invites endless (and arguably useless) debate, it is worth noticing that each of these proposals tends to highlight a different dimension of the very same “civilizing” project of the West. Yet the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity in all facets of Western society—and, indeed, throughout the world—was a complex one. It is for this reason that many thinkers from different disciplines, such as Charles Taylor in the field of philosophy, have emphasized the multifaceted nature of modernity and the importance of a global perspective.
If we define modernity in terms of certain institutional changes, such as the spread of the modern bureaucratic state, market economies, science, and technology, it is easy to go on nourishing the illusion that modernity is a single process destined to occur everywhere in the same form, ultimately bringing convergence and uniformity to our world. Whereas my foundational hunch is that we have to speak of “multiple modernities”( . . . ), it is very important to set about “provincializing Europe,” in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s pithy phrase. This means that we finally get over seeing modernity as a single process of which Europe is the paradigm, and that we understand the European model as . . . one model among many, a province of the multiform world.[17]
Postcolonial theorists such as Said, Spivak, and Bhabha analyzed the imperialist constitution of modernity (or modernities) beginning with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the French and English colonizing projects in Asia and Africa. Nonetheless, they omitted three hundred years of European colonization in the Americas. It is difficult to argue that the European powers’ constant exchange of books, resources, and even dynastic rule for more than three centuries did not strongly determine the English and French imperialist projects in Asia and Africa two centuries later. One must attend to the ways in which, with its early expansion of power and territory into the New World, Western Europe was first transformed from a peripheral and backward space to the new center of the planetary economic and political map, and one that sustained its global and hermeneutic prominence with a common theoretical vision.
With Dussel’s contribution, then, Latin American colonial history takes on key importance in our understanding of the constitution of modernity/modernities and of contemporary thought. Colonialism and modernity began their projects at the same time, with the arrival of the Spaniards in the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century, and they were mutually constituted during the following centuries. The European experience in the New World generated the first philosophical debates (such as the Valladolid debate between Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda over the rights of indigenous peoples) of the modern imperial project, and provided it with its cultural, economic, and political sustenance. This is why Latin American thinkers look to their own colonial history in order to understand the entirety of the current world system, in order to point out the shadows of early modernity that continue to stretch over the sociopolitical structures of succeeding centuries.
Under these premises, Lope de Aguirre can represent a challenging and controversial prism in the postcolonial debate. First, his revolution could represent the first modern anti-imperial project. According to Galster, Aguirre’s rebellion was the first explicit declaration of separation from a European monarchy in the Americas, an event that anticipated, at least in intention, the independence of the American countries more than two centuries later.[18] Galster points out that, in addition to this first historical novelty, Aguirre was also the first to preach his hatred of the king in an open forum; and his vitriolic tone is undoubtedly one of the essential elements of his later notoriety.[19] Aguirre accused Philip II of cruelty and of breaking his word. Aguirre also reproached Carlos V for having used the riches obtained in the territories for his own hegemonic imperatives, while those who had discovered that wealth received nothing.[20]
Aguirre’s anti-imperial project, and its radicality, thus represented a novelty in nascent modernity in more ways than one. Walter Mignolo recognizes the importance of studying this type of reactionary project as part of the constitution of modernity.[21] For Mignolo, modernity’s salvationist rhetoric presupposes the oppressive and condemnatory logic of colonialism, which inevitably produces an energy of discontent, distrust, and detachment among those forced to react to imperial violence. This energy is translated into decolonial projects that, in the final analysis, are constitutive of modernity.
As mentioned already, Lope de Aguirre, in addition to proclaiming liberation from the Spanish empire, exercised violent rule among his followers and enemies, causing abuses and murders among native peoples and colonizers alike. These events demonstrate the temptation to tyranny inherent in modern anti-imperial enterprises. Following Jacques Derrida’s lead, Said, Spivak, and Bhabha might respond to the tyrannical dimension of Aguirre’s anti-imperial discourse through an analysis of essentialism. According to this notion, the marañón project buys into an imperial/anti-imperial binary, which seeks fixed identities and excludes the “other”; and it is the fault of this binary that epistemic and physical violence is generated.
In this approach, even anti-imperial sentiments and discourse can be scrutinized. For example, Said reads the novels of Joseph Conrad to find their anti-imperial positions but also to uncover how Conrad’s anti-imperialism reproduced certain assumptions of the imperial episteme. “To the extent that we see Conrad both criticizing and reproducing the imperial ideology of his time,” says Said, “to that extent we can characterize our present attitudes: the project, or the refusal, of the wish to dominate, the capacity to damn, or the energy to comprehend and engage with other societies, traditions, [and] histories.”[22]
If imperialist knowledge is power and works with binaries, postcolonial research seeks to demonstrate the limitations of such dichotomies and their porousness, even in resistance movements. To avoid fixed and binary essentialisms, postcolonial theorists propose alternative strategies. For example, Homi Bhabha sees in cultural hybridity the possibility of subversion. For Bhabha, there is no immutable and “natural” essence of the Western person and another essence of the “Indian” on which colonized societies can build an argument for resistance. However, colonized groups that adapt to imperial cultures can show the artificiality of colonizing discourses. Terms such as mimicry and hybridity, taken from biology, refer to the ability of weaker animals to adapt in order to avoid the threat of their hunters:
Homi Bhabha’s work is exemplary. . . . His alternative is to deploy concepts like “mimicry,” “hybridity,” and “ambivalence.” If hybridity in practice confounded colonialists, then textually recovering hybridity and celebrating it can confound imperial knowledge, serving to represent the colonized in a manner that escapes the binaries or essentialisms of the imperial episteme. Rather than recovering an authentic subaltern identity and consciousness that is the source of resistance, the task is to illuminate those moments when mimicry and subsequent hybridization undo the colonizers’ authoritative claims. This is destabilization as an effect, and the approach thereby recovers a sort of agency without resorting to essentialized notions of the colonized’s culture or consciousness.[23]
In this postcolonial perspective, modern anti-imperial rebellions generate violent and tyrannical projects when they seek to reaffirm a fixed identity and exclude everything associated with the dominating agent, thus reproducing the same binary conception imposed by the imperial powers. Yet while the programmatic deconstruction of binaries is persuasive and has theoretical consistency, it does not fully answer every question raised by the tyrannical dimension of some anti-imperial projects. For example, the rebellion of Lope de Aguirre is challenging because it does not depend on a fixed identity or essentialization of the marañones in order to motivate its revolt. Quite the opposite: in Nietzschean terms, Aguirre makes explicit his will to power, his will to recover just payment for the soldiers who had fought in the conquest. Even without an essentialization of their struggle or a fixed identity, the marañones generated systematic violence and oppression just like the imperial one had.
What, then, is the reason behind this movement’s own tyrannical turn, if not the simple consequence of a replication of the essentialist imperial binaries? As mentioned earlier,
