y si el marmol del marmol, pero la literatura es un arte que sabe profetizar aquel tiempo en que habra enmudecido, y encarnizarse con la propia virtud, y enamorarse de la propia disolucion y coretjar su fin” (Borges 1972, 205). Reading the several essays here dedicated to moments when literature’s awareness of itself surges into unprecedented new perceptual coordinates, new narrative forms, unimagined dialogues with and fictionalization of other forms of representation such as cinema, photography, and digitization might provide some sense of the directions that literature, and culture at large, might take in Latin America as it faces not just another imperial thrust from the West but rather the self-claim made by the Chinese with regard to their having become a world power on a par with the West. Will Latin America face yet another cycle of extractive capitalism, as the war for water seems to indicate? How will a new ecological awareness and strategy maneuver the economic, political, and cultural influence of China? What role will the West play in postcolonial spaces as it struggles with the East? This volume certainly opens onto uncharted waters even though it carries the weight of more than 500 years of cultural struggle and creation in “Latin America.”
References
1 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin . The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures . London and New York: Routledge, 1989.
2 Borges, Jorge Luis . Obras Completas 1923–1972. Buenos Aires: Emece Editores, 1972.
3 Bush, Matthew and Tania Gentic, Eds. Technology, Literature, and the Digital Culture in Latin America: Mediatized Sensibilities in a Globalized Era. New York: Routledge, 2016.
4 King, Edward . “Between Street and Book: Textual Assemblages and Urban Topologies in Graphic Fiction from Brazil,” in Latin American Textualities: History, Materiality, and Digital Media. Eds. Heather J. Allen and Andrew R. Reynolds . Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2018.
5 Mignolo, Walter . Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking: Local Histories/Global Designs. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
6 Restall, Matthew . When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History. New York: Harper Collins, 2018.
Second Thoughts on the Historical Foundations of Modernity/Coloniality and the Advent of Decolonial Thinking
Walter D. Mignolo
I
After reviewing the Preamble to the Blackwell Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture as well as the chapters from the first edition, a “second thoughts” rather than editing the already printed version would be more appropriate for the occasion. The main factor is that we, on the planet today, are experiencing a change of era. The era that is closing is the era of Westernization of the planet which was formed since 1500. The planet, before 1500, did not “belong” to Europe. After 1500 and until 2000 approximately, Europe appropriated the planet. The Americas and Latin America were invented and appropriated in names, labor, and natural resources to the historical foundation of modernity. The incorporation of the Americas to an already exsisting European cosmo-geography, the constituton of an unipolar world order and the consolidaton of universal reason, theological and secular, are three pillars of Westernizaton.1
The signs of the upcoming era are the distancing of the Americas, North and South, from the centrality of Europe simultaneously with Europe losing a privileges that lasted for 450 years; the unipolar world order mutating into a multipolar interstate world order and, last but not least, the universality of reason being overcome by the pluriversality of independent thoughts. If global linear thinking traced the axes that legitimized continental and territorial partitions to the benefit of Europe, border thinking is today enacted to delegitimize its universality in both the multipolar world order of the interstate system and the public sphere where the political society is delinking from universality and reclaiming the rights of the people to think and act for their own benefit and not for the benefit of someone else. So both the invention of America and partition of continental Latin and Anglo America, the confluence of Atlantic colonial enterprise in the Caribbean, are events that belong to the era of Westernizaton that today is closing. The change of era that now is opening, and that Covid-19 accelerated, will be dominated for years to come by de-Westernizaton of the global interstate system and decolonizaton of universality enacted by the political society tangentially related to the nation-state. Both the present and the future of the Americas and Latin America are already experiencing the impact of de-Westernization and decoloniality. Consequently, Latin American Studies could not be excempt from the present and forthcoming turmoils.
The first edition of the Companion was published in 2008, and the Preamble was written in 2006. In 2021, the cultural configuration of “Latin” America has significantly changed politically and economically: politics and economy are cultural spheres both of the materiality of doing politics and economy as well as of the ideas and designs that guide and govern their doing. culture, with a capital letter, is everything that human beings do with their hands and mouths. With our mouths, we make coded signs called speech; with our hands, visible signs called writing while economy and politics are activities that cannot be separated from what people (us) think economy and politics are, how they shall be practiced, what are the benefits or drawbacks, what they do for us and why we need them. In this regard, thinking is not just a process of mental imagination, but processes that materialize in sounds (speech, discourses, music) and in writing (written words, graphics, images) guiding the interaction among people (all of us) involved in the economic and political spheres.
Thus, by 2008 the cultural configuration of “Latin” America was coming out of the turbulent era of neo-liberal culture that put a halt to the hopes brought about by the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and the election of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1970. Three years later, 1973 remains as the date of the dreadful beginning of a period in which politics and economics were legitimized, sustained, and promoted by neo-liberal culture until approximately 2000. Since then, the expression “turn to the left” captured the culture of hopes of the first decade of the twenty-first century that appeared to leave behind the nightmare of neo-liberal nightmares and dictatorships.2
However, by 2011 signs that the turn to the left was a premature and misleading intuition began to emerge: rather than a turn to the left, the signs were indicating a move towards de-Westernization. De-Westernization since then is perhaps what prompted the major turmoil in the political and economic culture in Latin America. I began to sense that in 2011 and published another op-ed suggesting that if it was a turn (both in the sense of turning and in the sense of being next in line), it was neither to the left nor to decolonization but to de-Westernization.3 At that time, the word “de-Westernization” was slowly entering the geo-political vocabulary.
The praxes and self-understanding of de-Westernization began to materialize in East and South East Asia. One of the first uses, in 1978, was in the controversial and at the same time interesting book by Malaysian Muslim thinker Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas entitled Islam and Secularism. Chapter 8 is titled “The Dewesternization of Knowledge.”4 Rightly so because Islam was never colonized, for Islam is not a region but a belief system spread over regions and countries. Hence, decolonization was not a proper concept in this context. However, Islam couldn’t escape coloniality of knowledge or, if you wish, Westernization of knowledge. Al-Attas’s de-Westernization is a proposal in the Cultural sphere, which means that it is not specific to political and economic cultures, linguistic culture, historical culture, technological culture, or scientific culture but culture with a capital letter, which means what we human beings do and what we think, explain, discuss, and
