other reason for foregrounding universalism is largely practical and has little to do with the frequently drawn contrast between universalism and relativism. It is based on the observation that the frontiers of racial and ethnic populations, and thus the basis on which resources will be allocated under affirmative action or multicultural policies, are impossible to draw independently of political judgements about where those frontiers lie, or even personal judgements about whether a particular person is black, brown or white, or indio, cholo, mestizo or blanco. Distribution on the basis of socio-economic status, gender, age or region, in contrast, is in principle less likely to be challenged for its subjective character. Of course, the criteria of class belonging are subject to debate, but at least they can be established on the basis of agreed rational discussion. I have set much store by the merits of gender as a universalist basis on which to pursue equality, even though self-assignation is an ever more prominent element in gender classification, simply because the scale of the phenomenon is still small compared to the exclusive use of self-assignation in racial and ethnic classification. Although the ground is shifting under both regimes of classification, I still would maintain that for some time to come classification by gender will remain less open to politicization. I therefore advocate the restoration of a degree of balance between gender and race in discussions about inequality and rights, even while allowing plenty of room for intersectionality between them.
On this basis, universal rights are rights that belong to all human beings and should be adjudicated according to features that can be assigned to all human beings. This is the case for differentiating features such as age, gender and social class, whereas indigenous laws can apply only to people of particular indigenous groups. Indigenous rights, however – as distinct from indigenous laws – are universal in the sense that anyone claiming indigenous status should be treated in accordance with universal rights, not least the right to non-discrimination. My argument in the chapters that follow is that the systems of indigenous law advocated in decolonial debates are for the most part perfectly compatible with universal rights and should not be considered different in kind from positive law, even if they apply only within a certain population or region.
The institutional and social setting
Since about 1992 race, ethnicity and gender have become the leading topics shaping the scholarly interpretation of two of Latin America’s most distressing problems: inequality and the abuse of human rights by both state and private actors. This is the case among Latin Americanists throughout the western hemisphere and also in Europe: those subjects have set the agenda in publication, in conferences and in university teaching. The broadly left-wing or simply dissident political sensibility which has long dominated the humanities and social science departments of public universities remains, but the content has shifted from Marxism towards identity politics. By identity politics in the university context, I mean recourse to racial, ethno-linguistic, religious and gender ascription or belonging for explanations of advantage and disadvantage in society as a whole, but also in internal matters affecting the university, such as the curriculum, the profile of the student body and the professoriat. The bodies of those involved are also at stake in the less visible and less audible shaping of scholarly and pedagogical discourse and exchange. The academic business of teaching, of the exchange of research and of management, is influenced (not necessarily in a negative sense) by the physical and online presence, or absence, of people who recognize themselves and are recognized by ascription to a population defined by skin colour, by religion, by gender or by ethnic or ethno-linguistic background.
Identity politics occurs when such belonging, in and of itself, confers authority or legitimacy on a speaker or author. It comes in many shapes and forms, sometimes to include and sometimes to exclude, sometimes to break down barriers and sometimes to erect them, sometimes to facilitate exchange and sometimes to interrupt it.
The visibility and audibility of identity politics comes at a time of growth in the number and presence of students from Afro-descendant and indigenous backgrounds in Latin American universities and research institutions, but the presence of professors from those backgrounds lags far behind. Nonetheless, universities have been pioneering spaces where those groups have found a voice ahead of other institutions such as professional bodies or the judiciary.
There has also been a change in the class composition of the professoriat, which is now drawn less from the upper-middle classes than was once the case. University salaries may guarantee security to those with tenure, but they no longer guarantee an upper-middle class existence, and an ever-increasing number of highly qualified people with Masters degrees and doctorates, finding difficulty getting a full-time academic job, are making a living on short-term or hourly contracts. The proliferation of private and public universities and the concomitant growth of student numbers have also expanded the profession, contributing to refined gradations of prestige, status, income and locational differences. This structural change may have added an edge to the traditional dissident posture of academics.
The expression ‘ivory tower’ is anachronistic in a world where there are millions of undergraduates, hundreds of thousands of graduate students and tens of thousands of professors. Academia today constitutes a political arena and a market all of its own where interest groups compete for resources, for departments and centres, for publication outlets, for research funds and for the power of patronage.
A similar scenario exists in the United States where identity politics has been a standard feature of university life for longer than in Latin America and where significant numbers of students and professors teaching and following courses on Latin America are immigrants or people from immigrant families. This US-based contingent can be said to form a single constituency with Latin American humanities and social science: the distinction between a Latin American scholar and an ‘American’ scholar is blurred. They conduct their exchanges equally in English, Spanish and Portuguese, are riven by similar disagreements and are fired by similar enthusiasms. Until 2020, the more prominent figures among them have been fixtures on the same hemisphere-wide lecture, workshop and conference circuits. Decolonial scholarship is a mutation of identity politics adapted to the arena of the university and of scholarship.
Identity politics brought the question of representation into the university and now contests the content of teaching. In its Latin Americanist strand, decolonialism’s theme is not inequality of access to science but the biases and prejudices that lie at the heart of science itself and the instrumentalization of science to fashion weapons used against indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants.
Much as it may challenge the institutions of science and academia and all they stand for, decolonial advocacy depends on those institutions. This marks a difference from the radical autonomist wings like Black Power that broke away from anti-racist movements such as civil rights. Decolonials express little interest in those breakaways, or in the Latin American guerrilla forces that broke with the ‘Moscow line’ after the Cuban Revolution and went into action across the region over three decades. Yet the decolonial theoretical onslaught on today’s social order is even more radical: those Marxist revolutionaries had no issues with science or with modernity, and for the most part assumed that in a socialist society the problems of indigenous peoples and people of colour would be overcome, as would inequality between the sexes (to use the language of the time). They sought a different modernity, but a modernity nonetheless, in which the class structure and economic system would be replaced. Decolonials contest the entire culture of modernity and are dismissive of the universal values embodied, in their very different ways, in Marxism and liberalism. Yet professionally they remain within the ‘system’, and although they do profess admiration for the questionably democratic practices of Chavez-Maduro, Christina Kirschner, Evo Morales and Rafael Correa, they certainly do not advocate violence.
So much is background. I have depicted it in summary form because scholarly writing tends to sidestep the institutional context of its production, but to offer a full analysis would require another research project. We have much to learn from ethnographies and a macro sociology of academia that would test these
