There is literally, and figuratively, no space for the unitary or organic political objective which would
offend against the sense of a socialist community of interest and articulation.

NO LINK: The redeployment of theory is not epistemically mimeticwe cant be held to all of our
authors political commitments
Homi Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language, and the Director of the
Humanities Center at Harvard University, 94 [The Location of Culture, p. 18-28] //DDI13
I have chosen to demonstrate the importance of the space of writing, and the problematic of address, at the very heart of the
liberal tradition because it is here that the myth of the 'transparency' of the human agent and the reasonableness of political
action is most forcefully asserted. Despite the more radical political alternatives of the right and the left, the popular,
common-sense view of the place of the individual in relation to the social is still substantially thought and lived in ethical
terms moulded by liberal beliefs. What the attention to rhetoric and writing reveals is the discursive ambivalence

that makes 'the political' possible. From such a perspective, the problematic of political judgement cannot
be represented as an epistemological problem of appearance and reality or theory and practice or word
and thing. Nor can it be represented as a dialectical problem or a symptomatic contradiction constitutive
of the materiality of the 'real'. On the contrary, we are made excruciatingly aware of the ambivalent juxtaposition, the
dangerous interstitial relation of the factual and the projective, and, beyond that, of the crucial function of the textual and
the rhetorical. It is those vicissitudes of the movement of the signifier, in the fixing of the factual and the
closure of the real, that ensure the efficacy of stategic thinking in the discourses of Realpolitik . It is this toand-fro, this fort/da of the symbolic process of political negotiation, that constitutes a politics of address . Its
importance goes beyond the unsettling of the essentialism or logocentricism of a received political tradition, in the name of
an abstract free play of the signifier.

A critical discourse does not yield a new political object, or aim, or knowledge, which is simply a mimetic
reflection of an a priori political principle or theoretical commitment. We should not demand of it a pure
teleology of analysis whereby the prior principle is simply augmented, its rationality smoothly developed ,
its identity as socialist or materialist (as opposed to neo-imperialist or humanist) consistently confirmed in each
oppositional stage of the argument. Such identikit political idealism may be the gesture of great individual

fervour, but it lacks the deeper, if dangerous , sense of what is entailed by the passage of history in
theoretical discourse. The language of critique is effective not because it keeps forever separate the terms of the master
and the slave, the mercantilist and the Marxist, but to the extent to which it overcomes the given grounds of opposition and

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opens up a space of translation: a place of hybridity, figuratively speaking, where the construction of a political object that
is new, neither the one nor the other, properly alienates our political expectations, and changes, as it must, the very forms of
our recognition of the moment of politics. The challenge lies in conceiving of the time of political action and understanding
as opening up a space that can accept and regulate the differential structure of the moment of intervention without rushing
to produce a unity of the social antagonism or contradiction. This is a sign that history is happening - within the pages of
theory, within the systems and structures we construct to figure the passage of the historical.
When I talk of negotiation rather than negation, it is to convey a temporality that makes it possible to conceive of the
articulation of antagonistic or contradictory elements: a dialectic without the emergence of a teleological or transcendent
History, and beyond the prescriptive form of symptomatic reading where the nervous tics on the surface of ideology reveal
the 'real materialist contradiction' that History embodies. In such a discursive temporality, the event of theory becomes

the negotiation of contradictory and antagonistic instances that open up hybrid sites and objectives of
struggle, and destroy those negative polarities between knowledge and its objects, and between theory and
practical-political reason. If I have argued against a primordial and previsionary division of right or left, progressive or
reactionary, it has been Only to stress the fully historical and discursive diffirance between them. I would not like my
notion of negotiation to be confused with some syndicalist sense of reformism because that is not the political level that is
being explored here. By negotiation I attempt to draw attention to the structure of iteration which informs political
movements that attempt to articulate antagonistic and oppositional elements without the redemptive rationality of sublation
or transcendence.

Speaking For Others Turn

Speaking for others is wrongtheir privileged social location makes any claim to political empowerment
suspectits an act of commodification and colonial domination, which turns the K
Linda Martn Alcoff (Department of Philosophy at Syracuse University. The Problem of Speaking For Others Cultural Critique
Winter 1991-92, pp. 5-32.)
Feminist discourse is not the only site in which the problem of speaking for others has been acknowledged and addressed.
In anthropology there is similar discussion about whether it is possible to speak for others either adequately or
justifiably. Trinh T. Minh-ha explains the grounds for skepticism when she says that anthropology is "mainly a
conversation of `us' with `us' about `them,' of the white man with the white man about the primitive-nature man...in
which `them' is silenced. `Them' always stands on the other side of the hill, naked and speechless...`them' is only
admitted among `us', the discussing subjects, when accompanied or introduced by an `us'..."4 Given this
analysis, even ethnographies written by progressive anthropologists are a priori regressive because of the structural features
of anthropological discursive practice.
The recognition that there is a problem in speaking for others has followed from the widespread acceptance of two claims.
First, there has been a growing awareness that where one speaks from affects both the meaning and truth of what
one says, and thus that one cannot assume an ability to transcend her location. In other words, a speaker's location
(which I take here to refer to her social location or social identity) has an epistemically significant impact on that
speaker's claims, and can serve either to authorize or dis-authorize one's speech. The creation of Women's
Studies and African American Studies departments were founded on this very belief: that both the study of and the advocacy for the
oppressed must come to be done principally by the oppressed themselves, and that we must finally acknowledge that systematic
divergences in social location between speakers and those spoken for will have a significant effect on the content of what is said. The
unspoken premise here is simply that a speaker's location is epistemically salient. I shall explore this issue further in the next section. The

second claim holds that not only is location epistemically salient, but certain privileged locations are discursively
dangerous.5 In particular, the practice of privileged persons speaking for or on behalf of less privileged
persons has actually resulted (in many cases) in increasing or reenforcing the oppression of the group
spoken for. This was part of the argument made against Anne Cameron's speaking for Native women: Cameron's
intentions were never in question, but the effects of her writing were argued to be harmful to the needs of Native authors
because it is Cameron rather than they who will be listened to and whose books will be bought by readers interested in
Native women. Persons from dominant groups who speak for others are often treated as authenticating presences that

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confer legitimacy and credibility on the demands of subjugated speakers; such speaking for others does nothing to
disrupt the discursive hierarchies that operate in public spaces. For this reason, the work of privileged authors
who speak on behalf of the oppressed is becoming increasingly criticized by members of those oppressed groups
themselves.6 As social theorists, we are authorized by virtue of our academic positions to develop theories that express and
encompass the ideas, needs, and goals of others. However, we must begin to ask ourselves whether this is ever a
legitimate authority, and if so, what are the criteria for legitimacy? In particular, is it ever valid to speak for
others who are unlike me or who are less privileged than me? We might try to delimit this problem as only
arising when a more privileged person speaks for a less privileged one. In this case, we might say that I should only

speak for groups of which I am a member. But this does not tell us how groups themselves should be
delimited. For example, can a white woman speak for all women simply by virtue of being a woman? If not, how narrowly should we
draw the categories? The complexity and multiplicity of group identifications could result in "communities" composed of single
individuals. Moreover, the concept of groups assumes specious notions about clear-cut boundaries and "pure" identities. I am a
Panamanian-American and a person of mixed ethnicity and race: half white/Angla and half Panamanian mestiza. The criterion of group
identity leaves many unanswered questions for a person such as myself, since I have membership in many conflicting groups but my
membership in all of them is problematic. Group identities and boundaries are ambiguous and permeable, and decisions about
demarcating identity are always partly arbitrary. Another problem concerns how specific an identity needs to be to confer epistemic
authority. Reflection on such problems quickly reveals that no easy solution to the problem of speaking for others can be found by simply
restricting the practice to speaking for groups of which one is a member.

Though well intentioned, their discursive act reinscribes the hierarchy of civilizations and reinforces
racist, imperialist conceptions of Latin Americamust reject the K on face
Linda Martn Alcoff (Department of Philosophy at Syracuse University. The Problem of Speaking For Others Cultural Critique
Winter 1991-92, pp. 5-32.)
(1) The impetus to speak must be carefully analyzed and, in many cases (certainly for academics!), fought
against. This may seem an odd way to begin discussing how to speak for, but the point is that the impetus to always be
the speaker and to speak in all situations must be seen for what it is: a desire for mastery and domination. If
one's immediate impulse is to teach rather than listen to a less-privileged speaker, one should resist that impulse long

enough to interrogate it carefully. Some of us have been taught that by right of having the dominant gender, class, race, letters
after our name, or some other criterion, we are more likely to have the truth. Others have been taught the opposite and will speak
haltingly, with apologies, if they speak at all. 16 At the same time, we have to acknowledge that the very decision to "move

over"
or retreat can occur only from a position of privilege. Those who are not in a position of speaking at all
cannot retreat from an action they do not employ. Moreover, making the decision for oneself whether or not to retreat
is an extension or application of privilege, not an abdication of it. Still, it is sometimes called for. (2) We must also
interrogate the bearing of our location and context on what it is we are saying, and this should be an explicit part of
every serious discursive practice we engage in. Constructing hypotheses about the possible connections between our
location and our words is one way to begin. This procedure would be most successful if engaged in collectively with others,
by which aspects of our location less obvious to us might be revealed.17One deformed way in which this is too often
carried out is when speakers offer up in the spirit of "honesty" autobiographical information about
themselves, usually at the beginning of their discourse as a kind of disclaimer. This is meant to acknowledge

their own understanding that they are speaking from a specified, embodied location without pretense to a transcendental truth.
But as Maria Lugones and others have forcefully argued, such an act serves no good end when it is used as a disclaimer against one's
ignorance or errors and is made without critical interrogation of the bearing of such an autobiography on what is about to be said. It
leaves for the listeners all the real work that needs to be done. For example, if a middle class white man were to begin a speech by
sharing with us this autobiographical information and then using it as a kind of apologetics for any limitations of his speech, this would
leave to those of us in the audience who do not share his social location all the work of translating his terms into our own, apprising the
applicability of his analysis to our diverse situation, and determining the substantive relevance of his location on his claims. This is
simply what less-privileged persons have always had to do for ourselves when reading the history of philosophy, literature, etc., which
makes the task of appropriating these discourses more difficult and time-consuming (and alienation more likely to result). Simple
unanalyzed disclaimers do not improve on this familiar situation and may even make it worse to the extent that by offering

such information the speaker may feel even more authorized to speak and be accorded more authority by his
peers. (3) Speaking should always carry with it an accountability and responsibility for what one says. To whom one is

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accountable is a political/epistemological choice contestable, contingent and, as Donna Haraway says, constructed through
the process of discursive action. What this entails in practice is a serious commitment to remain open to criticism and to
attempt actively, attentively, and sensitively to "hear" the criticism (understand it). A quick impulse to reject criticism must
make one wary. (4) Here is my central point. In order to evaluate attempts to speak for others in particular
instances, we need to analyze the probable or actual effects of the words on the discursive and material
context. One cannot simply look at the location of the speaker or her credentials to speak; nor can one look merely at the
propositional content of the speech; one must also look at where the speech goes and what it does there. Looking merely at
the content of a set of claims without looking at their effects cannot produce an adequate or even meaningful evaluation of
it, and this is partly because the notion of a content separate from effects does not hold up. The content of the claim, or its
meaning, emerges in interaction between words and hearers within a very specific historical situation. Given this, we have
to pay careful attention to the discursive arrangement in order to understand the full meaning of any given discursive event.
For example, in a situation where a well-meaning First world person is speaking for a person or group in

the Third world, the very discursive arrangement may reinscribe the "hierarchy of civilizations " view
where the U. S. lands squarely at the top. This effect occurs because the speaker is positioned as authoritative
and empowered, as the knowledgeable subject, while the group in the Third World is reduced, merely
because of the structure of the speaking practice, to an object and victim that must be championed from
afar. Though the speaker may be trying to materially improve the situation of some lesser-privileged
group, one of the effects of her discourse is to reenforce racist, imperialist conceptions and perhaps also
to further silence the lesser-privileged group's own ability to speak and be heard.18 This shows us why
it is so important to reconceptualize discourse, as Foucault recommends, as an event, which includes speaker,
words, hearers, location, language, and so on.
All such evaluations produced in this way will be of necessity indexed. That is, they will obtain for a very specific location
and cannot be taken as universal. This simply follows from the fact that the evaluations will be based on the specific
elements of historical discursive context, location of speakers and hearers, and so forth. When any of these elements is
changed, a new evaluation is called for.

Speaking For Others Turn Ext.

Speaking from a position of privilege props up power relationsthe speaker relies on the assumption
that less privileged cannot speak for them selves
Nontsasa Nako (Possessing the voice of the other: African women and the Crisis of Representation in Alice Walkers possessing
Secret of Joy Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies, 2001)
In her essay, The Problem of Speaking for Others, Linda Alcoff identifies two widely accepted claims relating to
speaking for others (1994). The first one concerns the relationship between location and speech; that the
position from which one speaks affects the meaning of his or her speech. Therefore where one speaks from
has an epistemically significant impact on that speakers claim and can serve either to authorize or disauthorize ones
speech(Alcoff 1994, 287). This is perhaps the reason why most critics tend to leave their identities and locations visible.
One example is Chandra Mohanty in her introduction to a volume of essays by Third World women, where she writes: I
[also] write from my own particular political, historical, and intellectual location as a third world feminist trained in the
U.S., interested in questions of culture, knowledge production, and activism in an international context (1991, 3).Whether
such acts of self-identification are always possible is debatable, as it is now commonly understood that identities are
fluid and always shifting. But it is clear that such acts are necessary, because for instance, in Mohantys case, by

foregrounding her position within the category Third World women she ensures that the meaning of
what she says is not separated from the conditions which produced it. She also acknowledges the difference
within Third World women, and this anticipates her definition of Third World women as imagined communities of women
with divergent histories and social locations(Mohanty 1991, 4).The second claim that Alcoff identifies is that power

relations make it dangerous for a privileged person to speak for the less privileged because that often
reinforces the oppression of the latter since the privileged person is more likely to be listened to. And
when a privileged person speaks for the less privileged, she is assuming either that the other cannot do

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so or she can confer legitimacy on their position. And such acts, do nothing to disrupt the discursive
hierarchies that operate in public spaces (Ibid).
Speaking for others oppresses themwe must stop the impulse to speak to allow the organic intellectual
to rise up
Lauren Marino (published author in the Malacester Journal of Philosophy, Volume 14, Issue 1, Spring 2005. Speaking for Others)
What then is the solution? I agree with bell hooks that the oppressed must celebrate their position on the margins . The
oppressed should not try to move into the center but appreciate their counterculture. The oppressed must produce

intellectuals so that the dominated can speak to the dominating. The idea goes back to Antonio Gramscis
concept of the organic intellectual.7 The elites are indoctrinated in the ruling ideology and have an investment in the current
order. No matter how progressive their politics may be, the elite will always be the elite . Their investment in the
current social order precludes offers of true systemic change. Gramsci writes of the need for the working class to develop its own
intellectuals who are organically tied to their class. This argument is similar to hooks argument. The margin must produce
organic intellectuals. It might be thought that these organic intellectuals should translate between language games. But as hooks
points out, using the oppressors language is not adequate because it cannot articulate the experience of the oppressed. Yet, it is the
only language game the oppressing can play. Organic intellectuals affect the center from the margins if they are able to incorporate
multiple voices in the texts they create. The goal of the organic intellectual according to hooks is to identify the spaces where we
begin a process of revision to create a counter-ideology.8 Hooks relates this agency to language. Language is also a place of
struggle.9 The counterculture can produce a counter-language , which is able to produce a new language to mediate
between the margins and the center. Necessarily the new game must include portions of both old language games or no one will
understand it. It must use old understandings to create new meanings. These counter-languages can function as the intermediary
language games that the oppressed and the elites can be initiated simultaneously. A new language game must be created. A
good example of this is Martin Luther Kings I Have a Dream speech. He used concepts of freedom and democracy familiar to the
center to explain the experience of the oppressed within in the mainstream language game, as well as created new metaphors and
linguistic form, i.e. the preachers sermon, to bring the voice of the oppressed and the oppressors into a realm of communication. (bell
hooks uses the preachers sermon form in her refrain language is also a place of struggle).10 One famous metaphor is freedom as a
bounced check to African Americans. This created a new understanding of the situation. It worked between the language of
oppression understood by African Americans and the centers understanding of freedom and the promises of democracy. King was
able to include multiple voices, building a bridge between the margin and the center. The conclusion of hooks is that the margin can
be more than a place of oppression and alienation. It can be a site of radical possibility, a space of resistance, that is not open to
those in the center. It is the space to produce counter-hegemonic culture that the organic intellectual is looking for. The oppressed
can retell their story, and if we accept Rortys argument that the self is contingent, the oppressed create themselves in the
process. To speak for the oppressed is to silence them. Moreover, in their absence of voice, we define them. We can
define them in many ways, but they will always be a they and not an us. They will be the other. We must have faith
in the margins to produce new language games to communicate with us.

A retreat from the practice of speaking for others allows for receptive listening without sacrificing
political effectively
Linda Martn Alcoff (Department of Philosophy at Syracuse University. The Problem of Speaking For Others Cultural Critique
Winter 1991-92, pp. 5-32.)
First I want to consider the argument that the very formulation of the problem with speaking for others involves a
retrograde, metaphysically insupportable essentialism that assumes one can read off the truth and meaning of what one says
straight from the discursive context. Let's call this response the "Charge of Reductionism", because it argues that a sort of
reductionist theory of justification (or evaluation) is entailed by premises (1) and (2). Such a reductionist theory might, for
example, reduce evaluation to a political assessment of the speaker's location where that location is seen as an
insurmountable essence that fixes one, as if one's feet are superglued to a spot on the sidewalk. For instance, after I
vehemently defended Barbara Christian's article, "The Race for Theory," a male friend who had a different evaluation of the
piece couldn't help raising the possibility of whether a sort of apologetics structured my response, motivated by a desire to
valorize African American writing against all odds. His question in effect raised the issue of the reductionist/essentialist

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theory of justification I just described. I, too, would reject reductionist theories of justification and essentialist accounts of
what it means to have a location. To say that location bears on meaning and truth is not the same as saying that location
determines meaning and truth. And location is not a fixed essence absolutely authorizing one's speech in the way that God's
favor absolutely authorized the speech of Moses. Location and positionality should not be conceived as one-dimensional or
static, but as multiple and with varying degrees of mobility.13 What it means, then, to speak from or within a group
and/or a location is immensely complex. To the extent that location is not a fixed essence, and to the extent that
there is an uneasy, underdetermined, and contested relationship between location on the one hand and meaning and truth on
the other, we cannot reduce evaluation of meaning and truth to a simple identification of the speaker's location. Neither
Premise (1) nor Premise (2) entail reductionism or essentialism. They argue for the relevance of location, not its singular
power of determination, and they are non-committal on how to construe the metaphysics of location. While the "Charge of
Reductionism" response has been popular among academic theorists, what I call the "Retreat" response has been
popular among some sections of the U.S. feminist movement. This response is simply to retreat from all practices of

speaking for; it asserts that one can only know one's own narrow individual experience and one's "own
truth" and thus that one can never make claims beyond this. This response is motivated in part by the desire to
recognize difference and different priorities, without organizing these differences into hierarchies.Now, sometimes I think
this is the proper response to the problem of speaking for others, depending on who is making it. We certainly

want to encourage a more receptive listening on the part of the discursively privileged and to
discourage presumptuous and oppressive practices of speaking for. And the desire to retreat sometimes results
from the desire to engage in political work but without practicing what might be called discursive imperialism. But a retreat
from speaking for will not result in an increase in receptive listening in all cases; it may result merely in a retreat into a
narcissistic yuppie lifestyle in which a privileged person takes no responsibility for her society whatsoever. She may even
feel justified in exploiting her privileged capacity for personal happiness at the expense of others on the grounds that she
has no alternative. *The major problem with such a retreat is that it significantly undercuts the possibility of political
effectivity. There are numerous examples of the practice of speaking for others which have been politically efficacious in
advancing the needs of those spoken for, from Rigoberta Menchu to Edward Said and Steven Biko. Menchu's efforts to
speak for the 33 Indian communities facing genocide in Guatemala have helped to raise money for the revolution and bring
pressure against the Guatemalan and U.S. governments who have committed the massacres in collusion. The point is not
that for some speakers the danger of speaking for others does not arise, but that in some cases certain political effects can be
garnered in no other way. Joyce Trebilcot's version of the retreat response, which I mentioned at the outset of this essay,
raises other issues. She agrees that an absolute prohibition of speaking for would undermine political effectiveness, and
therefore says that she will avoid speaking for others only within her lesbian feminist community. So it might be argued that

the retreat from speaking for others can be maintained without sacrificing political effectivity if it is
restricted to particular discursive spaces. Why might one advocate such a partial retreat? Given that interpretations
and meanings are discursive constructions made by embodied speakers, Trebilcot worries that attempting to persuade
or speak for another will cut off that person's ability or willingness to engage in the constructive act of
developing meaning. Since no embodied speaker can produce more than a partial account, and since
the process of producing meaning is necessarily collective, everyone's account within a specified
community needs to be encouraged.

Speaking for Others Turn A2: Impact Turns

Speaking for others is a tautologythe assertion that the oppressed have no voice makes that a reality
when the privileged constantly speak for them
Jeanne Perreault (Professor of English at the University of Calgary, Chain Gang Narratives And The Politics Of Speaking For
Biography 24.1 (2001) 152-171, Biographical Research Center) [Gunnarsdottir]
The problem of "speaking for" has become a problem since the spoken for have begun, publicly, to examine the
unconscious or unspoken assumptions of superior knowledge, insight, and solutions of well-meaning speakers for. The
assumption of the speakers for is that the oppressed have no voice, and thus intervention is required.
This belief is a kind of tautology: to be oppressed is to have no voice / to have no voice is to be

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oppressed. The figuring of oppressed peoples as without voice is no longer accurate, however, if it ever
was. We understand, as Canadian Mtis writer Emma LaRocque says, that the issue is not of speaking, but of being heard
(xv). Some of the earliest challenges to speaking for came from African American feminists like Audre
Lorde and bell hooks in the 1970s and 1980s. They raised an impassioned double assertion: that when white feminists

made general references to "women," they were not speaking about them; and that no one could speak
for them. When those understood to be the disenfranchised or marginalized challenged those understood to have greater
privilege to look to their own histories and identities, the guilt for having socially designated privilege was at least as
pronounced as the fruitful examinations of responsibility inhering to their own subject positions.

Minority narratives establish victim politicsdepictions of the minority struggle construct images of
minorities as helpless victims
Jodi Dean (Editor, Cultural Studies and Political Theory. Lauren Berlant, The Subject of true feeling: pain privacy, and politics
2000) [Gunnarsdottir]
The central concern of this essay is to address the place of painful feeling in the making of political worlds. In this I affiliate
with Wendy Brown's concern about the overvaluation of the wound in the rhetoric of contemporary U.S. identity politics.
Brown argues that the identification of minority identity with a wound-a conventional story about the
particular and particularizing injuries caused by domination-must lead to the wound becoming fetishized evidence of
identity, which thereby awards monumentality and value to the very negativity that would also be
overcome. As a result, minority struggle can get stuck in a groove of self-repetition and habituated
resentment while from the outside it would appear vulnerable to the charge of "victim politics." In my
view, however, what Brown locates in minority discourse generally has a longer: more specific, and far more privileged
genealogy than she suggests. In particular, I would like to connect it to something I call national sentimetality, a liberal
rhetoric of promise history which vows that a nation can best be built across fields of social difference through channels of
affective identification and empathy

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