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Latin American postcolonial theories

Santiago Castro-Gómeza
a
Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, Colombia

To cite this Article Castro-Gómez, Santiago(1998) 'Latin American postcolonial theories', Peace Review, 10: 1, 27 — 33
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 Peace Review 10:1 (1998), 27-33

Latin American Postcolonial Theories

Santiago Castro-Gómez

During the late 1970s a new field of investigation called "postcolonial studies"
began to consolidate itself in Western universities, especially those in Britain and
the United States. The discourses emerged from influential university chairs held
by refugees or sons and daughters of foreigners and immigrants. These individ-
uals were socialized in two worlds differing in language, religion, traditions, and
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socio-political organization. They were acquainted with both the world of

colonized nations, which they or their parents abandoned for some reason or
another, and the world of industrialized countries in which they live and work
today as intellectuals or academics. At a time when postmodern, structuralist,
and feminist theory enjoyed a privileged position in the intellectual Anglo-Saxon
world, these people considered themselves to be "Third World intellectuals of the
First World," thus defining the form in which they began to reflect on problems
relating to colonialism.

D eparting from institutionally accepted studies such as anthropology, literary

criticism, ethnology, and historiography, postcolonial theorists articulated a
critique of colonialism which substantially differs from anticolonial narratives of
the 1960s and 1970s. During that period academic circles popularized a type of
discourse which emphasized the revolutionary rupture from the capitalist system
of colonial domination. Working within the geopolitical spaces opened by the
Cold War, as well as the environments created by Asian and African indepen-
dence movements, this discourse focused on the fortification of national identities
of colonized countries and the construction of a society free from class antago-
nism. The critique of colonialism was understood as a rupture from the
structures of oppression which had impeded the "Third World" from realizing
the European project of modernity. However, anticolonialist narratives never
pondered the epistemological status of their own discourse. Such criticism arose
from methodologies pertaining to the social sciences, the humanities, and
philosophy—fields of study that had been developed by European modernism
since the 19th century. Economic dependence, the destruction of cultural
identity, the growing poverty of the majority of the population, and the
discrimination of minorities were all phenomena considered to be "deviations"
from modernity. All of these maladies, it was thought, could be rectified through
revolution and the popular sector's seizure of power. These popular sectors, not
the bourgeoisie, would be the true "subjects of history," those who would carry
out the project of "humanizing humanity," which in turn would be realized
within colonized nations themselves.
What postcolonial theorists began to realize is that the very language of
1040-2659/98/010027-07 © 1998 Carfax Publishing Ltd
 28 Santiago Castro-Gomez

modernity, with which anticolonialists expressed themselves, is essentially located

within the totalizing practices of European colonialism. Third World critiques of
colonialism, narratives theoretically based on sociology, economics, and the
political sciences, could not leave behind the space in which these disciplines
reiterated the hegemonic language of modernity in colonized countries. Follow-
ing the thesis of Jacques Derrida, the Indian philosopher Gayatri Spivak affirms
that no socially diagnostic discourse can transcend the homogenizing structures
of modern rationality. This means that no sociological theory can "represent"
objects found outside the totality of signs that configure the institutionality of
knowledge in modern societies. It is always anticipated that scientific knowledge
is codified within the interior of a fabric of signs that regulate the production of
"meaning," such as in the creation of objects and subjects of knowledge. It is
from a certain "politics of interpretation," then, (actualized in universities,
publishing houses, centers of investigation, etc.) that a theory's "effects of truth"
are produced. Furthermore, the politics of interpretation define the frontiers that
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separate one scientific discipline from another and assign determined parcels of
knowledge.
Anticolonialist narratives discursively generated a "marginalized,"
"exteriorized" space which agreed with the reconfiguration of intellectual
strongholds experienced by institutions responsible for creating new knowledge.
In many metropolitan universities "marginality," "alterity," and "Third World-
ism" were even converted into new fields of academic investigation capable of
mobilizing a considerable amount of financial assistance. The institutional
implementation of these new objects of knowledge/investigation demanded the
importation of "practical examples" from the "Third World," such as magical
realism, liberation theology, and any other subjects that could be classified within
the space of "otherness." From this point of view, the emphasis of anticolonial
narratives on opposition, such as the divisions between the oppressors and the
oppressed, the powerful and the meek, center and periphery, civilization and
barbarism, succeeded in strengthening the binary system of classification in-
herent to metropolitan apparatuses that produce knowledge.
The Indian philosopher Homi Bhabha, another central figure in postcolonial
discourse, also criticized the institutional mechanisms that produced representa-
tions of the "other" and projected it as an entity easily obscured by modernity's
ethnological, anthropological, geographic, historiographic, and linguistic dis-
courses. In order to legitimate itself, the European project of colonial expansion
needed to create the metaphysical self-image of conqueror: that of "Man" as
god, maker of the world, owner and master of his own historic destiny. The once
sacred space of the world, considered to be vestigia Dei, is replaced by vestigia
hominis, in reality object of and subject to technical manipulation.
It is perhaps Edward Said who has had the most impact in postcolonial
discourse. In studying the diverse textual formats with which Europe produces
and codifies knowledge about the "Orient," Said emphasizes the connections
between imperialism and the human sciences, thereby following the line of
thought delineated in the 1970s by European theorists like Michel Foucault. This
French philosopher had studied the rules that outlined the truth of a discourse,
showing where truth was constructed and how it circulated and was administered
by determined instances of power. Said elaborates on this and explores the way
 Latin American Postcolonial Theories 29

in which European colonialist societies discursively constructed an image of

non-metropolitan cultures, especially those found under their territorial control.
The limitless power European imperialist forces exercised upon every aspect of
a locality, from its territorial boundaries to its traditional culture, warranted the
production of a series of historical, archaeological, sociological, and ethnological
discourses about the "other."

D uring the early 1980s a group of Indian intellectuals, identified with the
historian Ranajid Guha, noticed Said's critical study. The works of this
group, later compiled under the name "subaltern studies," critiqued the anti-
colonial, nationalist discourse of the Indian political class and the official
historiography of the independence movement. Ranajid Guha, Partha Chatter-
jee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and other authors considered such narratives to be
colonialist constructions projected on to the Indian people by social scientists,
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historians, and political elites. India's fight for independence amidst the threat of
British domination was presented in the narratives as a process rooted in the
"universal ethic" fleeced by the colonizers, but efficaciously recuperated by
Gandhi, Nehru, and other nationalist leaders. According to the subalternists, this
reliance on a supposed "moral exteriority" contained the Christian rhetoric of
victimization, which made the masses, by dint of their oppression, morally
superior to the colonizers. One may then conclude that the narration of the
independence • movement mirrored the Christian—humanist project of universal
redemption. In other words, the movement used the exact same discursive
figures that had succeeded in legitimating European overseas colonialism.
The demystification of anticolonialist nationalism also includes a harsh critique
of the imperial rhetoric of English Marxism, which employed distant examples
of anti-imperialist struggles of the "Third World" in order to politically legitimate
itself "at home." Rural insurrections, such as demonstrations, written agendas,
and well advised programs of political action, were understood as manifestations
of a recently acquired (social and moral) "consciousness." Since the Indian
masses lacked the socio-historical literacy in which to base their politically
subversive activities, the homogenizing schemes of sociological and historio-
graphic discourses ignored and subsequently left their protagonist position
unwritten. According to Guha, all humanistic studies, including literature and
historiography, functioned as strategies of subalternization in the hands of the
educated elites of India. They are, as Spivak would say, essentialist narratives still
subject to colonial epistemologies which obscure cultural hybridizations, varied
spaces, and contrasting identities.
The postcolonial criticism of Said, Guha, Bhabha, and Spivak stresses the
persistence of colonial legacies within modern systems, as evidenced by represen-
tations of the "other" generated by the social sciences which bureaucratic
rationality politically administers. In the early 1990s, thinkers in the United
States like Walter Mignolo, John Beverley, Alberto Moreiras, Ileana Rodriguez,
and Norma Alarcon began to reflect upon the political function of Latin
American studies in the North American university and society. They adopted
Indian criticism and established a postcolonial restoration aptly named "Latin
American Studies." According to the aforementioned authors, "Area Studies,"
and "Latin American Studies" in particular, have traditionally functioned as
 30 Santiago Castro-Gomez

discourses inscribed in a bureaucratic—academic rationality that homogenizes the

social, economic, political, and sexual differences of Latin American societies.
Latin Americanism, that is, the consolidation of theoretical representations of
Latin America produced from the human and social sciences, is identified as a
disciplinary mechanism in accord with the imperialist interests of North Amer-
ica's foreign policy. The emergence of the United States as the triumphant
power during the Second World War, the financial aid programs for the
modernization of the "Third World," the postmodern globalization of the
American way of life during the phase called "late capitalism," the political
struggle against the expansion of communism in the southern part of South
America—all of these factors must have acted as empirico-transcendental
conditions of possibility for Latin Americanist discourse in North American
universities.
Similarly to the misrepresentation of India, the United States' "official histori-
ography" of Latin America, presented as a series of literary, philosophical, and
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sociological representations, structurally conceals difference. In fact, humanist

epistemologies, with their emphasis on the centrality of intellectuals and erudi-
tion, find themselves symbiotically incorporated in literature programs present in
almost all universities. They seek to formulate a critique of modernity's epistemo-
logical strategies of subalternization in hopes of moving toward the locus enuntia-
tionis (the site of enunciation) from which subaltern subjects may articulate their
own representations. In the following pages I would like to examine closely the
specific premises of two members of the group: John Beverley and Walter
Mignolo.
Beverley's criticisms are mainly directed toward the type of literary and
humanistic discourse which predominates in Latin American literature depart-
ments in the U.S. Following Foucault's thesis, Beverley argues that structures of
the university apparatus offer professors and students material that is already
reified, "packaged," into rigid canonical schemata that have defined Latin
American literature. Beverley reveals that the institutional organization of such
literature programs follows the hegemonic ideology of imperialism. Thus,
Spanish, English, and French literature departments exist because Spain, Eng-
land, and France had important empires. Polish and Romanian literatures, on
the other hand, are not given whole departments. In many universities Latin
American literature exists as a subdivision of the "Romance languages," while at
the same time literatures from Romania and Poland are studied within the
context of "Slavic Languages."
Like Guha, Viswanathan, and other Indian authors, Beverley posits that
literature was an example of the elites' humanistic training, the same elites who,
since the 19th century, encouraged the neocolonialist project of the nation state.
Latin American nationalism emerged from a disciplinary logic that
"subalternized" a series of social subjects: women, the insane, Indians, blacks,
homosexuals, peasants, etc. Literature and all other humanistic fields of study
appeared to be structurally inscribed within exclusive hegemonic systems. Intel-
lectuals like Bello, Sarmiento, and Marti, to name a few canonical examples,
acted from a privileged position secured by literature and the humanities.
Authorized by their privilege, the authors exercised a "politics of representation."
The humanities were converted into the space from which the subaltern is
 Latin American Postcolonial Theories 31

discursively "produced," from which his/her interests are represented. The

subaltern is thus assigned a place in the temporal succession of history, and is
shown the "correct" path from which he/she should base his/her political
revindications.
John Beverley seeks to break from the humanistic view concerning intellectuals
in order to arrive at post-representational forms of theory. In Literature and Politics
(1990) he advanced that literary theory is not a mere superstructural reflection
of the economic sphere, but rather a discourse involved in social formation
through its presence within the educational apparatus. Later, in Against Literature
(1993), he presents the university as an institution in which almost all hegemonic
and counter-hegemonic societal struggles occur. Beverley understands struggle as
a deconstruction of the humanistic discourses that formed the patriarchal subject
and the modern bourgeois. The struggle signals another type of extra-academic,
non-literary practice that resists representation in the "critical discourse" of
intellectuals. These are differentiated voices capable of representing themselves,
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as is the case with Rigoberta Menchu and the Zapatista Army of Liberation.
Beverley considers criticism of humanistic discourses that deal with Latin
America as liberating therapy, a "psychoanalysis of literature," which should
raise the intellectual's consciousness regarding what Spivak calls the "epistemic
violence" attached to his/her heroic fantasies. Liberated from his/her "will of
representation," the literary critic may be capable of efficaciously acting within
the boundaries that Michel de Certau calls a "micropolitics of the mundane," the
site where social conflicts more closely affect his/her own life, the university.

W alter Mignolo also comments on the authority of the canon in North

American universities, which defines the true territories of knowledge
about "Latin America." Some members of the Latin American Group of
Subaltern Studies adopt the Indian model of postcolonial theorization and use it
to assess Latin American colonial situations. Mignolo, however, thinks that this
model corresponds to a very specific locus rooted in India's British colonial legacy.
Instead of converting Indian postcolonial theory into a model exportable to other
peripheral zones, Mignolo tries to investigate the "local sensitivities" that accom-
modated the emergence of postcolonial theories in Latin America.
When Mignolo talks about "postcolonial theories" he refers to, like Bhabha
and Spivak, a critique of the epistemological legacies of colonialism, as they are
reproduced by North American academia. The critique of the "teaching ma-
chine" is politically relevant because it annuls the legitimacy of modernity's
universalizing paradigms. The paradigms rendered European colonialist prac-
tices as irrelevant in modern processes responsible for organizing knowledge.
Basing his assertions on the theory developed by Carl Pletsch concerning the
geopolitical division within intellectual projects, Mignolo advances that between
1950 and 1975 (the "third phase of capitalism's global expansion") the enuncia-
tion and production of theoretical discourses were localized within the "First
World," in technologically and economically developed countries. "Third
World" countries were recognized only as receptors of such scientific knowledge.
Mignolo wishes to investigate fully the relationship between imperialism and
knowledge, how it manifests itself in the scientific practices of imperialist
countries. In his magnificent book The Darker Side of the Renaissance, this Argentine
 32 Santiago Castro-Gomez

thinker proposed to demonstrate that during the 16th century, historiographical,

linguistic, and geographical knowledge was directly linked to the beginning of
European expansion. In this work, as well as in previous writings, Mignolo
reveals that modern science produces objects of knowledge, like "America,"
"The West Indies," "Latin America," or "the Third World," which functioned
as colonialist strategies of subalternization. These strategies cannot be interpreted
as mere "pathologies," but rather as palpable proof that modernity was an
intrinsically colonialist and genocidal project. In fact, modern science has been
accomplice to what Mignolo, after Dussel, calls the "three big genocides of
modernity:" the destruction of Amerindian cultures, the slavery of blacks from
Africa, and the massacre of Jews in Europe.
But, what occurs once the old European colonialist agenda is dissolved and the
balance of the world order established during the Cold War falters? Mignolo
posits that three types of theory stemming from different loci of enunciation will
emerge and epistemologically exceed the colonial legacies of modernity. They
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are: postmodernity, postcolonialism, and postoccidentalism. While postmodern

theories express the crisis of modernity's project within Europe (Foucault,
Lyotard, Derrida) and the United States (Jameson), postcolonial theories deal
with the crisis from the colonial perspective of countries that had attained their
independence after the Second World War, like India (Guha, Bhabha, Spivak)
and the Middle East (Said). Latin America, with its long tradition of failed
modernizing projects, is "naturally" the origin of postoccidental theories. What
these three theoretical constructions have in common is their dissatisfaction with
the globalization of new technological developments after 1945 and their
profound skepticism about what Habermas calls "the unfinished project of
modernity."
According to Mignolo's research, postoccidental theories began to emerge in
Latin America after 1918, the time when Europe began to lose hegemony over
global power. Theorists like Jose Carlos Mariategui, Edmundo O'Gormann,
Fernando Ortiz, Leopoldo Zea, Rodolfo Kusch, Enrique Dussel, Raul Prebisch,
Darcy Ribeiro, and Roberto Fernandez Retamar succeeded in epistemologically
dismantling the colonialist and hegemonic discourse of modernity, which in turn
motivated Latin America to move toward a technologically modernized society.
The theoretical knowledge of these authors is "postoccidental" because they
expressed a critical response to what Jameson refers to as the social and scientific
project of modernity in its new stage of imperialist globalization. Latin America
had already produced theories that, ipso facto, broke with the privileges of colonial
discourse long before Guha established his Indian Group of subaltern studies and
before Europe and United States began to discuss postmodernism.
Naturally, the following question may be posed: What guarantees that the
epistemologies of Latin American social science and philosophy (treated by the
aforementioned authors) did not also play a subversive/subalternizing role, like
those from the United States and Europe? Mignolo wonders if an interpretation
of texts produced in pluricultural spaces, involved in colonialist relations of
power, is possible. Hermeneutics is an exercise that facilitates the comprehension
of colonial situations or legacies, for the subject who interprets, as well as for
the texts that are interpreted. When the social scientist (or philosopher) bio-
graphically or ethnically identifies himself/herself with a determinate excluded
 Latin American Poskolonial Theories 33

community, then what Gadamer called a "fusion of horizons" is produced: the

interpreter does not approach his/her object as a disinterested observer, rather
he/she brings along all the prejudices (ethical, theoretical, political) that bind
him/her to his/her own lifestyle, in this case, to a lifestyle underpinned by the
experience of colonial marginalization. Colonialism functions as a globally
identified pre-philosophical space, a "cultural tradition" from which an interpret-
ation of Latin American perspectives is possible. In contrast to events in Europe
and the U.S., Mignolo posits that a major part of social science and philosophy
in Latin America has manifested itself as a "pluritopic hermeneutics" which
breaks away from the objectifying epistemologies of colonial science.
I think it is unquestionable that subaltern studies have discovered important
aspects of the ways in which colonial legacies of modernity continue to be
reproduced in First World academic settings. However, I am not very convinced
by the way in which postcolonial theorists relate the sociological knowledge of
experts (in the human and social sciences) with the rationality of abstract systems
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(capitalist economy and the bureaucratic—administrative apparatus). It appears

that knowledge has a purely instrumental function, being directly tied to the
homogenizing imperatives of the technical, as Max Weber demonstrates. Imperi-
alism's politico-economic interests permeate the social sciences, and their institu-
tional role is reduced to the subalternization of the "other." Yet, if this were so,
it remains unclear how Mignolo's hermeneutics escapes the straitjacket imposed
by colonial epistemologies to mysteriously become reflexive knowledges.
Subaltern studies appear to read globalization, modernity, and the develop-
ment of expertise systems in a mystifying form. Subaltern studies treat these
processes as if they were agents invested in an omnipresent "imperial reason."
This amounts to removing the social foundation upon which the critique of the
system is based. It is for this reason that the weakest point of subaltern studies,
much to its chagrin, is its incapacity to represent its own locus enuntiationis.

Translated by Christina Lloyd

RECOMMENDED READINGS
Beverley, J. 1996. "¿Posliteratura? Sujeto subalterno e impasse de las humanidades."
in B. González Stephan (ed.), Cultural y Tercer Mundo. Caracas: Editorial Nueva Sociedad.
Beverley, J. 1993. Against Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press.
Bhabha, H. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
Guha, R. 1988. "On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India." in R. Guhan and
G. Spivak (ed.), Selected Subaltern Studies. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mignolo, W. 1995. The Darker Side of the Renaissance. Literacy,Territorialityand Colonization. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
Mignolo, W. 1996. "Posoccidentalismo: las epistemologías fronterizas y el dilema de los estudios
(latinoamericanos) de área." in M. Moraña (ed.), Crítica Culturaly Teoría Literaria Latinoamericana.
Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh.
Said, E. 1978. Orientalism. Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Spivak, G. Ch. 1994. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in P. Williams and L. Chrisman (eds.), Colonial
Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.

Santiago Castro-Gómez teaches at the Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia. He recently

published a book entitled Crítka de la Razón Latinoamericana. Correspondence: Stoecklestrasse 22-A,
72070 Tuebingen, Germany.