Critique of the decolonial
Chapter 1 offers a genealogy of the decolonial, beginning with three precursors – Said, Fanon and Emmanuel Levinas. I show Said to be a universalist occasionally co-opted by over-binarized anti-western versions of identity politics. Fanon’s universalist values are ignored by the decolonial and his outlook on the world vulgarized by making him into an enemy of European culture and a supporter of nationalism, neither of which describes his values. Fanon’s eloquence is directed against racism, pure and simple: he fiercely opposed négritude and blackness as an identity to be valued in and of itself, and his ideal was a world without race. When he sympathizes with violence, it is in the context of the response of the peasant masses to the unspeakable violence inflicted by French colonial forces, but he does not provide a blanket endorsement of violence, as even Hannah Arendt, often quoted for her hostility to Fanon, eventually recognized. Their invocation of the notoriously impenetrable but widely admired Levinas as a precursor is the most puzzling, and setting him besides Fanon equally so, making for a very odd couple. In what I call an instance of ‘forced politicization’, they have even co-opted his Leçons Talmudiques in support of an effort to make Levinas into a tercermundista or Third World nationalist.
The decolonial in its Latin American version is further criticized for several reasons:
its trivialization of the universal in human rights, in feminism and in science;
its confection of a binary opposition of the indigenous and the European, or western, as if almost nothing has changed in 500 years and with no consideration of the heterogeneity of hundreds of ethno-linguistic groups;
the relativization of human rights in contention with collective rights;
its obliviousness in the face of the mixtures and exchanges which pervade race, religion, culture and class relations in Latin America;
the confusion of differences of culture with different ‘epistemologies’;
its obliviousness to women, to inequalities of gender and to violence against women (excluding the feminist variant of the decolonial)
its oversimplified use of the word ‘neo-liberalism’.
The leading philosopher of the decolonial, Enrique Dussel, is a difficult figure to summarize: formed in theology and an adept of liberation theology, during the 1970s he oversaw the multi-volume Historia de la Iglesia en América Latina. The 600-page first volume, despite its unorthodox organization, interspersing transcribed documents and narrative, bears witness to the depth of his Catholic learning and to his vast knowledge of the history not only of the Catholic Church but of religion in the entire region, going back to pre-conquest times (Dussel 1974, 1983–1994). Yet after that his writings bifurcate: on the one hand highly politicized and polemical interventions; and on the other complex philosophical works which he places in a phenomenological lineage quite different from his early involvement in liberation theology. Other leading decolonials (principally Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Walter Mignolo and Nelson Maldonado-Torres) write in a macho style that disqualifies all that stands in their way, proclaiming a set of ‘truths universally acknowledged’ without offering evidence when they refer to history and, when they are philosophical, name-dropping in the place of a reasoned genealogy. Their attack on western science is unsupported by an account of science itself, and their interpretations of colonialism are based on superficial generalizations or, when they do use historical sources, on misinterpretation. They write as if today’s colonial order is no different from that of the sixteenth century and do not explain why they sidestep the influence of the United States – once the whipping boy of choice for Latin American nationalist and marxisant thought. Decolonial ‘gurus’ even single out Descartes as responsible for reducing non-European peoples to the status of non-humans and describe his cogito as a banner for colonial conquest. The result is a polarization of the field between their fans and their critics or, better, between their fans and those who ignore them and are ignored by them. The field of Latin American Studies has become divided: fans and non-fans attend separate conferences, organize separate panels, publish in separate journals and thus avoid the clash of ideas – a refusal of exchange that is a common feature of contemporary scholarly life in general. I do not venture a view on whether this is to be blamed on the decolonials or on their opponents.
I do not claim that the decolonial has been built on false problems. Some decolonial writing is based on an important theme, which Boaventura de Souza Santos calls the ‘abyss’. The abyss divides society into two spaces: that which is governed by law and inhabited by people who receive the protection of the law and the state, and a vast periphery where government is in the hands of unofficial bodies (like drug traffickers and militia), where official bodies only enter to inflict repression or exactions, where business is conducted with neither regulation nor certification nor taxation, where citizens, having no effective rights, are reduced to the condition of supplicants. Although the model is simplified beyond measure, it does convey vividly the failure of many Latin American states. It also should highlight the interdependence of the two ‘worlds’, especially the dependence of politicians on traffickers and militia, and their penetration of police forces. And then, in the penultimate chapter, there is a surprise as we find evangelical churches poised on the edges of the abyss, and sometimes straddling it.
The colonial in anthropology
The next chapter approaches the decolonial in anthropology via the usages of the influential term ‘internal colonialism’ in mid-twentieth-century Mexican scholarship, and the feminist and legal anthropology which has been a salient feature of recent Mexican social science.
A close reading of this very rewarding literature shows that, despite their occasional protestations to the contrary, Mexican feminist anthropologists are universalists because, while by no means dismissing the value of cultural recognition, they prioritize the question of violence against women and effective equal opportunities for them over the cultural rights of indigenous peoples.
Those anthropologists were the first to extract a feminist message from the Zapatista phenomenon, which hit the headlines on January 1994 as an uprising more strategic in its theatrical performance than in its political effectiveness, and continues as a quasi-independent enclave in the Southern Mexican state of Chiapas. The original Zapatistas and associated organizations said little about activist women or gender, although they demonstrated their feminism by the presence of women in leading positions, including as military commanders, but in their subsequent research the anthropologists found women who infused the movement’s message with a defence of their rights and their bodies. The Zapatista leaders were the product of a Marxist and Maoist stream going back to the 1960s, and only discovered their indigenous vocation after they had found glamour in the world’s media. By returning to the literature on the background to the uprising and its setting in the Lacandonian jungle of Chiapas I have been able to recognize its originality and the context in which its ideals were forged.
The feminist anthropologists force open the issues of class and ethnicity (Hernández Castillo 2003; Sieder 2017). The most original figure among them, the Bolivian Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, defies categorization in one or another camp of identity or left-wing politics and rejects identification with one or another racial or ethnic group in a society at once predominantly indio and also marked by pervasive métissage. These feminist-ethnic intersections draw our attention to important tools in the understanding of Latin American society, and in later chapters I describe those in detail with examples, mostly from Bolivia, whose intelligentsia have generated some of the most compelling debates about race and gender.
