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Crystallization of Power and Epistemological Questioning in Latin America

The idea that a crystallization of universalism, the sedimentation in individual and collective subjectivities of an artificial particular set of assumptions that, nonetheless, are taken for granted as the only plausible truth has defined what we call Latin America since its formation is the central point of the first part of this essay. In order to understand how could this happen I will try to address the Latin American coloniality situation as delineated by several key authors (Quijano and Wallerstein, 1992; Mignolo, 2001, 2005); in other words, I will try to portray the specificity and complexity of the dynamics of colonization and domination that were established in the territory which today is conceived as Latin America since the event regarded as the discovery. Dynamics of power and cultural homogenization that not only determined the character of newly born Latin American Republics, but, I will argue, continue operating vigorously within the socio-cultural and political conceptual framework of contemporary Latin American Nations, generating a stagnated thoughtless naturalized idea of Latin America that prevents the identification of diverse mechanisms of domination and oppression against native indigenous social groups and afrodescendent populations throughout the continent. The main task at the first part of the work would be to use relevant theories and concepts produced in the Latin America subaltern/postcolonial scenario, such as Americanity, coloniality of power, interstate power system (Quijano and Wallerstein, 1992), coloniality/modernity, decolonization (Mignolo, 2001, 2005)

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and de-nationalization (Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, 1995), to present a de-colonized reading of traditional historicisms and socio-cultural analyses of the new continent. The process of striking back and deconstructing official histories and the process of crystallization of oppression within Latin American histories and current states demands more that the simple erection of another history. It demands the epistemological analysis of conceptual frameworks, logical operations and tacit reasonable inferences that compose the way of thinking reality within which many of us were socialized. Benedict Andersons Imagined Communities (1983), Naoki Sakais

Translation and Subjectivities (1997) and Dipesh Chakrabartys Provincializing Europe (2000) presents us an extended set of clarifying epistemological reflections about the theoretical and conceptual structures that have been constructed as a result of the popularization, spread and establishment of the sixteenth centurys ideology of Enlightenment, in the forms of rationalism, historicism, colonialism, republicanism, nationalism and such regarded as european western or modern conceptual elaborations (Chakrabarty, 2000). By addressing and offering epistemological analysis and deconstructions such as Andersons depiction of nationalisms and the collective processes that permits the imagination of a perennially bounded community, Chakrabartys theoretical and epistemological dismantling of traditional historicism or Sakais analysis of the functioning and dangers of binary representation schemes, these authors provide important elements to posit and reflect, in depth, about the way in which most modern subjects conceive and think their countries and their histories in Latin America. This epistemological confrontation is needed in order of articulate ways to overcome the widely incapacity, within societies outlined by modern conceptual

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frameworks, to think outside a historicist, binary, nationalist and thus colonialist structures. Paradoxically, an epistemological questioning of our critical thought towards Latin American colonial process, contemporary Latin American societies and NationStates could lead us, I would argue, to a paralyzing and passive posture about our possibilities of concrete action and influence upon the power structure we identify and wish to change. A humble and pragmatic analysis is then needed in order to conceive strategically effective political actions that would allow practical palpable advances not only in the concrete living conditions of subaltern groups within Latin American States, but also in the very foundational instances and conceptions of what we call State. I will close the work with the attempt of envisaging new models of thinking and structuring what we naturalized as government are needed in order to gradually set goals of overcoming the exclusionary character of Latin American States.

Latin America and the socio-cultural crystallization of universalism In their 1992 important work Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas in the Modern-World System, Anibal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein stated that independence crystallized the stateness of the newly born Republics, referring to the reinforcement of the relation of power between former colonies and metropolis that subtly took place as result of the Independence struggles in the Americas. (Quijano and Wallerstein, 1992: 550). By crystallization I, as well as these authors, mean not only the unquestionable naturalization with which something is tacitly accepted, but also the strength and structurality that the accepted element in these cases stateness and

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universalism acquire in specific contexts in this case on the newly formed American Republics. I choose to talk about crystallization of universalism specifically, as a form of synthesize in this word which is one of its main characteristics the whole ideology of rationalism, scientificism, humanism and progress built out of the intellectual, moral and political movement regarded as enlightenment, which was originated on western nations of Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (Pagden, 2008: 315325) My main argument here is that the putative uniqueness and the supposed universal validity of this spatially and temporarily particular cosmology have not only been merely accepted, but crystallized into the invention and essence of Latin America and later its Republics and Nation-States. The foundational characteristic of the Americas within a global ideological project and dynamic of power regarded as modernity determined that its idealization and invention by the elites of key european countries as well as for the creole elites inside the American nations (Mignolo, 2005) beginning to be imagined (Anderson, 1983), were developed quite zealously, which resulted in a strong imprint and naturalization of characteristics, values and methods such as eurocentrism, homogeneous-linear-progressive historicism, rationalism and racism. The feeling, beliefs and certainties, commonly found in part of Latin American populations common sense, in the official dominant media discourses, in the average humanities programs within primary and secondary school, in political and scientific agendas, that indeed Latin America is this secular, cohesive, bounded unity; that its states, social hierarchies, white elites, racism and social inequalities are inherent and natural elements of their realities; that the european and african descendent populations

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are as natural part of Latin America as the natives that were here; that the native populations, their culture and own cosmological knowledge are indeed these outsider, backward remnants of a pre-modern past that should be respected and conserved while modernity and development must be, tacitly, pursued and achieve; this state of acceptance and naturalization of all this artificial premises is what I call crystallization of universalism. In order to illustrate the automatic natural acceptation of universal values, hierarchies and binarisms that constitute the individual and collective subjectivities of Latin America, the following passage, extracted from Suzana Sawyer relate of an encounter, in Ecuador, between representatives of the state, ARCO, an oil multinational and OPIP, a native indigenous organization could be of assistance:
By expounding on the glories of liberal thought and using its frameworks to set the rules of engagement, the ARCO executive implicitly invoked a distinction between himself and indigenous interlocutors: modern/tribal, global/local, cosmopolitan/insular. ARCO represented the force of modernity and reason that would bring progress and democracy to isolated lands. Amazonian Indians represented tradition and unreason, caught in their own parochial particulars. (Sawyer, 2004:8).

Although this grassroots organization, as portrayed by the author along the narrative, is not willing to accept the symbolical invocation that both representatives of the state and multinational company display of and at them, this implicit and tacit unbalance between these two parts state and neo-liberal reason against a devalued and subsumed subaltern cosmology largely constitutes the broader reality of Latin American societies. It is possible to track this characteristic element of Latin Americas countries, states and social subjectivities through the theoretical model regarded as coloniality of power or simply coloniality, idealized mainly by the Peruvian sociologist Anibal

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Quijano, although in clear relation of inspiration and contribution with American worldsystem analyst and sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein. This theoretical model has also been adopted and substantially developed by Argentinean semiotician Walter Mignolo. In my opinion, a fundamental foundational point treated by these authors that would give us a good starting point to the analysis, is the specificity and extent of the Native population genocide that took place after the Spanish and Portuguese started settling their projects of conquering and accumulation in the new continent. According to Quijando and Wallerstein, the Iberians colonizers, in contrast with the Anglo-Saxons had heated debates as to whether the 'Indians' were really human and had 'souls', while they were precisely in the process of conquering and destroying highly advanced Native American societies. (Quijano and Wallerstein, 1992: 552-553) The Latin American natives enslavement and almost extermination prevented a possible process of reconstruction and re-articulation of their own institutions and cosmologies after the process of colonization, during the construction of the nationalist imaginary, as Quijano and Wallerstein relate it happen on peripheral zones of Europe such as Poland and Sicily. (Ibid.: 550). On the contrary, according to them, in the Americas: there was such widespread destruction of the indigenous populations, especially among hunting and gathering populations, and such widespread importation of a labour force, that the process of peripheralization involved less the reconstruction of economic and political institutions than their construction, virtually ex nihilo everywhere (except perhaps in the Mexican and Andean zones). (Ibid.) Direct consequence of this radical project of colonization is the paving for the possibility of an extremely Eurocentric and colonial nationalist process. The role of the national, creole, euro-centered, dominant elite, which at least in Latin American

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processes can be considered the ideological and cosmological inheritor of colonial power following Quijano and Wallerstein thesis on an interstate power system (Ibid.) was fundamental since they adopted the European mystifying model of the nation-state for societies whose foundation remained the colonial stratification between the European and non-European, and the liberal model of a political system for societies that were dominated by mercantile-seignoral strata. (Ibid.: 556) As Mignolo puts it when comparing the Americas colonization process with the Indian one: The very existence of a Creole elite in the Americas that went through the process of decolonization from european colonial powers (approximately between 1776 and 1831) is one of the crucial differences between coloniality in India and in the Americas. Decolonization in the Americas was in the hands of Creoles (Anglo, African, and Iberian), while in India it was in the hands of the indigenous population. The diverse Creole elite in the Americas reproduced coloniality of power in the form of internal colonialism. Contrary to what happen in India, the indigenous population in the Americas was not in a position to accomplish the type of collaboration Guha analyzed for the indigenous population in India in complicity with the officers of the British Empire (240-245). (Mignolo, 2001: 439). The Creole elites desire for autonomy and independence, determined by a certain feeling of singularity and resentfulness towards the metropolis (Anderson, 1983: 52-65), as well as for the necessity of structuring their own economic project independent of the stagnated Iberian colonial powers in decay at that moment (Quijano and Wallerstein, 1992: 553, 555), had to idealize ways of conceptualizing and therefore controlling the native and afro-descendent populations in the nations that were being imagined as a way of guaranteeing the coercion, hierarchy and immobility of the social structure even after losing the logistic support of the colonial power. (Anderson, 1983: 48). As consequence of this conjuncture, two determinant processes to the crystallization, in Latin America, of the universal value of enlightenments ideological heritage will happen concomitantly. The first one, Independence, is well known in its illusory characteristic

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and in the new forms in which it will articulate power relations between the former metropolis and colonies. While some authors elaborate this fictional characteristic of Latin American processes of independence in a broader global approach, enhancing the appearance of Neocolonialism, as Robert Young, for whom the system of apparently autonomous Nation-States is in fact the means through which international capital exercises imperialist control (Young, 2001: 46); we prefer to emphasize, with Mignolo, Quijano and others, a viewpoint that would put subalternity and internal colonialism at the center of the argument: The history of Latin America after independence is the variegated history of the local elite, willingly or not, embracing modernity while Indigenous, Afro, and poor Mestizo/a peoples get poorer and more marginalized. The idea of Latin America is that sad one of the elites celebrating their dreams of becoming modern while they slide deeper and deeper into the logic of coloniality. (Mignolo, 2005: 57-58) Following Mignolo, Independence was not only a process that re-configured the ways of suppression, exploitation and dependence of oppressed cosmologies within Latin America, but it was also a deceiving strategy of the creole elite, who allegedly advocates the good of the people, the subaltern classes, claiming altruism and self-abnegation instead of a search for class-empowerment. (Latin American, Subaltern Studies Group, 1995:144). Suzana Sawyer, on her empirical work within an Ecuadorian native organization struggling for land titling and self-representation, give us an important account of these post-independence tensions among the different groups that compose unevenly the Nation, through the analysis of a national Ecuadorian symbol. After accompanying the organization in a 250 km march from Pestanza the organizations partially entitled land to Quito, the author register and elaborates on a mix moment of contemplation,

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admiration and reflection when 100 representatives of the pilgrim group gaze at The Discovery of the Amazon, an imposing mosaic that seemed to be welcoming them into the domains of State by invoking the foundational time and events of discovery and conquering:
In particular, the mosaic exemplifies a dominant cultural logic whereby one cannot simultaneously be both Indian and Ecuadorian. Hierarchical binaries between civilized/savage, modern/traditional, cosmopolitan/tribal, national/indigenous infuse this origin myth of Ecuador. As a racist saying ( Muestre su patria, mate un indio; Show your patriotism, kill an indio) often heard throughout the 1990s suggests, Indian have little place in the elite notions of the Ecuadorian nation. If they are to join the process of modernization they must renounce their identities as Indians. Other than serving as dead markers in history, their existence vanishes from our nation. (Sawyer, 2004: 35).

The second determinant process to the crystallization of Universalism takes part during, and mainly after Independence. Within this fundamental moment of transition and emancipatory illusion, the real dimension of the obscenity of the foundational colonial genocide is felt and the absence of a heavier presence and pressure of native populations, cosmologies and organizations allows for the mechanisms of ethnicity and racism or what Benedict Anderson would call bound seriality to appear as efficient mechanisms for knowing and controlling populations within the newly born Latin Nations. (Anderson, 1998; Quijano and Wallerstein, 1992: 550-551). In The Spectre of Comparisons, Benedict Anderson will propose two types of serialities bound and unbound through which subjective collectivities, essential to nationalism purposes, will be shaped and imprinted on social groups. (Anderson, 1998). His bound seriality correspond to the statistical classification and organization of a population body into certain conceptualizations and identity categories that seeks, first, to adapt the political concepts, agendas and programs to these invented essentialisms and, second, to make subjects and social groups vulnerable and maneuverable through what has

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increasingly been called identity politics (Anderson, 1998: 35-45). This second assumption converges significantly with the analysis of Ethnicity and Racism we found in Quijano and Wallerstein text. The authors consider Ethnicity as a creation inherent to the invention of Americanity and Latin American national states as imagined, singular and bounded communities (Anderson, 1983: 6-7). Within the political project of the nationalist creole elites of Latin America, Ethnicity would not only reinforce the singularity in relation to european former metropolis of the American Nations, but it would also and mainly occupy a central space on the creation and maintenance of a strict, oppressive social hierarchy (Quijano and Wallerstein, 1992: 551). The social order and collective subjectivities of the Republics and ulterior contemporary Nation-States, therefore, will be deeply characterized not only by the natural grouping and categorization of the whole population within ethnicity frameworks, but also by a fierce racism product of the politicization and ideologization of this categorization process (Ibid.). The ideology and oppression mechanism of racism, idealized to maintain and reinforce the artificial, supposedly insurmountable gap between the west european world-view created during enlightenment and other world-views existent on America and Africa, has acted perennially on the shaping of both elite and subaltern collective and individual subjectivities and constituted itself as one of the most blameworthy inventions of nationalism. As analyzed genially by Quijano and Wallerstein, the coupling of racism with currently popular ideologies such as humanism, egalitarianism and universalism, generates the latter facet of cosmological domination; one strong and tight adjustment of the crystallization of universalism knot:

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Ethnicity still needed to be buoyed up by racism, but racism now had to take on a subtler face. Racism took refuge in its seeming opposite, universalism and the derived concept of meritocracy. I t is in the debates of the last 20 years that we find this latest contribution of Americanity. Given an ethnic hierarchization, an examination system inevitably favors disproportionately upper ethnic strata. The extra added plus is that a meritocratic system justifies racist attitudes without the need to verbalize them. (Ibid.)

The advent of Independence, with its characteristic stateness and reorganization of the strategies of exploitation and dominance, as well as the establishment of ethnicity and racism as modus operandis of the new States foundational objectives of categorize, separate, order hierarchically and oppress, determined the unquestionable naturalization of social and political systems where native and afro-centered cosmologies were largely excluded from the natural composition, the temporality and the pursues of the Modern Nation. Naturalization that has only recently begun to be efficiently questioned and deconstructed through isolated focus of popular organization and intellectual production.

The need for epistemological deconstruction within Latin American realities Except for subaltern activist and intellectuals, and a resistant parcel of the cosmologically oppressed population within the Americas, this scenario of cosmological dictatorship has remained untouched and even thoughtless by most of the population living in this continent, including a big parcel of these own oppressed social groups native indigenous, afro-descendents and peasantry. Fortunately, a variety of scientific and empirical works has been produced among a variety of subaltern scenarios throughout the world in order to portray and articulate resistance to what Mignolo refers as the rearticulation of the colonial matrix of power through neoliberal globalization (Mignolo, 2005: 49). While the already largely cited works of

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Quijano and Wallerstein and Mignolo are example of subaltern intellectual efforts to deconstruct the current scenario of blindness and conformism in Latin America, there is no better empirical manifesto than the well-known TODAY WE SAY ENOUGH IS ENOUGH of the Zapatist armys Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle (EZLN, 1995: 311). However, the questioning and deconstruction of the crystallized character of power in Latin American contemporary Nation-States is not a simple task, especially when we take into consideration the epistemological efforts needed to unveil these oppressive realities. In this sense, I will intend to capitulate, through the theoretical and epistemological discussions around nationalism, historicism and representation three conceptual frameworks that not only are present in Latin American States social and symbolical structures, but that permeates the very way in which most modern subjects think and experience their realities the extent to which domination and oppression ideas are incrusted in the way Latin American Nation-States have been thought; as well as which are the epistemological turns critical thinking and common sense must undertake in order to erode the naturalized oppressive character of our societies. Benedict Andersons theorization around the cultural artifact of nationalism traces its origins on the structural need for substituting the certainties offered by secular religions once these eroded during the eighteenth century. (Anderson, 1983: 11) His conceptualization of nations as limited and sovereign imagined communities that represent themselves through specific ways of apprehending time, bounded and unbounded serializations is of singular importance in the extent that permits to visualize

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more accurately important state mechanisms of control and manipulation of social groups and subjectivities. (Anderson, 1983, 1989) While Latin American Independence process will produce creole-led mimetic Nations highly marked by exclusion, racism and internal colonialism, on contemporary Nation-States the ideology of nationalism continues to be a powerful force that, through illusions of collective unity and singularity, spatial co-existence and solidarity masks the power hierarchies, exclusionary processes and population manipulation within societies. Furthermore, the bounded serialization of society that, according to Anderson, organizes the population body in measurable categories and classes has been the base for obscure governmental techniques and the brainwashing ideology of homogeneity, since this seriality, as put by Partha Chatterjee: can operate only with integers. This implies that for each category of classification, any individual can count only as one or zero, never as a fraction, that in turn means that all partial or mixed affiliation to a category are ruled out. (Chatterjee, 2004: 5-6). The challenge to think the social and cultural realities in Latin America ou tside the framework of nationalism is difficult since it has been a basic ideological resource to think emancipation in the continent. Simn Bolvar, for example, intellectual and Latin American symbol of the struggle for freedom and liberation nurtured homogenizing nationalist purposes such as a strong centralized government that could re-educate popular masses in order to inject them with the spirit of citizenry in the love of country and law (Skurski, 1996: 379). Similarly, Jos Carlos Mariategui, Peruvian famous intellectual who advocated insistently for indigenous social revolutions that could truly insert the Indian in Perus idea of nation for what is considered ahead of his time (Young, 2001: 198-199), was deeply influenced by the more naive, nationalist,

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teleological conceptions of Marxism. In considering the union, upon the homogenizing empty idea of people, of more than 40 different Indian groups in Peru (Chirapaq, 2008: Ethno-Linguistic map) and defend their articulation in an indigenous Marxist revolution (Mariategui, 1991: 47), Mariategui is not only misjudging the effects that such a distant conception in cosmological terms as Marxism could have upon this specific context, as is also ignoring that even if this indigenous process could be developed successfully popular nationalist movements contain exclusionary moments that can easily develop into oppressive official nationalist ideologies when these movements achieve statehood. (Cheah, 1998: 31) In order to advance on the unveiling of exclusionary and power mechanisms within the Americas is mandatory that new intellectual productions overcome the ideological movement of supporting and equate emancipation with nationalism. The ideas of de-nationalization and de-territorialization proposed by the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, for example, permit to explore new possibilities of spatial and symbolic social connections that globalization, migration and virtual spaces had made visible and could erode the coercive forces of Nation-States and strength the existence of Difference. (Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, 1995: 143). Deeply defined by universalism, secularism and scientificism as produced within enlightenment, what Chakrabarty defines as historicism is a specific way of comprehending time that posit itself as universal and unique. Drawing from Guhas ideas about the exclusionary oppressive relation between a universal political thought and what this would consider as a prepolitical thought (Chakrabarty, 2000: 12-13), Chakrabarty, for who historicism would be the enabling condition of modern historical consciousness conceptualizes it as the capacity to construct a single historical context

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for everything the capacity to see the past as gone and reified into an object of investigation (Ibid.: 243). Through this depiction of modern historicism that reveals its anachronic element of considering time as one and cosmological and cultural productions of non-modern social groups as remnants from an ancient past (Ibid.: 14, 249), Chakrabarty deconstruct the ideas of development/underdevelopment, modernity, traditional culture, science and others that, tacitly accepted and naturalized, collaborate to the unquestioned and stagnant cosmological hierarchy of contemporary Latin American societies. Historicist approaches and readings of reality in Latin America not only conforms a-critical common sense, but come as automatic reflexes even to critical thinkers. As an example we could argue, again on a critical approach to the advantages and solutions Mariategui saw in socialist revolution among the Indian, that the fact of considering that the native groups needed an external ideology that would make their organization and political action possible, is indirectly to devaluate their own organizational capacity and own ways of resistance, considering them as prepolitical. On the contrary, what Rabasa and Harvey on their accounts of popular insurgent movements in Mexico come to show is that subaltern successful political strategies, rather than being defined by official modern concepts and guidelines, perform exactly what Guha calls the stretching of the [official] category of the political. (Harvey, 1998: 165; Rabasa, 2001: 202-207) (Chakrabarty, 2000: 12). We can find another example of well intentioned historicism in Nstor Garcia Canclini, who, when trying to map Latin American hybrid modernities, fails to identify the traps of historicist discourse by expressing that From the popular side, we should be less concerned about its becoming extinct than about its being transformed. Never have there been so many artisans, or popular musicians, or

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such a distribution of folklore, because their products maintain traditional functions (provide work for indigenous people and peasants) and develop other modern ones (Canclini, 2005: 5) The clear separation between supposedly traditional and modern functions to the cultural products and folklore produced by the entities external and alien to Canclini (their) of artisans and popular musicians may seem dubious as an evidence of the historicist character of Canclinis discourse. This dubiety disappears, however, if we assess critically his assumption that the function of craftwork and music to popular social groups in Latin America are to provide work to indigenous people and peasants. Canclinis failure to, from a humility position, avoid to interpret, represent and historicize a popular culture that is definitely different than his own popular culture, represents in my opinion, an example of what to avoid within the marshland of subalternity intellectuality. The reflex of historicizing, specifically, should be avoided first by acknowledging that to read and interpret practices cosmologically oriented differently as a survival of an earlier mode of production would inexorably lead us to stagist and elitist conceptions of history; it would take us back to a historicist framework. (Chakrabarty, 2000: 14). Then, by understanding the need of deconstructing a linear, unitarian and progressive way of conceiving time, according to which there would be space for only one now (Ibid.: 249). In this respect Chakrabarty gives us Guhas fundamental understanding: His point is that what seemed traditional in this modernity were traditional only in so far as [their] roots could be traced back to pre colonial times, but [they were] by no means archaic in the sense of being outmoded. (Ibid.: 15). Only then, according to the authors, we could finally be able to re-conceive time as hetero-temporal and not-one, as the certainty of many actual existences in this

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precise now instead of only remnants possibilities of dead existences that we contemplate from one actuality: To critique historicism in all its varieties is to unlearn to think of history as a development process in which that which is possible becomes actual by tending to a future that is singular. Or, to put it differently, it is not to learn to think the present the now that we inhabit as we speak as irreducible not-one. To take that step is to rethink the problem of historical time and to review the relationship between the possible and the actual. (Chakrabarty, 2000: 249) One last epistemological approach of fundamental importance to our aim of addressing critically ways of thought and intelligibility with reality that support and reinforce domination dynamics in Latin America, is that of representation. Although this thematic has been treated extensively within philosophical and anthropological debates, we are interested here on its relevance and pertinence to analyze subaltern and postcolonial scenarios. In this sense, the discussion established by linguistic Naoki Sakai around Japan nationalism, language and identity brings important considerations about the dynamics of representation within established hierarchies and power relations between what he defines as West universalism and non-West particularisms. (Sakai, 1997: 61,154) On his deconstructive pursuit about what would be, effectively, a truly Japanese way of thought, Sakai reaches important conclusions not only about the way in which nations idealize a performative transition in order to create, within an historicist progressive and linear conception of time, the illusion of continuity of an homogeneous bounded collectivity that would be the Japanese (Ibid.: 46). The author also construct relevant considerations about the dynamics of imagination and co-production what he defines as schema of cofiguration in which Japan can represent its own image and identity through its relation to the putative West: By the schema of cofiguration, I want

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to point out the essentially imaginary nature of the comparative framework of Japan and the West In the desire to want to know Japanese thought, not only Japan but also the West has to be figured out: Japan and the West have to be configured. (Ibid.: 52). Deeply rooted on language and representation mimetic dynamics, this schema led him to realize the impossibility of avoiding, either to a supposedly true Japanese culture, either to any other cultural minority or particularisms, the necessary linkage to the also imagined modern West at the very moment of identity affirmation and selfrepresentation. (Ibid.). Furthermore, Sakai concludes that the illusion of

differentiating, far from establish a difference that should be respected, connects and homogenize in a more subtle epistemological layer. To Sakai an epistemic arrangement has come into being, according to which to insist on the particularity and autonomy of Japan is paradoxically to worship the putative ubiquity of the idealized West. (Ibid.: 50) We can see the relevance of these epistemological reflections to Latin American realities when we realize, first, the radical nationalist ethos, in contraposition with the former colonial powers, of the Latin American Nations; and second, the fierceness which with critical intellectual production and subaltern movements had invariably been implicated in this form of domination and have had to construct their identities in the dynamics of assimilation and repulsion against this Occidental ethnocentrism. (Ibid.: 61). Following Sakai analysis, when groups of non-recognized cosmologies within Latin American States feel the necessity of, and actually seek self-representation and identification within the oppressive and determinant conceptual frameworks and structures of the State rights, citizenship, democracy, equality, etc, they are still playing within the rules of a fixating oppressing identification by/through the values and

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concepts of a dominant cosmology. A truly resistance and liberation would come, then, according to Sakai, only with the total avoidance of representation and alien definition: Above all, resistance here is that which disturbs the possible representational relationship between the self and its image. It is something that resists the formation of those identities that subject people to various institutions. (Ibid.: 175). In this sense, Sakai thesis implies, to native or afro-descendent subject, groups and political movements within Latin America, a denial of representation that would pass through the denial of the political, through the avoidance of manifest and claim for selfrepresentation and recognition, through the deep existential acknowledge of an ultimate existent reality of freedom of spirit where external oppression and domination would be only mundane transient illusions. We might see, after going through these three fundamental epistemological discussions, how, political strategies and conceptual instruments that has been used in different moments and histories of subaltern struggles within Latin America, and that continue to forge insurgent agendas and critical intellectual perspectives nowadays could actually, either through camouflaging heterogeneous world-views, practices and temporalities with nationalist homogenizing projects; or by ordering Difference within temporality in a way to strictly determinate what can rule our modern lives; or lastly through unconsciously support and reinforce the very chains we wish to shatter; attaching our efforts for emancipation to the very ideology that oppress. However, are epistemological radical deconstruction and Sakais conscious and resolute acceptance plausible options when only few can have access to these approaches and so many live happy within their daily illusions?

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Even apprehending the authors positions, I would argue that the ultimate pursuit for an emancipatory truth that would let us all free although has its undeniable value is not for everybody on the one hand. There must be intellectuals and activists committed with realistic and pragmatic thinking although always acknowledging their epistemological limitations that would propose and contribute to concrete changes on power and symbolic social structures, allowing the social live contexts to change and mutate even that limited and slowly to closer of those emancipatory horizons glimpsed by more radical theoretical and epistemological productions. On the other hand, this epistemological deconstructions that envisage an emancipatory truth or at least an ideal state of social and cultural relations as we can appreciate in Chakrabarty and Sakai theories for example brings with it the arrogance and lack of humility that characterizes science as a modern, enlightened ideological production. This pursuit for answers and epistemological lies cannot become a paralyzing teleological project revolving perennially inside the walls of academic institutions, plotting comfortably while subalternity, more than a word is the death, the burden, the injustice and tears of millions of individuals inhabiting this exact now. Real people has to benefit not only from a supposedly happy end that would emancipate everyone in the blink of an eye, but from the hole process of looking for this ultimately set of liberating deconstructions. We must avoid, within subaltern scientific projects of deconstruction and critical constructive thinking, the arrogant, elitist and plastering teleological practices characteristic of traditional philosophy, history and social sciences in the way they were developed within the enlightenment tradition.

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Final Remarks Due limitations of space and time I wont be able to present fully developed this third part of the argument, that I sketch at these final remarks as one of many possibilities of thinking and achieving, politically although not exactly in the strict, official, modern meaning of the concept concrete advances on the current disputes for recognition, self-representation and pluri-temporalities within fragmented societies in Latin America. I believe that acknowledging the epistemological limitations of subaltern political and intellectual projects could be an important strategic advantage of struggling within limited coercive frameworks, since those involved already know what is currently impossible of being achieved, and therefore their projects are zealously idealized to put others in better positions to achieving it. Hybridization within State: institutional production of third spaces Several authors and theoretical groups concerned with the thematic of colonialism and Postcolonialism, as well as politics, multiculturalism and subalternity within contemporary societies, have treated the problematic of the conflictive relation between subaltern, unrepresentable social/political movements with specific claims and characteristics, and official governmental bodies or States. This primary concern appears, for example, in Partha Chatterjees Political Society (Chatterje, 2004: 38-41), Homi Bhabhas political differentiation between cultural difference and cultural diversity (Rutherford, 1990: 207-209), Jorge Rabasas accounts on political agreements between the Mexican State and the insurgent city of Tepoztln, (Rabasa, 2001: 206-208) and in the founding statement of the Latin American Subalter Studies Group when is stated that:

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The subaltern, in other words, is not only acted on, despite the tendencies in tradicional paradigms to see it as a passive or absent subject that can be mobilized only from above; it also acts to produce social effects that are visible, if not always predictable or understandable, by these paradigms or the state policies and research projects they authorize. (Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, 1995: 137)

Basically these relates and theorizations converge not only to the conflictive antagonist essence of the matter, but also to the fundamental agency of subaltern social groups and organizations in the process and specially to the transformation the realm of politics, the traditional structure and modus operandis of the State must undertake in order to comport this new demands. Within this context it seems reasonable to suppose that new key political actors, from both sides of this new configuration, not only will emerge, as could possibly occupy key roles and develop significant functions within governments. In this sense, drawing from and analyzing on three different models of subjective and collective hybridization: the one suffered by diasporic black subjects, portrayed by Fanon and Du Bois; Bhabhas idea of hybridity as a third space formed of incommensurable cultural codes intelligible due their symbol-forming activity (Rutherford, 1990: 210); and Chatterjees theory of cultural resistance and corruption of modernity by a national culture divided in inner/outer or material/spiritual spheres (Chatterjee, 1993: 6), I would try to address how hybrid individualities and social groups could, when obtaining political spaces and legitimacy within a specific political body, bring hybridization, hetero-temporality and otherness into the state, corrupting it from within and enabling, gradually, institutional third spaces.

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REFERENCES
Anderson, B., 1991. Imagined Communities. London: Verso. __________., 1998. The Spectre of Comparison. London: Verso. Canclini, N. G., 1995. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Chakrabarty, D. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Post Colonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chatterjee, P. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ___________., 2004. The Politics of the Governed. New York: Columbia University Press. Cheah, P., 1998. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Chirapaq. Available (Acessed: 1 May 2011). at: http://www.chirapaq.org.pe/es/mapa-etnolinguistico

Harvey, N., 2005. The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy. Durham: Duke University Press. Latin American Subaltern Studies Group. 1993. Founding Statement. In: J. Beverly, J. Oviedo and M. Aronna. eds. 1995. The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America. London: Duke University Press, 135-146. Mariategui, J. C., 1991. 7 Ensayos de Interpretacion de la realidade Peruana. Lima: Editorial Horizonte. Mignolo, W. D., 2001. Coloniality of Power and Subalternity. In: I. Rodrguez. ed. 2001. Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader. Duke: Duke University Press, 424442. __________., 2005. The Idea of Latin America. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Pagden, A., 2008. Worlds at War: The 2500 Years Struggle Between East and West. New York: Random House. Quijano, A. and Wallerstein, I., 1992 Americanity as a Concept; Or the Americas in the Modern World-System. In: 1992. ISSA I:134, 54956.

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Rabasa, J., 2001. Beyond Representation? The Impossibility of the Local (Notes on Subaltern Studies in Light of a Rebellion in Tepoztln, Morelos). In: I. Rodrguez. ed. 2001. Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader. Duke: Duke University Press, 191208. Rutherford, J., 1990. The Third Space: an interview with Homi Bhabha. In: J. Rutherford, ed. 1990. Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 207-221. Sakai, N., 1997. Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Sawyer, S. 2004. Crude Chronicles: Indigenous, Politics, Multinational Oil, and Neoliberalism in Ecuador. Durham: Duke University Press. Skurski, J., 1994. The Ambiguities of Authenticity in Latin America: Doa Brbara and the Construction of National identity. In: G. Eley and G. Suny. eds. 1996. Becoming National: A Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 371-398. Young, R. J. C., 2001. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Zapatista National Liberation Army. 1993. Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle. In: J. Beverly, J. Oviedo and M. Aronna. eds. 1995. The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America. London: Duke University Press, 311-313.

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