knowledge-makers rather than objects of studies and natural resources for First World social sciences and humanities.10 The second disobedient path was the emergence of decolonial humanities. The strength of this designation was to make evident that there are no, and cannot be, scholarly humanities without a modifier. Consequently, the humanities are indeed Western (modern and postmodern) humanities. Decolonial humanities run parallel to reclaiming the Third World and the Global South as a place of pride as it affirms and does not confront or disobey the pretence of modern and postmodern humanities to be The Humanities, and rebuilds humanness grounded on experiencing coloniality and long periods of destitution.11
The third path, concurrent with reclaiming the Third World and decolonial humanities, is a proposal that encompasses both. With the title of Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (2010), Taiwanese scholar Kuan-Hsing Chen made a radical move.12 While Asia was an object of study for Area Studies and the social sciences, the humanities in this sector had traditions going back to Orientalism in the eighteenth century: Orientalism was, in the humanities, the forerunner of Area Studies in the social sciences. Hence, Western humanities had to confront the racial underpinnings of its past.13 Kuan-Hsing Chen turned the tables and took Asia out of the box, away from being an object and provider of natural resources. He returned the favor as a boomerang that returns to the First World: Asia is a method, not an object of natural resources. His proposal is not orientalism in reverse, not at all. Why? Because Kuan-Hsing did not fall in the trap of refuting the content of orientalism. He attacked the terms of the conversation, the method. By so doing, he did not contest the content with the same method, but made of the context of Western scholarship the method for Asian thinkers. Taken as a method, Asia is no longer a place to be observed but a place of observation, of itself and of the West. The West, the First World, and the Global North become an object of study once Asia is a method and the place for the restitution of pride. Asia as method is the place for thinking and the place of thoughts of Asians for themselves and for the world. The radical move consists of reclaiming the legitimacy of Asia as place of thinking and of thought instead of being a place whose culture is raw material for First World scholarship.
The lessons for Latin American Studies should be at this point evident. While Latin America (as Asia) was and will continue to be an object of Area Studies/Third World/Global South studies offering raw material for First World scholarship, it has become already a place for thinking and a location of thought. Latin America could be thought out and reconstituted as method. The politics of scholarship (and, in my case, for the politics of decolonial investigations) is at stake. For social scientists and humanists of the Third World/Global South and decolonial thinkers, this could be the moment of its happening. It is already at work in Asia, as I mentioned, and in Africa.14 In South America, the period equivalent to decolonization during the Cold War was the nineteenth century and the constitution of the modern/colonial nation-states. And one of the outcomes of independence was precisely the idea of Latin America,15 the location of a genealogy of thinking that between 1930 and 1960 was manifested in the splendors of the essay as the genre where creative thinking was expressed, in the essay that was destituted by the advent of the social sciences and academic humanities that were part of the package of development and modernization in the 1960s.16 However, as a location of thinking, “Latin” America today is a sector or a larger compound next to Abya Yala and La Gran Comarca, as I explained in The Idea of Latin America.
Notes
1 1 Serge Latouche, L´occidentalization du monde. Paris: La Découverte, 1989.
2 2 Walter D. Mignolo, “Nationalization of Natural Gas in Bolivia,” Counterpunch, May 9, 2006, www.counterpunch.org/2006/05/09/nationalization-of-natural-gas-in-bolivia.
3 3 Walter D. Mignolo, “Hacia la desoccidentalización,” Página 12, Diciembre 6, 2011. www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/4-182727-2011-12-06.html.
4 4 Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas, Islam and Secularism. Pakistan: Suhail Academy Lahore, 1978.
5 5 Kishore Mahbubani, The New Asian Hemisphere. The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East. London: Public Affair, 2008.
6 6 Peimin Ni, “The Silk Order: A Philosophical Perspective.” DOC Research Institute, March 2018.
7 7 On Abya Yala, see Emil Keme and Adam Coon, “For Abyayala to Live the Americas must die: Towards a transhemisferic indigeneity.” Native American and Indigenous Studies, 5/1, 2018, 42–68. The essay is also available in Maya-Quiché and Spanish. On la Gran Comarca, see Catherine Walsh and Juan García, “El pensar del emergente movimiento afroecuatoriano: Reflexiones desde un proceso.” En: Daniel Mato (coord.), Estudios y Otras Prácticas Intelectuales Latinoamericanas enCultura y Poder. Caracas: Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales Universidad Central de Venezuela, 2002, pp. 317–326. www.ceapedi.com.ar/imagenes/biblioteca/libreria/39.pdf.
8 8 World Economic Forum, “The Great Reset,” www.weforum.org/great-reset; International Monetary Fund, “From the Great Lockdown to the Great Transformation,” www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2020/06/09/sp060920-from-great-lockdown-to-great-transformation.
9 9 Carl E. Pletsch, “The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, 1950–1975.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 4, 1981, 565–590.
10 10 Third World Quarterly, www.tandfonline.com/loi/ctwq20; Journal of Third World Studies/Journal of Global South Studies, www.jstor.org/journal/jthirworlstud.
11 11 Decolonial humanities, www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/26924865.pdf, decoloniality and the humanities, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1538192718790045 .
12 12 Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method. Toward Deimperialization. durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
13 13 Edward Said, Orientalism. London: Vintage Book, 1978.
14 14 Felwine Sarr, Afrotopia. Paris: Édition Philippe Rey, 2016.
15 15 Walter D. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America. London: Blackwell, 2005.
16 16 Walter Mignolo, “Avatares de habitar y pensar en/las fronteras.” En “Resquebrajaduras del presente. Virus, neolibralismo y humanidades.” La Biblioteca. Buenos Aires, Primavera 2020, 427–499. https://vaconfirma.com.ar/archivos//archivos_0_1_201201_674421.pdf.
1 Mapping the Geopolitics of Contact: Indigenous Peoples of the Americas and Western Knowledge
Gustavo Verdesio
The power of the first chronicles that told the stories of exploration and colonization of the Americas is still intact. They represent a land that appears to these authors as pristine and untouched
