Of postcolonial critique, replicants

and turf wars in Latin American

cultural studies
JEFF BROWITT
Mabel Morana, Enrique Dussel and Carlos Jauregui (eds)
Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate
Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2008
640 pp ISBN 0 8223 4169 7 (pb) US$34.95
Colonialityat Large is a multifaceteddebate onthe utilityof postcolonial theory
and its critical apparatus for Latin America, especially the need to adjust
historical perspectives and conceptual categories to acknowledge the particu-
larities of that floating signifier, Latin America, and its much earlier processes
of colonization and decolonization. The editors wish to draw attention to
the fact that colonial logic, which went hand in handwith European expansion
and capitalist-industrial development, is still alive and well, both as real
material process and as unconscious sedimented ideology underpinning
political and cultural imaginaries. The books ideal reader is the Latin
Americanist concernedwith the complex relationships between culture, politics
and history in the Americas, but non-Latin Americanists can profit from
its debates since many of the critical-political conundrums of Latin American
studies overlap with concerns in other non-metropolitan societies: which
position to take on strong assertions of ethnic and cultural identity within
the encompassing nation-state; the increasingly fraught relationship between
nation-states and globalization; the global flows of knowledge, including
intellectual knowledge; the enduring issues of class, power, exploitation (and
their genealogy and particular, localized workings); the relationship between
the intellectual and the subaltern for whom the former proposes to speak; and
the appropriateness of key terminology: postcolonialism, coloniality, imperi-
alism, capitalism, Marxism, globalization, hegemony, difference, Occidental-
ism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, subalternity, postmodernism and so
forth. The terms and their genealogy and utility should be familiar to
postcolonial scholars anywhere. In addition, and more specific to Latin
America, Coloniality at Large is a meta-discursive intervention on issues such
as the legitimacy of US academic Latin Americanism, the geopolitics of
knowledge and the politics of location. For this reviewer, these issues remain
as unresolved as ever.
ISSN 1368-8790 print/ISSN 1466-1888 online/09/0202556 #2009 Jeff Browitt
DOI: 10.1080/13688790902905791
Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 255260, 2009
Each essay in Coloniality at Large engages with theory while reflecting
on specific texts or ethnographic case studies covering Mexico, Ecuador,
Guatemala, Brazil, the Andes, and the Caribbean. It is impossible to review
every essay, but some detail is obligatory. Part One is perhaps the most satisfying
of the whole collection and begins chronologically with the early colonial
period, especially of the sixteenth century, and two readings by Gordon
Brotherston and Jose Rabasa of the Aztec codices. Through critical readings of
the Mexicanus Codex and the Aztec Sun Stone*an embodiment of American
cosmogony which has resisted repeated attempts at intellectual colonization
(p 24)*Gordon Brotherston demonstrates how colonizing Europe was
challenged intellectually in America (p 42) by a more advanced indigenous
appreciation of calendrics, which reveals a sophisticated, transculturated native
critique of Christianity. Jose Rabasagives a similarly critical semiotic reading of
sixteenth-century, early-conquest codices in the form of pictographs, high-
lighting howthe prejudice against non-alphabetical, indigenous forms of iconic
writing obscures a complex indigenous appreciation of their conquerors
undetected by the Spaniards, who were only adept at policing alphabetical
writing. Indigenous peoples were thus not all stereotypically paralysed, abject
and totally dominated. This leads Rabasa to challenge shop-worn binaries
largely developed in the nineteenth century, but still prevalent today, which
make false generalizations of the colonial past: We find Indians partaking of
the modernity of the colonial order, in fact as active participants in its creation
(p 71). Jose Antonio Mazotti examines Creole (American-born Spaniard)
subjectivity and agency, an under-studied aspect of colonial Latin America,
through an eclectic mix of European-derived conceptual categories combined
with Latin American interdisciplinarity. Creole subjectivity formations make it
much harder to define monolithic subjectivities and divide these into bipolar
categories, such as colonizer and colonized (p 102). For Mazotti, postcolonial
theory struggles to account for Spanish American Creoles through concepts
such as mimicry, simulacrum, and hybridity since the Creole was not exactly
the other who would transform himself in the eyes of metropolitan authorities,
nor was his hybridism the same as that of the oscillating mestizo positioned
between two cultures (p 99).
Part Two presents three essays which analyse narratives of Latin American
colonial history in Brazil (Russell Hamilton), Peru (Sara Castro Klaren) and
the Caribbean (Elzbieta Sklodowksa) in relation to the utility of postcolonial
critique. Sklodowska questions whether postcolonial discourse can success-
fully be applied to a Caribbean which resists over-arching theoretical capture
(too ambiguous and too heterogeneous), while Hamilton questions its use but
then proceeds to identify those elements that lend themselves to such critique.
Castro Klaren draws links between early Andean historiography (Guaman
Poma and Inca Garcilaso) and Jose Carlos Mariategui, the early twentieth-
century Peruvian Marxist historian, whom Castro Klaren sees as a precursor
to later postcolonial critics such as Walter Mignolo and An bal Quijano.
Part Three, Occidentalism, Globalisation, and the Geopolitics of Knowl-
edge, is in many ways the most homogeneous and the section most attuned
to the position of the editors introduction. However, for this reviewer, it is
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the least satisfying. Here the collective critical impulse seems to be a turf war
and an appeal for respect for Latin American intellectuals. Unfortunately,
though the contributors make strong points with their key operative terms
(coloniality of power and colonial difference), they tend to work with
overly strong binaries (centre/periphery, Europe/non-Europe, modernity/
modernitys other) which no longer hold as well as they did two decades
ago. Furthermore, their critique of European modernity is one-sided, limiting
its development almost solely to the plunder of the New World (no doubt a
key element), but without ceding any of the dynamics that were internal to the
development of European modernity long before the simplistic and reduc-
tionist starting point of Iberian colonization. In doing so, Mignolo, for
example, imagines that he is able to bracket Western epistemology while
critiquing it at the same time. While it is possible to do this, the results can
only ever be partial. Mignolo insists on making a claim for epistemic colonial
difference (p 251), which speciously aligns Latin American-born intellectuals
(portrayed as excluded barbarians who avail themselves of all the benefits of
First World academic location) with the Latin American subaltern.
Part Four brings together three critics under the title Religion, Liberation,
and the Narratives of Secularism. The authors collectively wish to rescue a
version of Christianity (especially liberation theology, here referred to by
Enrique Dussel as philosophyof liberation) fromwithinthe monolithic notion
of imperial Christendom (Maldonado) and fromsecularism, which they see as
a limit condition on both postcolonial critique and any other emancipatory
practices. Many other critics in this volume who attend to indigenous issues
would give an even more expansive statement to this position: all knowledges,
including those fromnon-Christian, indigenous sources (as just one element of
colonial difference), need to be taken into account in any emancipatory
discourses on Latin America. If not, then one remains in a state of coloniality,
a kind of non-conscious and blinkered entrapment within European and thus
colonizing modes of thought.
Part Five offers five Comparative (Post)colonialisms. Peter Hulmes 1994
article points out how the Caribbean exhibits a rich set of cultural practices
and complex histories which might function as a metonym for America and
thus a source for a Latin American postcolonial conceptual repertory: the
language of transculturation and counterpoint, of Creolization and metissage,
sits quickly and comfortably alongside hybridity and ambivalence, migration
and diaspora (p 395). Whether the Caribbean should function this way, is
something Hulme is unwilling to claim. (As mentioned above, Mazotti points
to the blindnesses that occur if such conceptual parallelisms are applied in
blanket fashion). Roman de la Campa approaches the question of postcolonial
critique in Latin America through a sophisticated, fine-grained analysis of
literary criticism and the genealogy of what might stand for Latin American
postcolonial critique today. He identifies a critical engagement with post-
Independence Latin American modernity, seen as shifting the focus from
cosmopolitan Latin America to Amerindian cultures (p 445). He locates its
beginning in the US academy before migrating south. Amaryll Chanady finds
inspiration in Castro-Go mezs re-conceptualization of modernity as a creature
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of a global network of interactions which generate self-reflective critique
which can then be differentially applied to the local circumstance elsewhere:
Expert knowledges thus provide local groups with the reflexive competence
to reterritorialize the abstract in the local and develop self-reflexive and
resistant practices leading to new subjectivity formations and social and
political action (pp 423424). Chanady then proceeds to a reading of failed
cultural translation in the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier and the
Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias.
The volume closes in Part Six with three meditations on Postcolonial
Ethnicities. Catherine Walsh focuses on Ecuadorean indigenous movements
and how the construction of new loci of enunciation [ . . .] depart from the
knowledge, experience, and understanding of those who are living in and
thinking from colonial and postcolonial legacies (p 506). The placing of
diametrically opposed takes on contemporary Guatemalan politics by Mario
Roberto Morales and Arturo Arias generates critical heat. Morales accuses
those who self-define as Mayans of essentialism and divisiveness in a society
where the mixed-race (mestizo) population is the majority. Morales points to
the constructedness of all ethnic and cultural identities and thus his desire for
an inter-ethnic detente as the solution to Guatemalas problems. This is fine on
one level, but as Arias points out: Mayas have chosen ethnic affirmation
because they lack political power within the traditional spaces in which they
have lived (p 528). And this lack of political power is linked to their historical
marginalization based on race by the dominant mixed-race ladinos (mestizos)
and the remnants of a Creole social stratum in a country where the ethnic-
racial split is 60 per cent ladinos and 40 per cent Mayans.
Coloniality at Large is a valuable contribution to a growing body of
sophisticated theory from and about Latin America. Nevertheless it also
exhibits some failings. The editors and several of the contributors are keen
to posit a Latin American difference that makes a difference (also labelled
colonial difference) and to show how, in the struggle between forces of
decolonization and re-colonization, points of resistance born of Latin
American difference can be highlighted. The introduction refers to the way
the volumes contributors draw attention to some of the philosophical and
ideological blindspots of postcolonial theories (p 5). In this sense they
highlight the need for more nuanced versions of postcolonial theories in order
to take into account a rich local tradition of critique of colonialism and
coloniality (p 5). Such an approach also seeks to expose and thus avoid
reductive ideological and cultural dualisms (p 5). Well and good. Never-
theless, neither the editors nor many of the contributors always respect this
dictum since time and again a kind of reductive, binary interpretation of
Europe, modernity, the West, underpins critical position-taking. The
editors also occasionally lapse into grand, untheorized statement: the
overarching structure of power that has impacted all aspects of social and
political experience in Latin America since the beginning of the colonial era
(p 17). Such totalizing pronouncements tend to evacuate any emancipatory
content from terms such as resistance.
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In the opening blurb announcing the series by Duke*Latin America
Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nations*we are told that Coloniality at Large
also focuses on the roles intellectuals have played, fromthe construction of the
Creole cultural and historical archive, to the writings and practices associated
with the process of independence and the foundation of national states, to the
modernisation and imposition of neoliberalism in the global era; thus the
editors reference to Replicants in the introductions title: Colonialismand its
Replicants. Yet for a collection which taken as a whole places strong emphasis
on loci of enunciation and links them to the legitimacy and accuracy of
pronouncements on Latin American cultural politics, it is remarkably silent on
its own: none of the theorists question their own privileged loci of enunciation
(as intellectual elites well placed in prestigious US universities), whilst
ironically problematizing everyone elses. In fact, of the contributors and
editors, who total twenty-four, only three are actually institutionally located in
Latin America. Most of the other nineteen are located in the USA (18) or
Europe (2). This need not be a problem, but when foregrounding loci of
enunciation as a strategy in turf wars, one should also be self-reflexive. This
silence on ones own privilege sits very uneasily with claims to victimhood by
selected intellectuals whose knowledge and intellectual traditions are said to be
not given fair due in metropolitan centres of learning, the same intellectuals
who place themselves side by side with the subaltern in a specious alignment of
resistance, collapsing the massive class and status distance between the two
groups. I think we need the margins to write back to the centre here too.
It is also disappointing to note that acknowledgement of prior copyright
for several articles is absent from the table of contents, though one comes
across it by surprise on the second last, unnumbered, untitled page, as if the
editors did not wish to draw attention to the fact that some recycling is going
on here (one article is from 1994). This is an acceptable practice for such
collections, but it should be stated up front in the editors introduction and in
the page of contents. Furthermore, judging by the footnotes, many of the
essays were finished a few years ago. This volume therefore has the air of
arriving late to the party. There are also serious inconsistencies with the
index. For example, George Yu dice is referred to by some essayists, yet does
not figure in the index at all, only in the bibliography. The same goes for
Santiago Castro-Go mez. John Beverley is under-cited in the index and this
matters since in recent times he has functioned as a critical target and
favoured whipping boy for some Latin American cultural critics and it is
helpful to be able to trace his presence (and Yu dices) in the volume in order
to see how he is positioned by various contributors. On the other hand,
Mignolo and Quijano are massively over-represented in both the bibliography
and index compared to everyone else. A little more balance is required.
Finally, Brazil is vastly under-represented as the country with one-third of
Latin Americas population and 40 per cent of the land area (Lowy and
Hamilton are exceptions to the rule).
Having pointed out these shortcomings, nevertheless one has to say that the
editors are to be commended for assembling a dissonant orchestra of thought-
provoking responses to the utility of postcolonial thinking to Latin America.
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Postcolonial critique is variously criticized, adopted or re-fashioned, each
appropriation signalling subtle ideological prise de positions as well as different
readings of Latin American histories. The value of this collection lies therefore
not in some collective truth about colonialism in Latin America and resistance
to it (though particular truths abound), but rather in the juxtaposition of
different viewpoints on the colonial experience and the theoretical ways of
framing that. This makes the book rewarding since there is nothing more
boring or damaging to the spirit of critique than a cosy and self-satisfied
ideological homogeneity.
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