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POSTCOLONIALISM
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1NC BHABHA SHELL
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LINKS
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LINK-MODERNIZATION
LINK-DEVELOPMENT
LINK-NAFTA/FTAA
LINK-MEXICO
LINK-BORDER
LINK- ECON CULTURE
LINK– UNIVERSAL
LINK – GENERIC
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FRAMEWORK
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COLONIALITY THOUGHT
DECOLONIAL THOUGHT KEY
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IMPACTS
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IMPACT –INTERSECTIONAL OPPRESSION
IMPACT - BIOPOWER/RACISM
IMPACT - OTHERIZATION
IMPACT-ENVIRONMENT
IMPACT-LANGUAGE
IMPACT – RACISM
IMPACT- COLONIALISM
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ALTERNATIVES
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ALTERNATIVE-NEGATIVE THOUGHT
ALTERNATIVE- POSTCOLONIAL THOUGHT
ALTERNATIVE-UNBUILT
ALTERNATIVE-HYBRID
ALTERNATIVE-POSTCOL. TRANSLATION
ALTERNATIVE- SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE
ALTERNATIVE-DECOLONIZATION
ALTERNATIVE-MIMICRY
ALTERNATIVE – EPISTEMOLOGICAL DECOLONIZATION
ALTERNATIVE-MIRROR
ALTERNATIVE-EMBRACE THE OTHER
ALTERNATIVE-DISCOURSE
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BLOCK AT
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AT: NOT COLONIALITY
AT: ECONOMIC THEORY
AT: WESTERN THEORY
AT: PERM
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AFF
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TURNS
NO ALT SOLVENCY
AT: STATE BAD
AT BHABHA
PERM
BROWN T/S
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1NC Bhabha Shell
A) The Affirmatives construction of a “Nation-Space” manifests in
distinction to a colonized Other- locking the colonial Other in a violent
cycle.
Bhabha 1994 (Homi K. Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language, and
the Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University “The Location of Culture” pg. 141-142 , Routledge
1994)
How does one write the nation's modernity as the event of the everyday and the advent of the epochal? The
laniDiage of national belonging comes laden with atavistic apologues, which has led Benedict Anderson to ask: 'But
why do nations celebrate their hoariness, not their astonishing youth?'8 The nation's claim to modernity, as an
autonomous or sovereign form of political rationality, is particularly questionable if, with Partha Chatterjee, we
adopt the postcolonial perspective: Nationalism . . . seeks to represent itself in the image of the Englightenment
and fails to do so. For Enlightenment itself, to assert its sovereignty as the universal ideal, needs its Other; if it
could ever actualise itself in the real world as the truly universal, it would in fact destroy itself.9Such ideological
ambivalence nicely supports Gellner's paradoxical point that the historical necessity of the idea of the nation
conflicts with the contingent and arbitrary signs and symbols that signify the affective life of the national culture.
The nation may exemplify modern social cohesion but Nationalism is not what it seems, and above all not what
it seems to itself . . . The cultural shreds and patches used by nationalism are often arbitrary historical
inventions . Any old shred would have served as well. But in no way does it follow that the principle of
nationalism . . . is itself in the least contingent and accidental.10 (My emphasis) The problematic boundaries of
modernity are enacted in these ambivalent temporalities of the nation-space . The language of culture and
community is poised on the fissures of the present becoming the rhetorical figures of a national past .
Historians transfixed on the event and origins of the nation never ask, and political theorists possessed of the
'modem' totalities of the nation - 'homogeneity, literacy and anonymity are the key traits'11 - never pose, the
essential question of the representation of the nation as a temporal process.
B) Colonial ‘truisms’ of unitary growth and universal aims results in the denial of
colonized power and the erasure of their alterity
Bhabha, Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard, 1985
(Homi K, Autumn 1985, Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside
Delhi, May 1817. Critical Inquiries: Volume 12, Number 1. JSTOR. page 152-153. RH)
Despite appearances, the text of transparency inscribes a double vision: the field of the "true" emerges as a visible
effect of knowledge/ power only after the regulatory and displacing division of the true and the false. From this
point of view, discursive "transparency" is best read in the photographic sense in which a transparency is also
always a negative, processed into visibility through the technologies of reversal, enlargement, lighting, editing,
projection, not a source but a re-source of light. Such a bringing to light is never a prevision; it is always a question
of the provision of visibility as a capacity, a strategy, an agency but also in the sense in which the prefix pro(vision)
might indicate an elision of sight, delegation, substitution, contiguity, in place of... what? This is the question that
brings us to the ambivalence of the presence of authority, peculiarly visible in its colonial articulation. For if
transparency signifies discursive closure-intention, image, author-it does so through a disclosure of its rules of
recognition-those social texts of epistemic, ethnocentric, nationalist intelligibility which cohere in the address of
authority as the "present," the voice of modernity. The acknowledgement of authority depends upon the
immediate-unmediated-visibility of its rules of recognition as the unmistakable referent of historical necessity. In
the doubly inscribed space of colonial representation where the presence of authority-the English book-is also a
question of its repetition and displacement, where transparency is techne, the immediate visibility of such a
regime of recognition is resisted. Resistance is not necessarily an oppositional act of political intention, nor is it the
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simple negation or exclusion of the "content" of an other culture, as a difference once perceived. It is the effect of
an ambivalence produced within the rules of recognition of dominating discourses as they articulate the signs of
cultural difference and reimplicate them within the deferential relations of colonial power-hierarchy,
normalization, marginalization, and so forth. For domination is achieved through a process of disavowal
that denies the differance of colonialist power -the chaos of its intervention as Entstellung, its dislocatory
presence-in order to preserve the authority of its identity in the uni-versalist narrative of nineteenth-century
historical and political evolutionism. The exercise of colonialist authority, however, requires the production of
differentiations, individuations, identity effects through which discriminatory practices can map out subject
populations that are tarred with the visible and transparent mark of power. Such a mode of subjection is distinct
from what Foucault describes as "power through transparency": the reign of opinion, after the late eighteenth
century, which could not tolerate areas of darkness and sought to exercise power through the mere fact of things
being known and people seen in an immediate, collective gaze.17 What radically differentiates the exercise of
colonial power is the unsuitability of the Enlightenment assumption of collectivity and the eye that beholds it. For
Jeremy Bentham (as Michel Perrot points out), the small group is representative of the whole society-the part is
already the whole. Colonial authority requires modes of discrimination (cultural, racial, administrative .. .) that
disallow a stable unitary assumption of collectivity. The "part" (which must be the colonialist foreign body) must be
representative of the "whole" (conquered country), but the right of representation is based on its radical
difference. Such doublethink is made viable only through the strategy of disavowal just described, which requires a
theory of the "hybridization" of discourse and power that is ignored by Western post-structuralists who engage in
the battle for "power" as the purists of difference.
C) Alternative: Vote for the position of the Hybrid subaltern. The Hybrid is
a space where the colonized subject articulates the ambivalence of the state
and resists the colonizers.
Bhabha, Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard, 1985
(Homi K, Autumn 1985, Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside
Delhi, May 1817. Critical Inquiries: Volume 12, Number 1. JSTOR. page 153-154. RH)
The discriminatory effects of the discourse of cultural colonialism, for instance, do not simply or singly refer to a
"person," or to a dialectical power struggle between self and Other, or to a discrimination between mother culture
and alien cultures. Produced through the strategy of disavowal, the reference of discrimination is always to a
process of splitting as the condition of subjection: a discrimination between the mother culture and its bastards,
the self and its doubles, where the trace of what is disavowed is not repressed but repeated as something
different-a mutation, a hybrid. It is such a partial and double force that is more than the 153 mimetic but less than
the symbolic, that disturbs the visibility of the colonial presence and makes the recognition of its authority
problematic. To be authoritative, its rules of recognition must reflect consensual knowledge or opinion; to be
powerful, these rules of recognition must be breached in order to represent the exorbitant objects of
discrimination that lie beyond its purview. Consequently, if the unitary (and essentialist) reference to race, nation,
or cultural tradition is essential to preserve the presence of authority as an immediate mimetic effect, such
essentialism must be exceeded in the articulation of "differentiatory," discriminatory identities. To demonstrate
such an "excess" is not merely to celebrate the joyous power of the signifier. Hybridity is the sign of the
productivity of colonial power, its shifting forces and fixities; it is the name for the strategic reversal of the process
of domination through disavowal (that is, the production of discriminatory identities that secure the "pure" and
original identity of authority). Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity through the
repetition of discriminatory identity effects. It displays the necessary deformation and displacement of all sites of
discrimination and domination. It unsettles the mimetic or narcissistic demands of colonial power but reimplicates
its identifications in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power.
For the colonial hybrid is the articulation of the ambivalent space where the rite of power is enacted
on the site of desire, making its objects at once disciplinary and disseminatory-or, in my mixed met-aphor, a
negative transparency. If discriminatory effects enable the au-thorities to keep an eye on them, their proliferating
difference evades that eye, escapes that surveillance. Those discriminated against may be instantly recognized, but
they also force a re-cognition of the immediacy and articulacy of authority-a disturbing effect that is familiar in the
repeated hesitancy afflicting the colonialist discourse when it contemplates its discriminated subjects: the
inscrutability of the Chinese, the unspeakable rites of the Indians, the indescribable habits of the Hottentots. It is
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not that the voice of authority is at a loss for words. It is, rather, that the colonial discourse has reached that point
when, faced with the hybridity of its objects, the presence of power is revealed as something other than what its
rules of recognition assert.
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Links
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Link-Modernization
Use of the term modernization is a blanket to cover colonization
Slater 2004 (David, Professor of Social and Political Geography at Loughborough University, “Geopolitics
and the Post-colonial: Rethinking North-South Relations”, 62-3)
Modernization theory provided post-war society in the West, and especially the US, with a temporal and spatial
identity, an identity that could only be effectively constructed in a relation of difference with another time and
another space. In this sense the will to be modern designated two forms of separation. First, there was a
separation or break in time - the contrast between a modern now and a traditional, backward past, so that the
societies of the Third World were located in another, previous time and their co-presence in modern time was
effectively erased (Fabian 1983). Second, there was a separation in space - a geopolitical distinction made between
the modern societies of the West and the 'traditional societies' of Africa, Asia and Latin America. These processes
of separation were seen as being accompanied by transformations in science, technology, administration and
economy, which were portrayed as opening up the future to limitless advancement and improvement (Adas [ 990,
Latour 1993). The second kind of separation which reflected the existence of a geopolitical divide was further
accentuated by the emergence of the Cold War, which gave a new kind of conflictual significance to the spatial
separation between the modern and traditional spheres of world development. . Sakai (1997), in a discussion of the
universal and the particular, Illuminates significant facets of the connection between the modern! non-modern
difference and geopolitics. Thus, while we may wish to keep in mind that the modern has always been opposed to
its historical precedent, the pre-modern, geopolitically the modern has been contrasted to the non-West, so that a
historical condition is translated into a geopolitical one and vice versa. Although the West is particular in itself, it
has been constructed as the universal point of reference through which others arc encouraged to recognize
themselves as particularities. In the context of post-war modernization theory, the particular universality of the
West came to be founded in a process of Americanization, so that as Sakai (1997: 157) puts it, whereas, in the pre-I
940 period the process of modernization had been the approximate equivalent of Europeanization, after the
Second World War, modernization theory was deployed in a way that reflected the shifting of the centre of
geopolitical gravity from Western Europe to the United States. The emphasis on modernization in the United States
can be interpreted as a reflection of a new ethos of national purpose. Emerging at the end of the Second World
'War as the key Western power, there was a sense within the US that its burgeoning power was the result of the
combination of its scientific and technological prowess, its military capacity, its democratic and open traditions and
its expansive modernity. The US was the world's number one modern nation with a way of life that other less
advanced nations would benefit from following and adopting. In its economic, political and cultural spheres, the US
was seen as being ahead of other nations, as the nation that could and should offer leadership to the world. Its
contemporaneity, rationality, innovation, dynamism, opportunity, mobility and freedom - in a nutshell, its modern
being - was a beacon to the world. But there was another factor which helps to explain the focus on modernization
in the context of West/non-West encounters. The term 'modernization' would, according to Walt Rostow, leading
economist and deputy national security advisor, replace colonialism and create a 'new post-colonial relationship
between the northern and southern halves of the Free World' in which a 'new partnership among free men- rich
and poor alike' would emerge (quoted in Latham 2000: 16). Modernization would be conceptualized as a
benevolent and universal process, a process based on a certain reading of Western and especially US experience,
an experience in which US imperialism was erased, and this process would be framed as being necessary for the
modernization and development of non-Western societies, especially relevant in a period in which many of these
societies, in particular Africa and Asia, were undergoing a process of rapid decolonization. The term
'modernization' had a positive, progressive, and seductive orientation- to be against modernization would be
tantamount to being irrational, backward, and retrogressive.
The projection of power portrayed of the US gave them an entitled sense of
superiority. The American ideas of “modernization” are all really
outgrowths of what we believed to be progress.
Slater 2004 (David, Professor of Social and Political Geography at Loughborough University, “Geopolitics
and the Post-colonial: Rethinking North-South Relations”, p 57-58)
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As we have seen in the previous chapter, the emergence of the United States as a global power went together with
a projection of notions of civilization, progress, democracy and order that posited a subordinate place for the
societies of the non-West. The powers of expansion and intervention, both internally in the territorial constitution
of the United States itself, and in a broader transnational mission of Empire, were intimately rooted in a vision of
the United States as a driving force of Western civilization, diffusing its values to the presumed benefit of other
non-Western societies (Cumings 1999). However, while US-modeled notions of civilization, progress, democracy
and order continued to be transmitted in the period after the Second World War, and remained part of the
Americanizing mission, other concepts came to receive greater emphasis. From the 1950s onward notions of
'modernization' and 'development' came to be more closely associated with the portrayal of West/non-West
encounters, whereas representations of civilization and order, although still present, as noted above in the Dulles
quotation, became less prominent - they were no longer the master signifiers they had been before 1940. At the
same time, democracy and order were resituated in a discursive context organized around the new signifiers of
modernization and development. This does not mean, of course, (hat these terms had never been deployed before
the Second World War, but rather that their visibility and discursive weight came to assume greater predominance
in the post-War period. The post-War origins of the 'discourse of development' have been dealt with in
considerable detail by Escobar (1995), while Patterson (1997) has traced the links between notions of Western
civilization and modernization. Also, recent contributions (for example, Baber 2001 and Blaney & Inayatullah 2002)
have revisited modernization theory in relation to Cold War politics and the conceptualization of international
relations. What therefore still needs to be examined; or more precisely, what constitutes my own perspective?
First, in analyzing the continuing intersections between geopolitical power and the cultural representations of
other, non-Western societies, and particularly Latin America in the example of this study, it is important to keep in
mind that the notion of modernization - or more specifically modernization theory - came to be closely associated
with the nature and direction of US interventions in the Third World in the 1950s and 1960s. There was a
specificity about this intersection which contrasts with earlier and later periods and needs to be understood in its
geopolitical and historical context. It not only provides another important example of the interwoven nature of
power, politics and representation but also illustrates the changing dynamic of US power as it impacted on the
Third World. Second, from a post-colonial perspective, and in the specific setting of this chapter, there are two
analytical elements that can be usefully signaled: a) The power to intervene was certainly not unaffected by the
societies in which that invasive power was projected, since, as was noted in the previous chapter, resistances and
oppositions US hegemony altered the subsequent modalities of intervention, and this was particularly the case
with respect to both the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and the Vietnam War, set as they were in a broader context of
accelerating geopolitical turbulence. b) The geopolitics of intervention situated as it was in a Cold War context had
an inside and an outside, since the Cold War had its chilling effect on domestic politics in the United States itself,
and the phenomenon of 'containment culture' was a reflection of the interweaving of international and national
concerns. Third, modernization as an idea, and its association in the 1950s and 1960s with Americanization, was
not new (Ceasar 1997: 168), and nor was it to disappear after the 1970s-. As will be further shown in the next
chapter, there are connections between neo-liberalism and modernization theory, as well as significant and often
neglected differences. Furthermore, the term 'modernization' is frequently invoked today as if it had no history,
and so in my own discussion an important objective is to highlight the historical specificity of the modernization
idea in the Cold War era as ·part of a counter-geopolitics of memory. In this chapter, I shall argue that the
Occidental, and predominantly US enframing and deployment of modernization theory for the 'developing
world' was a reflection of a will to spatial power. It provided a legitimation for a whole series of incursions and
penetrations that sought to -subordinate, contain and assimilate the Third World as other. In the process it also
put into place a vision of the West, and especially of the United States, which in some important aspects was reasserted in later neo-liberal delineations of modern development, as well as in subsequent writings on
globalization.
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Link-Development
The affirmative’s economic salvation rhetoric is representative of the
rhetoric of modernity which allows the logic of colonialism to justify the
disposing of human life.
Mignolo, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature at Duke University, 2005
(Walter, The Idea of Latin America, page 10-11, RH)
The logic of coloniality can be understood as working through four wide domains of human experience: (1) the
economic: appropriation of land, exploitation of labor, and control of finance; (2) the political: control of authority;
(3) the civic: control of gender and sexuality; (4) the epistemic and the subjective/personal: control of knowledge
and subjectivity. The logic of coloniality has been in place from the conquest and colonization of Mexico and Peru
until and beyond the war in Iraq, despite superficial changes in the scale and agents of exploitation/control in the
past five hundred years of history. Each domain is interwoven with the others, since appropriation of land or
exploitation of labor also involves the control of finance, of authority, of gender, and of knowledge and
subjectivity.8 The operation of the colonial matrix is invisible to distracted eyes, and even when it surfaces, it is
explained through the rhetoric of modernity that the situation can be “corrected” with “development,”
“democracy,” a “strong economy,” etc. What some will see as “lies” from the US presidential administration are
not so much lies as part of a very well-codified “rhetoric of modernity,” promising salvation for everybody in order
to divert attention from the increasingly oppressive consequences of the logic of coloniality. To implement the
logic of coloniality requires the celebratory rhetoric of modernity, as the case of Iraq has illustrated from day one.
As capital and power concentrate in fewer and fewer hands and poverty increases all over the word, the logic of
coloniality becomes ever more oppressive and merciless. Since the sixteenth century, the rhetoric of modernity
has relied on the vocabulary of salvation, which was accompanied by the massive appropriation of land in the New
World and the massive exploitation of Indian and African slave labor, justified by a belief in the dispensability of
human life – the lives of the slaves. Thus, while some Christians today, for example, beat the drum of “pro-life
values,” they reproduce a rhetoric that diverts attention from the increasing “devaluation of human life” that the
thousands dead in Iraq demonstrate. Thus, it is not modernity that will overcome coloniality, because it is precisely
modernity that needs and produces coloniality. As an illustration, let us follow the genealogy of just the first of the
four domains and see how the logic of coloniality has evolved in the area of land, labor, and finance. Below I will
complement the brief sketch of this first quadrant by going deeper into the fourth one (knowledge and
subjectivity) to show how knowledge transformed Anáhuac and Tawantinsuyu into America and then into Latin
America and, in the process, how new national and subcontinental identities were created. But, first, think of the
massive appropriation of land by the Spanish and Portuguese, the would-be landlords of the Americas during the
sixteenth century, and the same by the British, French, and Dutch in the extended Caribbean (from Salvador de
Bahia in Brazil to Charleston in today’s South Carolina, and including the north of Colombia and Venezuela in
addition to the Caribbean islands). The appropriation of land went hand in hand with the exploitation of labor
(Indians and African slaves) and the control of finance (the accumulation of capital as a consequence of the
appropriation of land and the exploitation of labor). Capital concentrated in Europe, in the imperial states, and not
in the colonies. You can follow this pattern through the nineteenth century when England and France displaced
Spain and Portugal as leading imperial countries. The logic of coloniality was then reproduced, and, of course,
modified, in the next step of imperial expansion into Africa and Asia.
You can still see the same projects today in the appropriation of areas of “natural resources” (e.g., in the Amazon
or oil-rich Iraq). Land cannot be reproduced. You can reproduce seeds and other “products” of land; but land itself
is limited, which is another reason why the appropriation of land is one of the prime targets of capital
accumulation today. The “idea” of Latin America is that of a large mass of land with a wealth of natural resources
and plenty of cheap labor. That, of course, is the disguised idea. What the rhetoric of modernity touted by the IMF,
the World Bank, and the Washington consensus would say is that “Latin” America is just waiting for its turn to
“develop.” You could also follow the exploitation of labor from the Americas to the Industrial Revolution to the
movement of factories from the US to developing nations in order to reduce costs. As for financial control, just
compare the number and size of banks, for example, in New York, London, or Frankfurt, on the one hand, versus
the ones in Bolivia, Morocco, or India, on the other.
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Link-NAFTA/FTAA
Free Trade agreements obscure the insidious twin of “economic
engagement”: coloniality.
Mignolo, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature at Duke University, 2005
(Walter, The Idea of Latin America, page 98-100, RH)
What remains unsaid in the official reports prepared by international agencies, like the CIA or the World Bank, is
hundreds of situations like the following: a farmer in Mexico has to spend $800 to cultivate two acres of corn.
When he sells it, he only gets between $400 and $600. Sophisticated technology and state subsidies in the US and
Canada allow these two countries to pour cheap corn into Mexico’s markets. Two consequences of this deal are
massive farmer protests to the Mexican government and massive profits for farmers and traders in Canada and the
US, who make corn into a profitable commodity at the cost of increasing the poverty and worsening the living
conditions of Mexican farmers. Mexican farmers petition their government to change the conditions of NAFTA
(North American Free Trade Agreement) in order to have a more equitable exchange. President Vicente Fox listens
both to the farmers and to the US government, which is reluctant to change the agreement because NAFTA is the
first stage of a larger plan to open similar (profitable) free trade routes throughout the Americas, in the Free Trade
Agreement of the Americas (FTAA). Among the stated goals of the FTAA is the liberalization of trade to generate
economic growth and improve the quality of life. Nothing is said about equity in distribution. All the goals
emphasize growth and increases (like the increase of the levels of trade in good and services). Nothing is said
about the fact that the “increase” means capital accumulation, not the improvement of quality of life for the
totality of the population. The agreement states that one of its goals is to enhance competition among its parties.
Yet, again, nothing is said about the fact that the goal of competition is capital accumulation for the strongest,
since actors in the economic games are ruled by the principle of individuality and disregard (or exploit to personal
gain) the community of people. The goals also purport to eliminate barriers among the parties. But those parties
do not begin with equal conditions; so the elimination of barriers favors the centers of industrial and technological
production and financial accumulation. No mention is made of the fact that the elimination of “barriers” in
economic trades is parallel to the enforcement of the “frontiers” to keep immigrants from entering from the
South. Each goal only tells half of the story. Either those who are in the position of formulating and implementing
global designs are blind, and truly believe their own rhetoric of development as the improvement of people
around the world, or they are using that rhetoric to cover a lie. Whoever pays attention to the history of the world
in the past thirty or so years will understand the implications of each of these goals and know that they imply the
increasing marginalization of the majority of the world’s population, and the decrease in their quality of life and
decent living conditions. The principles of the FTAA are no less illusory or misleading than its goals. The first
principle states that the participants are committed to advancing toward economic prosperity, strengthening ties
of friendship and co-operation, and protecting fundamental human rights. This principle is contradicted daily by
the facts. Economic prosperity means the increasing concentration of wealth in fewer hands. Friendship translates
into persecution through the lobbying and enforcing principles that favor the landowners, shareholders, and
bankers over the people of a given participant country. Each goal and principle clearly shows that the missionaries
of the sixteenth century have changed their habits and now count the number of acres of land and stocks acquired
rather than the number of converted souls. What we see in the FTAA is, simply, a particular recent
example of the rhetoric of modernity charging forward while hiding its insidious twin, coloniality.
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Link-Mexico
The AFF manifest in a coloniality of American policy makers and society
continuing the message of Manifest Destiny.
Slater 2004 (David, Professor of Social and Political Geography at Loughborough University, “Geopolitics and the
Post-colonial: Rethinking North-South Relations”, p 35-36)
Frederick Jackson Turner (1962: 37-8), in his 1893 essay on the frontier in American history, argued that the
process of settlement and colonization brought to life intellectual traits of profound importance-the emergence of
a 'dominant individualism', a 'masterful grasp of material things', a 'practical, inventive turn of mind', a 'restless,
nervous energy', which all reflected the specificity of the American intellect. Moreover, he did not limit his thesis to
the internal territory of the United States, noting three years after his seminal paper that for nearly three centuries
the dominant fact in American life has been expansion. For Turner, the demands for a 'vigorous foreign policy, for
an interoceanic canal, for a revival of our power upon the seas, and for the extension of American influence to
outlying islands and adjoining countries are indications that the movement will continue' (Turner 1896: 296). In a
similar vein, Theodore Roosevelt ( 1889: 26-7), in his four-volume examination of the frontier, entitled The
Winning of the West, portrayed the frontier farmers and 'warlike borderers' as an 'oncoming white flood', while
their adversaries, the native Indians, were considered to be the 'most formidable savage foes ever encountered by
colonists of European stock' (ibid.: 17). Roosevelt's notion of an 'oncoming white flood' being associated with a
civilizing mission found an international expression in what came to be known as the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904,
which will be mentioned below. By the beginning of the twentieth century, as the waves of colonization and
settlement had passed their peak, the earlier Jeffersonian objective of separating the Indians from their land, of
incorporating and assimilating the Indian into an advancing civilization, had taken its toll. War and subsequent
treaties resulted in Native America being constricted to about 2.5 per cent of its original land base within 48
contiguous states of the union (Rickard 1998: 58), and the violent appropriation of land and subsequent
confinement of native Indian communities to limited reservations gave another darker expression to the meaning
of the frontier (Slotkin 1998; Takaki 1993: 228-45; and Zinn 1980: 124-46). The reality of war and violence was
customarily represented as an unavoidable, preordained consequence of the beneficial march of a new civilization
(see, for example, Tocqueville 1990: 25). The expansion of the frontier, and the territorial constitution of the
United Stares as we know it today, had another dimension which was also particularly relevant to the later
projection of power and hegemony in the societies of the South, and especially in the context of US-Latin American
relations. On the eve of the US-Mexican War, and in the wake of the annexation of Texas from Mexico, a pivotal
cause of the war, notions of 'Manifest Destiny' came to circulate in the worlds of journalism and politics. John L.
O'Sullivan, the editor of the Democratic Review, and the originator of the term, had already written in 1839 of a
boundless future for America, asserting that 'in its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of many
nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles'. It was six years later in 1845, in
relation to continuing opposition to the annexation of Texas into the Union, that O'Sullivan wrote of 'our manifest
destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying
millions' (both quotations in Pratt 1927: 797-8). The doctrine of 'manifest destiny' embraced a belief in American
Anglo-Saxon superiority, and it was deployed to justify war and the appropriation of approximately 50 percent of
Mexico's original territory. Furthermore, as with accompanying characterizations of the native Indians' purported
lack of efficient utilization of their natural resources, it was observed by President Polk, at the end of the War in
l848, that the territories ceded by Mexico had remained and would have continued to remain of 'little value to her
or to any nation, while as part of our Union they will be productive of vast benefits to the United States, to the
commercial world, and the general interests of mankind' (quoted in Gantenbein 1950: 560).
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Link-Border
The US Mexican border is not only a physical boundary but also a representation of ontological repression- the
first border from which we need to be freed is not that of nation but of identity itself
Ashcroft 2009 (Bill, teaches at the University of Hong Kong and the University of NSW, editor of The Post-Colonial
Studies Reader and the author of The Empire Writes Back, “Beyond the Nation: Post-Colonial Hope”, The Journal of
the European Association of Studies on Australia, Australian Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona)
Given that we can never shake ourselves free of the nation, the idea of Transnation is built on the possibility of a
national citizen being at the same time a transnational subject. The genuinely utopian possibility this presents is
that of a ‘transnational citizen.’ The closest thing we have to this transnational citizen/subject is a member of the
second-generation diaspora, who offers the most interesting possibilities of transnation, of the actual liberating
ambivalence of diasporic subjectivity. The second generation finds itself born into a transcultural space and
indicates an interesting way in which the borders may be crossed. But there are other groups who live in the
perpetual space of the border, who can say in the words sung by the Chicano group Los Tigres del Norte—“I didn’t
cross the border, the border crossed me.” Borders continue to cross the transnational subject born into competing
ideologies. The borders from which we might be free are therefore not simply the boundaries of the nation but
those of nationness , and ultimately of identity itself. It is the strange contrapuntal relationship between identity,
history, and nation that needs to be unravelled. For the Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldua the US-Mexican border ,
the “chainlink fence crowned with rolled barbed wire,” is an “open wound” some l,950 miles long. Such a line
divides a people and their culture on both sides of the border. But it is not just a border in space, it is a lived
border “running down the length of my body” splitting her very being (Anzaldúa 1988, 193). The concept of the
border is disrupted in many ways in postcolonial literatures, but most powerfully in the relationship between
memory and place: memory rather than nostalgia and place rather than nation.The first border from which we
need to be freed then is not that of nation but of identity itself and here Edward Said’s essay Freud and the
European provides a fascinating entry. This is primarily a discussion of Freud’s late work Moses and Monotheism,
an attempt to disrupt the status of Moses as the father of Jewish identity by claiming that Moses was actually
Egyptian, and had imported monotheism from Pharaonic culture. Freud’s intervention is not only an attempt to
disrupt the monolithic character of Jewish identity but more importantly to attack the rigid boundaries of identity
itself. Said’s strategy is to situate Freud’s excavation of Jewish identity in the context of present day Palestine. The
investigation of Moses’ identity is an exploration of the non- European origin of the Jewish people. Victims of a
specifically European anti-Semitism under Hitler, the ‘invasion’ of Palestine and establishment of a Jewish state
nevertheless relied implicitly on the assumption that the Jews were European ‘like us’ (and hence Britain’s support
for Zionism and eventually America’s unquestioning support for Israel). This maintains an unresolved paradox: if
the Jews are dispersed and mistreated because they are foreigners as Freud maintains, they also occupy Palestine
as a returning, ‘civilized’ ‘European’ population. The issue of Jewish identity under these circumstances is,
psychologically, a continual cycle of repression and return. The contrast to this is Isaac Deuscher’s idea of the ‘nonJewish Jew’ the great secular intellectuals, such as Spinoza, Marx, Heine and Freud himself, who operate as
powerful critics of society, strengthened to a great extent by their exile and diasporic unhousedness. They agreed
“on the relativity of moral standards, giving not one race, or culture or God a monopoly of reason and virtue.” Said
adds that the essential component of this state is its irremediably diasporic unhoused character, a character that is
not exclusively Jewish but can “be identified in the diasporic, wandering, unresolved, cosmopolitan consciousness
of someone who is both inside and outside his or her community” (53). All these represent limits that prevent
Jewish identity being incorporated into “one, and only one, Identity.” Freud’s symbol of these limits was that the
founder of Jewish identity was himself a non-European Egyptian. The irony here is the Zionism represents a people
moving backwards into a European form of nationalism, relying on an implicit Europeanness for the specific
purpose of reinventing this repressed ‘one true identity.’ “Freud had no thought of Europe as the malevolent
colonizing power described a few decades later by Fanon” (50-1) and he had no idea that this colonizing process
would be repeated in Israel: “Europeans who had superior title to the land over the non-European natives” (51)
like the French in Algeria. Moses had to be a non-European “so that in murdering him the Israelites would have
something to repress, and also something to recall, elevate and spiritualise during the course of their great
adventure in rebuilding Israel overseas” (51). The extraordinary thing about Israel, and perhaps why Freud and the
non-European is so interesting to the concept of the transnation is that it is the only example we have— with the
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possible exception of Liberia—of a diaspora moving centripetally into the borders of a specially created nation, a
reversal of the accelerating global dispersal of peoples during the twentieth century. This makes it a very
interesting case study of the pathology of national identity. The fact that this nation just happened to be another
people’s homeland is but one of the many sordid consequences of what appears to be now, and indeed was seen
to be by many European Jews at the time, a regression from diasporic ethnicity into nationality. The consequences
of this regression are virtually a parable of the dire effects of national borders. Just how dire is remarked on by
Gilroy when he recounts the occasion when Rachel Corrie, a 23 year old US citizen, a member of the international
solidarity movement active in Palestine was crushed by an Israeli army bulldozer as she attempted to prevent the
machine from demolishing a home in the Gaza strip. Gilroy quotes from an email sent to her parents before her
death: “I really can’t believe that something like this can happen in the world without a bigger outcry about it. It
really hurts me (…) to witness how awful we can allow the world to be” (2004, 91). He ponders that sentence:
“How awful we can allow the world to be,” repeating it “for the lucidity with which it brings together collective
responsibility, planetary consciousness, and the horrors of imperial injustice into contact with one another” (91-2).
But it also brings to awareness the extent of the regression from a planetary consciousness occasioned by the toxic
combination of nation and identity. The key to this dystopian catastrophe for Palestinians was that the state of
Israel, something about which Freud himself was remarkably ambivalent, was built upon the idea of a stable
Jewish identity founded in Moses the Egyptian. This speaks, for Said, to other identities In other words, identity
cannot be thought of or worked through itself alone; it cannot constitute or even imagine itself without that
radical originary break or flaw which will not be repressed, because Moses was Egyptian, and therefore always
outside the identity inside which so many have stood and suffered (…) The strength of this thought is, I believe,
that it can be articulated and speak to other besieged identities as well – not through dispensing palliatives such as
tolerance and compassion but, rather, by attending to it as troubling, disabling, destabilizing secular wound – the
essence of the cosmopolitan, from which there can be no recovery, no state of resolved or Stoic calm, and no
utopian reconciliation even within itself. (2003, 54) Said appears to be locating the cosmopolitan firmly in the
register of the ‘melancholic’ in a characteristic mode of agonistic critique. He is using the word ‘utopian’ here in
the standard way, as a vain and unachievable ideal. But what if the idea of identity as unresolved, destabilizing
and constantly protean rather than fixed and imprisoning, is itself a form of utopianism, a recognition of hope?
In the question of identity Said has always been paradoxical: while exile might be a ‘secular wound,’ generating the
‘mind of winter,’ it is far from disabling, being the profoundly enabling feature of the intellectual’s relationship
with regimes of identity control such as nation, ethnicity, culture and religion. Exile is the invigorating condition
of the public intellectual. Not only have Said’s intellectual heroes been exiles of one kind or another, but indeed
his very concept of the intellectual, is founded on the empowering freedom from boundaries. The freedom from
borders is itself a deeply paradoxical freedom , for it entails immense risk, it means disembarking from the
comfort of Identity, and perhaps the comfort of home , for the much more stormy waters of becoming. In this
way exile, that “ uniquely punishing destiny” becomes utopian, the region of hope, perhaps the only region
from which truth can be spoken to power.
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Link- Econ Culture
Economic advancement models from EuroAmerican cultural influence
separate
the violence of colonialty and the neutral assumptions of a universal ethic of development.
Slater 2004 (David, Professor of Social and Political Geography at Loughborough University, “Geopolitics
and the Post-colonial: Rethinking North-South Relations”, p 10-12)
It is possible to specify three constituent elements of Euro-Americanism.3 First, Euro-Americanist interpretations
emphasize what is considered to be the leading civilizational role of the West through referring to some special or
primary feature of its inner socio-economic, political and cultural life. Hence, Max Weber asserted that the West
was the 'distinctive seat of economic rationalism' (1978: 480), and that outside Europe there was no evidence of
the 'path of rationalization' specific to the Occident (1992: 25). In a similar vein, although within the Marxist
tradition, Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks stated that European culture was the "only historically and concretely
universal culture" (Gramsci 1971: 416, emphasis added). In contemporary political theory, the West is frequently
portrayed as the primary haven of human rights, enlightened thought, reason and democracy (see, for example,
Zizek 1998). In a related manner, and in the domain of philosophy, Western culture has been depicted as the only
culture capable of self-critique and reflexive evaluation (see, for example, Castoriadis 1998: 94). Second, the
special or primary feature or essential matrix of attributes that is posited as being uniquely possessed by the West
is further regarded within a Euro-Americanist frame as being internal or intrinsic to European and American
development. This set of attributes is envisaged in a way that assumes the existence of an independent logic and
dynamism of Euro-American development. There is no sense of such development being the result of a process of
cross-cultural encounter. Not only is there a process of self-affirmation, but also a denial of a
potentially beneficial association with the non-Western other . This sense of self-affirmation is often
associated with a posited superiority which has permeated many discourses, from progress and civilization through
to modernization and neo-liberal development (see chapters 2, 3 and 4 below), and has helped fuel the drive to
expand and colonize other cultures. Third, the development of the West, as situated within a Euro-Americanist
frame, is held to constitute a universal step forward for humanity as a whole. Such a standpoint has been captured
in both traditional Marxist views of a progressive succession of modes of production, and in the Rostowian notion
of the 'stages of economic growth' (Rostow 1960) with the West offering the non-West a mirror for its future
development. The assertion of universality has deep roots and for both Marxist and non-Marxist traditions Hegel
was a primary source. In the early part of the nineteenth century, for example, he defined Europe as the principle
of the modern world, being synonymous with thought and the universal (Hegel 1967: 212). Such a vision was later
re-asserted by Husserl who stated that 'philosophy has constantly to exercise through European man its role of
leadership for the whole of mankind' (Husserl 1965: 178). These three elements -the primary or special, the
internally independent, and the universal - form the basis of Euro-Americanist representations, and they tend to
go together with negative essentializations of the non-Western other. There is an insistent belief in the key
historical and geopolitical significance of the West as the essential motor of progress, civilization, modernity and
development. This is coupled with a view of the non-West as passive or recalcitrant recipient, not dissimilar to the
Hegelian view of those peoples as being at a 'low level of civilization'. Such a perspective is not without
contemporary resonance. For example, in the field of development studies, one can encounter passages such as
the one below from an OECD (1996: 6) document: In the early 1950s, when large-scale development assistance
began, most people outside the developed countries lived as they had always lived, scraping by on the edge of
subsistence, with little knowledge of and no voice in global or national affairs. and little expectation of more than a
short life of hard work with slight reward. This image of stagnation, lack of knowledge and political participation,
pervasive hardship, and negative sameness contrasts with the vibrant reality of industrialization already under way
in many parts of Latin America at that time, especially in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico, of heterogeneous currents
of nationalism across Asia, Africa and Latin America and of early, albeit sometimes precarious, forms of democratic
government in Latin, America, established well before the early 1950s. The above passage, which represents one
kind of erasure of history, is not unsymptomatic, and can be related to those interpretations which stigmatize the
developing countries or 'impoverished countries' for their own ascribed lack of improvement. Giddens (2000: 129),
for example, in his chapter on taking globalization seriously, writes that most of the problems that impede the
economic development of the 'impoverished countries' are not to be attributed to the global economy itself, nor
should they be linked w the self-seeking behaviour of the richer nations; rather 'they lie mainly in the societies
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themselves - in authoritarian government, corruption, conflict, over-regulation and the low level of emancipation
of women'. While these phenomena are not unknown in developed countries as well, Western narratives will tend
to treat the social and political problems of the West as specific and relatively separate. They will not be combined
to call into question Western society as a whole (see Lazreg 2002). Overall, one of the determining features of
Euro-Americanism concerns the emphasis given to the universalist power of Western reason, thought and
reflection. This underscoring of the thinking, reasoning subject goes together with a general avoidance of the
importance of war and violence as a background as this posited Western supremacy. The Argentinian philosopher
Enrique Dussel (1998) takes issue with the separation of thought from conquest and reminds the reader that 'I
conquer' must be given historical and ontological priority over what is considered to be the founding Cartesian
cogito ergo slim ('I think, therefore I am').
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Link– Universal
The assumed cultural norms of economic engagement entrenches a
universal market aesthetic reenacting a pattern of domination inherent in
colonial thought.
Quijano 2007 (Aníbal, PhD National University of San Marcos Peru, “COLONIALITY AND
MODERNITY/RATIONALITY,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, 1, pg. 169,JC)
In the beginning colonialism was a product of a systematic repression, not only of the specific beliefs,
ideas, images, symbols or knowledge that were not useful to global colonial domination, while at the same time
the colonizers were expropriating from the colonized their knowledge, specially in mining, agriculture,
engineering, as well as their products and work. The repression fell, above all, over the modes of knowing,
of producing knowledge, of producing perspectives, images and systems of images , symbols, modes of
signification, over the resources, patterns, and instruments of formalized and objectivised expression, intellectual
or visual. It was followed by the imposition of the use of the rulers' own patterns of expression, and of their
beliefs and images with reference to the supernatural. These beliefs and images served not only to impede
the cultural production of the dominated, but also as a very efficient means of social and cultural
control , when the immediate repression ceased to be constant and systematic.
The colonizers also imposed a mystified image of their own patterns of producing knowledge and
meaning. At first, they placed these patterns far out of reach of the dominated. Later, they taught
them in a partial and selective way, in order to co-opt some of the dominated into their own power
institutions. Then European culture was made seductive: it gave access to power. After all, beyond repression,
the main instrument of all power is its seduction. Cultural Europeanisation was transformed into an
aspiration. It was a way of participating and later to reach the same material benefits and the same
power as the Europeans : viz, to conquer nature — in short for 'development'. European culture became a
universal cultural model. The imaginary in the non-European cultures could hardly exist today and, above all,
reproduce itself outside of these relations.
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Link – Generic
Capitalist motives perpetuate coloniality and the exclusion that it produces.
Saldívar 07 (Jose David, Professor of Ethnic Studies @ UC Berkeley, “Unsettling Race, Coloniality, and Caste,”
Cultural Studies, volume: 21, pg. 346-7, MCJC)
The category of the coloniality of power is not, of course, without its defects. But it has fewer than others, as well
as having some local and global additional advantages. So let the coloniality of power be taken in my essay for
what it is: a hypothesis designed to grapple with hierarchy based on what Quijano terms the 'social classification of
the world's population around the idea of race'. The racial axis of mestizaje in Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera,
of peasants in Martinez's poem, 'Shoes', and of caste in Roy's The God of Small Things have colonial origins in the
Americas and South Asia, but Anzalduia, Martinez, and Roy suggest that race, peasantry, and caste have proven to
be more durable in our so-called postcolonial world.
By cobbling together Quijano's subalternist concept of the coloniality of power and Wallerstein's modern worldsystem, we can argue that the coloniality of power has survived in the Americas and South Asia (the Portuguese
brought with them to India the idea of caste) for over 500 years and yet they have not come to be transformed
into a world empire. The secret strength of the coloniality of power and the world system is the political side of
economic organization called capitalism. Capitalism, Wallerstein astutely argues, has flourished precisely because
the world-economy 'has had within its bounds not one but a multiplicity of political systems' (1974, p. 348).
Economic Engagement “towards” other countries is an act violent social
mimesis, re-speaking the colonial position.
Bhabha 1994 (Homi K. Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language, and
the Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University “The location of Culture” pg. 190-191) Routledge 1994
These questions are provoked by Arendt's brilliant suggestiveness, for her writing symptomatically performs the
perplexities she evokes. Having brought close together the unique meaning and the causal agent, she says that the
'invisible actor' is an 'invention arising from a mental perplexity' corresponding to no real experience.47 It is this
distancing of the signified, this anxious fantasm or simulacrum - in the place of the author - that, according to
Arendt, indicates most clearly the political nature of history. The sign of the political is, moreover, not invested in
'the character of the story itself but only [in] the mode in which it came into existence'.48 So it is the realm of
representation and the process of signification that constitutes the space of the political. What is temporal in the
mode of existence of the political? Here Arendt resorts to a form of repetition to resolve the ambivalence of her
argument. The 'reification' of the agent can only occur, she writes, through 'a kind of repetition, the imitation of
mimesis, which according to Aristotle prevails in all arts but is actually appropriate to the drama'.49This repetition
of the agent, reified in the liberal vision of togetherness, is quite different from my sense of the contingent
agency for our postcolonial age. The reasons for this are not difficult to find. Arendt's belief in the revelatory
qualities of Aristotelian mimesis are grounded in a notion of t:ommunity, or the public sphere, that is largely
consensual: 'where people are with others and neither for nor against them - that is sheer human
togetherness' .50 When people are passionately for or against one another, then human togetherness is lost as
they deny the fullness of Aristotelian mimetic time. Arendt's form of social mimesis does not deal with social
marginality as a product of the liberal State, which can, if articulated, reveal the limitations of its common sense
(inter-est) of society from the perspective of minorities or the marginalized. Social violence is, for Arendt, the
denial of the disclosure of agency, the point at which 'speech becomes "mere talk", simply one more means
towards the end'. My concern is with other articulations of human togetherness, as they are related to cultural
difference and discrimination . For instance, human togetherness may come to represent the forces of
hegemonic authority ; or a solidarity founded in victimization and suffering may, implacably, sometimes
violently, become bound against oppression; or a subaltern or minority agency may attempt to interrogate and
rearticulate the 'interest' of society that marginalizes its interests. These discourses of cultural dissent and
social antagonism cannot find their agents in Arendt's Aristotelian mimesis. In the process I've described as the
return of the subject, there is an agency that seeks revision and reinscription: the attempt to renegotiate the third
locus, the intersubjective realm. The repetition of the iterative, the activity of the time-lag, is not so much arbitrary
as interruptive, a closure that is not conclusion but a liminal interrogation outside the sentence.
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Framework
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Coloniality Thought
Coloniality frames the way that we function.
Maldonado-Torres 07 (Nelson, “On the Coloniality of Being,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, pg. 243, MCJC)
Coloniality is different from colonialism. Colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which the
sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation, which makes such nation an empire.
Coloniality, instead, refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that
define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial
administrations. 14 Thus, coloniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic
performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so
many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breath coloniality all the time and
everyday. Coloniality is not simply the aftermath or the residual form of any given form of colonial relation.
Coloniality emerges in a particular socio-historical setting, that of the discovery and conquest of the Americas.15
For it was in the context of this massive colonial enterprise, the more widespread and ambitious in the history of
humankind yet, that capitalism, an already existing form of economic relation, became tied with forms of
domination and subordination that were central to maintaining colonial control first in the Americas, and then
elsewhere. Coloniality refers, first and foremost, to the two axes of power that became operative and defined the
spatio-temporal matrix of what was called America.
We must confront colonial knowledge head on to shift our geopolitical
reasoning and knowledge.
Mignolo, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature at Duke University, 2005
(Walter, The Idea of Latin America, page 104-108, RH)
Changing the geography of knowledge requires an understanding of how knowledge and subjectivity are
intertwined with modernity/ coloniality. The imperial and colonial differential of languages shapes the modes in
which knowledge is produced and circulated. As such, knowledge and subjectivity are two sides of the same coin.
Political theory and political economy, for example, were thought out and written down by men who did not have
a conflict between the language they spoke and the civilization carried in that language. Not just knowledge is
carried in language. Social order, organization, and ranking values are as well. Political theory, political economy,
ethics, and knowledge we call “scientific” are all determined in the conceptual fabric of a given language. There is a
continuum, so to speak, between the English language and experience and Adam Smith’s political economy in The
Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments, or between the French subjectivity of Marie Jean Antoine
Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, and his mapping of the human spirit in his Esquisse d’un tableau
historique des progrès de l’esprit humain. For an Afro-Caribbean, then, the perspective from which the wealth of
nations, moral sentiments, or the progress of the human spirit can be articulated will be from the experiences of
the colonial wound rather than from the sensibility of imperial victories. As I have been insisting throughout our
discussion, these are not merely different perspectives within the same paradigm. They are perspectives from two
radically different paradigms, intertwined and articulated by the colonial matrix of power; articulated also in the
unfolding of heterogeneous structural histories of language and knowledge. The paradigm of the damnés is
formed by the diversity of heterogeneous structural histories of those who have lived in the condition of having to
deal with imperial languages and the weight of the imperial civilization that those languages carry; that is, the
paradigm of all those who have to deal with the colonial wound in all its manifestations. Fanon, an Afro-Martinican
himself, expressed the difference in the opening pages of Black Skin, White Masks (1952) when he wrote that “to
speak (and we could add, to write) means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of
this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.”5 Fanon
explains that the problem, more precisely, is that: The Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately whiter – that is,
he will come closer to being a real human being – in direct relation to his mastery of the French language . . . Every
colonized people – in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the
death and burial of its local cultural originality – finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation.6
Focusing on knowledges and subjectivities in the sphere of language takes us beyond the question of bi- or plurilingualism or multiculturalism. It is more, much more. Language, epistemic, and subjective borders are the
foundations of new ways of thinking, of an-other thinking, an-other logic, an-other language, as I have elaborated
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elsewhere.7 Confronting Fanon’s predicament of colonial language and subjectivity amounts to provincializing the
totalizing effect of “Latin” and “Anglo” (and the consequent power differential between both) in America, as one
way to understand the shift introduced by rewriting the “discovery” from the history of African slavery and of the
problem of the “Negro and language,” as Fanon puts it. It is the opening of an epistemology of the borders built on
the colonial difference, on the subjectivity of the colonial wound. It is taking us from the paradigm of newness to
the decolonial paradigm of co-existence. The rule applies not only to the colonial epistemic difference, the
example I just gave, but to the imperial difference as well: thinking in Spanish from the colonial history of South
America is also a necessary practice in shifting the geography of knowledge. For Creoles of Spanish and Portuguese
descent, the problem of their own history and language was not as acute as for Afro and Indigenous people. A
sentiment of autonomy and creativity, rather than dependence, was developed. Jorge Luis Borges’s famous
indictment of Spanish philosopher and historian Américo Castro could be taken as a contrasting example of
Fanon’s predicament. In his well-known article “The Alarms of Dr. Américo Castro,” Borges mocked Castro’s
concerns about the corruption of Spanish in South American lands. The colonial wound, so pronounced in
Indigenous and Afro sensibilities, was, for “Latin” Americans, a source either of confrontational pride, as in Borges,
or of concern about the secondary global role of Spanish and Portuguese in relation to English, French, and
German. Those three languages set global standards of knowledge and subjectivities across the globe for all those
who do not have English, French, or German as their “native” language. In that sense, Spanish and Luso America is,
in this respect, at a disadvantage vis-à-vis excolonies of the British Empire, such as India, Australia, New Zealand,
and South Africa, because of the simple fact that English, and not Spanish or Portuguese, is the global language of
scholarship, trade, and the media. However, we are talking here about languages of imperial difference. Instead,
Fanon’s description of “the Negro and language” set the problem in the domain of the colonial difference. Thus, on
the one hand, his observation applies simultaneously to the diversity of borders between imperial languages,
knowledges, and subjectivities and colonial subalternity, the condition of the damnés – the wounded of the
imperial/colonial world order. It also serves as a theory from which to understand the problems of language and
subalternity at the imperial level (e.g., the subaltern position of Spanish vis-à-vis English).
Our process of delinking from modern epistemology refuses Western
knowledge and recognizes that other modes of thinking and solutions are
possible
Mignolo, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature at Duke University, 2005
(Walter, The Idea of Latin America, page 117, RH)
Waman Puma inaugurated a practice of “double critique” – of simultaneous critical theory and epistemic
decolonization. He critiqued both the Spaniards and the Incas.18 Today, when Indigenous social movements in the
ex-Spanish colonies of the Americas claim epistemic rights (that is, rights to the principles of the politics of
knowledge), we should look to Waman Puma as men of the European Renaissance looked to Aristotle, or as
contemporary European thought looks to Kant. Indigenous leaders have learned the futility of claiming land rights
under the principles of Western political economy (as laid down by the legal theologian Francisco Vitoria in the
sixteenth century, the political economist Adam Smith in the eighteenth, and onward), or linguistic rights under
the principles and assumptions of Western concepts of literacy, or cultural rights under the Western practice of
putting the state in control of multiculturalism. The difference is that an Indigenous intellectual still has to know
Kant alongside Waman Puma to be conversant, while a German or French intellectual can dispense with Waman
Puma and solve the problem of rights for all and for ever with Kant and Hegel. Therein lies the colonial epistemic
difference: Indigenous scholars and intellectuals who do not want to submit to the Western standards of
knowledge must delink from a concept of knowledge that is taken for granted as the only way in which world
history can be told and known. Delinking means, among other things, that thinking other-wise is possible (and
necessary) and that the best solutions are not necessarily found in the actual order of things under
neoliberal globalization , and it also means knowing that thinking otherwise is not only possible but very
necessary.
Western Language assumes one world view and alienates other cultures
and constructs representation of the world
Nieto, Ph.D in Public Policy in the University of Massachusetts Boston, 2007
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[David, Summer 2007, “The Emperor’s New Worlds Language and Colonization,” Human
Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of self-Knowledge, Volume:5 special double issue, page #
1, TZ]
It is no coincidence that Frantz Fanon (1967) starts his work Black Skin, White Masks talking about language. Having
experienced what it means to be left voiceless, he immediately learnt that “to speak is to exist absolutely for the
other” (p. 17). The fundamental role of language in the development of human identity has been sufficiently
documented. In fact, the human being cannot exist without communicating; eliminating the possibility of
communication from the human spirit entails removing its humanity. Language has such a vital incidence in the
human being and is so omnipresent in our lives that we are generally unaware of its influence. The psychologist
Daniel Coleman (1995) in his work Emotional Intelligence argues that when an individual is able to put a name to
one’s feelings, it is a sign that one has mastered them. Equally, Frantz Fanon recognized that being able to name
the world around in one’s own words provides the individual with a sense of possession, a sense of belonging. To
name is to own. In Fanon’s words, To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the
morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a
civilization […] A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that
language. (p. 17-18) In that respect, language cannot be reduced to a mechanic device with which objects and
subjects are neutrally transformed into words and arranged as disinterested social conventions. Precisely, the
bridge between the individual and the world is built through the meaning-making process that communication
entails. That meaning, which comes embedded in language, serves as the conceptual material with which human
beings construct and deconstruct their representations of the world. As Donaldo Macedo (2003) indicates, such
meaning can never be interpreted in isolation, or exclusively restricted to the positivist paradigms of science, as if
language could exist without its speakers.
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Decolonial Thought Key
Epistemological decolonization is key to liberating those imprisoned by
coloniality.
Walsh 07 (Catherine, “Shifting the Geopolitic of Critical Knowledge,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, pg. 234-5,
MCJC)
In a recent work, Arturo Escobar (2003) makes the argument for the need to take seriously the epistemic force of
local histories and the need to think theory through the political praxis of subaltern groups. What such argument
points to is not the incorporation or inclusion of the histories, praxis, and 'other' thought of subaltern groups as
new objects of study — a kind of critical cultural studies of the other. Rather and as I have argued here, it suggests
the building of new places and new communities of thought, interpretation, and intervention that seek to
generate and build intersections among critical forms of decolonial thought and political-epistemic projects
grounded in the histories and lived experiences of coloniality — what we might instead refer to as cultural studies
'others' or a cultural studies of decolonial orientation. Of course the issue is much deeper than the naming or
conceptualization of spaces and places of critical thought. As I have attempted to make clear here, it is an issue
grounded in the ways coloniality and the geopolitics of knowledge have worked to enable modernity as the
'civilization' project of the West, a project that has systematically worked to subordinate and negate 'other'
frames, 'other' knowledges, and 'other' subjects and thinkers. The location of critical thought and the metanarratives that have directed it within this project, including that critical thought associated with the Left in Latin
America, is demonstrative of the complexity of the problem and its simultaneously local and global nature. To
begin to 'think thought' from 'other' places and with intellectuals for whom the point of departure is not the
academy but political-epistemic projects of decoloniality, might open paths that enable shifts in the geopolitics of
critical knowledge as well as the building of a shared praxis of a very different kind, a praxis that attempts to
confront what the Afro-Colombian intellectual and ekobio mayor Manuel Zapata Olivella once affirmed: 'The
chains are not on our feet, but on our minds'.
Discussion of an ‘other’ thought system recognize the system of coloniality and hoists the subalterns
stories to the forefront challenging Colonialist-racist epistemologies.
Walsh 07 (Catherine, “Shifting the Geopolitic of Critical Knowledge,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, pg. 232, MCJC)
To speak of an ‘other’ critical thought then is to give credence to ongoing struggles _ struggles that are
epistemic as well as political in character _ to confront coloniality, thus marking a positioning radically
distinct from that which locates critical theory simply within the histories and experiences of modernity
and the narratives these histories and experiences have fostered and created. Such shift is important for
what it helps reveal, including the subjects left out or marginalized by much of critical theory and their
socio-political and epistemic agency, but also the association between thought and social and political
intervention. Said differently, what this ‘other’ thought brings to light is both a political use of knowledge
and an epistemic acting on the political from the colonial difference. It is an intellectual production not
aimed at individual accomplishment or limited to the confines of the academy, but rather at the shared
need to confront the colonial-racist structures, systems, and institutions of society through a collective
praxis that finds its meaning in the condition of the colonial difference.14 And it is this difference that marks
a distinction with the anti-colonial thinking predominant in Latin America in the 60s and 70s, a thinking typically
associated with the Left and white-mestizo intellectuals.
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Impacts
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Impact –Intersectional Oppression
The colonial power matrix installs an intersectional matrix of oppressions.
Grosfoguel 07 (Ramon, “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, pg. 217, MCJC)
It is not an accident that the conceptualization of the world-system, from decolonial perspectives of the South will
question its traditional conceptualizations produced by thinkers from the North. Following Peruvian Sociologist,
Anı´bal Quijano (1991, 1998, 2000), we could conceptualize the present world-system as a historical-structural
heterogeneous totality with a specific power matrix that he calls a ‘colonial power matrix’ (‘patro´n de poder
colonial’). This matrix affects all dimensions of social existence such as sexuality, authority, subjectivity and labor
(Quijano 2000). The sixteenth century initiates a new global colonial power matrix that by the late nineteenth
century came to cover the whole planet. Taking a step further from Quijano, I conceptualize the coloniality of
power as an entanglement or, to use US Third World Feminist concept, intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989, Fregoso
2003) of multiple and heterogeneous global hierarchies (‘heterarchies’) of sexual, political, epistemic, economic,
spiritual, linguistic and racial forms of domination and exploitation where the racial/ethnic hierarchy of the
European/non-European divide transversally reconfigures all of the other global power structures. What is new in
the ‘coloniality of power’ perspective is how the idea of race and racism becomes the organizing principle that
structures all of the multiple hierarchies of the world-system (Quijano 1993). For example, the different forms of
labor that are articulated to capitalist accumulation at a world-scale are assigned according to this racial hierarchy;
coercive (or cheap) labor is done by non-European people in the periphery and ‘free wage labor’ in the core. The
global gender hierarchy is also affected by race: contrary to pre-European patriarchies where all women were
inferior to all men, in the new colonial power matrix some women (of European origin) have a higher status and
access to resources than some men (of non-European origin). The idea of race organizes the world’s population
into a hierarchical order of superior and inferior people that becomes an organizing principle of the international
division of labor and of the global patriarchal system. Contrary to the Eurocentric perspective, race, gender,
sexuality, spirituality, and epistemology are not additive elements to the economic and political structures of the
capitalist world-system, but an integral, entangled and constitutive part of the broad entangled ‘package’ called
the European modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system (Grosfoguel 2002). European patriarchy and
European notions of sexuality, epistemology and spirituality were exported to the rest of the world through
colonial expansion as the hegemonic criteria to racialize, classify and pathologize the rest of the world’s population
in a hierarchy of superior and inferior races.
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Impact - Biopower/Racism
Colonialism is the foothold for biopower and racism – European thought is
predicated off the assumption of a white exceptionalism
Ikeotuonye 07 (Festus is a writer, activist and Fellow at the School of Sociology, University College Dublin,
Republic of Ireland, “Connexus Theory and the Agonistic Binary of Coloniality: Revisiting Fanon’s Legacy”, pg. #212,
BW)
As Quijano suggested above, a key element of this modern classificatory model of power is the binary articulation
of a new planetary geohistorical and biocultural identities based on the idea of “race.” This entailed the process
through which corporeality or body/nature was violently separated from “non-body” (“subject,” “spirit” or
“reason”). The colonization of the body/ nature by the secularized forms of the “spirit/soul” is the central plot of
the Cartesian epic which also is the nerve centre of the modern/colonial world (Veroli 2002). As Nicolas Veroli put
it, “After the rain there must come the sun” goes the old French proverb. Similarly, after doubt there comes
certainty in the Cartesian epic: I have doubted everything that could be doubted, and must thus come to the
conclusion that the only thing I cannot doubt is my own existence as the one who doubts. But who am I? The
inquiry must turn from the question of existence to that of identity: what is this “I” that doubts? The theoretical
task, henceforth, is that of constituting the cogito, the subject, as a purely homogeneous substance that will
contain no trace of alterity. “I” must be “I” and not another. Since, as it turns out, I can only be (with absolute
certainty) a thing that thinks, a thinking thing, that is, the opposite of a material or extended thing, corporeality
will be the stand-in for alterity, for the threat of heterogeneity. (ibid: 5) The implication of this binary separation is
that it embodies a radical view which did not only ascribe the values of certainty and uncertainty on the mind and
body/nature respectively; it also became the model on which to organize and classify the world in scales, scopes,
meters, graphs and the usual allochthonous hierarchies and cartographies of mind, bio-culture and space.
Additionally, the shift from the questions of existence6 to that of “identity” not only marked the move to a
ceteris paribus7 conception of spaces, persons and peoplehood but also serves as the foundation of what
Foucault described as disciplinary power and bio-politics. The classification and reclassification of the planet’s
population based on this Cartesian split between mind and body came to represent the foundational binary
principle that was used to organize and manage bodies, spaces and cultures. Martin Heidegger argued in his book
on Nietzsche that …when it (the Cartesian cogito) is nonetheless thought through in its metaphysical import and
measured according to the breath of its metaphysical project, then it is the first resolute step through which
modern machine technology, and along with it the modern world and modern mankind, became metaphysically
possible for the first time. (Heidegger 1982: 116) Quijano argues that without the “expulsion of the body from the
realm of the spirit” the notion of “race” in its modern sense would not have been possible. The notion of “inferior
races” relies on the treatment of these inferior races as “objects” of study, “correction,” domination, exploitation
and discrimination precisely because they are not “subjects” or “rational subjects.” This lack of “rationality” is
seen as the defining quality of those races who like the natural world represents as Georg Simmel put it, the
personification of those irrational, instinctive, sovereign traits and impulses which aim at determining the mode
of life from within” (Simmel 1964: 413). It is then understandable why Thomas Jefferson wrote in his book Notes
on the State of Virginia (1781) that in the faculties of memory and imagination the “Negro” appears to be equal to
“whites.” But that when it comes to reason and rationality they (Negroes) are inferior since none can be found
capable of “tracing or comprehending the investigations of Euclid.” However, Jefferson argues that these reasonchallenged Negroes “are more generally gifted than whites with accurate ears for tune and time” (Levine 1978: 4).
In other words, “Negroes” and the “others,” alongside the natural world, came to be seen as blank or empty
mental and physical spaces without history, or perhaps, “raw materials” subjected to “gardening,” “design,”
“cultivation” and “weed poisoning” (Beilharz 2001). The extent of this hostility is easily confirmed by the fact that
the modern world view sees the growing distance from nature and the “image of its origin” as “progress” and
development. According to Walter Mignolo (2005:114)
Biopolitics takes responsibility for optimizing the life of whole populations. Any
amount of violence, even nuclear genocide, becomes justified.
Dean ‘1 (Mitchell, Professor of Sociology at Macquarie University, “Demonic Societies: Liberalism, biopolitics,
and sovereignty.” Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State, ed. Hanson and Stepputat, p. 55-58)
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Consider again the contrastive terms in which it is possible to view biopolitics and sovereignty. The final chapter in
the first volume of the History of Sexuality that contrasts sovereignty and biopolitics is titled "Right of Death and
Power over Life." The initial terms of the contrast between the two registers of government is thus between one
that could employ power to put subjects to death, even if this right to kill was conditioned by the defense of the
sovereign, and one that was concerned with the fostering of life. Nevertheless, each part of the contrast can be
further broken down. The right of death can also be understood as "the right to take life or let live"; the power
over life as the power "to foster life or disallow it." Sovereign power is a power that distinguishes between
political life (bios) and mere existence or bare life (zoe). Bare life is included in the constitution of sovereign power
by Its very exclusion from political life. In contrast, biopolitics might be thought to include zoe in bios: stripped
down mere existence becomes a matter of political reality. Thus, the contrast between biopolitics and
sovereignty is not one of a power of life versus a power of death but concerns the way the different forms of
power treat matters of life and death and entail different conceptions of life. Thus, biopolitics reinscribes the
earlier right of death and power over life and places it within a new and different form that attempts to include
what had earlier been sacred and taboo, bare life, in political existence. It is no longer so much the right of the
sovereign to put to death his enemies but to disqualify the life—the mere existence—of those who are a threat to
the life of the population, to disallow those deemed "unworthy of life," those whose bare life is not worth living.
This allows us, first, to consider what might be thought of as the dark side of biopolitics (Foucault 1979a: 136—37).
In Foucault's account, biopolitics does not put an end to the practice of war: it provides it with new and more
sophisticated killing machines. These machines allow killing itself to be reposed at the level of entire populations.
Wars become genocidal in the twentieth century. The same state that takes on the duty to enhance the life of
the population also exercises the power of death over whole populations. Atomic weapons are the key weapons
of this process of the power to put whole populations to death. We might also consider here the aptly named
biological and chemical weapons that seek an extermination of populations by visiting plagues upon them or
polluting the biosphere in which they live to the point at which bare life is no longer sustainable. Nor does the
birth of biopolitics put an end to the killing of one's own populations. Rather, it intensifies that killing—whether
by an "ethnic cleansing" that visits holocausts upon whole groups or by the mass slaughters of classes and groups
conducted in the name of the Utopia to be achieved. There is a certain restraint in sovereign power. The right of
death is only occasionally exercised as the right to kill and then often in a ritual fashion that suggests a relation to
the sacred. More often, sovereign power is manifest in the refraining from the right to kill. The biopolitical
imperative knows no such restraint. Power is exercised at the level of populations and hence wars will be waged
at that level, on behalf of everyone and their lives. This point brings us to the heart of Foucault's provocative thesis
about biopolitics: that there is an intimate connection between the exercise of a life-administering power and
the commission of genocide: "If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent
return of the ancient right to kill: it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the
race, and the large-scale phenomena of population" (1979a: 137). Foucault completes this same passage with an
expression that deserves more notice: "massacres become vital." There is thus a kind of perverse homogeneity
between the power over life and the power to take life characteristic of biopower. The emergence of a biopolitical
racism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be approached as a trajectory in which this homogeneity
always threatened to tip over into a dreadful necessity. This racism can be approached as a fundamental
mechanism of power that is inscribed in the biopolitical domain (Stoler 1995: 84—85). For Foucault, the primary
function of this form of racism is to establish a division between those who must live and those who must die, and
to distinguish the superior from the inferior, the fit from the unfit. The notion and techniques of population had
given rise, at the end of the nineteenth century, to a new linkage among population, the internal organization of
states, and the competition between states. Darwinism, as an imperial social and political program, would plot the
ranking of individuals, populations, and nations along the common gradient of fitness and thus measure
eflicienqp6 However, the series "population, evolution, and race" is not simply a way of thinking about the
superiority of the "white races" or of justifying colonialism, but also of thinking about how to treat the degenerates
and the abnormals in one's own population and prevent the further degeneration of the race. The second and
most important function for Foucault of this biopolitical racism in the nineteenth century is that "it establishes a
positive relation between the right to kill and the assurance of life" (Stoler 1995: 84). The life of the population,
its vigor, its health, its capacities to survive, becomes necessarily linked to the elimination of internal and
external threats. This power to disallow life is perhaps best encapsulated in the injunctions of the eugenic project:
identify those who are degenerate, abnormal, feeble*minded, or of an inferior race and subject them to forced
sterilization: encourage those who are superior, fit, and intelligent to propagate. Identify those whose life is but
mere existence and disqualify their propagation: encourage those who can partake of a sovereign existence and of
moral and political life. But this last example does not necessarily establish a positive justification for the right to
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kill, only the right to disallow life. If we are to begin to understand the type of racism engaged in by Nazism,
however, we need to take into account another kind of denouement between the biopolitical management of
population and the exercise of sovereignty. This version of sovereignty is no longer the transformed and
democratized form founded on the liberty of the juridical subject, as it is for liberalism, but a sovereignty that
takes up and transforms a further element of sovereignty, its "symbolics of blood" (Foucault 1979a: 148). For
Foucault, sovereignty is grounded in blood—as a reality and as a symbol—just as one might say that sexuality
becomes the key field on which biopolitical management of populations is articulated. When power is exercised
through repression and deduction, through a law over which hangs the sword, when it is exercised on the scaffold
by the torturer and the executioner, and when relations between households and families were forged through
alliance, "blood was a reality with a symbolic function." By contrast, for biopolitics with its themes of health, vigor,
fitness, vitality, progeny, survival, and race, "power spoke of sexuality and to sexuality" (Foucault 1979a: 147). For
Foucault (1979a: 149—50), the novelty of National Socialism was the way it articulated "the oneiric exaltation of
blood," of fatherland, and of the triumph of the race in an immensely cynical and naive fashion, with the
paroxysms of a disciplinary and biopolitical power concerned with the detailed administration of the life of the
population and the regulation of sexuality, family, marriage, and education.'Nazism generalized biopower without
the limit-critique posed by the juridical subject of right, but it could not do away with sovereignty. Instead, it
established a set of permanent interventions into the conduct of the individual within the population and
articulated this with the "mythical concern for blood and the triumph of the race." Thus, the shepherd-flock
game and the city-citizen game are transmuted into the eugenic ordering of biological existence (of mere living and
subsistence) and articulated on the themes of the purity of blood and the myth of the fatherland. In such an
articulation of these elements of sovereign and biopolitical forms of power, the relation between the
administration of life and the right to kill entire populations is no longer simply one of a dreadful homogeneity. It
has become a necessary relation. The administration of life comes to require a bloodbath. It is not simply that
power, and therefore war, will be exercised at the level of an entire population. It is that the act of disqualifying
the right to life of other races becomes necessary for the fostering of the life of the race. Moreover, the
elimination of other races is only one face of the purification of one's own race (Foucault 1997b: 231). The other
part is to expose the latter to a universal and absolute danger, to expose it to the risk of death and total
destruction. For Foucault, with the Nazi state we have an "absolutely racist state, an absolutely murderous state
and an absolutely suicidal state" (232), all of which are superimposed and converge on the Final Solution. With the
Final Solution, the state tries to eliminate, through the Jews, all the other races, for whom the Jews were the
symbol and the manifestation. This includes, in one of Hitler's last acts, the order to destroy the bases of bare life
for the German people itself "Final Solution for other races, the absolute suicide of the German race" is inscribed,
according to Foucault. in the functioning of the modern state (232).
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Impact - Otherization
Colonialism created the hierarchy for exclusion.
Walsh 07 (Catherine, “Shifting the Geopolitic of Critical Knowledge,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, pg. 228-9,
MCJC)
Coloniality as both a concept and lived reality provides a foundational context for understanding this 'other'
intellectual production in Latin America in general and in the Andes in particular. While colonialism ended with
independence, coloniality is a model of power that continues. Central to the establishment of this model was the
codification of differences in ways that construct and establish a domination and inferiority based on race, serving
as a fundamental criterion for the distribution of the population in ranks, places and roles within the social
structure of power (Quijano 2000). While this codification was installed with colonialism and with the naming of a
hierarchal ordering of social identities: whites, mestizos, 'indios' and 'negros', the latter two erasing the cultural
differences that existed before colonialization, its efficacy remains ever present. Such efficacy in fact extends to
the 'coloniality of knowledge'; that is, the hegemony of Eurocentrism as the perspective of knowledge, and an
association of intellectual production with 'civilization', the power of the written word, and with the established
racial hierarchy (Quijano 2000). In this construction and its maintenance over more that 500 years, indigenous and
black peoples are still considered (by dominant society but also by the white-mestizo Left) as incapable of serious
'intellectual' thinking. It is in this context that the eurocentricity and racialized character of critical thought takes
form.
Lack of understanding leads to objectification and rejection of the “Other”
from a society that is familiar to the “Subject”
Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 95 (Bill, Gareth, Helen, Professors at the University of NSW, University of Western
Australia, Queen’s University, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, p. 232-234, AM)
IT is MY perception that the shape of the signifying process as it applies to indigenous peoples is formed by a
certain semiotic field, a field that provides the boundaries within which the images of the indigene function. The
existence of this semiotic field constitutes an important aspect of the ‘subjugated knowledges’ to which Foucault
refers in Power/Knowledge (1980:81). The indigene is a semiotic pawn on a chess board under the control of the
white signmaker. And yet the individual signmaker, the individual player, the individual writer, can move these
pawns only within certain prescribed areas. Whether the context is Canada, New Zealand, or Australia becomes a
minor issue since the game, the signmaking is all happening on one form of board, within one field of discourse,
that of British imperialism. Terms such as ‘war-dance,’ ‘war-whoop,’ ‘tomahawk,’ and ‘dusky’ are immediately
suggestive everywhere of the indigene. To a North American, at least the first three would seem to be obvious
Indianisms, but they are also common in works on the Maori and the Aborigine. Explorers like Phillip King
(Narrative 1827) generally refer to Aborigines as Indian, and specific analogies to North American Indians are
ubiquitous in nineteenth-century Australian literature. Terms misapplied in the Americas became re-misapplied in
a parody of imperialist discourse. The process is quite similar to one Levi-Strauss describes in The Savage Mind
(1972): ‘In other words, the operative value of the systems of naming and classifying commonly called totemic
derives from their formal character: they are codes suitable for conveying messages which can be transposed into
other codes, and for expressing messages received by means of different codes in terms of their own system’ (75).
Obvious extreme ethnographic differences between the different indigenous cultures did little to impede the
transposition. To extend the chessboard analogy, it would not be oversimplistic to maintain that the play between
white and indigene is a replica of the black and white squares, with clearly limited oppositional moves. The basic
dualism, however, is not that of good and evil, although it has often been argued to be so, as in Abdul
R.JanMohamed’s The Economy of Manichean Allegory’ (1985): ‘The dominant model of power—and interest—
relations in all colonial societies is the manichean opposition between the putative superiority of the European and
the supposed inferiority of the native’ (63). JanMohamed maintains that in apparent exceptions ‘any evident
“ambivalence” is in fact a product of deliberate, if at times subconscious, imperialist duplicity, operating very
efficiently through the economy of its central trope, the manichean allegory’ (61). Such a basic moral conflict is
often implied but in contemporary texts the opposition is frequently between the ‘putative superiority’ of the
indigene and the ‘supposed inferiority’ of the white. As Said suggests, the positive and negative sides of the image
are but swings of one and the same pendulum: ‘Many of the earliest oriental amateurs began by welcoming the
Orient as a salutary derangement of their European habits of mind and spirit. The Orient was overvalued for its
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pantheism, its spirituality, its stability, its longevity, its primitivism, and so forth…. Yet almost without exception
such overesteem was followed by a counter-response: the Orient suddenly appeared lamentably underhumanized, antidemocratic, backward, barbaric, and so forth’ (1978:150). Almost all of these characterizations
could be applied to the indigenes of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, as positive or negative attributes. The
complications of the issue extend even beyond oppositions of race, as Sander Gilman suggests in Difference and
Pathology (1985): Because there is no real line between self and the Other, an imaginary line must be drawn; and
so that the illusion of an absolute difference between self and Other is never troubled, this line is as dynamic in its
ability to alter itself as is the self. This can be observed in the shifting relationship of antithetical stereotypes that
parallel the existence of ‘bad’ and ‘good’ representations of self and Other. But the line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’
responds to stresses occurring within the psyche. Thus paradigm shifts in our mental representations of the world
can and do occur. We can move from fearing to glorifying the Other. We can move from loving to hating. (18) The
problem is not the negative or positive aura associated with the image but rather the image itself…. At least since
Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks (1952) it has been a commonplace to use ‘Other’ and ‘Not-self for the white view
of blacks and for the resulting black view of themselves. The implication of this assertion of a white self as subject
in discourse is to leave the black Other as object. The terms are similarly applicable to the Indian, the Maori, and
the Aborigine but with an important shift. They are Other and Not-self but also must become self. Thus as Richon
suggests and Pearson implies, imperialist discourse valorizes the colonized according to its own needs for
reflection. ‘The project of imperialism has always already historically refracted what might have been the absolute
Other into a domesticated Other that consolidated the imperialist self,’ explains Gayatri Spivak in ‘Three Women’s
Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’ (1985c: 253). Tzvetan Todorov in The Conquest of America: The Question of
the Other (1982) also notes how the group as Other can function. This group in turn can be interior to society:
women for men, the rich for the poor, the mad for the ‘normal’; or it can be exterior to society, i.e., another
society which will be near or far away, depending on the case: beings whom everything links to me on the cultural,
moral, historical plane; or else unknown quantities, outsiders whose language and customs I do not understand, so
foreign that in extreme instances I am reluctant to admit they belong to the same species as my own.
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Impact-Environment
Western European globalization is the root cause for environmental
exploitation – Western identity sees nature as a frontier to be tamed,
whereas the natives were one with nature
Ikeotuonye 07(Festus is a writer, activist and Fellow at the School of Sociology, University College Dublin,
Republic of Ireland, “Connexus Theory and the Agonistic Binary of Coloniality: Revisiting Fanon’s Legacy”, pg. #213,
BW)
The idea that humanity is universally defined by the separation from nature first emerged in seventeenthcentury
Europe and developed in tandem with the industrial revolution, as the appropriation of land increased,
accompanied by the increasing demand for natural resources. It is again crucial to bear in mind that this
“universally defined” split is by no means universal. The cleaving of mind from nature is again specific to the
Western world. This was quite clear to a progeny of Africans enslaved by Dutch “settlers”: We of the khoin, we
never thought of these mountain and plains, these long grass lands and marshes as a wild place to be tamed. It
was the whites who called it wild and claimed it was filled with wild animals and wild people. To us it has always
been friendly and tame. It has given us food and drink and shelter even in the worst of droughts. It was only when
the whites moved in and started digging and breaking and shooting, and driving off the animals, that it really
became wild.” (André Brink 1983:21)
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Impact-Language
Our perception of language destroys the human spirit of all deemed another
Nieto, Ph.D in Public Policy in the University of Massachusetts Boston, 2007 [David, Summer 2007,
“The Emperor’s New Worlds Language and Colonization,” Human Architecture: Journal of the
Sociology of self-Knowledge, Volume:5 special double issue, page #2 , TZ]
Such invasion of the human spirit, such painful process of forced adherence and identification with the oppressor’s
version of the world, causes two indelible marks in the spirits of the colonised according to Fanon (1967). On the
one hand, the feeling of inferiority, for the reason that even once assimilated, the colonized are never considered
equals, and they are continuously reminded of their lack of capabilities; on the other hand, the dependency
complex, which assaults those who have traded all their values in the attempt to treasure proof of their humanity,
those who have learnt to despise their origins, and later find themselves without a home. Fanon (1967) portrays
the deep psychological impact that someone suffers who must artificially adopt a language different from the one
of the group he was born in as an “absolute mutation” (p. 19). A psychological mutation that must be directed
from schools, where kids are taught to “scorn the dialect,” “avoid creolism” (p. 20), and ridicule those who use it.
Nevertheless, the oppressors do not walk away free. Their own chains also imprison them, they will always have to
distrust the oppressed, and they will have to live fearing freedom. They know that renouncing to oppress
challenges their own identity, as Fanon puts it, “It is the racist who creates his inferior” (p. 93). And in this context
of violence and suspicion, Fanon finds himself “in a world where words wrap themselves in silence; in a world
where the other endlessly hardens himself” (p. 229).
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Impact – Racism
Colonization leads to racism.
Quijano 2007 (Aníbal, PhD National University of San Marcos Peru, “COLONIALITY AND
MODERNITY/RATIONALITY,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, 1, pg. 171, JC)
Coloniality of power was conceived together with America and Western Europe, and with the social category of
'race' as the key element of the social classification of colonized and colonizers. Unlike in any other previous
experience of colonialism, the old ideas of superiority of the dominant, and the inferiority of dominated under
European colonialism were mutated in a relationship of biologically and structurally superior and inferior.1 The
process of Eurocentrification of the new world power in the following centuries gave way to the imposition of
such a 'racial' criteria to the new social classification of the world population on a global scale. So, in the first
place, new social identities were produced all over the world: 'whites', 'Indians, 'Negroes', 'yellows', 'olives', using
physiognomic traits of the peoples as external manifestations of their 'racial' nature. Then, on that basis the new
geocultural identities were produced: European, American, Asiatic, African, and much later, Oceania. During
European colonial world domination, the distribution of work of the entire world capitalist system, between
salaried, independent peasants, independent merchants, and slaves and serfs, was organized basically following
the same 'racial' lines of global social classification, with all the implications for the processes of nationalization of
societies and states, and for the formation of nation-states, citizenship, democracy and so on, around the world.
Such distribution of work in the world capitalist system began to change slowly with the struggles against
European colonialism, especially after the First World War, and with the changing requirements of capitalism
itself. But distribution of work is by no means finished, since Eurocentered coloniality of power has proved to be
longer lasting than Eurocentered colonialism. Without it[Eurocentered colonilaism], the history of capitalism in
Latin America and other related places in the world can hardly be explained.2 So, coloniality of power is based
upon 'racial' social classification of the world population under Eurocentered world power. But coloniality of
power is not exhausted in the problem of 'racist' social relations. It pervaded and modulated the basic instances
of the Eurocentered capitalist colonial/modern world power to become the cornerstone of this coloniality of
power.
As long as colonialism exists there can be nothing but violence, corruption
and barbarism
Césaire 1972 (Aimé, Francophone poet, author and politician from Martinique. "one of the founders of the
négritude movement in Francophone literature, “Discourse on Colonialism” Translated by Joan Pinkham) Monthly
Review Press: New York and London, 1972.
Monstrosity? Literary meteorite? Delirium of a sick imagination? Come, now! How convenient it is! The truth is
that Lautreamont had only to look the iron man forged by capitalist society squarely in the eye to perceive the
monster, the everyday monster, his hero. No one denies the veracity of Balzac. But wait a moment: take Vautrin,
let him be just back from the tropics, give him the wings of the archangel and the shivers of malaria, let him be
accompanied through the streets of Paris by an escort of Uruguayan vampires and carnivorous ants, and you will
have Maldoror.12 The setting is changed, but it is the same world, the same man, hard, inflexible, unscrupulous,
fond, if ever a man was, of "the flesh of other men." To digress for a moment within my digression, I believe that
the day will come when, with all the elements gathered together, all the sources analyzed, all the circumstances of
the work elucidated, it will be possible to give the Chants de Maldoror a materialistic and historical interpretation
which will bring to light an altogether unrecognized aspect of this frenzied epic, its implacable denunciation of a
very particular form of society, as it could not escape the sharpest eyes around the year 1865. Before that, of
course, we will have had to clear away the occultist and metaphysical commentaries that obscure the path; to reestablish the importance of certain neglected stanzas-for example, that strangest passage of all, the one
concerning the mine of lice, in which we will consent to see nothing more or less than the denunciation of the evil
power of gold and the hoarding up of money; to restore to its true place the admirable episode, of the omnibus,
and be willing to find in it very simply what is there, to wit, the scarcely allegorical picture of a society in which the
privileged, comfortably seated, refuse to move closer together so as to make room for the new arrival. And-be it
said in passing-who welcomes the child who has been callously rejected? The people! Represented here by the
ragpicker. Baudelaire's ragpicker: Paying no heed to the spies of the cops, his thralls, He pours his heart out in
stupendous schemes. He takes great oaths and dictates sublime laws, Casts down the wicked, aids the victims'
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cause.13 Then it will be understood, will it not, that the enemy whom Lautreamont has made the enemy, the
cannibalistic, brain-devouring "Creator," the sadist perched on "a throne made of human excrement and gold,"
the hypocrite, the debauchee, the idler who "eats the bread of others" and who from time to time is found dead
drunk, "drunk as a bedbug that has swallowed three, barrels of blood during the night," it will be understood that
it is not beyond the clouds that one must look for that creator, but that we are more likely to find him in Desfosses'
business directory and on some comfortable executive board! But let that be. The moralists can do nothing about
it. Whether one likes it or not, the bourgeoisie , as a class, is condemned to take responsibility for all the
barbarism of history, the tortures of the Middle Ages and the Inquisition, warmongering and the appeal to the
raison d'Etat, racism and slavery , in short everything against which it protested in unforgettable terms at the
time when, as the attacking class, it was the incarnation of human progress. The moralists can do nothing about
it. There is a law of progressive dehumanization in accordance with which henceforth on the agenda of the
bourgeoisie there is - there can be - nothing but violence, corruption, and barbarism . I almost forgot
hatred, lying, conceit.
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Impact- Colonialism
Colonialism shaped the systems of discrimination that dominates the
racial, political, and social hierarchal.
Quijano 2007 (Aníbal, PhD National University of San Marcos Peru , “COLONIALITY AND
MODERNITY/RATIONALITY,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, 1, pg. 168-169,JC)
However, that specific colonial structure of power produced the specific social discriminations which later were
codified as ‘racial’, ‘ethnic’, ‘anthropological’ or ‘national’, according to the times, agents, and populations
involved. These intersubjective constructions, product of Eurocentered colonial domination were even assumed
to be ‘objective’, ‘scientific’, categories, then of a historical significance. That is, as natural phenomena, not
referring to the history of power. This power structure was, and still is, the framework within which operate the
other social relations of classes or estates. In fact, if we observe the main lines of exploitation and social
domination on a global scale, the main lines of world power today, and the distribution of resources and work
among the world population, it is very clear that the large majority of the exploited, the dominated, the
discriminated against, are precisely the members of the ‘races’, ‘ethnies’, or ‘nations’ into which the colonized
populations, were categorized in the formative process of that world power, from the conquest of America and
onward. In the same way, in spite of the fact that political colonialism has been eliminated, the relationship
between the European also called ‘Western’ culture, and the others, continues to be one of colonial domination.
It is not only a matter of the subordination of the other cultures to the European, in an external relation; we have
also to do with a colonization of the other cultures, albeit in differing intensities and depths. This relationship
consists, in the first place, of a colonization of the imagination of the dominated; that is, it acts in the interior of
that imagination, in a sense, it is a part of it.
Colonization of the “Other” leads to an Increasingly Violent Struggle of Life
and Death
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Associate Professor of Literature @ Duke and independent researcher and
currently an inmate at the Rebibbia prison in Rome, formerly a lecturer in Politics at Paris University and a
Professor of political science at the University of Padua, “Empire” Harvard University Press, 20 00, pg. 129
The White and the Black, the European and the Oriental, the colonizer and the colonized are all
representations that function only in relation to each other and (despite appearances) have no real
necessary basis in nature, biology or rationality. Colonialism in an abstract machine that produces
alterity and identity. And yet to function ad if they were absolute, essential, and natural. The first result of the dialectical reading is
thus the denaturalization of racial as artificial constructions, colonial identities evaporate into thin air; they are real illusions and continue
to function as if they were essential. This recognition is not a politics in itself, but merely the sign that an anticolonial politics is possible. In
the second place, the
dialectical interpretation makes clear that colonialism and colonialist
representations are grounded in a violent struggle that must be continually renewed. The European
Self needs violence and needs to confront its Other to feel and maintain its power, to remake itself
continually. The generalized state of war that continuously subtends colonial representations is not
accidental or even unwanted – violence is the necessary foundation of colonialism itself. Third, posing
colonialism as a negative dialectic of recognition makes clear the potential for subversion inherent in
the situation. For a thinker like Fanon, the reference to Hegel suggests that the Master can only achieve a hollow form
of recognition; it is the Slave, through life-and-death struggle, who has the potential to move forward
toward full consciousness. The dialectic ought to imply movement, but this dialectic of European sovereign identity has fallen
back into stasis. The failed dialectic suggests the possibility of a proper dialectic that through negativity
will move history forward.
Colonialization Leads to Absolute Otherization and Racial Terror
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Associate Professor of Literature @ Duke and independent researcher and
currently an inmate at the Rebibbia prison in Rome, formerly a lecturer in Politics at Paris University and a
Professor of political science at the University of Padua, “Empire” Harvard University Press, 2000, pg. 127-8
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In the logic of colonialist representations, the construction of a separate colonized other and the
segregation of identity and alterity turns out paradoxically to be at once absolute and extremely
intimate. The process consists, in fact, of two moments that are dialectically related. In the first moment difference has to be pushed to
the other banished outside the realm of civilization; rather, it is grasped or produced as Other, as the absolute
negation, as the most distant point on the horizon. Eighteenth-century colonial slaveholders, for example, recognized
the absoluteness of this difference clearly, “The Negro is a being, whose nature and dispositions are not merely different for those of the
European that are the reverse of them. Kindness and compassion excite in his breast implacable and deadly hatred, but stripes and insults,
and abuse, generate gratitude, affection and inviolable attachment!” Thus, the slaveholders’ mentality, according to an abolitionist
pamphlet. The
non-European subjects acts, speaks, and thinks in a manner exactly opposite to the
European. Precisely because the difference of the Other is absolute, it can be inverted in a second
moment as the foundation of the Self. In other words, the evil, barbarity, and licentiousness of the colonized Other are what
make possible the goodness, civility, and propriety of the European Self. What first appears strange, foreign, and distant thus turns out to
be very close and intimate. Knowing,
seeing, and even touching the colonized is essential, even if this
knowledge and contact take place only on the plane of representation and relate little to the actual
subjects in the colonies and the metropole. The intimate struggle with the slave, feeling the sweat on its skin, smelling its
odor, defines the vitality of the master. This intimacy, however, in no way blurs the division between the two
identities in struggle, but only makes more important that the boundaries and the purity of the
identities be policed. The identity of the European Self is produced in this dialectical movement. Once the colonial subject
is constructed as absolutely Other, it can in turn be subsumed (cancelled and raised up) within a higher
unity. The absolute Other is reflected back into the most proper. Only through opposition to the colonized does the metropolitan subject
really become itself. What first appeared as a simple logic of exclusion, then, turns out to be a negative dialectic of recognitions. The
colonizer does produce the colonized as negation, but, through a dialectical twist, that negative colonized
identity is negated in turn to found the positive colonizer Self. Modern European thought and the modern Self are both
necessarily bound to what Paul Gilroy calls the “relationship of racial terror and subordination.”
Genocide and Civil War is an inevitable product of postcolonial thinking—it
banalizes political violence against the colonized
Shaikh 07 (Nermeen. Broadcast news producer and weekly co-host at Democracy Now!. Interrogating Charity and
the Benevolence of Empire. United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print.JMR)
At the political and administrative levels, the governing structures colonial imperialists established in the colonies,
many of which survive more or less intact, continue, in numerous cases, to have devastating consequences - even
if largely unintended (though by no means always, given the venerable place of divide et impera in the arcana
imperii ). Mahmood Mamdani cites the banalization of political violence (between native and settler) in colonial
Rwanda, together with the consolidation of ethnic identities in the wake of decolonization with the institution and
maintenance of colonial forms of law and government. Belgian colonial administrators created extensive political
and juridical distinctions between the Hutu and the Tutsi, whom they divided and named as two separate ethnic
groups. These distinctions had concrete economic and legal implications: at the most basic level, ethnicity was
marked on the identity cards the colonial authorities introduced and was used to distribute state resources. The
violence of colonialism, Mamdani suggests, thus operated on two levels: on the one hand, there was the violence
(determined by race) between the colonizer and the colonized; then, with the introduction of ethnic distinctions
among the colonized population, with one group being designated indigenous (Hutu) and the other alien (Tutsi),
the violence between native and settler was institutionalized within the colonized population itself. The Rwandan
genocide of 1994, which Mamdani suggests was a 'metaphor for postcolonial political violence' (2001: 11;
2007), needs therefore to be understood as a natives' genocide - akin to and enabled by colonial violence against
the native, and by the new institutionalized forms of ethnic differentiation among the colonized population
introduced by the colonial state. It is not necessary to elaborate this point; for present purposes, it is sufficient to
mark the significance (and persistence) of the colonial antecedents to contemporary political
violence. The genocide in Rwanda need not exclusively have been the consequence of colonial identity
formation, but does appear less opaque when presented in the historical context of colonial violence and
administrative practices. Given the scale of the colonial intervention, good intentions should not become an
excuse to overlook the unintended consequences. In this particular instance, rather than indulging fatuous
theories about 'primordial' loyalties, the 'backwardness' of 'premodern' peoples, the African state as an aberration
standing outside modernity, and so forth, it makes more sense to situate the Rwandan genocide within the logic of
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colonialism, which is of course not to advance reductive explanations but simply to historicize and contextualize
contemporary events in the wake of such massive intervention. Comparable arguments have been made about the
consolidation of Hindu and Muslim identities in colonial India, where the corresponding terms were 'native' Hindu
and 'alien' Muslim (with particular focus on the nature and extent of the violence during the Partition) (Pandey,
1998), or the consolidation of Jewish and Arab identities in Palestine and the Mediterranean generally.
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Alternatives
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Alternative-Negative Thought
Postcolonialm’s potential lies in its constant rejection of the paradigm of coloniality. The only
potential is in a negative relation to the past.
Colas [Santiago, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature ,Associate Professor of Residential College
(Arts and Ideas in the Humanities) University of Michigan, “Of Creole Symptoms, Cuban Fantasies, and
Other Latin American Postcolonial Ideologies,” PMLA, Vol. 110, No. 3 (May, 1995), pp. 382-396]
The fundamental problematic of which postcolonial culture responds is the inseparability of worlds in the
wake of colonization. With the movement of capital, culture, and persons initiated by colonization becoming ever
greater and more rapid, it has become less appropriate to restrict the adjective postcolonial to writers working in
formerly colonized regions. As I have tried to show, the term postcolonial designates not simply the state of
dependence on colonial relations but also the self styled independent subject that derives an illusion of
independence by extending and perpetuating colonial relations and structures and, in a second stage, by
repressing this extension. Culture produced in the wake of colonization becomes postcolonial ideology as I
define it above only when the producer represses rather than foregrounds this condition. In whatever form
the concept of postcoloniality is deployed, it must remain resolutely negative: in my view, it must mark
failures, shortcomings, distances to be traversed, and pockets of domination in thought that remain
critically unexamined, let alone eradicated in their practical form. I want to conclude this essay by trying to
remain as faithful to this imperative as possible.
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Alternative- Postcolonial Thought
Postcolonial thinking requires the recognition of cultural differences, key
to prevent degrading of individuals to subalterns
Bhabha 92 (Homi, Professor of English and American Literature and Language, and the Director of the Humanities
Center at Harvard University, Summer 1992, Freedom’s Basis in the Indeterminate, October, Vol. 61, The Identity
in Question, pp. 46-57)
The postcolonial perspective departs from the traditions of the sociology of underdevelopment or the
"dependency" theory. As a mode of analysis it attempts to revise those nationalist or "nativist" pedagogies that set
up the relation of Third and First Worlds in a binary structure of opposition. The postcolonial perspective resists
attempts to provide a holistic social explanation, forcing a recognition of the more complex cultural and political
boundaries that exist on the cusp of these often opposed political spheres. It is from this hybrid location of cultural
value-the transnational as the translational-that the postcolonial intellectual attempts to elaborate a historical and
literary project. It has been my growing conviction that the encounters and negotiations of differential meanings
and values within the governmental discourses and cultural practices that make up "colonial" textuality have
enacted, avant la lettre, many of the problematics of signification and judgment that have become current in
contemporary theory: aporia, ambivalence, indeterminacy, the question of discursive closure, the threat to
agency, the status of intentionality, the challenge to "totalizing" concepts, to name but a few. To put it in general
terms, there is a "colonial" countermodernity at work in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century matrices of
Western modernity that, if acknowledged, would question the historicism that, in a linear narrative, analogically
links late capitalism to the fragmentary, simulacral, pastiche-like symptoms of postmodernity. This is done without
taking into account the historical traditions of cultural contingency and textual indeterminacy that were generated
in the attempt to produce an "enlightened" colonial subject-in both the foreign and native varieties-and that
transformed, in the process, both antagonistic sites of cultural agency. Postcolonial critical discourses require
forms of dialectical thinking that do not disavow or sublate the otherness (alterity) that constitutes the symbolic
domain of psychic and social identifications. The incommensurability of cultural values and priorities that the
postcolonial critic represents cannot be accommodated within a relativism that assumes a public and symmetrical
world. And the cultural potential of such differential histories has led Fredric Jameson to recognize the
"internationalization of the national situations" in the postcolonial criticism of Roberto Retamar. Far from
functioning as an absorption of the particular by the general, the very act of articulating cultural differences "calls
us into question fully as much as it acknowledges the Other . . . neither re-duc[ing] the Third World to some
homogeneous Other of the West, nor ... vacuously celebrat[ing] the astonishing pluralism of human cultures."2
The historical grounds of such an intellectual tradition are to be found in the revisionary impulse that informs
many postcolonial thinkers. C. L. R. James once remarked that the postcolonial prerogative consisted in
reinterpreting and rewriting the forms and effects of an "older" colonial consciousness from the later experience
of the cultural displacement that marks the more recent, post-war histories of the Western metropolis. A similar
process of cultural translation, and transvaluation, is evident in Edward Said's assessment of the response from
disparate postcolonial regions as a "tremendously energetic attempt to engage with the metropolitan world in a
common effort at reinscribing, reinterpreting, and expanding the sites of intensity and the terrain contested with
Europe."
Only radical change of social norms strays away from ideology
Bhabha 92 (Homi, Professor of English and American Literature and Language, and the Director of the Humanities
Center at Harvard University, Summer 1992, Freedom’s Basis in the Indeterminate, October, Vol. 61, The Identity
in Question, pp. 46-57)
Postcolonial criticism bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the
contest for political and social authority within the modern world order. Postcolonial perspectives emerge from
the colonial or anticolonialist testimonies of Third World countries and from the testimony of minorities within the
geopolitical division of East/West, North/ South. These perspectives intervene in the ideological discourses of
modernity that have attempted to give a hegemonic "normality" to the uneven development and the differential,
often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races, communities, and peoples. Their critical revisions are formulated
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around issues of cultural difference, social authority, and political discrimination in order to reveal the antagonistic
and ambivalent moments within the "rationalizations" of modernity. To assimilate Habermas to our purposes, we
could also argue that the postcolonial project, at its most general theoretical level, seeks to explore those social
pathologies-"loss of meaning, conditions of anomie"-that no longer simply "cluster around class antagonism, [but]
break up into widely scattered historical contingencies."' These contingencies often provide the grounds of
historical necessity for the elaboration of strategies of emancipation, for the staging of other social antagonisms.
Reconstituting the discourse of cultural difference demands more than a simple change of cultural contents and
symbols, for a replacement within the same representational time frame is never adequate. This reconstitution
requires a radical revision of the social temporality in which emergent histories may be written: the rearticulation
of the "sign" in which cultural identities may be inscribed. And contingency as the signifying time of
counterhegemonic strategies is not a celebration of "lack" or "excess" or a self-perpetuating series of negative
ontologies. Such "indeterminism" is the mark of the conflictual yet. productive space in which the arbitrariness of
the sign of cultural signification emerges within the regulated boundaries of social discourse.
Instead of accepting a Euro-American mindset of thinking of the “third
world” as the “other” and subjecting the non-Western countries to
subordination, accept the postcolonial mindset of rejecting the Western
narrative.
Slater 2004 (David, Professor of Social and Political Geography at Loughborough University,
“Geopolitics and the Post-colonial: Rethinking North-South Relations”, p 19-21)
Furthermore, and very much linked to issues of representation, a postcolonial perspective would question the
geographies of reference for self and other, and their interrelation or intersubjectivity. What is missing in both
Bauman and Foucault is a sense of the difference that colonialism or Empire makes to the ways in which power,
politics and knowledge combine and work out their effects on the landscape of social change. Spivak (1999), in her
work on the post-colonial, which includes a critique of Foucault and Deleuze, has reminded us of the 'sanctioned
ignorance' and occlusion of the colonial and imperial moment in Western post-structuralist thinking. The ways in
which non-Western others have been and continue to be represented is reflected in a range of subordinating
forms of classification, surveillance, negation, appropriation and debasement, as contrasted to a positive selfaffirmation of Western identity (Spurr 1993).8 These forms of representation, incisively analysed by Säid (1978 and
1993), find expression within the frame of North-South relations post-1989, as Doty (1996) has shown, and their
production is crucial to the sustainability of particular relations of power and subordination. As has been outlined
above, Euro-Americanism exemplifies many of the problems associated with the depiction and representation of
non-Western societies, and the elements I mentioned in that section could be considered in a geopolitical setting
as having three interwoven components - representations of: a) the other, e.g. the Third World; b) the self, e.g. the
First World and, c) the interrelations between self and other, e.g. First World/Third World relations. Frequently
critiques of the geopolitics of representation focus on (a) and (c) so that in the example of dependency
perspectives (discussed in chapter 5) the critical assessment of modernization theory focused on the inadequate
portrayal of Third World reality (a) and the overly sanguine depiction of First World-Third World relations (c),
whereas the image drawn of the First World self was subjected to much less critical scrutiny, even though, it might
be suggested, that representation was quite vital to the functioning of the theory, as also is the case with the neoliberal discourse of development (see chapter 4). These three intersecting components, need to be borne in mind
in the development of any critique of the state of North-South relations and they can be seen as an important part
of any post-colonial perspective. How might such a perspective be initially specified? I want to outline five
elements, to which I shall return in chapter 6. 1 . As an analytical mode, as distinct from a historical periodization,
the post-colonial seeks to question Western discourses of, for example, progress, civilization, modernization,
development and democracy, by making connections with the continuing relevance of invasive colonial and
imperial power that these discourses tend to evade. 2. The post-colonial can be employed to highlight the mutually
constitutive role played by colonizer and colonized, or globalizers and globalized. 3. The post-colonial as a critical
mode of enquiry can be used to pose a series of questions concerning the location and differential impact of the
agents of knowledge. Not only does a post-colonial perspective consider the thematic silences present in influential
Western discourses, it also challenges the pervasive tendency to ignore the contributions of African, Asian and
Latin American intellectuals and their counter-representations of West/non-West relations. 4. Fourth, as a mode of
analysis, the post-colonial seeks to give key attention to the 'centrality of the periphery', to foreground the
peripheral case since, as the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano (1983: 184) once put it, it is 'in the outskirts of the
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world . . . that the system reveals its true face'. 5. Fifth, the post-colonial in terms of the way I interpret it in this
text carries with it an ethico-political positionality that seeks to oppose the coloniality and imperiality of power and
re-assert the salience of autonomy and popular resistance to Western penetrations. This is an issue to which I shall
return in subsequent chapters.
Even though nation states are the most organized political sites in the
world, some nation states are clearly positioned differently, which is an
outgrowth of the coloniality and imperiality formerly imposed on the post
colonial countries. Reject the aff-it embodies the colonial mindset.
Slater 2004 (David, Professor of Social and Political Geography at Loughborough University,
“Geopolitics and the Post-colonial: Rethinking North-South Relations”, p 23-24)
Thus, it can be argued that whereas within the frame of global politics there is more interdependence, the pace of
cultural communication, military delivery, disease transmission and so on have accelerated, and that while global
issues of refugees, ecology, arms control, organized crime and terrorism have become more intense, nevertheless
the territorial state remains the most visible and organized site of political action in the world (Connolly 2001). It is
a crucial crossroads for politics, the political and the spatial. But are all nation-states geopolitically positioned in the
same way? Clearly they are not; and what needs stressing in the context of a post-colonial perspective on NorthSouth relations is the difference that both coloniality and imperiality have made. Making this connection is also
part of the geopolitical. How? Customarily, the analysis of the relations between politics and the political is worked
out within the conceptual confines of an implicitly Western territorial state. There is an assumption of a pre-given
territorial integrity and impermeability.9 But in the situation of peripheral polities, the historical realities of
external power and its effects within those polities are much more difficult to ignore. What this contrast points to is
the lack of equality in the full recognition of the territorial integrity of nation-states. For the societies of Latin
America, Africa and Asia, the principles governing the constitution of their mode of political being were deeply
structured by external penetration, by the invasiveness of foreign powers. The framing of time and the ordering of
space followed an externally imposed logic, the effects of which still resonate in the postcolonial period. The
struggles to recover an autochthonous narrative of time to counter a colonialist rule of memory, and to rediscover
an indigenous amalgam of meanings for the territory of the nation have formed a primary part of postIndependence politics. In what were referred to as 'wars of national liberation', the struggle to breathe new life
into the time-space nexus of independence lay at the core of the anti-imperialist movement. This then is one
modality of the geopolitical, of a transformative rupture, where anti-colonial movements were the disrupting
and destabilizing currents able to challenge and eventually bring to an end the colonial appropriation of national
space.
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Alternative-Unbuilt
The alternative is the Unbuilt of Colonial social construction, where we
refuse to engage in their narrative of growth that comes at the expense of
the Other.
Bhabha ‘03(Homi K, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English at Harvard, the
Director of the Humanities Center and the Senior Advisor on the Humanities to the President and Provost at
Harvard University, "Democracy De-realized." Diogenes 50.1 (2003): 34-5,
http://dio.sagepub.com/content/50/1/27.full.pdf+html)
As I end let me return to the beginning of my article, to the fallen towers and falling idols. What has befallen the
ideals and the ideas of global progress now that the New World is bereft of its towers, its towering ladder without
rungs targeted as the symbol of our times? Such days that eerily hollow out the times and places in which we live
confront our sense of progress with the challenge of the unbuilt. The unbuilt is not a place, Wittgenstein says,
that you can reach with a ladder; what is needed is a perspicuous vision that reveals a space, a way in
the world, that is often obscured by the onward and upward thrust of progress : Our civilisation is
characterised by the word ‘progress’. Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features.
Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure . . . I am not interested in
constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundation of possible buildings. (Culture
and Value, 7e, 1930) Neither destruction nor deconstruction, the unbuilt is the creation of a form whose virtual
absence raises the question of what it would mean to start again, in the same place, as if it were elsewhere,
adjacent to the site of a historic disaster or a personal trauma. The rubble and debris that survive carry the
memories of other fallen towers, Babel for instance, and lessons of endless ladders that suddenly collapse beneath
our feet. We have no option but to be interested in constructing buildings; at the same time, we have no choice
but to place, in full view of our buildings, the vision of the Unbuilt –- ‘the foundation of possible buildings’, other
foundations, other alternative worlds. Perhaps, then, we will not forget to measure Progress from the ground,
from other perspectives, other possible foundations, even when we vainly believe that we are, ourselves, standing
at the top of the tower.
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Alternative-Hybrid
Only recognizing hybridization as the production of colonial power can
expose the ambivalence of discourses of authority.
Bhabha, Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard, 1985
(Homi K, Autumn 1985, Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside
Delhi, May 1817. Critical Inquiries: Volume 12, Number 1. JSTOR. page 154-155. RH)
If the effect of colonial power is seen to be the production of hybrid-ization rather than the noisy command of
colonialist authority or the silent repression of native traditions, then an important change of per-spective occurs.
It reveals the ambivalence at the source of traditional discourses on authority and enables a form of subversion,
founded on that uncertainty, that turns the discursive conditions of dominance into the grounds of intervention. It
is traditional academic wisdom that the presence of authority is properly established through the nonexercise of
private judgment and the exclusion of reasons, in conflict with the authoritative reason. The recognition of
authority, however, requires a validation of its source that must be immediately, even intuitively, apparent-"You
have that in your countenance which I would fain call master"-and held in common (rules of recognition). What is
left un-acknowledged is the paradox of such a demand for proof and the resulting ambivalence for positions of
authority. If, as Steven Lukes rightly says, the acceptance of authority excludes any evaluation of the content of an
utterance, and if its source, which must be acknowledged, disavows both conflicting reasons and personal
judgement, then can the "signs" or "marks" of authority be anything more than "empty" presences of strategic
devices?'8 Need they be any the less effective because of that? Not less effective but effective in a different form,
would be our answer.
Recognition of the colonial hybrid creates resistance with cultural
knowledge that can split the dominant power discourse.
Bhabha, Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard, 1985
(Homi K, Autumn 1985, Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside
Delhi, May 1817. Critical Inquiries: Volume 12, Number 1. JSTOR. page 155-158. RH)
In repeating the scenario of the English book, I hope I have succeeded in representing a colonial difference: it is the
effect of uncertainty that afflicts the discourse of power, an uncertainty that estranges the familiar symbol of
English "national" authority and emerges from its colonial appropriation as the sign of its difference. Hybridity is
the name of this displacement of value from symbol to sign that causes the dominant discourse to split along the
axis of its power to be representative, authoritative. Hybridity represents that ambivalent "turn" of the
discriminated subject into the terrifying, exorbitant object of paranoid classification-a disturbing questioning of the
images and presences of authority. To grasp the ambivalence of hybridity, it must be distinguished from an
inversion that would suggest that the originary is, really, only the "effect" of an Entstellung. Hybridity has no such
perspective of depth or truth to provide: it is not a third term that resolves the tension between two cultures, or
the two scenes of the book, in a dialectical play of "recognition." The displacement from symbol to sign creates a
crisis for any concept of authority based on a system of recognition: colonial specularity, doubly inscribed, does
not produce a mirror where the self apprehends itself; it is always the split screen of the self and its doubling, the
hybrid.
Hybridity reverses the formal process of disavowal so that the violent dislocation, the Entstellung of the act of
colonization becomes the conditionality of colonial discourse. The presence of colonialist authority is no longer
immediately visible; its discriminatory identifications no longer have their authoritative reference to this culture's
cannibalism or that people's perfidy. As an articulation of displacement and dislocation, it is now possible to
identify "the cultural" as a disposal of power, a negative transparency that comes to be agonistically constructed
on the boundary between frame of reference/frame of mind. It is crucial to remember that the colonial
construction of the cultural (the site of the civilizing mission) through the process of disavowal is authoritative to
the extent to which it is structured around the ambivalence of splitting, denial, repetition-strategies of defence
that mobilize culture as an open-textured, warlike strategy whose aim "is rather a continued agony than a total
disappearance of the pre-existing culture."20 To see the cultural not as the source of conflict-different cultures but as the effect of discriminatory practices -the production of cultural differentiation as signs of authority-changes
its value and its rules of recognition. What is preserved is the visible surfaces of its artefacts-the mere visibility of
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the symbol, as a fleeting immediacy. Hybridity intervenes in the exercise of authority not merely to indicate the
impossibility of its identity but to represent the unpredictability of its presence. The book retains its presence, but
it is no longer a representation of an essence; it is now a partial presence, a (strategic) device in a specific colonial
engagement, an appurtenance of authority. This partializing process of hybridity is best described as a metonymy
of presence. It shares Sigmund Freud's valuable insight into the strategy of disavowal as the persistence of the
narcissistic demand in the acknowl-edgement of difference.2' This, however, exacts a price, for the existence of
two contradictory knowledges (multiple beliefs) splits the ego (or the discourse) into two psychical attitudes, and
forms of knowledge, toward the external world. The first of these takes reality into consideration while the second
replaces it with a product of desire. What is remarkable is that these two contradictory objectives always
represent a "partiality" in the construction of the fetish object, at once a substitute for the phallus and a mark of
its absence. There is an important difference between fetishism and hybridity. The fetish reacts to the change in
the value of the phallus by fixing on an object prior to the perception of difference, an object that can
metaphorically substitute for its presence while registering the difference. So long as it fulfills the fetishistic ritual,
the object can look like anything (or nothing!). The hybrid object, however, retains the actual semblance of the
authoritative symbol but revalues its presence by resiting it as the signifier of Entstellung-after the intervention of
difference. It is the power of this strange metonymy of presence to so disturb the systematic (and systemic)
construction of discriminatory knowledges that the cultural, once recognized as the medium of authority, becomes
virtually unrecognizable. Culture, as a colonial space of intervention and agonism, as the trace of the displacement
of symbol to sign, can be transformed by the unpredictable and partial desire of hybridity. Deprived of their full
presence, the knowledges of cultural authority may be articulated with forms of "native" knowledges or faced with
those discriminated subjects that they must rule but can no longer represent. This may lead, as in the case of the
natives outside Delhi, to questions of authority that the authorities-the Bible included-cannot answer. Such a
process is not the deconstruction of a cultural system from the margins of its own aporia nor, as in Derrida's
"Double Session," the mime that haunts mimesis. The display of hybridity-its peculiar "replication"-terrorizes
authority with the ruse of recognition, its mimicry, its mockery. Such a reading of colonial authority profoundly
unsettles the demand that figures at the centre of the originary myth of colonialist power. It is the demand that
the space it occupies be unbounded, its reality coincident with the emergence of an imperialist narrative and
history, its discourse nondialogic, its enunciation unitary, unmarked by the trace of difference-a demand that is
recognizable in a range of justificatory Western "civil" discourses where the presence of the "colony" often
alienates its own language of liberty and reveals its universalist concepts of labour and property as particular, postEnlightenment ideological and technological practices. Consider, for example: Locke's notion of the wasteland of
Carolina-"Thus in the beginning all the World was America"; Montes-quieu's emblem of the wasteful and
disorderly life and labour in despotic societies-"When the savages of Louisiana are desirous of fruit, they cut the
tree to the root, and gather the fruit"; Grant's belief in the impossibility of law and history in Muslim and Hindu
India-"where treasons and revolutions are continual; by which the insolent and abject frequently change places";
or the contemporary Zionist myth of the neglect of Pal-estine-"of a whole territory," Said writes, "essentially
unused, unappre-ciated, misunderstood ... to be made useful, appreciated, understandable."22 What renders this
demand of colonial power impossible is precisely the point at which the question of authority emerges. For the
unitary voice of command is interrupted by questions that arise from these het-erogeneous sites and circuits of
power which, though momentarily "fixed" in the authoritative alignment of subjects, must continually be represented in the production of terror or fear-the paranoid threat from the hybrid is finally uncontainable because
it breaks down the symmetry and duality of self/Other, inside/outside. In the productivity of power, the
boundaries of authority--its reality effects -are always besieged by "the other scene" of fixations and phantoms.
We can now understand the link between the psychic and political that is suggested in Frantz Fanon's figure of
speech: the colon is an exhibitionist, because his preoccupation with security makes him "remind the native out
loud that there he alone is master."23 The native, caught in the chains of colonialist command, achieves a "pseudopetrification" which further incites and excites him, thus making the settler-native boundary an anxious and
ambivalent one. What then presents itself as the subject of authority in the discourse of colonial power is, in fact, a
desire that so exceeds the original authority of the book and the immediate visibility of its metaphoric writing that
we are bound to ask: What does colonial power want? My answer is only partially in agreement with Lacan's vel or
Derrida's veil or hymen. For the desire of colonial discourse is a splitting of hybridity that is less than one and
double; and if that sounds enigmatic, it is because its explanation has to wait upon the authority of those canny
questions that the natives put, so insistently, to the English book.
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Our alternative is key to understand practices of colonialist discourses and unveil
the colonial mimicry’s invisible exclusion of those who resist colonization.
Bhabha, Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard, 1985
(Homi K, Autumn 1985, Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside
Delhi, May 1817. Critical Inquiries: Volume 12, Number 1. JSTOR. page 162. RH)
In each of these cases we see a colonial doubling which I've described as a strategic displacement of value through
a process of the metonymy of presence. It is through this partial process, represented in its enigmatic,
inappropriate signifiers-stereotypes, jokes, multiple and contradictory belief, the "native" Bible-that we begin to
get a sense of a specific space of cultural colonial discourse. It is a "separate" space, a space of separation-less than
one and double-which has been systematically denied by both colonialists and nationalists who have sought
authority in the authenticity of "origins." It is precisely as a separation from origins and essences that this colonial
space is constructed. It is separate, in the sense in which the French psychoanalyst Victor Smirnoff describes the
separateness of the fetish as a "separateness that makes the fetish easily available, so that the subject can make
use of it in his own way and establish it in an order of things that frees it from any subordination."26 The
metonymic strategy produces the signifier of colonial mimicry as the affect of hybridity-at once a mode of
appropriation and of resistance, from the disciplined to the desiring. As the discriminated object, the metonym of
presence becomes the support of an authoritarian voyeurism, all the better to exhibit the eye of power. Then, as
discrimination turns into the assertion of the hybrid, the insignia of authority becomes a mask, a mockery. After
our experience of the native interrogation, it is difficult to agree entirely with Fanon that the psychic choice is to
"turn white or disappear."7 There is the more ambivalent, third choice: camouflage, mimicry, black skins/white
masks. "Mimicry reveals something in so far as it is distinct from what might be called an itself that is behind. The
effect of mimicry," writes Lacan, "is camouflage, in the strictly technical sense. It is not a question of harmonizing
with the background but, against a mottled background, of being mottled-exactly like the technique of camouflage
practised in human warfare."28 Read as a masque of mimicry, Anund Messeh's tale emerges as a question of
colonial authority, an agonistic space. To the extent to which discourse is a form of defensive warfare, mimicry
marks those moments of civil disobedience within the discipline of civility: signs of spectacular resistance. When
the words of the master become the site of hybridity-the warlike sign of the native-then we may not only read
between the lines but even seek to change the often coercive reality that they so lucidly contain. It is with the
strange sense of a hybrid history that I want to end.
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Alternative-Postcol. Translation
Postcolonial translation of modern discourse shapes our understanding of
the world
Bhabha 92 (Homi, Professor of English and American Literature and Language, and the Director of the Humanities
Center at Harvard University, Summer 1992, Freedom’s Basis in the Indeterminate, October, Vol. 61, The Identity
in Question, pp. 46-57)
How does the deconstruction of the sign, the emphasis on indeterminism in cultural and political judgment,
transform our sense of the subject of culture and the historical agent of change? If we contest the grand,
continuist narratives, then what alternative temporalities do we create to articulate the contrapuntal (Said) or
interruptive (Spivak) formations of race, gender, class, and nation within a transnational world culture? Such
problematic questions are activated within the terms and traditions of postcolonial critique as it reinscribes the
cultural relations between spheres of social antagonism. Current debates in postmodernism question the cunning
of modernity-its historical ironies, its disjunctive temporalities, the paradoxical nature of progress. It would
profoundly affect the values and judgments of such interrogations if they were open to the argument that
metropolitan histories of civitas cannot be conceived without evoking the colonial antecedents of the ideals of
civility. The postcolonial translation of modernity does not simply revalue the contents of a cultural tradition or
transpose values across cultures through the transcendent spirit of a "common humanity." Cultural translation
transforms the value of culture-as-sign: as the time-signature of the historical "present" that is struggling to find its
mode of nar-ration. The sign of cultural difference does not celebrate the great continuities of a past tradition, the
seamless narratives of progress, the vanity of humanist wishes. Culture-as-sign articulates that in-between
moment when the rule of language as semiotic system-linguistic difference, the arbitrariness of the sign-turns
into a struggle for the historical and ethical right to signify. The rule of language as signifying system-the
possibility of speaking at all-becomes the misrule of discourse: the right for only some to speak diachronically and
differentially and for "others"-women, migrants, Third World peoples, Jews, Palestinians, for instance-to speak
only symptomatically or marginally. How do we transform the formal value of linguistic difference into an analytic
of cultural difference? How do we turn the "arbitrariness" of the sign into the critical practices of social authority?
In what sense is this an interruption within the discourses of modernity? This is not simply a demand for a
postcolonial semiology. From the postcolonial perspective, it is an intervention in the way discourses of modernity
structure their objects of knowledge. The right to signify-to make a name for oneself-emerges from the moment of
undecidability-a claim made by Jacques Derrida in "Des Tours de Babel," his essay on "figurative translation." Let
us not forget that he sees translation as the trope for the process of dis-placement through which language names
its object. But even more suggestive, for our postcolonial purposes, is the Babel metaphor that Derrida uses to
describe the cultural, communal process of "making a name for oneself": "The Semites want to bring the world to
reason and this reason can signify simultaneously a colonial violence . . . and a peaceful transparency of the human
condition." This is emphatically not, as Terry Eagleton has recently described it, "the trace or aporia or ineffable
flicker of difference which eludes all formalization, that giddy moment of failure, slippage, or jouissance."5 The
undecidability of discourse is not to be read as the "excess" of the signifier, as an aestheticization of the formal
arbitrariness of the sign. Rather, it represents, as Habermas suggests, the central ambivalence of the knowledge
structure of modernity; "unconditionality" is the Janus-faced process at work in the modern moment of cultural
judgment, where validity claims seek justification for their propositions in terms of the specificity of the
"everyday." Undecidability or unconditionality "is built into the factual processes of mutual understanding....
Validity claimed for propositions and norms transcends spaces and times, but the claim must always be raised here
and now, in specific contexts."6 Pace Eagleton, this is no giddy moment of failure; it is instead precisely the act of
representation as a mode of regulating the limits or liminality of cultural knowledges. Habermas illuminates the
undecidable or "unconditional" as the epistemological basis of cultural specificity, and thus, in the discourse of
modernity, the claim to knowledge shifts from the "universal" to the domain of context-bound everyday practice.
However, Habermas's notion of communicative reason presumes intersubjective understanding and reciprocal
recognition. This renders his sense of cultural particularity essentially consensual and essentialist. What of those
colonial cultures caught in the drama of the dialectic of the master and the enslaved or indentured?
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Alternative- Symbolic Violence
In the colonial situation a desire of the Colony to destroy the colonized
perpetuates a system of violence-only resisting the desire to become
colonizer can the violence be overthrown through a symbolic upheaval.
Krebs 07 (Andreas Krebs, Phd University of Ottawa,“The Transcendent and the Postcolonial Violence in Derrida
and Fanon”,pg. 93, BW)
Fanon also states that the dreams of the colonized constantly turn towards the desire to take the place of the
colonizer. This desire of ‘becoming-Other’ is mirrored in the colonizer, who wants to become the colonized,
making the colonized into the threat to the ‘natural order’ (Krautwurst 2003). This mutual desire of becoming is
also a mutual desire of destruction. The colonizer, says Fanon, would like nothing better than to annihilate the
colonized: le colon demande à chaque représentant de la minorité qui opprime de descendre 30 ou 100 ou 200
indigènes [et] il d’un seul s’aperçoit que personne n’est indigné et qu’à l’ex trême tout le problème est de savoir si
on peut faire ça coup ou par étapes. (Fanon 2002: 81-82) However, this annihilation would result in suicide. The
colonizer requires the colonized at two levels of existence: economic and psychological. The labour power of the
colonized is required in order for the colony to be viable. Also, elimination of the colonized would be elimination of
the opposite end of the colonizer’s identifying binary. Similarly, the logic of the colonized is couched in the capacity
of swallowing the colonizer through the sheer force of numbers. This desire for mutual destruction marks the
beginning of anti-colonial violence and decolonization—not just of land, but also of mind and body. Anti-colonial
violence, for Fanon, is a kind of “self-rehabilitation of the oppressed [which] begins in directly confronting the
source of his dehumanization” (Bulhan 1985: 147). This rehabilitation is expressed through the act of violence. This
violence demonstrates to the colonized that the colonial structures are not impervious to harm, and that her
inferiority, entrenched through colonial ideology, is not essential. What becomes essential is that both colonized
and colonizer are mortal, and that both shed blood. Thus through (violent) action against the symbols of
colonialism, the colonized becomes more than a mere thing or animal. Therefore, at some level, Fanon is
concerned with the transformation of the colonized individual into ‘man,’ which corresponds to a certain
humanism in his thought: “la ‘chose’ colonisé devient homme dans le processus même par lequel elle se libère”
(Fanon 2002:40). However, as his thought develops over the course of Les damnés de la terre, it becomes clear
that this ‘becoming man’ by no means corresponds to a simple desire for recognition by the colonizer, or to fit
within the category of ‘man’ as determined by universal humanism. The necessary violence to which the
colonized resorts is a process of becoming. Through this process, the colonized becomes an agent, experiences
that which is required to realize oneself in the world. This agent making, anti-colonial violence works against the
existing structures of violence, both colonial and humanist. Through this violence there transpires a mutual
transformation of both sides of the previously Manichean binary. As will be discussed in the final section, the
transformative, anti-colonial violence is accompanied by the blossoming of a ‘national consciousness’ which is
neither exclusionary nor a refounding of the violent structures of the state. As Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks states,
anti-colonial violence as presented by Fanon is “utterly beyond good and evil [and] does not avail of a selfjustifying meta-narrative” (2002: 85). This recognition of the pure nature of anti-colonial violence is the opening
necessary for a discussion linking it to Derrida’s concept of divine violence. The spontaneous outbursts of violence
that are the initial expressions of anticolonial violence have no ends in mind; this is violence as pure means, as
pure expression, as pure anger, it has “no other aim than to show and show itself” (Derrida 2002: 287). Anticolonial violence destroys the colonial law, the expression of universal humanism, through demonstrating its
untenable inconsistencies. The boundaries of the colonial state are destroyed; violence begins to be perpetrated
in the métropole itself (viz. the café bombings in France during the Algerian war of independence). The boundaries
between colonizer and colonized are likewise destroyed. As mentioned, each becomes no less mortal than the
other. In language strangely similar to that used by Derrida, Fanon states that once anti-colonial violence begins,
the “enterprise of mystification” practiced by the “demagogues, opportunists, magicians” becomes “practically
impossible” (Fanon 2002: 91; translation mine). The violence against the colonial structure pits divine violence
against mythic violence; as the thousands of colonized are felled by machine gun fire, the founding/ preserving
mythic violence of the colonial state works against itself. Its arbitrary nature becomes clear through its constant
shedding of representative blood. Each victim of colonial violence represents all colonized individuals, in the
consciousness of the colonizer and colonized. For the colonizer this is because the shapeless masses of the
colonized are indistinguishable one from the other; for the colonized, colonial massacres work as the threat
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principle of the state. In this orgy of violence, which is at once both founding and preserving, the colonial state
drives itself towards suicide. The foundational becomes all the more present in each preservation of order, and
necessarily demystifies the foundation of the colonial state from the sheer quotidian presence of mythic fate.
Each victim of anticolonial violence, however, is killed without warning, without threat. Anti-colonial violence
does not threaten, and is never arbitrary. This violence is expiatory: through his death, the colonizer receives the
capacity for atonement for his complicity in the violence of the colonial structure. The only possible characteristic
of divine violence outlined by Derrida which presents a problem is bloodshed; for Derrida, “[b]lood would make all
the difference” (2002: 288). Anti-colonial violence does not seem capable of escaping from the shedding of blood.
However, it is clear that, as with divine violence, anti-colonial “violence is exercised on all life but to the profit of
for the sake of the living” (ibid). The lack of a “self-justifying meta-narrative” (Seshadri-Crooks 2002: 85) in
anticolonial violence, far more than bloodshed, seems to really ‘make all the difference.’ This is not to say that
Fanon does not recognize that attempts are constantly made to ideologically channel anti-colonial violence. This
channeling comes for the most part from the national (colonized) bourgeoisie and nationalist political parties, who
attempt to pacify the colonized, and seize the role of ‘interlocutor’ between those working against the colonial
structures, and those representing those structures. These actors work to re-orient the violence of the colonized
towards a non-radical, passive acceptance of the terms of decolonization as determined by the colonizing power
itself. Fanon characterizes the national bourgeoisie and mainstream political actors as “une sorte de classe
d’esclaves libérés individuellement, d’esclaves affranchis” (Fanon 2002: 60-61). This ideological recuperation of
spontaneous, divine, anti-colonial violence results not in the potential for a complete annihilation of the violence
of colonial/ state structures, but a recreation of them. Just as Derrida states that “all revolutionary situations, all
revolutionary discourses […] justify the recourse to violence by alleging the founding, in progress or to come, of a
new law, of a new state” (2002: 269), Fanon recognizes that: [l]e militant qui fait face, avec des moyens
rudimentaires, à la machine de guerre colonialiste se rend compte que dans le même temps où il démolit
l’oppression coloniale il contribue par la bande à construire un autre appareil d’exploitation (2002: 138-9) For
Fanon, prevention of the founding of a new ‘apparatus of exploitation’ is only possible through the inculcation of a
national consciousness. This national consciousness denies the accumulation of power, and the rational
recuperation, of the foundational violence of the state through a horizontal spread of capacity, responsibility and
agency. This links with the mutual recognition achieved through the transformative process of anti-colonial
violence, and with Derrida’s requirement of a recognition of the unique in any possible non-violent politics.
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Alternative-Decolonization
Decolonization creates a free flow of subjectivity where race, sex, and
gender dynamics can be dismantled from the war frame constituting the
colonial situation.
Maldonado-Torres 07 (Nelson, PhD, Religious Studies with a Certificate for Outstanding Work in Africana
Studies, Brown University, “On the Coloniality of Being,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, pg. 243, MCJC)
War is the opposite of the anarchical relation of absolute responsibility for the Other that gives birth to human
subjectivity. The obliteration of the transontological takes the tendency of producing a world in which war
becomes the norm, rather than the exception. That is the basic meaning of the coloniality of being: the radical
betrayal of the trans-ontological by the formation of a world in which the non-ethics of war become naturalized
through the idea of race. The damne´ is the outcome of this process. Her agency needs to be defined by a
consistent opposition to the paradigm of war and the promotion of a world oriented by the ideals of human
generosity and receptivity. This is the precise meaning of decolonization: restoration of the logic of the gift. Fanon
suggests as much in the conclusion of Black Skin, White Masks: Superiority? Inferiority? Why not the quite simple
attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself? Was my freedom not given to me
then in order to build the world of the You?65 Fanon’s message is clear: decolonization should aspire at the very
minimum to restore or create a reality where racialized subjects could give and receive freely in societies founded
on the principle of receptive generosity.66 Receptive generosity involves a break away from racial dynamics as well
as from conceptions of gender and sexuality that inhibit generous interaction among subjects. In this sense, a
consistent response to coloniality involves both decolonization and ‘des-gener-accio´n’ as projects, both of which
are necessary for the YOU to emerge. Only in this way the trans-ontological can shine through the ontological, and
love, ethics, and justice can take the role that the non-ethics of war have occupied in modern life.
Decolonizing knowledge and being is essential in bringing down coloniality.
Mignolo 07 (Walter, professor@ Duke U on semiotics and literary theory, “DELINKING The rhetoric of modernity,
the logic of coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality,” Cultural Studies, volume:21, pg.450-2, MCJC)
Under the spell of neo-liberalism and the magic of the media promoting it, modernity and modernization, together
with democracy, are being sold as a package trip to the promised land of happiness, a paradise where, for
example, when you can no longer buy land because land itself is limited and not producible or monopolized by
those who control the concentration of wealth, you can buy virtual land!!3 Yet, when people do not buy the
package willingly or have other ideas of how economy and society should be organized, they become subject to all
kinds of direct and indirect violence. It is not a spiritual claim, or merely a spiritual claim that I am making. The
crooked rhetoric that naturalizes 'modernity' as a universal global process and point of arrival hides its darker side,
the constant reproduction of 'coloniality'. In order to uncover the perverse logic — that Fanon pointed out —
underlying the philosophical conundrum of modernity/coloniality and the political and economic structure of
imperialism/colonialism, we must consider how to decolonize the 'mind' (Thiongo) and the 'imaginary' (Gruzinski)
— that is, knowledge and being. Since the mid-seventies, the idea that knowledge is also colonized and, therefore,
it needs to be de-colonized was expressed in several ways and in different disciplinary domains.4 However, the
groundbreaking formulation came from the thought and the pen of Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano. Quijano's
intellectual experience was shaped in his early years of involvement in the heated debates ignited by dependency
theory, in the seventies. Dependency theory, however, maintained the debate in the political (e.g., state, military
control and intervention) and economy, analyzing the relation¬ships of dependency, in those spheres, between
center and periphery.5 That knowledge could be cast also in those terms was an idea to which Enrique Dussel, in
1977, hinted at in the first chapter of his Philosophy of Liberation titled 'Geo-politics and Philosophy'. In a
complementary way, in the late eighties and early seventies, Anibal Quijano introduced the disturbing concept of
'coloniality' (the invisible and constitutive side of 'modernity'). In an article published in 1989 and reprinted in
1992, titled 'Colonialidad y modernidad- racionalidad' Quijano explicitly linked coloniality of power in the political
and economic spheres with the coloniality of knowledge; and ended the argument with the natural consequence:
if knowledge is colonized one of the task ahead is to de-colonize knowledge.6 In the past three or four years, the
work and conversations among the members of the modernity/coloniality research project',7 de-coloniality
became the common expression paired with the concept of coloniality and the extension of coloniality of power
(economic and political) to coloniality of knowledge and of being (gender, sexuality, subjectivity and knowledge),
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were incorporated into the basic vocabulary among members of the research project.8 One of the central points of
Quijano's critique to the complicity between modernity/rationality, is the exclusionary and totalitarian notion of
Totality (I am aware of the pleonasm); that is a Totality that negates, exclude, occlude the difference and the
possibilities of other totalities. Modern rationality is an engulfing and at the same time defensive and exclusionary.
It is not the case, Quijano added, that in non-European imperial languages and epistemologies (Mandarin, Arabic,
Bengali, Russian, Aymara, etc.), the notion of Totality doesn't exist or is unthinkable. But it is the case that,
particularly since the 1500s and the growing dominance of Western epistemology (from Theo-logy to secular Egology (e.g., Descartes, 'I think, therefore I am'), non-Western concepts of Totality had to be confronted with a
growing imperial concept of Totality. The cases of the Ottoman and Inca Empires are often quoted as examples of
respect for the difference. I am not of course offering the examples of the Ottoman and the Inca Empires as idea
for the future but just in order to show the regionalism of the Western notion of Totality. I am observing that from
1500 on, Ottomans, Incas, Russians, Chinese, etc., moved toward and inverted 'recognition': they had to
'recognize' that Western languages and categories of thoughts, and therefore, political philosophy and political
economy, were marching an expanding without 'recognizing' them as equal players in the game. Quijano’s project
articulated around the notion of ‘coloniality of power’ moves in two simultaneous directions. One is the analytic.
The concept of coloniality has opened up, the re-construction and the restitution of silenced histories, repressed
subjectivities, subalternized knowledges and languages performed by the Totality depicted under the names of
modernity and rationality. Quijano acknowledges that postmodern thinkers already criticized the modern concept
of Totality; but this critique is limited and internal to European history and the history of European ideas. That is
why it is of the essence the critique of Totality from the perspective of coloniality and not only from the critique of
post-modernity. Now, and this is important, the critique DELINKING 4 5 1 of the modern notion of Totality doesn’t
lead necessarily to post-coloniality, but to de-coloniality. Thus, the second direction we can call the programmatic
that is manifested in Quijano as a project of ‘desprendimiento’, of de-linking. At this junction, the analytic of
coloniality and the programmatic of decoloniality moves away and beyond the post-colonial.
Epistemic de-colonization collapses and delinks the political with
coloniality
Mignolo 07 (Walter, professor@ Duke U on semiotics and literary theory, “DELINKING The rhetoric of modernity,
the logic of coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality,” Cultural Studies, volume:21, pg.452-3, MCJC)
The last statement may sound somewhat messianic but it is, nonetheless, an orientation that in the first decade of
the twenty-first century has shown its potential and its viability. Such ‘destruction’ shall not be imagined as a global
revolution lead by one concept of Totality that would be different from the modern one, but equally totalitarian.
The Soviet Union was already an experiment whose results is not an exemplar to follow. The statement shall be
read in parallel to Quijano’s observations about none-totalitarian concepts of totality; to his own concept of
heterogeneous structural-histories (I will come back below to this concept), and to what (I will develop below)
pluriversality as 4 5 2 CULTURAL STUDIES a universal project . And, above all, it shall be read in complementarity
with Quijano’s idea of ‘desprenderse’ (delinking).10 In this regard, Quijano proposes a de-colonial epistemic shift
when he clarifies that: En primer te´rmino, la descolonizacio´n epistemolo´gica, para dar paso luego a una nueva
comunicacio´n inter-cultural, a un intercambio de experiencias y de significaciones, como la base de otra
racionalidad que pueda pretender, con legitimidad, a alguna universalidad. Pues nada menos racional, finalmente,
que la pretension de que la especı´fica cosmovisio´n de una etnia particular sea impuesta como la racionalidad
universal, aunque tal etnia se llama Europa occidental. Porque eso, en verdad, es pretender para un
provincianismo el tı´tulo de universalidad (italics mine).11 The argument that follows is, in a nutshell, contained in
this paragraph. First, epistemic de-colonization runs parallel to Amin’s delinking. A delinking that leads to decolonial epistemic shift and brings to the foreground other epistemologies, other principles of knowledge and
understanding and, consequently, other economy, other politics, other ethics. ‘New inter-cultural communication’
should be interpreted as new inter-epistemic communication (as we will see bellow, is the case of the concept of
inter-culturality among Indigenous intellectuals in Ecuador). Furthermore, de-linking presupposes to move toward
a geo- and body politics of knowledge that on the one hand denounces the pretended universality of a particular
ethnicity (body politics), located in a specific part of the planet (geo-politics), that is, Europe where capitalism
accumulated as a consequence of colonialism. De-linking then shall be understood as a de-colonial epistemic shift
leading to other-universality, that is, to pluri-versality as a universal project. I’ll come back to this point in section IV
(‘The grammar of de-coloniality’).
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Alternative-Mimicry
Mimcry breaks out of the traditional notion of colonization.
Bhaba 1984 (Homi K, Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard, 1984, "Of Mimicry and Man: The
Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” http://www.jstor.org/stable/778467)(pg. 131-133)
From such a colonial encounter between the white presence and its black semblance, there emerges the
question of the ambivalence of mimicry as a problematic of colonial subjection. For if Sade's scandalous
theatricalization of language repeatedly reminds us that discourse can claim "no priority," then the work of
Edward Said will not let us forget that the "ethnocentric and erratic will to power from which texts
can spring"19 is itself a theater of war. Mimicry, as the metonymy of presence is, indeed, such an
erratic, eccentric strategy of authority in colonial discourse. Mimicry does not merely destroy
narcissistic authority through the repetitious slippage of difference and desire. It is the process of
thefixation of the colonial as a form of cross-classificatory, discriminatory knowledge in the defiles of
an interdictory discourse, and therefore necessarily raises the question of the authorizationo f
colonial representations. A question of authority that goes beyond the subject's lack of priority
(castration) to a historical crisis in the conceptuality of colonial man as an object of regulatory power,
as the subject of racial, cultural, national representation."This culture . . . fixed in its colonial status,"
Fanon suggests, "(is) both present and mummified, it testified against its members. It defines them in fact without
appeal."20 The ambivalence of mimicry--almost but not quite-suggests that the fetishized colonial culture is
potentially and strategically an insurgent counter-appeal. What I have called its "identity-effects," are always
crucially split. Under cover of camouflage, mimicry, like the fetish, is a part-object that radically revalues the
normative knowledges of the priority of race, writing, history. For the fetish mimes the forms of authority at the
point at which it deauthorizes them. Similarly, mimicry rearticulates presence in terms of its "otherness," that
which it disavows. There is a crucial difference between this colonial articulation of man and his doubles
and that which Foucault describes as "thinking the unthought"21 which, for nineteenth-century
Europe, is the ending of man's alienation by reconciling him with his essence. The colonial discourse
that articulates an interdictory" otherness" is precisely the "other scene" of this nineteenth-century
European desire for an authentic historical consciousness. The "unthought" across which colonial man
is articulated is that process of classificatory confusion that I have described as the metonymy of the
substitutive chain of ethical and cultural discourse. This results in the splitting of colonial discourse so
that two attitudes towards external reality persist; one takes reality into consideration while the
other disavows it and replaces it by a product of desire that repeats, rearticulates "reality" as mimicry.
So Edward Long can say with authority, quoting variously, Hume, Eastwick, and Bishop Warburton in his support,
that: Ludicrous as the opinion may seem I do not think that an orangutang husband would be any dishonour to a
Hottentot female.22 Such contradictory articulations of reality and desire--seen in racist stereotypes,
statements, jokes, myths- are not caught in the doubtful circle of the return of the repressed. They are
the effects of a disavowal that denies the differences of the other but produces in its stead forms of
authority and multiple belief that alienate the assumptions of "civil" discourse. If, for a while, the ruse of
desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudoscientific theories,
superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to "normalize" formally
the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.
The ambivalence of colonial authority repeatedly turns from mimicry-a difference that is almost nothing but not
quite-to menace- a difference that is almost total but not quite. And in that other scene of colonial power, where
history turns to farce and presence to "a part," can be seen the twin figures of narcissism and paranoia that
repeat furiously, uncontrollably. In the ambivalent world of the "not quite/not white," on the margins
of metropolitan desire, the founding objects of the Western world become the erratic, eccentric,
accidental objets trouves of the colonial discourse- the part-objects of presence. It is then that the body and
the book loose their representational authority. Black skin splits under the racist gaze, displaced into signs
of bestiality, genitalia, grotesquerie, which reveal the phobic myth of the undifferentiated whole
white body. And the holiest of books - the Bible - bearing both the standard of the cross and the standard of
empire finds itself strangely dismembered. In May 1817 a missionary wrote from Bengal:
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Still everyone would gladly receive a Bible. And why? - that he may lay it up as a curiosity for a few pice; or use it
for waste paper. Such it is well known has been the common fate of these copies of the Bible.... Some have been
bartered in the markets, others have been thrown in snuff shops and used as wrapping paper.23
Mimicry may be used as a tool to oppress the postcolonial subject, or a
method to explode the postcolonial power matrix.
Bhaba 1984 (Homi K, Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard, 1984, "Of Mimicry and Man: The
Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” http://www.jstor.org/stable/778467)(pg. 127)
The discourse of post-Enlightenment English colonialism often speaks in a tongue that is forked, not false.
If colonialism takes power in the name of history, it repeatedly exercises its authority through the figures
of farce. For the epic intention of the civilizing mission, "human and not wholly human" in the famous
words of Lord Rosebery, "writ by the finger of the Divine" 1 often produces a text rich in the traditions of trompe
l'oeil, irony, mimicry, and repetition. In this comic turn from the high ideals of the colonial imagination to its low
mimetic literary effects, mimicry emerges as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial
power and knowledge. Within that conflictual economy of colonial discourse which Edward Said2 describes as the
tension between the synchronic panoptical vision of domination- the demand for identity, stasis-and the
counter-pressure of the diachrony of history-change, difference - mimicry represents an ironic
compromise. If I may adapt Samuel Weber's formulation of the marginalizing vision of castration,3 then colonial
mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a differencteh at is almost thes
ame, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence;
in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference. The
authority of that mode of colonial discourse that I have called mimicry is therefore stricken by an
indeterminacy: mimicry emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal.
Mimicry is, thus, the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation, and
discipline, which "appropriates" the Other as it visualizes power. Mimicry is also the sign of the
inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of
colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both "normalized" knowledges
and disciplinary powers. The effect of mimicry on the authority of colonial discourse is profound and
disturbing. For in "normalizing" the colonial state or subject, the dream of post-Enlightenment civility
alienates its own language of liberty and produces another knowledge of its norms. The ambivalence which
thus informs this strategy is discernible, for example, in Locke's Second Treatise which splits to reveal the
limitations of liberty in his double use of the word "slave": first simply, descriptively as the locus of a legitimate
form of ownership, then as the trope for an intolerable, illegitimate exercise of power. What is articulated in that
distance between the two uses is the absolute, imagined difference between the "Colonial" State of Carolina and
the Original State of Nature. It is from this area between mimicry and mockery, where the reforming,
civilizing mission is threatened by the displacing gaze of its disciplinary double, that my instances of colonial
imitation come. What they all share is a discursive process by which the excess or slippage produced by the
ambivalenceo f mimicry (almost the same, but not quite) does not merely "rupture" the discourse, but becomes
transformed into an uncertainty which fixes the colonial subject as a "partial" presence. By "partial" I mean both
"incomplete" and "virtual." It is as if the very emergence of the "colonial" is dependent for its representation
upon some strategic limitation or prohibition within the authoritative discourse itself. The success of
colonial appropriation depends on a proliferation of inappropriate objects that ensure its strategic failure,
so that mimicry is at once resemblance and menace.
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Alternative – Epistemological Decolonization
The alternative is to reject the aff – epistemological decolonization is
necessary to clear the way for intercultural communication. Only then, can
we liberate those who are imprisoned by coloniality.
Quijano 2007 (Aníbal, PhD National University of San Marcos Peru, “COLONIALITY AND
MODERNITY/RATIONALITY,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, 1, pg. 177, JC)
The idea of totality in general is today questioned and denied in Europe, not only by the perennial empiricists, but
also by an entire intellectual community that calls itself postmodernist. In fact, in Europe, the idea of totality is a
product of colonial/modernity. And it is demonstrable, as we have seen above, that the European ideas of totality
led to theoretical reductionism and to the metaphysics of a macro-historical subject. Moreover, such ideas have
been associated with undesirable political practices, behind a dream of the total rationalization of society. It is not
necessary, however, to reject the whole idea of totality in order to divest oneself of the ideas and images with
which it was elaborated within European colonial/modernity. What is to be done is something very different: to
liberate the production of knowledge, reflection, and communication from the pitfalls of European
rationality/modernity. Outside the 'West', virtually in all known cultures, every cosmic vision, every image, all
systematic production of knowledge is associated with a perspective of totality. But in those cultures, the
perspective of totality in knowledge includes the acknowledgement of the heterogeneity of all reality; of the
irreducible, contradictory character of the latter; of the legitimacy, i.e., the desirability, of the diverse character of
the components of all reality — and therefore, of the social. The idea of social totality, then, not only does not
deny, but depends on the historical diversity and heterogeneity of society, of every society. In other words, it not
only does not deny, but it requires the idea of an 'other' — diverse, different. That difference does not necessarily
imply the unequal nature of the 'other' and therefore the absolute externality of relations, nor the hierarchical
inequality nor the social inferiority of the other. The differences are not necessarily the basis of domination. At the
same time — and because of that — historical-cultural heterogeneity implies the co- presence and the
articulation of diverse historical 'logic' around one of them, which is hegemonic but in no way unique. In this
way, the road is closed to all reductionism, as well as to the metaphysics of an historical macro- subject capable of
its own rationality and of historical teleology, of which individuals and specific groups, classes for instance, would
hardly be carriers or missionaries. The critique of the European paradigm of rationality/modernity is
indispensable — even more, urgent. But it is doubtful if the criticism consists of a simple negation of all its
categories; of the dissolution of reality in discourse; of the pure negation of the idea and the perspective of
totality in cognition. It is necessary to extricate oneself from the linkages between rationality/modernity and
coloniality, first of all, and definitely from all power which is not constituted by free decisions made by free people.
It is the instrumentalisation of the reasons for power, of colonial power in the first place, which produced distorted
paradigms of knowledge and spoiled the liberating promises of modernity. The alternative, then, is clear: the
destruction of the coloniality of world power. First of all, epistemo- logical decolonization, as decoloniality, is
needed to clear the way for new intercultural communication, for an interchange of experiences and meanings,
as the basis of another rationality which may legitimately pretend to some universality. Nothing is less rational,
finally, than the pretension that the specific cosmic vision of a particular ethnie should be taken as universal
rationality, even if such an ethnie is called Western Europe because this is actually pretend to impose a
provincialism as universalism. The liberation of intercultural relations from the prison of coloniality also implies
the freedom of all peoples to choose, individually or collectively, such relations: a freedom to choose between
various cultural orientations, and, above all, the freedom to produce, criticize, change, and exchange culture and
society. This liberation is, part of the process of social liberation from all power organized as inequality,
discrimination, exploitation, and as domina¬tion.
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Alternative-Mirror
We must look at the concept of borders through a symbolic lens and embrace “the
other” through a unifying metaphor known as the mirror
Ashcroft 2009 (Bill, teaches at the University of Hong Kong and the University of NSW, editor of The PostColonial Studies Reader and the author of The Empire Writes Back, “Beyond the Nation: Post-Colonial Hope”, The
Journal of the European Association of Studies on Australia, Australian Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona)
Such freedom comes only by rejecting or overcoming the shadow lines of history and geography. One of the
most powerful critiques of these shadow lines is of course Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988) a book whose
critique of borders shows the kind of critical foundation upon which later cosmopolitan utopianism could be built.
This novel asks: “How is it possible to live in a way that might escape the borders of nation, maps and
memory?”—and the metaphorical answer to this lies in the most subtle of boundaries: the boundary of the
mirror. Mirrors appear both as objects and metaphors in the novel because mirrors disrupt the clear border of
identity and difference. The clearest statement of this comes late in the novel after the narrator has pondered the
absurd power of lines on the map. Speaking about the people who made the map that divided India and Pakistan
What had they felt, I wondered, when they discovered that there had never been a moment in the 4000 year old
history of the map when the places we know as Dhaka and Calcutta were more closely bound to each other than
after they had drawn their lines – so closely that I, in Calcutta, had only to look into the mirror to be in Dhaka; a
moment when each city was the inverted image of the other, locked into an irreversible symmetry by the line that
was to set us free – our looking-glass border. (228) The mirror is the border that dissolves borders, by revealing
the other as the same. Mirrors function in several ways in the novel: national and other borders create a barrier
beyond which we see in the other , if we look hard enough, an image of ourselves; borders are dissolved in the
‘mirroring’ of vicarious experience and photographs. The nameless narrator’s habit of living vicariously through
the memories and imaginations of others is a form of border dissolving in which the experiences of the other
become one’s own, and in which one’s self may become defamiliarized. This is one way in which memory can
avoid nostalgia and refashion the present. The mirror may be Ghosh’s metaphor for the dissolving border of
Gilroy’s convivial multicultural democracy, a utopian vision of “an indiscriminate attitude to friends and
enemies alike” that comes about by seeing the one who is othered by the borders of nation, maps and
identity , as the same. It is tempting to see the mirror, the looking glass border, as a metaphoric location of the
Third Space of Enunciation. But the mirror goes much further, dissolving the persistence of all borders of identity.
It is a spectral contact zone, created by the phantom border of the mirror, indiscriminate but ultimately revealing.
The Indian Ghosh looking at himself in the other across the Pakistani border may seem to achieve an easier
reflection than that attempted across the borders of race, ethnicity and religion. But this is the first border
towards freedom : the national border. The metaphor of the mirror might encapsulate what Gilroy sees as the
question of the political agency of art and literature, for it might capture perfectly the capacity for borders to
dissolve as the other becomes the same, but it cannot remove those borders of nation, race, ethnicity and religion.
Yet the potency of literature lies in its utopian potential, its capacity to imagine a different future. For liberation is
not possible until it is first imagined. The utopian energy propelling each of these very different texts is the
possibility of a freedom from the borders of nation and identity. Where Roger Scruton sees postcolonial
immigration as a scandalous attempt by people to dispense with nationality, we can see at least that it can be
done. Whether it is possible to dispense with the other borders of ethnicity, religion and cultural tradition is
another story. Certainly Said’s location of Freud’s deconstruction of Jewish identity in the context of Palestine
leads him to suggest that the borders of identity itself can be overcome. For Said the person who embodies this
utopian freedom that comes from being outside, from crossing the borders of identity and nation, is Jean Genet.
In On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain he says: “Here is a man in love with “the other,” an
outcast and stranger himself, feeling the deepest sympathy for the Palestinian revolution as the “metaphysical”
uprising of outcasts and strangers” (2004, 84). Genet is “the traveler across identities, the tourist whose purpose is
marriage with a foreign cause, so long as that cause is both revolutionary and in constant agitation” (85). Genet
made the step, crossed the legal borders, that very few white men or women ever attempted. He traversed the
space from the metropolitan centre to the colony; his unquestioned solidarity was with the very same oppressed
identified and so passionately analyzed by Fanon. (87) I believe Said saw Genet as a prophetic sign, in this age of
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civilizational conflict, of a freedom that whether possible or not, encapsulated the hope upon which post-colonial
liberation is built. Yet the possibility of such freedom seems to require something even deeper, something
provided by the metaphor of the mirror, for not only does the mirror show that the other is the same, but that
true freedom comes when we become other to ourselves.
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Alternative-Embrace the Other
Only by embracing the “other”, neighbors, strangers and enemies alike, will we
overcome the empirical happenings of class hierarchies and war
Ashcroft 2009 ( Bill, teaches at the University of Hong Kong and the University of NSW, editor of The PostColonial Studies Reader and the author of The Empire Writes Back, “Beyond the Nation: Post-Colonial Hope”, The
Journal of the European Association of Studies on Australia, Australian Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona)
Gilroy’s aim is to see whether multicultural diversity can be combined with an hospitable civic order (1), whether a
convivial acceptance of difference might be achieved in a different kind of multicultural society than the examples
presently available, particularly in Britain. A key moment in the book comes when he considers Freud’s rejection,
in Civilization and its Discontents, of Christ’s admonition to “love thy neighbour as thyself.” Not all men, Freud
concludes, are worthy of love (72). But Gilroy responds I want to dispute his explicit rejection of the demand to
practice an undifferentiated attitude toward friends and enemies, intimates and strangers, alike (…) I want to
explore ways in which the ordinary cosmopolitanism so characteristic of postcolonial life might be sustained and
even elevated. I would like it to be used to generate abstract but nonetheless invaluable commitments in the
agonistic development of a multicultural democracy that Freud and the others cannot be expected to have been
able to foresee. (80) Like many forms of utopian hope, Gilroy’s utopianism is critical, relying on “a planetary
consciousness” in which the world “becomes not a limitless globe, but a small, fragile and finite place, one
planet among others with strictly limited resources that are allocated unequally” (83). On such a planet the
injunction to “love thy neighbour as thyself,” an undifferentiated attitude toward friends and enemies, might
become a necessity rather than a vain hope . This, at least, for Gilroy, is worth exploring. Paradoxically, the
ground on which the possibility of a convivial diaspora rests is the melancholia of a post-imperial Europe, and of
Britain in particular. The imperial melancholia first articulated by Mathew Arnold in ‘Dover Beach’—a peculiarly
Victorian version of the condition “started to yield to [a post-imperial] melancholia as soon as the natives and
savages began to appear and make demands for recognition in the Empire’s metropolitan core” (99).
Consequently, “immigration, war and national identity began to challenge class hierarchy as the most
significant themes from which the national identity would be assembled” (99). Former colonial subjects were
confident that “their reasonable requests for hospitality would be heard and understood. They had no idea,”
says Gilroy, “that those requests were impossible to fulfil within the fantastic structures of the melancholic
island race” (111).
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Alternative-Discourse
Through the power of discourse we must break through the ontological
constriction of national borders, only then will we be free
Ashcroft 2009 (Bill, teaches at the University of Hong Kong and the University of NSW, editor of The Post-Colonial
Studies Reader and the author of The Empire Writes Back, “Beyond the Nation: Post-Colonial Hope”, The Journal of
the European Association of Studies on Australia, Australian Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona )
Yet in cultural terms the nation is perhaps an even more ambiguous phenomenon than it has been in the past, and
this is particularly so in post-colonial theory. The nation-state has been critiqued in post-colonial analysis largely
because the post-independence, postcolonized nation, that wonderful utopian idea, proved to be a focus of
exclusion and division rather than unity; perpetuating the class divisions of the colonial state rather than
liberating national subjects. However nationalism, and its vision of a liberated nation has still been extremely
important to post-colonial studies because the idea of nation has so clearly focussed the utopian ideals of anticolonialism. There is perhaps no greater example of this than India, where independence was preceded by decades
of utopian nationalist thought, yet in Rabindranath Tagore we find also the earliest and most widely known antinationalist. For Tagore, there can be no good nationalism; it can only be what he calls the “fierce self-idolatry of
nation-worship” (2002, 15)—the exquisite irony being that his songs were used as Bengali, Bangladeshi and Indian
Copyright © Bill Ashcroft 2009. This text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard
copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged¶13 national anthems. So the
trajectory of colonial utopianism has been deeply ambivalent: on the one hand offering the vision of a united
national people, and on the other a perhaps even more utopian idea of the spiritual unity of all peoples. The years
since 1947, when India led the way for other colonial states into post-colonial independence, has been marked by
the simultaneous deferral of pre-independence nationalist utopias, and yet a vibrant and unquenchable
utopianism in the various postcolonial literatures. This utopianism has taken many forms but its most significant
postcolonial characteristic has been the operation of memory. Yet in the decades before and after the turn of the
century utopianism has taken a significant turn—one affected by globalization, with its increasing mobility and
diasporic movement of peoples—that might be cautiously given the term cosmopolitan. Again it is India that has
led the way in its literature, not only because of the proliferation of South Asian diasporic writing, but also because
India itself has thrown the traditional idea of the nation as imagined community into question. That national ideal
of one people, so successfully championed by Nehru has never been more challenged than it has by India’s size
and complexity. India shows us that the ‘nation’ is not synonymous with the state and despite the increasing
mobility of peoples across borders, the proliferation of diasporas, the increasing rhetoric of international
displacement, India reveals that before national borders have been crossed, the national subject is already the
subject of a transnation. I want to propose the concept of transnation to extend the post-colonial critique of
nation, (or more specifically the linking of nation and state) and to argue with the entrenched idea of diaspora as
simply defined by absence and loss. Such a definition of the diasporic population as fundamentally absent from the
nation fails to recognise the liberating possibilities of mobility. The transnation, on the other hand, represents the
utopian idea that national borders may not in the end need to be the authoritarian constructors of identity
that they have become. The beginning of the twenty first century reveals a utopianism as powerful as it is
different from the nationalist utopianism that began to grow in the early decades of the twentieth. This
cosmopolitan utopianism reaches beyond the state and considers the liberating potential of difference and
movement. This is, of course, dangerous territory because we have ample evidence of the melancholic plight of
people who must move across borders, must in fact flee the nation either as economic or political refugees, or
as subjects oppressed in some way by state power. Such people are decidedly unfree. Transnation may be
mistaken to rest on a far too benign view of global movement and may encounter the objection that the idea of
freedom from borders is in fact ignoring the plight into which globalization has thrown people disadvantaged by
class, ethnicity, war, tyranny and all of the many reasons why they may need to escape. For this reason I treat the
term ‘cosmopolitan’ with considerable caution, as a word complicated by overtones of urbanity and sophistication,
a term much more successful as an adjective than a noun. The term ‘transnation’, while it pivots on a critique of
the nation, and a utopian projection beyond the tyranny of national identity, nevertheless acknowledges that
people live in nations and when they move, move within and beyond nations, sometimes without privilege and
without hope. The transnation is more than ‘the international,’ or ‘the transnational,’ which might more properly
be conceived as a relation between states. The concept exposes the distinction between the occupants of the
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geographical entity—the historically produced multi-ethnic society whom we might call the ‘nation’ and the
political, geographic and administrative structures of that nation that might be called the ‘state.’ Transnation is the
fluid, migrating outside of the state (conceptually and culturally as well as geographically) that begins within the
nation. This is possibly most obvious in India where the ‘nation’ is the perpetual scene of translation, but
translation is but one example of the movement, the ‘betweenness’ by which the subjects of the transnation are
constituted. It is the ‘inter’—the cutting edge of translation and renegotiation, the inbetween space—that
carries the burden of the meaning of culture. Nevertheless, the ‘transnation’ does not refer to an object in
political space. It is a way of talking about subjects in their ordinary lives, subjects who live in-between the
positivities by which subjectivity is normally constituted. That the transnation is distinct from diaspora can be
confirmed by seeing Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) as the founding text of a new generation. This
generation was indeed characterised by mobility and hybridity and gained worldwide attention through Indian
literature in English, literature from what might called the ‘third-wave’ diaspora. It was characterised by a deep
distrust of the boundaries of the nation, a distrust embodied in Saleem’s despair. But Rushdie’s novel had a
different, more utopian vision as he explains in Imaginary Homelands The story of Saleem does indeed lead him to
despair. But the story is told in a manner designed to echo, as closely as my abilities allowed, the Indian talent for
non-stop self-regeneration. This is why the narrative constantly throws up new stories, why it “teems.” The form –
multitudinous, hinting at the infinite possibilities of the country – is the optimistic counterweight to Saleem's
personal tragedy. (1991, 16) Saleem’s personal tragedy is of course the tragedy of the post-colonial nation. But it is
also the tragedy of the idea of the bordered nation itself, the very concept of a bounded utopian space within
which a diverse people could come together as one. The saving grace, for Rushdie, is the capacity of a people to
‘teem,’ its irrepressible and exorbitant capacity to transcend the nation that becomes its most hopeful gesture.
This way of describing national concerns deeply rooted in culture and myth engages the nation as a ‘transnation,’ a
complex of mobility and multiplicity that supersedes both ‘nation’ and ‘state.’ What is perhaps most striking about
contemporary post-colonial utopianism is that it captures the spirit of liberation strengthened rather than
suppressed by the massive absurdities of the ‘War on Terror.’ Marxist utopianism was generated paradoxically by
the growth of neo-liberal capitalism, growing stronger and stronger during the latter half of the Twentieth Century
as communist states imploded. But I think this growth can be matched by the deep vein of postcolonial
utopianism that we find in literature, a vein of hope that becomes more prominent with the growth of
transnational and diasporic writing. This is quite different from that nationalist utopianism that died under the
weight of post-independence reality. This is a global utopianism now entering the realm of critical discourse ,
even in the most agonistic of critics. While the utopianism of post-colonial literature has developed extensively
during the Twentieth Century, I want to address examples of this utopian tendency in post-colonial criticism at the
turn of this century. Paul Gilroy’s After Empire (2004) and Edward Said’s Freud and the non-European (2003)
indicate that the element of hope circulating around the possibility of freedom from nation, (or at least from the
ontological constriction of national borders) , and freedom from identity itself, may be gathering strength as a
feature of twenty first century literature and criticism. Indeed, the characteristic these works all share is a
utopianism deeply embedded in critique, a tentative hope for a different world emerging from a clear view of the
melancholic state of this one.
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Block AT
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AT: Not Coloniality
In order to understand Latin America we must first analyze coloniality
Mignolo, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature at Duke University, 2005
(Walter, The Idea of Latin America, page xiii, RH)
To excavate coloniality, then, one must always include and analyze the project of modernity, although the reverse
is not true, because coloniality points to the absences that the narrative of modernity produces. Thus, I choose to
describe the modern world order that has emerged in the five hundred years since the “discovery of America” as
the modern/colonial world, to indicate that coloniality is constitutive of modernity and cannot exist without it.
Indeed, the “idea” of Latin America cannot be dealt with in isolation without producing turmoil in the world
system. It cannot be separated from the “ideas” of Europe and of the US as America that dominate even today.
The “Americas” are the consequence of early European commercial expansion and the motor of capitalism, as we
know it today. The “discovery” of America and the genocide of Indians and African slaves are the very foundation
of “modernity,” more so than the French or Industrial Revolutions. Better yet, they constitute the darker and
hidden face of modernity, “coloniality.” Thus, to excavate the “idea of Latin America” is, really, to understand how
the West was born and how the modern world order was founded.
K comes first – coloniality is impossible to recognize from the aff’s
perspective of modernity.
Mignolo, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature at Duke University, 2005
(Walter, The Idea of Latin America, page 4-5, RH)
Max Weber has been credited, after Hegel, with having conceptualized “modernity” as the direction of history that
had Europe as a model and a goal. More recently, since the late 1980s, Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano
unveiled “coloniality” as the darker side of modernity and as the historical perspective of the wretched, the
outcasts from history told from the perspective of modernity. From the perspective of modernity,
coloniality is difficult to see or recognize, and even a bothersome concept . For the second set of actors,
the wretched, modernity is unavoidable although coloniality offers a shifting perspective of knowledge and history.
For the first actors, modernity is one-sided and of single density. For the second, modernity is double-sided and of
double density. To understand the coexistence of these two major paradigms is to understand how the shift in the
geo-graphy and the geo-politics of knowledge is taking place. My argument is straightforwardly located in the
second paradigm, in the double density of modernity/coloniality. How do these two entangled concepts,
modernity and coloniality, work together as two sides of the same reality to shape the idea of “America” in the
sixteenth century and of “Latin” America in the nineteenth? Modernity has been a term in use for the past thirty or
forty years. In spite of differences in opinions and definitions, there are some basic agreements about its meaning.
From the European perspective, modernity refers to a period in world history that has been traced back either to
the European Renaissance and the “discovery” of America (this view is common among scholars from the South of
Europe, Italy, Spain, and Portugal), or to the European Enlightenment (this view is held by scholars and
intellectuals and assumed by the media in Anglo-Saxon countries – England, Germany, and Holland – and one Latin
country, France). On the other side of the colonial difference, scholars and intellectuals in the ex-Spanish and exPortuguese colonies in South America have been advancing the idea that the achievements of modernity go hand
in hand with the violence of coloniality. The difference, to reiterate, lies in which side of each local history is told.
O’Gorman’s “invention of America” theory was a turning point that put on the table a perspective that was absent
and not recognized from the existing European and imperial narratives. Let’s agree that O’Gorman made visible a
dimension of history that was occluded by the partial “discovery” narratives, and let’s also agree that it is an
example of how things may look from the varied experiences of coloniality.
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AT: Economic Theory
The criticism of capitalism is rooted in westernized, Eurocentric view of the
world that colonized in the first place.
Grosfoguel 07 (Ramon, “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, pg. 215, MCJC)
Globalization studies, political-economy paradigms and world-system analysis, with only a few exceptions, have
not derived the epistemological and theoretical implications of the epistemic critique coming from subaltern
locations in the colonial divide and expressed in academia through ethnic studies and woman studies. They still
continue to produce knowledge from the Western man ‘point zero’ god-eye view. This has led to important
problems in the way we conceptualize global capitalism and the ‘world-system’. These concepts are in need of
decolonization and this can only be achieved with a decolonial epistemology that overtly assumes the decolonial
geopolitics and body-politics of knowledge as points of departure to a radical critique. The following examples can
illustrate this point. If we analyze the European colonial expansion from a Eurocentric point of view, what we get is
a picture in which the origins of the so-called capitalist world-system is primarily produced by the inter-imperial
competition among European Empires. The primary motive for this expansion was to find shorter routes to the
East, which let accidentally to the so-called discovery and, eventual, Spanish colonization of the Americas. From
this point of view, the capitalist world-system would be primarily an economic system that determine the behavior
of the major social actors by the economic logic of making profits as manifested in the extraction of surplus value
and the ceaseless accumulation of capital at a world-scale. Moreover, the concept of capitalism implied in this
perspective privileges economic relations over other social relations. Accordingly, the transformation in the
relations of production produces a new class structure typical of capitalism as oppose to other social systems and
other forms of domination. Class analysis and economic structural transformations are privileged over other power
relations.
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AT: Western Theory
The subaltern’s voice and the intellectual’s knowledge can coexist
Libretti 96 (Tim, Ph.D., Professor at the University of Michigan in American Modernism and Minority Literatures,
January-February 1996, Beyond Liberal Multiculturalism, http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/2485)
The assumption of a totalizing perspective and the focus on resistance and historic agency are two aspects that
distinguish this work among contemporary Marxist theory. The simultaneous privileging of both a totalizing
perspective and subaltern voices, however, creates tensions in attempting to unify theory and practice. For
example, the totality perspective privileges systematic knowledge over experience in theorizing a socialist project
of emancipation, whereas politics organized around subaltern identities typically grow out of the experience of
oppression. One wonders to what extent these positions are consistent. Adopting a totalizing perspective implies
assuming the right to speak for others. Traditionally, it has been intellectuals who have had the time and economic
support to theorize a totality beyond their own material experience. The question arises as to whether one
presuming to speak from a totalizing perspective can let the subaltern speak? If the subaltern speaks from
experience and the intellectual from systematic knowledge, which do we privilege? The question need not be
posed as such a rigid either/or proposition, but I raise it to point up an abiding tension in Racial Formations/Critical
Transformations which surfaces most fully in chapter 5 titled "Beyond Identity Politics." San Juan dismisses identity
politics on the basis of an experience he had attending a conference on "Issues of Identity" which featured writers
and critics. Writers "found themselves privileged somehow as the fountainhead of answers to questions of AsianAmerica personal/collective identity" while critics, commenting in theoretical vocabulary, found themselves
admonished "for not conforming to the unwittingly self-serving identity politics." San Juan's attempts to introduce
distinctions between knowledge and experience failed, knowledge being taken as a code word for theory. This
experience, in San Juan's view, measures the movement away from engagement with structures of power and
toward a psychotherapeutic introspection which internalizes and depoliticizes real issues of political struggle
characteristic of some tendencies in identity politics. Nonetheless San Juan, I think, too quickly scraps a viable
political strategy, the idea of organizing around shared identity, which was crucial to the women's liberation
movement in the 1960s and classic nationalist movements and also informs Fanon's and Cabral's writings. Indeed,
San Juan's own emphasis on nationalist struggles and their use of race "as a principle of difference in constructing
their collective identity through symbolic (cultural) modes" underwrites a politics of identity. This tension between
totality and identity, knowledge and experience, might be inherent in any attempt to develop a totalizing vision
necessary to any socialist project. In maintaining a commitment to the self-determination of oppressed peoples,
we must negotiate this tension carefully and not look for easy resolutions. We must look to synthesize knowledge
and experience in ways that allow the subaltern to speak, without granting automatic authority to that voice and
silencing those whose perspective derives not from experience but from research and critical practice. On the
whole, I sympathize with San Juan's defense of theory. His work should give all scholars a sense of the political
centrality of their theoretical work while also agitating them to activist work. On the flip side, this work should give
activists skeptical of theory, who might view university reform movements as divorced from the real battle, a
sense of the importance of critically transforming our world through a dialectic of theory and practice.
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AT: PERM
Perm fails: The demands of modernity require colonization for their
fulfillment. The perm cannot tell the story that was excluded because it does
not shift the geography of reason.
Mignolo, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature at Duke University, 2005
(Walter, The Idea of Latin America, page 6, RH)
America, as a concept, goes hand in hand with that of modernity, and both are the self-representation of imperial
projects and global designs that originated in and were implemented by European actors and institutions. The
invention of America was one of the nodal points that contributed to create the conditions for imperial European
expansion and a lifestyle, in Europe, that served as a model for the achievements of humanity. Thus, the
“discovery and conquest of America” is not just one more event in some long and linear historical chain from the
creation of the world to the present, leaving behind all those who were not attentive enough to jump onto the
bandwagon of modernity. Rather, it was a key turning point in world history: It was the moment in which the
demands of modernity as the final horizon of salvation began to require the imposition of a specific set of values
that relied on the logic of coloniality for their implementation. The “invention of America” thesis offers, instead, a
perspective from coloniality and, in consequence, reveals that the advances of modernity outside of Europe rely on
a colonial matrix of power that includes the renaming of the lands appropriated and of the people inhabiting them,
insofar as the diverse ethnic groups and civilizations in Tawantinsuyu and Anáhuac, as well as those from Africa,
were reduced to “Indians” and “Blacks.” The idea of “America” and of “Latin” America could, of course, be
accounted for within the philosophical framework of European modernity, even if that account is offered by
Creoles of European descent dwelling in the colonies and embracing the Spanish or Portuguese view of events.
What counts, however, is that the need for telling the part of the story that was not told requires a
shift in the geography of reason and of understanding. “Coloniality,” therefore, points toward and intends
to unveil an embedded logic that enforces control, domination, and exploitation disguised in the language of
salvation, progress, modernization, and being good for every one. The double register of modernity/coloniality
has, perhaps, never been as clear as it has been recently under the administration of US president George W. Bush.
Perm Fails – Only decolonization from the perspective of the oppressed can
solve. This decolonization reveals the colonial wound that makes visible the
experiences of the oppressed challenges Western epistemology.
Mignolo, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature at Duke University, 2005
(Walter, The Idea of Latin America, page 155-157, RH)
The colonial wound, like the polis for Aristotle, the city-state for Machiavelli, or the emergent bourgeois
commercial and civilized city for Hobbes, makes visible the experiences and subjectivities that shape a way of
thinking, which, in this case, leads to a pluriversality of paradigms that are no longer subsumable under the linear
history of Western thought, managed as a totality from imperial institutions that control meaning and money. The
proliferation of other paradigms can no longer be determined by universal liberating projects, be they the theology
of liberation or Marxism. Why would Islamic progressive intellectuals wait to be liberated by Christian theologians?
Why would Afros in South America and the Caribbean, and Indians from Chile to Canada, want to be liberated
following a Marxist blue-print for revolution? Cannot there be salvation from neo-liberalism outside of Christianity
and Marxism (or Europe, as Jacques Derrida, Slavov Žižek, and Susan George would argue)? The explosions coming
out of the theoretical, political, and ethical awareness of the colonial wound make possible the imagination and
construction of an-other world, a world in which many worlds are possible. Examples of the practical
implementation of that future are coming from South America (the Zapatistas, Amawtay Wasi, the World Social
Forum, the Social Forum of the Americas, the Cumbre de los Pueblos Indígenas3) and from Latinos/as in the US.
The imperial/colonial economic, political, and military power is still in the hands of Washington. However,
decolonization of knowledge and of being (and more generally, of politics and the economy) cannot
be thought out and implemented other than from the perspective of the damnés (and not from those
of the World Bank or from an updated Marxism or a refreshed Christianity); that is, from the perspective, provided
by years of modern/colonial injustices, inequalities, exploitation, humiliation, and the humiliations and pains of the
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colonial wound, of an-other world where creative care for human beings and the celebration of life will take
precedence over individual success and meritocracy, and accumulation of money and of meaning (e.g., personal
CVs, the personal satisfaction of celebrity, and all other ways in which alienation is being reproduced and
encouraged ). The imperial perspective (advanced and implemented by European and US men and institutions)
cannot find the solution for the problems of the world created because of imperial designs and
desire s. Las Casas and Marx are necessary, but far from being sufficient. They should not only be complemented
by Waman Puma, Fanon, and Anzaldúa; their very critical foundation should be displaced. The “idea of Latin”
America and the “idea of America (as the US)” came into being in the process of building the modern/ colonial
imaginary and the colonial matrix of power organized through the colonial and the imperial (epistemic)
differences. Huntington’s fears are justified as he sees history taking the US toward a non-White, non-Anglo future.
The silences and absences of history are speaking their presence; the rumor of the disinherited can no longer be
controlled, in spite of desperate moves like Huntington’s, and its remarkable marketing success.
After the colonies, only power changed hands, but the same colonial
domination remained. Coloniality refers to the continual European
domination of the world.
Mignolo, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature at Duke University, 2005 (Walter, The Idea of
Latin America, page 6-8, RH)
Pedagogically, it is important for my argument to conceptualize “modernity/coloniality” as two sides of the same
coin and not as two separate frames of mind: you cannot be modern without being colonial; and if you are on the
colonial side of the spectrum you have to transact with modernity – you cannot ignore it. The very idea of America
cannot be separated from coloniality: the entire continent emerged as such in the European consciousness as a
massive extent of land to be appropriated and of people to be converted to Christianity, and whose labor could be
exploited. Coloniality, as a term, is much less frequently heard than “modernity” and many people tend to confuse
it with “colonialism.” The two words are related, of course. While “colonialism” refers to specific historical periods
and places of imperial domination (e.g., Spanish, Dutch, British, the US since the beginning of the twentieth
century), “coloniality” refers to the logical structure of colonial domination underlying the Spanish, Dutch, British,
and US control of the Atlantic economy and politics, and from there the control and management of almost the
entire planet. In each of the particular imperial periods of colonialism – whether led by Spain (mainly in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) or by England (from the nineteenth century to World War II) or by the US
(from the early twentieth century until now) – the same logic was maintained; only power changed hands. Some
would say (mainly before the 9/11 attacks on the US) that the US was not an imperial country because it has no
colonies like those of Spain or England. This opinion, however, confuses “colonialism” with having “colonies” in the
sense of maintaining the physical presence of institutions, administrators, and armies in the colonized country or
region. And it confuses also “colonialism” with “coloniality.” Coloniality is the logic of domination in the modern/
colonial world, beyond the fact that the imperial/colonial country was once Spain, then England and now the US.
Modern technology, alongside political and economic restructuring in the second half of the twentieth century, has
made it unnecessary to colonize in the old, more obvious, manner. Still, the US does in fact maintain military bases
in strategic parts of the world (e.g., the Middle East and South America). Likewise, the occupation of Iraq and
consequent pressure by the US for the appointment of a government favorable to imperialist power 3 reflects a
clear method of colonialism today. After 9/11, liberal voices in the US began to recognize that imperialism was
necessary; but, being liberals, they called it “reluctant” or “light” imperialism. No matter what it is called,
imperialism implies colonialism in some form, as it is difficult to imagine any empire without colonies, even if
colonies take different shapes at different points in history.4
The ethnicity paradigmof the permutation obscurely homogenizes colonial
history of exploitation and raciailized difference
Libretti 96 (Tim, Ph.D., Professor at the University of Michigan in American Modernism and Minority Literatures,
January-February 1996, Beyond Liberal Multiculturalism, http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/2485)
Far from offering an adequate way of understanding the complex U.S. race and ethnic relations, such a
multicultural model explains away racial inequality--even in the midst of its continuing violence to peoples of color.
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Thus by privileging the site of culture in the struggle for political power, San Juan challenges the putative and
apolitical status of cultural theory, exposing the liberal ideology that informs it. The most stringent critique
sustained throughout the book is of the "ethnicity school," represented by Werner Sollor's Beyond Ethnicity, the
prominent journal MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States), and Nathan Glazer's and Daniel
Moynihan's Ethnicity: Theory and Experience, to name only a few of the major representative works San Juan
discusses. What characterizes these studies is the underlying critical paradigm of the white immigrant success
story. This standard is then applied uniformly to all racial and ethnic groups to explaining their experiences. This
homogenization obscures the histories of exploitation and inequality experienced by colonized minorities, which
differentiate them from white European immigrants or provide a context from which they can enunciate their
specific interests and demands. The white immigrant paradigm spotlights a liberal ideology of equal opportunity,
upward mobility, self-reliance and possessive individualism. It ignores the ongoing construction of racial categories
and targeting of racialized groups for economic exploitation under capitalism. Thus, this paradigm ratifies the
political expediency of blaming the victims rather than interrogating and transforming the structural conditions
and ideological constraints--such as racism--of capitalism that systematically reproduce inequality and exploitive
social relations. The ethnicity school theorizes ethnicity as an aspect of identity that individuals voluntarily adopt as
a strategy of gaining power and privilege, overlooking the fact that colonized minorities were racialized by the
dominant culture for purposes of labor exploitation. Building on Robert Blauner's distinction between immigrant
and colonized minorities formulated in his classic Racial Oppression in America (1972), San Juan points out that the
immigrant model disregards the different modes of entry into the U.S. economy experienced by white ethnics and
people of color: The white European immigrant came voluntarily, even if pressured by economic or political
conditions, while peoples of color were dominated through force and violence (Native Americans and Mexicans
had their lands invaded; Africans were enslaved; Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos suffered under exclusion laws,
etc.).The effective erasure of this difference by the ethnicity ideologues, San Juan asserts, has "provided the chief
theoretical weapon for the neoconservative policy of the Reagan administration." He points specifically to the
ethnicity paradigm's denial of the historical logic underwriting affirmative action policies. Recognizing the
genocidal foundation of the U.S. nation and arguing that "American" national identity has historically been
mediated through the language of race, San Juan privileges race against ethnicity as the analytical category most
comprehensive of U.S. power relations. The ethnicity model cannot explain inequalities across ethnic boundaries
without introducing the category of race, nor can it elucidate class inequality or provide a conceptual apparatus for
theorizing the race-class nexus. By negating historically generated inequalities and cultural constraints, the
ethnicity model curtails investigation of racial and class difference. Through exclusion and silencing, this model
presents a monolithic version of "American" nationhood. Interrogating this "racializing national telos and its
institutional relay in the disciplinary regime of the humanities," San Juan establishes the political nature of and
necessity for intervention in humanistic studies. In this regard chapter 4, titled "Hegemony and Resistance: A
Critique of Modern and Postmodern Cultural Theory in Ethnic Studies," offers a series of stunning critiques and
textual readings in rethinking modernist and postmodernist theory toward the development of a Marxist strategy
of "realizable social emancipation." The university is a foremost site of ideological production and struggle, as San
Juan demonstrates by tracing the theoretical paradigms informing academic scholarship through to the
formulation of public policy.
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AFF
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Turns
Postcolonial is a euphemism for the third world reinstalling the nation.
Larsen 05 (Neil, Professor of Comparative Literature, 2005, “Imperialism, Colonialism, Postcolonialism”, A
Companion to Postcolonial Studies, P.g 40)
A “material genealogy” of postcolonialism is, to reiterate the point upon which we began, complicated by the
disparity between its generative principle – the sweeping history that the term invokes, if often unintentionally –
and the narrow, intramural sphere in which postcolonialism is talked about and practiced. To fully reconstruct such
a genealogy would require us to go on at considerable length about “Commonwealth Studies,” “Colonial Discourse
Analysis” symposia, competing postcolonial anthologies, Australian academic clearing-houses, and the like. I take
as given here a readerly consensus that there is no time for this – but also that the hypermediated relationship of
postcolonialism to secular realities, if carefully abbreviated, will allow us to make some important connections in
what follows. In the small world within which volumes like this one are likely to circulate we are now accustomed
to speak in the same breath of Bhabha and Fanon, Said and Walter Rodney (i.e., the reader and the read), when a
single step outside its walls suffices for these pairings to seem quizzical, and another for them to become
incomprehensible. But the fact that relatively few read the reader does not ipso facto invalidate the reading nor
prevent its genealogical investigation and assessment. To reiterate further: at some point over the last two
decades the same, small but significant class of intellectuals that had learned in the 1960s to say “third world”
became more hestitant about saying it. “Postcolonial,” a term with far more ambiguous political resonances, fit
this hesitation much better and, beginning in the early 1980s, gradually replaced “third world,” at least in some
contexts. (A similar story could be recounted about “cultural studies” as a euphemistic substitution for “Marxist
literary criticism” and even “Critical Theory.”) The question for us here is what major historical shift prompted
this minor terminological one (among others), and how such a shift effected conceptions, both popular and
intellectual, of the entity that is still really at issue here: the nation.
Use of postcolonialism leads to a misrepresentation of the “other”
Larsen 05 (Neil, Professor of Comparative Literature, 2005, “Imperialism, Colonialism, Postcolonialism”, A
Companion to Postcolonial Studies, P.g 45)
But this apparent emptying out of the nation as a historically emancipatory space has not, at least on the
phenomenological level, enforced a reconciliation of critical consciousness with “really existing” globalization. For
one might concede the actuality of the latter as a kind of total system and yet still – following in the philosophical
vein of a Nietzsche, for example – posit an opposing principle outside this, or any, system. Metropolitan critical
consciousness, at least of the academic kind, has for a generation or more been intimate with a modern variation
of such antisystemic critique in the form of poststructuralism. Suppose the globally dominant system could be
likened to “discourse” in the Foucaultian sense. This would enable one to account for the seeming absence of the
nation as “historical spatiality,” given that the elements of a discursive system bear only a structural, not spatial or
temporal relation to that system. Add to this the idea, intellectually popularized by theorists such as Foucault and
Derrida, that, while strictly speaking nothing can be outside a discursive system, every such system has built into it
an antisystemic principle, a law of “differance” or a selfreproducing gap that continuously threatens to undermine
it. Suppose further that the “nation” or its equivalent for contemporary anticolonialism and antiimperialism were
this sort of antisystemic principle – would not, then, the tables be turned, or at least turnable, on “globalization”?
The reader may have recognized by now the general theoretical orientation of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978),
the work from which virtually all contemporary postcolonial theory derives. The discourse named in its title is one
that has, purportedly since the time of Aeschylus, constructed the Orient not as a “free subject of thought and
action” (3) but as a mere effect, internal to this discourse, and justifying “in advance” (39) the Western
colonization of the East. In an incorporation of the Foucault of Discipline and Punish Said also equates orientalism
with a “power/knowledge” for which the Western cognition of a simulacrum called, say, “Egypt” is always already
inseparable from the colonization and domination of the real Egypt. Thus “discourse” (orientalism) and a secular,
historical reality (the Western colonization of the East) are, while not formally collapsed into each other,
nevertheless indistinguishable from the standpoint of their object. They are two facets of a single, encompassing
system that itself never comes to know or truthfully represent the “other” against which it is arrayed. Gaining the
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standpoint of this object would, if possible, be tantamount to subverting the “discourse” that – if we follow strictly
the logic of Orientalism’s Foucaultian conception – conditions the possibility of the object’s colonization.
Postcolonial studies leads to capitalist contributing to the exploitation of
Latin America.
Bartolovich 05 (Crystal, Associate Professor of English, 2005, “Global Capital and Transitions”, A Companion to
Postcolonial Studies, P.g 140)
The unwillingness to engage in this sort of sorting exercise which might expose definite “sides” to a struggle, has
evoked charges of “complicity” on the part of critics of postcolonial discourse. 32 While, as I have noted above,
Marxists are often charged with remaining within a “colonial” binary logic, Postcolonial theorists have been
charged with engaging in a theoretical exercise which encourages an exploitative status quo. Masao Miyoshi
(1996), for example, has argued that when we fail to consider “political and economic inequalities” – and the
causes for them – and engage in discourses of “postcoloniality” (which for him implies – falsely – the end of
colonialism in a neocolonial world) “we are fully collaborating with the hegemonic ideology, which looks, as usual,
as if it were no ideology at all” (98). Similarly, Arif Dirlik (1994b: 356) suggests that Postcolonial critics . . . in their
repudiation of structure and affirmation of the local in problems of oppression and liberation, . . . have mystified
the ways in which totalizing structures persist in the midst of apparent disintegration and fluidity. They have
rendered into problems of subjectivity and epistemology concrete and material problems of the everyday world.
While capital in its motions continues to structure the world, refusing it foundational status renders impossible
the cognitive mapping that must be the point of departure for any practice of resistance and leaves such
mapping as there is in the domain of those who manage the capitalist world economy. For Dirlik, this state of
affairs means that “postcoloniality is the condition of the intelligentsia of global capitalism,” whose ends they
further however unwittingly.
Postcolonial assumes a “post” state of oppression that ignores ongoing
violence
Shohat 1992 [Ella, Prof. of Cultural Studies at NYU, 1992, “Notes on the "Post-Colonial"
http://www.jstor.org/stable/466220?origin=JSTOR-pdf&, Accessed 7/8/13- JM]
Since, on one level, the "post" signifies "after," it potentially inhibits forceful articulations of what one
might call "neocoloniality." Formal independence for colonized countries has rarely meant the end of
First World hegemony. Egypt's formal independence in 1923 did not prevent European, especially British,
domination which provoked the 1952 revolution. Anwar Sadat's opening to the Americans and the Camp David
accords in the seventies were perceived by Arab intellectuals as a reversion to pre-Nasser imperialism, as was
Egyptian collaboration with the U.S. during the Gulf war.8 The purpose of the Carter Doctrine was to partially
protect perennial U.S. oil interests (our oil) in the Gulf, which, with the help of petro-Islamicist regimes, have
sought the control of any force that might pose a threat.9 In Latin America, similarly, formal "creole"
independence did not prevent Monroe Doctrine-style military interventions, or Anglo-American freetrade hegemony. This process sets the history of Central and South America and the Caribbean apart
from the rest of the colonial settler-states; for despite shared historical origins with North America,
including the genocide of the indigenous population, the enslavement of Africans, and a multi-racial/ethnic
composition these regions have been subjected to political and economic structural domination, on
some levels more severe, paradoxically, than that of recently independent Third World countries such as Libya and
even India. Not accidentally, Mexican intellectuals and independent labor unions have excoriated the
Gringostroika10 of the recent Trade Liberalization Treaty. Formal independence did not obviate the need for
Cuban or Nicaraguan- style revolutions, or for the Independista movement in Puerto Rico. The term
"revolution," once popular in the Third World context, specifically assumed a post-colonial moment, initiated
by official independence, but whose content had been a suffocating neo-colonial hegemony. The term
"post-colonial" carries with it the implication that colonialism is now a matter of the past,
undermining colonialism's economic, political, and cultural deformative traces in the present. The
"post-colonial" inadvertently glosses over the fact that global hegemony, even in the post-cold war era,
persists in forms other than overt colonial rule. As a signifier of a new historical epoch, the term "postcolonial," when compared with neo-colonialism, comes equipped with little evocation of contemporary power
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relations; it lacks a political content which can account for the eighties and nineties-style U.S. militaristic
involvements in Granada, Panama, and Kuwait-Iraq, and for the symbiotic links between U.S. political and
economic interests and those of local elites. In certain contexts, furthermore, racial and national oppressions
reflect clear colonial patterns, for example the oppression of blacks by Anglo-Dutch Europeans in South Africa
and in the Americas, the oppression of Palestinians and Middle Eastern Jews by Euro-Israel. The "post-colonial"
leaves no space, finally, for the struggles of aboriginals in Australia and indigenous peoples throughout the
Americas, in other words, of Fourth World peoples dominated by both First World multinational corporations
and by Third World nation-states.
Postcolonialism has become an abstraction whose amorphous nature stuns
any ability at real resistance.
Suleri 1992 (Sara, professor of English at Yale University, special concerns include postcolonial literatures and
theory, contemporary cultural criticism, literature and law, “Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial
Condition”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 18, No. 4, Identities (Summer, 1992), pp. 758-9, The University of Chicago Press)
Before such questions can be raised, however, it is necessary to pay some critical attention to the mobility that
has accrued in the category of postcolonialism. Where the term once referred exclusively to the discursive
practices produced by the historical fact of prior colonization in certain geographically specific segments of the
world, it is now more of an abstraction available for figurative deployment in any strategic redefinition of
marginality. For example, when James Clifford elaborated his position on travelling theory during a recent seminar,
he invariably substituted the metaphoric condition of postcoloniality for the obsolete binarism between
anthropologist and native.' As with the decentering of any discourse, however, this reimaging of the postcolonial
closes as many epistemological possibilities as it opens. On the one hand, it allows for a vocabulary of cultural
migrancy, which helpfully derails the postcolonial condition from the strictures of national histories, and thus
makes way for the theoretical articulations best typified by Homi Bhabha's recent anthology, Nation and
Narration.2 On the other hand, the current metaphorization of postcolonialism threatens to become so
amorphous as to repudiate any locality for cultural thickness. A symptom of this terminological and theoretical
dilemma is astutely read in Kwame Anthony Appiah's essay, "Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in
Postcolonial?"3 Appiah argues for a discursive space-clearing that allows postcolonial discourse a figurative
flexibility and at the same time reaffirms its radical locality within historical exigencies. His discreet but firm
segregation of the postcolonial from the postmodern is indeed pertinent to the dangerous democracy accorded
the coalition between postcolonial and feminist theories, in which
Postcolonialism is a self serving field
Figueira 00 [Dorothy, PhD Comparative Literature University of Chicago, “The Profits of
Postcolonialism,” Comparative Literature, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Summer, 2000), pp. 246-254, pp. 248-9]
As a result, postcolonial critics' refusal to define postcolonial theory in an unambiguous manner might not
necessarily point to diversity or vitality, but rather to personal projects and games of identification. Any adequate
analysis of the literature of postcolonial criticism cannot avoid highlighting the extent to which the intellectual
rigor and development of this criticism are seriously circumscribed by ideological posturing, reifying critical jargon,
and strategies of self-representation. It might well be that postcolonial criticism never intended to address directly
the myriad problems of analyzing Third-World societies, but rather has been fascinated with theorizing structures
of power and, by extension, the critic's position vis-a-vis these structures. This subtext informs a work such as
Zantop's Colonial Fantasies (1997), where the German imaginaire is the focus of discussion rather than any
historical colonial reality. A German fictional literature on colonialism is then telescoped to show the ways in which
fantasies of power can function even in a vacuum. The Holocaust becomes the inevitable case where such fantasies
are unleashed upon reality. Here, the logic of postcoloniality reaches its natural conclusion, where a text is only a
text and refers to no historical action. No coloniality, no postcoloniality, just ruminations on fantasies of power.
Postcolonial studies of this genre strike the old-fashioned pose of the European psychoanalyst who unmasks the
cultural crime of deformation. They are based on the virtually self-explanatory phenomenon of cultural struggle
and adjustment. Since the postcolonial subject/critic is someone with access to positional knowledge, the work of
generations of nonpostcolonial scholars (Orientalists or others who fit only marginally into the construction of
Orientalism) is not particularly important. Even those who made a genuine effort to bring cultures formerly called
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"Oriental" into the Euro-American continuum need not be examined. The postcolonial critic can dismiss this work
as serving a decrepit ideology (Clark 23). Often the postcolonial critic is unaware that a body of scholarship written
by area specialists pertaining to the topic even exists. In a quasimessianic manner, the postcolonial critic positions
her/himself to speak for the Other. Since Spivak's subalterns theoretically are mute, she can effectively coopt their
voice. In the process, she creates a need for the theorist (Spivak herself) who will determine the discourse of the
victimized. This is, indeed, a slippery game. For the postcolonial critic, notions of voicelessness and absence serve
to license the neglect of any texts ("archives," "voices," and "spaces") that contradict the theoretical script. At
work here is the age-old problem of the engaged intellectual and the pretense that academic criticism can function
as a political act and "textual culture" can displace "activist culture" (Ahmad 1). Rhetorical engagement should not
present a blueprint for social change, especially when critics are often located far from the native sites they
propose to analyze. It is true that the location of critics does not necessarily diminish their message. However,
being rooted to the territory of one's origin also does not assure a "pure and authentic standpoint" (Michel 87).
The problem is one of representation. Auto-minoritized (note: not necessarily minority) subjects assume roles as
spokespersons for minority communities. Regardless of their own socio-economic status and privileges, they speak
as/ for minorities and as representatives for a minority community and its victimization. They function as "victims
in proxy" (Bahri 73). This role is rarely seriously challenged. Spivak will, on occasion, voice concern that some critics
might lack the objectivity to conceptualize their Dasein, as if by projection she is absolved of accruing any blame
herself. But this strategy of projection, utilized with such aplomb by Said to mask a multitude of sins, does not
change the fact that victimization by proxy represents false consciousness.
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Postcolonial Thought mimics colonial thought it criticizes and only uses the
colonial Other as a justification for its existence.
Figueira 00 [Dorothy, PhD Comparative Literature University of Chicago, “The Profits of
Postcolonialism,” Comparative Literature, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Summer, 2000), pp. 246-254, 250-1]
The concept of the margin versus the center in postcolonial criticism, constructed upon Derrida's critique of
logocentrism, allows the postcolonial critic not only to theorize always from the impregnable position of "the
margin," but also to invoke "ambiguity," "binarism," and "splitting," etc. as constitutive of that margin and those
that inhabit it. Therefore, the postcolonial theorist is not constrained to "stand" on particular ground or take up a
position, but instead can "slide ceaselessly" (Bhabha 300). In Bhabha's work, Foucault is invoked to
establish the disequilibrium of the modern state and Bhabha's conception of the marginality of
the "people." Said and Bhabha accept Foucault's dubious claim that the most individualized
group in modern society are the marginals yet to be integrated into the political totality. They
attempt to validate interpretation from the margin, where "exiled" Third-World metropolitan intellectuals are the
most authoritative voices. Said, in particular, positions the "migrant" or "traveler" as "our model for academic
freedom" (cited in Krishnaswamy 127), hence his desire to auto-migrant himself in "biographical" accounts.
Once the need for a "tribe of interpreters" has been established, the migrant/traveler critics can then set out on
their annointed mission as the "translators of the dissemination of texts and discourses across cultures" (Bhabha
293). Traveling theory requires, among other things, "a kind of 'doubleness' in writing, a temporality of
representation that moves between cultural formations and social processes without a 'centered' causal logic"
(Bhabha 293). Here, Said, Spivak and Bhabha can be "located" at a place where theorists are necessary to
interpret across cultures and academic disciplines without the inconvenience of having to pinpoint cultural
particularities. The theorist can say whatever he or she likes, the only constraint, or test of validity, being that the
proper cultural space is occupied and that the writing validates and promotes the ambiguity and contradictoriness
of that position. The critic's location, in fact, often overrides the national historical situation and exegetical context.
Because little reference is made to culturally specific details, the discourse of postcoloniality mimics colonial
thinking. Although postcolonial theory problematizes the binaries of Western historicism, it still orders the globe
according to the single binary opposition of the colonial and the postcolonial (McClintock 85). In this manner,
the multitudinous cultures of the world are marked and marketed in postcolonial theory with their geopolitical
distinctions telescoped into invisibility (McClintock 86). One colonial experience seems always to resemble
another. Stripped of cultural specificity, postcolonial prognoses also have little to do with the Third-World reality.
Relying on the experience of modern colonialism, the critic divides history into manageable and isolated segments,
while at the same time arguing against the false homogenization of Orientalist projects (Bahri 52). A contextual
and fragmentary analyses are accepted out of a deep cynicism regarding the Other as a fossilized object of clinical
experimentation. Indiscriminately embracing the Other levels out the various competing Others. All postcolonial
experiences are the same, since their actuality is never taken seriously. Thus, the unfortunate Jameson
must be taken to task for assuming that all Third-World narratives function in the same way as
national allegories, for what is truly important is that the Other always be perceived as correct, regardless of
differences and histories, in order to fulfil the postcolonial critic's desire for a pure otherness in all of its pristine
luminosity (Chow 45). This form of criticism exhibits an uncritical primitivism that privileges non-Western culture
and glories in its presumptive, eventual-and always revolutionary-resurgence (Clark 44).
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Postcolonialism becomes a critic’s language game to avoid any
confrontation with the Other.
Figueira 00 [Dorothy, PhD Comparative Literature University of Chicago, “The Profits of
Postcolonialism,” Comparative Literature, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Summer, 2000), pp. 246-254, pp. 251]
The postcolonial critic's personal search in this way masks a lack of calling or significance. The stakes are
considerable: personal validation amidst an incestuously boundaried field, among other critics deemed worthy of
making the call. The Other is eclipsed by the critic's conception of it-a conception whose major function is to
validate the theorist within a community of theorists. The authoritative critic who has carefully picked through
information provided by individuals writing in these postcolonial places provides the dominant voice (Sunder Rajan
603). Although postcolonial critics claim acuity vis-a-vis the intricacies of their readings (Sunder Rajan 603-5), their
ignorance of key aspects in the narrative they seek to deconstruct can lead to gross distortions. However, these
mistakes are neither given significance nor, for that matter, acknowledged because of the overriding importance
assigned to the idealized image of the critic's own theory or of theory itself. This aestheticization of the critical
project is truly "criticism for criticism's sake." Criticism becomes a language game played by theorists.
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No Alt Solvency
Colonialism cannot be stopped- neocolonialism is being successfully
channeled through nationalist patriarchal elites.
Shohat 1992 [Ella, Prof. of Cultural Studies at NYU, 1992, “Notes on the "Post-Colonial"
http://www.jstor.org/stable/466220?origin=JSTOR-pdf&, Accessed 7/8/13- JM]
The hegemonic structures and conceptual frameworks generated over the last five hundred years
cannot be vanquished by waving the magical wand of the "postcolonial." The 1992 unification of Europe,
for example, strengthens cooperation among ex-colonizing countries such as Britain, France, Germany and Italy
against illegal immigration, practicing stricter border patrol against infiltration by diverse Third World peoples:
Algeri- ans, Tunisians, Egyptians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Indians, Turks, Senegalese, Malians, and Nigerians. The
colonial master narrative, mean- while, is being triumphantly re-staged. Millions of dollars are poured into
international events planned for the quincentenary of Columbus's so- called voyages of discovery, climaxing in the
Grand Regatta, a fleet of tall ships from 40 countries leaving from Spain and arriving in New York Harbor for U.S.
Independence Day, the Fourth of July. At the same time, an anti-colonial narrative is being performed via the viewfrom-the-shore projects, the Native American commemorations of annihilated communi- ties throughout the U.S.
and the American continent, and plans for setting up blockades at the arrival of the replicas of Columbus's
caravels, sailing into U.S. ports. What, then, is the meaning of "postcoloniality" when certain structural conflicts
persist? Despite different historical contexts, the conflict between the Native American claim to their
land as a sacred and communal trust and the Euro-American view of land as alienable property
remains structurally the same. How then does one negotiate sameness and difference within the framework of
a "post-colonial" whose "post" emphasizes rupture and deemphasizes sameness? Contemporary cultures are
marked by the tension between the official end of direct colonial rule and its presence and
regeneration through hegemonizing neo-colonialism within the First World and toward the Third
World, often channelled through the nationalist patriarchal elites. The "colonial" in the "postcolonial" tends to be relegated to the past and marked with a closure - an implied temporal border
that undermines a potential oppositional thrust. For whatever the philosophical connotations of the "post"
as an ambiguous locus of continuities and discontinuities, "its denotation of "after" - the teleological lure of the
"post" - evokes a celebratory clearing of a conceptual space that on one level conflicts with the notion of "neo."
The "neo-colonial," like the "post-colonial" also suggests continuities and discontinuities, but its emphasis is on the
new modes and forms of the old colonialist practices, not on a "beyond."
The term postcoloinialsm reintrenches exploitation, the alt cant solve.
Larsen 05 (Neil, Professor of Comparative Literature, 2005, “Imperialism, Colonialism,
Postcolonialism”, A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, P.g 24)
Think, for instance, of how, before the coinage of “postcolonial,” one was accustomed to speak of what the novels
of Gabriel García Márquez and Chinua Achebe had in common over and against, say, those of Margaret Drabble
and Alain Robbe-Grillet. The reference, unless my memory deceives me, was to the “third world.” By way of tarring
its utterer as a sixties relic, “third world” conjures up an entire historical conjuncture, and accompanying political
culture, in which one naturally went on to utter the above-cited slogans of “national liber-ation,” etc. For reasons
that the discussion to follow will, if successful, help to clarify, we who once unself-consciously said “third world”
now hesitate, if only for a second, to utter it in the same contexts. This hesitation reflects the decline of the
national liberation movements of the “Bandung era” (see below, sections 3 and 4) leaving us with the question of
why and with what effect this decline has occurred, but helping to explain in the meantime the currency of
“postcolonial” as, if nothing else, a euphemism for “third world.” Whether the term “postcolonial” or the “theory”
and/or the “condition” that are designated this way point us beyond the crisis of third worldism, or merely serve to
mystify it yet again, is a matter for genuine debate. But it seems no less certain that a terminology – and thus
perhaps a conceptual spectrum – limited to “imperialism” and “colonialism” will incur the risk of historical
mystification as well unless it can account for suspicions (often its own) that it has grown somehow
anachronistic. There may, in the end, be no particularly good reason for saying “postcolonial” – as distinct from
the prior habit of referring to the “neocolonial” – and yet be quite good ones for not saying “third world.”
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AT: State Bad
Western states violence necessary evil for democracy
Bhaba 2003 (Homi K, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English at Harvard,
the Director of the Humanities Center and the Senior Advisor on the Humanities to the President and Provost at
Harvard University, "Democracy De-realized." Diogenes 50.1 (2003): 27., pp27,
http://dio.sagepub.com/content/50/1/27.full.pdf+html)
The embattled and embalmed narrative of civilizational clash is often deployed to justify the reckless destruction of
civilians who are suspected, by virtue of their culture (considered to be their ‘second nature’), of being tainted with
the ‘guilt’ of their traditions and temperament. Only those societies of the North and the South, the East and West,
which ensure the widest democratic participation and protection for their citizens – their majorities and minorities
– are in a position to make the deadly difficult decisions that ‘just’ wars demand. To confront terror out of a sense
of democratic solidarity rather than retaliation gives us some faint hope for the future, hope that we might be able
to establish a vision of a global society, informed by civil liberties and human rights, that carries with it the shared
obligations and responsibilities of common, collaborative citizenship.
The nation is key to order and safety in society-without it, destruction and
death would happen.
Bhabha 1990 (Homi, Professor and Director of Humanities Center at Harvard University, “Nation and
Narration”, p 51, AX)
[L]ike language, the nation is an invariable which cuts across modes of production . . . . We should not become
obsessed by the determinate historical form of the nation-state but try to see what that form is made out of. It is
created from a natural organization proper to homo sapiens, one through which life itself is rendered untouchable
or sacred. This sacred character constitutes the real national question.21 Debray's focus is relevant here as an
explanation in literary terms of the nation's universal appeal, and so locates the symbolic background of national
fiction. The nation is not only a recent and transitory political form, but also responds to the 'twin threats of
disorder and death' confronting all societies. Against these, the nation sets two 'anti-death processes': These are,
first of all, a delimitation in time, or the assignation of origins, in the sense of an Ark. This means that society does
not derive from an infinite regression of cause and effect. A point of origin is fixed, the mythic birth of the Polis, the
birth of Civilization or of the Christian era, the Muslim Hegira, and so on. This zero point or starting point is what
allows ritual repetition, the ritualization of memory, celebration, commemoration — in short, all those forms of
magical behaviour signifying defeat of the irreversibility of time. The second founding gesture of any human society
is its delimitation within an enclosed space. Here also there takes place an encounter with the sacred, in the sense
of the Temple. What is the Temple, etymologically? It was what the ancient priest or diviner traced out, raising his
wand heavenwards, the outline of a sacred space within which divination could be undertaken. This fundamental
gesture is found at the birth of all societies, in their mythology at least. But the myth presence is an indication of
something real.
Governments are established because the people want them-in return, the
government bring political stability back to the people.
Bhabha 1990 (Homi, Professor and Director of Humanities Center at Harvard University, “Nation and
Narration”, p 163, AX)
To these notions, and in order to assert the principles on which the integrity of nation and empire are based,
Johnson returns the same, invariable reply. It is a matter of fact that governments are established, not on regular
plans, but by chance or accident. It is a matter of fact that from wherever, in a narrowly theoretical light,
governments should derive their authority, they derive it in practice from the respect which, by habit or custom,
we pay them. It is not from an analysis of the principles of natural right, or of human nature imagined as
uncontaminated by accident and contingency, that attempts at political reform should start; but from an
understanding of how custom, or 'second nature' as it was proverbially defined, has differently modified the first,
or essential and universal human nature, in different countries. For national customs and customary institutions so
shape the mind of a nation that it may be said that they constitute a people as a nation. The effects of political
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reform on second nature are extremely hard to calculate, so that to reform the institutions of a nation is always to
put its stability at risk; and it goes without saying for Johnson — though he says it often enough — that political
stability is the greatest good that a government can secure to a people. To calculate the effects of reform on first
nature, as the discourse of natural rights offers to do, is apparently a good deal easier, of course, but serves no
serious purpose; for it assumes the impossible, that we can decompound an essential and universal human nature
from the reality we actually perceive, which is of different nations differently modified by their different habits,
customs, and institutions. It follows, for Johnson, that 'for the law to be known, is of more importance than to be
right', and that 'all change is of itself an evil, which ought not to be hazarded but for evident advantage'.26
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AT Bhabha
Bhabha’s fixation on fluidity inscribes an academic colonialism that
destroys any hope of postcolonial liberation.
Juan 1998 [Jr., E San, Professor of Comparative American Cultures at Washington State U, “The Limits of
Postcolonial Criticism: The Discourse of Edward Said,” http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/1781, Accessed:
7/12/13]
I consider postcolonialism as the cultural logic of this mixture and multilayering of forms taken as an essential
ethos of late modernity, a logic distanced from its grounding in the unsynchronized interaction between colonial
powers and colonized subalterns. The Indo-British critic Homi Bhabha, among others, has given ontological priority
to the phenomenon of cultural difference between colonized and colonizer. The articulation of such difference in
“in-between” places produces hybridization of identities: “It is in the emergence of the interstices—the overlap
and displacement of domains of difference—that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness,
community interest, or cultural value are negotiated” (Bhabha 1994, 1-2). Since (following Wallerstein 1991)
capital ethnicizes peoples to promote labor segmentation, hybridity and other differential phenomena result. But
for Bhabha, ambivalence arises from the poststructuralist “difference of writing” that informs any cultural
performance. Such performances are found in certain privileged positionalities and experiences: “the history of
postcolonial migration, the narratives of cultural and political diaspora, the major social displacements of peasants
and aboriginal communities, the poetics of exile, the grim prose of political and economic refugees.” (5) Alex
Callinicos calls Bhabha's approach “an idealist reduction of the social to the semiotic.” (1995: 111) Indeterminacy,
interruption of the signifying chain, aporia, endless displacements, translations, and negotiations characterize
postcolonial literary theory and practice. Aijaz Ahmad (1996) points to the ambiguity of historical references in
postcolonial discourse. In the discursive realm of floating signifiers and the language metaphor, the objective
asymmetry of power and resources between hegemonic blocs and subaltern groups (racialized minorities in the
metropoles and in the “third world”) disappears, as well as the attendant conflicts. Clearly this fixation on the
manifestations of “unevenness” has undergone fetishization, divorced from its concrete social determinations.
What postcolonial theory (Bhabha's practice is replicated in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Trinh Minh-ha, and others)
seems to carry out in the name of individualist resistance is the valorization of reified immediacies—the
symptomatic effects of colonization in various forms of “orientalisms” and strategies of adaptations and
cooptations—unconnected with the institutions and instrumentalities that subtend them.
Meditations on the hybrid and liminal space of postcolonialism lead to a
mystification of the oppressed.
Juan 1998 [Jr., E San, Professor of Comparative American Cultures at Washington State U, “The Limits of
Postcolonial Criticism: The Discourse of Edward Said,” http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/1781, Accessed:
7/12/13]
Viewed from the perspective of late-capitalist political economy, the figures of difference, fragmentation, liminality
and diaspora, which Lawrence Grossberg (1996) considers the principles of identity for postmodern cultural
studies (of which postcolonialism is a subspecies), are modes of regulating the social relations of production, in
particular the division of global social labor and its reproduction. But postcolonial critics not only remove these
principles of identity from their circumstantial ground, from their historical contexts; they also treat them as
autonomous phenomena separate from the structures of cultural production and political legitimation in late
modern societies. In the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre's words, “Each of these `moments' of the real [i.e.
hybridity, fragmentation, etc.], once isolated and hypostatized, becomes the negator of the other moments and
then the negator of itself. Limited and transposed into a form, the content becomes oppressive and destructive of
its own reality.” (1968: 167) Postcolonialism is guilty of what it claims to repudiate: mystification and moralism.
What postcolonialism ultimately tries to do is to reify certain transitory practices, styles, modalities of thought and
expression that arise as attempts to resolve specific historical contradictions in the ongoing crisis of late,
transnational capitalism. Cultural difference is the single ambivalent result of colonialism that can be articulated in
plural ways. Unevenness is no longer an abstract categorizing term, but an empirical one-sided description that
affords the subaltern's newly-discovered agency some space for the display of libertarian astuteness. What the
Marxist theoretician Georg Lukacs (1971) calls “ethical utopianism,” the lapse into subjectivism, afflicts
postcolonial theory because it denies the internally complex determinants that are its condition of possibility. This
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mediation of the hybrid, interstitial and borderline experience with the concrete totality of the social formation is
rejected as “essentialism” or “totalization” (San Juan 1998).
Postcolonialism’s reliance on psychoanalysis misreads the Latin American
context and reinscribes coloniality
Bosteels, 2011[Bruno, of Romance studies at Cornell University, June 1st 2011, “Critique of
planned obsolescence: marx and freud in Latin America,” Revista Hispánica Moderna, 64: 1,
page # 6-7, TZ]
In fact, even if he saw himself as the Columbus of the unconscious, the founder of psychoanalysis
never refers specifically to the realities of Latin America—at least not beyond his personal and anthropological
interest in the culture of the Bolivian coca leaf. There are, to be sure, a number of eyebrow-raising
assertions similar to what Marx or Engels have to say early on about Mexicans, as when Freud
refers metaphorically to the unconscious, in his paper of the same title from 1915, by speaking of the mind’s
‘‘aboriginal population’’ or again, elsewhere, about the ‘‘dark continents.’’8 And in Freud’s case, too, we could try
to systematize the underlying prejudices, aside from a certain metaphysical fixity of concepts, which lead to such
affirmations: the universalist trend of his interpretation of evolution, with identical stages for all of humanity; the
correspondence between the phylogenetic and the ontogenetic aspects of development, which leads to the
utilization of metaphors of primitivism above all with reference to neurosis and the early stages of infanthood as in
his 1913 text Totem and Taboo, significantly subtitled Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of
Savages and Neurotics; and the Lamarckian faith in the possibility of the hereditary transmission of
acquired traits, which likewise renders superfluous the study of other or earlier cultures beyond
the confines of modern Western Europe. ‘‘These assumptions,’’ as Celia Brickman sums up, ‘‘did not
invalidate the potential of psychoanalysis, but their presence lent credence to readings of
psychoanalysis that could perpetuate and seemingly legitimate colonialist representations of
primitivity with their associated racist implications, in much the same way that psychoanalytic
representations of femininity were able to be enlisted for some time as an ally in the
subordination of women’’ (51).
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Perm
The histories of the oppressive are not meant to be separate entities used to
create dichotomous positions of power or inferiority
Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 95 (Bill, Gareth, Helen, Professors at the University of NSW, University of Western
Australia, Queen’s University, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, p. 147, AM)
The history of the West and the history of the non-West are by now irrevocably different and irrevocably shared.
Both have shaped and been shaped by each other in specific and specifiable ways. The linear time of the West or
the project of modernity did not simply mummify or overlay the indigenous times of colonized countries, but was
itself open to alteration and reentered into discrete cultural combinations. Thus the history of Latin America is also
the history of the West and informs its psychic and economic itinerary. The cultural projects of both the West and
the non-West are implicated in a larger history. If the crisis of meaning in the West is seen as the product of a
historical conjuncture, then perhaps the refusal either to export it or to import it may be a meaningful gesture, at
least until we can replace the stifling monologues of self and other (which, however disordered or decentered,
remain the orderly discourses of the bourgeois subject) with a genuinely dialogic and dialectical history that can
account for the formation of different selves and the construction of different epistemologies.
Failure to achieve the desired result in democracy is not a reason to reject
democracy perm can be the unrealized.
Bhaba 2003 (Homi K, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English at Harvard,
the Director of the Humanities Center and the Senior Advisor on the Humanities to the President and Provost at
Harvard University, "Democracy De-realized." Diogenes 50.1 (2003): pp28-9,
http://dio.sagepub.com/content/50/1/27.full.pdf+html)
To pose the crisis of democracy in terms of its unrealized ideals does not adequately challenge the failures of its
promise. ‘Falling short’ is often a strategic ‘necessity’ for democratic discourse, which acknowledges failure as part
of its evolutionary, utopian narrative. The argument goes something like this: we fail because we are mortal and
bound to history, the faith of democracy lies not in perfectibilty but in our perseverence and progress, our
commitment to set the highest ideals before ourselves and struggle towards them to revise and reshape our ‘best
selves’. Such an internal dialectic of the ‘unrealized’ and the ‘utopian’ encounters the negative instance of ‘failure’
only in order to provide a strange moral coherence and consolation for itself. I would thus propose that we
consider democracy as something de-realized rather than unrealized. I use ‘de-realization’ in the sense of Bertolt
Brecht’s concept of distantiation – a critical ‘distance’ or alienation disclosed in the very naming of the formation
of the democratic experience and its expressions of equality. I also use ‘derealization’ in the surrealist sense of
placing an object, idea, image or gesture in a context not of its making, in order to defamiliarize it, to frustrate its
naturalistic and normative ‘reference’ and see what potential that idea or insight has for ‘translation’, in the sense
both of genre and geopolitics, territory and temporality. If we attempt to de-realize democracy, by defamiliarizing
its history and its political project, we recognize not its failure but its frailty, its fraying edges or limits that impose
their will of inclusion and exclusion on those who are considered – on the grounds of their race, culture, gender or
class – unworthy of the democratic process. In these dire times of global intransigence and war, we recognize what
a fragile thing democracy is, how fraught with limitations and contradictions; and yet it is in that fragility, rather
than in failure, that its creative potential for coping with the trials of the new century lies.
Politics and the government are necessary for the existence of a stable
society simply because the government’s purpose is to maintain order in
society.
Bhabha 1990 (Homi, Professor and Director of Humanities Center at Harvard University, “Nation and
Narration”, p 129-130, AX)
From the 'post-structuralist' perspective assumed earlier, we can see that this theory presupposes that letters
arrive at their destination. If this were so, then the desire of politics to end the post would have been achieved, and
there would be no need of politics at all — if the legislative letter always reached its destination (always in fact
being returned to the sender), then there would be no need for it to be sent, for it would have always already
arrived. The fact that this is not the case is sufficiently proved by the existence of Rousseau's theories, which
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presuppose that politics has come adrift from the natural network and can only attempt to reproduce it in the form
of a radical fiction.25 The immediate implication is that politics is a name for the necessary possibility of the failure
of autonomy to close into the circuit which names the citizen as citizen, and that the designation 'citizen' is always
inhabited by an element of impropriety. This impropriety is both the condition of possibility of politics and the
reason why autonomy can never be achieved: this margin, which can be called 'freedom', is also the ground of
differentiation which allows for the fact that 'citizens' are always in fact bearers of so-called 'proper names', and
are not just isomorphic points. Rousseau also recognizes this in so far as he cannot let the law remain in its pure
generality, but formulates the need for a government or executive power to allow its particular applications: the
government being something like a central sorting office, 'an intermediary body established between the subjects
and the Sovereign for their mutual correspondence'.26 But more importantly for our concerns here, this necessary
failure of autonomy also denies the absolute closure of the circuit of the general will in the form of the absolutely
autonomous state. If the doctrine of the general will were not troubled by the necessary possibility of the letter's
not arriving, then the state would be absolute and have no relation to any outside: it could not strictly speaking be
a nation, and it would have no history, and thus no narration.27 In order to have a name, a boundary and a history
to be told at the centre, the state must be constitutively imperfect. The closure of the state becomes the frontier of
the nation, and, as we have seen, the frontier implies that there is more than one nation.
The rejection of the state guts any alt solvency – only perm can solve.
Juan No Date (Epifanio San Juan, profesor of Comparative American Cultures at Washington State U,
“POSTCOLONILAISM AND MATERIALISTIC DIALECTICS,” pg. 3, JC)
In essence, the most blatant flaw of postcolonial orthodoxy (I use the rubric to designate the practice of
Establishment postcolonialism employing a poststructuralist organon) lies in its refusal to grasp the category of
capitalist modernities in all its global ramifications, both the regulated and the disarticulated aspects. A
mechanistic formula is substituted for a dialectical analytic of historical motion. Consequently, in the process of a
wide-ranging critique of the Enlightenment ideals by postcolonial critics, the antithesis of capitalism— proletarian
revolution and the socialist principles first expounded by Marx and Engels—is dissolved in the logic of the global
system of capital without further discrimination. The obsession to do away with totality, foundations, universals,
and systemic analysis leads to a mechanical reification of ideas and terminology, as well as the bracketing of the
experiences they refer to, culminating in a general relativism, skepticism, and nominalism—even nihilism —that
undercuts the postcolonial claim to truth, plausibility, or moral high ground
The state is not over determined in dealing with the subaltern, a history remains
open for future acts of justice.
Bhaba 2003 (Homi K, 2003, "Democracy De-realized." Diogenes 50.1 (2003): 27-35.
http://dio.sagepub.com/content/50/1/27.full.pdf+html)(pg. 31)
The subaltern group is deprived of historical [dominance] and initiative ; it is often in a state of
continuous but disorganic expansion, without a necessary party affiliation; and [crucially for the issue of denationalisation], its authority may not be able to go beyond a certain qualitative level which still
remains below the level of the possession of the state.12 This includes those who are committed to cultural
justice and the emancipatory work of the imagination. The utopian dream of ‘total’ transformation may not
be available to the subaltern perspective which is nonetheless engaged in both struggles as an active
inventory of emancipation and survival as modes of forbearance that link the memory of history to
the future of freedom. Discourses that champion social ‘contradiction’ as the a priori motor of historical change
are propelled in a linear direction towards the terminus of the state. The subaltern imaginary, deprived of political
dominance and yet seeking to turn that disadvantage into a new vantage point, has to proceed at an oblique or
adjacent angle in its antagonistic relation to ‘the qualitative level of the State’. Subalternity represents a form
of contestation or challenge to the status quo that does not homogenize or demonize the state in
formulating an opposition to it. The subaltern strategy intervenes in state practices from a position that is
‘contiguous’ or tangential to the ‘authoritarian’ institutions of the state – flying just below the level of the state.
It is in this sense that the subaltern group is not a ‘sub-ordinate’ class. It propagates an ethico-political
practice in the name of the ‘human’ where ‘rights’ are neither simply unversalist nor individuated. The
‘human’ signifies a strategic, translational sign that gives ground to, or gains ground for, emergent demands for
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representation, redistribution and responsibility – claims of the excluded that come ‘from below the qualitative
level of the state’; modes of community and solidarity that are not fully sanctioned by the sovereignty of the state;
forms of freedom unprotected by it. Such an ‘opposition in terms of human rights’, Claude Lefort argues, takes
form in centers that power cannot entirely master . . . From the legal recognition of strikes or trade unions, to
rights relative to work of social security, there has developed on the basis of the rights of man a whole history
that transgressed the boundaries within which the state claimed to define itself, a history that remains open.13
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Brown T/s
Paradoxes in freedom redirect the will to power as a goal of antifreedom, causing
identities to be fixed social positions.
Brown 95 (Wendy Brown PhD Political Philosophy, professor of political science Berkeley “States of Injury: Power
and Freedom in Late Modernity” pp. 24-27)
These paradoxes incite a certain ambivalence and anxiety about freedom in which we dwell especially uncomfortably today. The pursuit of
political freedom is necessarily ambivalent because it is at odds with security, stability, protection, and
irresponsibility; because it requires that we surrender the conservative pleasures of familiarity, insularity, and
routine for investment in a more open horizon of possibility and sustained willingness to risk identity , both collective
and individual Freedom thus conceived is at odds with the adolescent pleasures held out liberal formulations of liberty as license. Indeed, the
admonition to adolescents that "with freedom comes responsibilities'' misses the point of this investment insofar
as it isolates freedom from responsibility. The notion that there is a debt to pay for spending, a price to pay for indulgence, a weight
to counter lightness already casts freedom as a matter of lightness, spending, indulgence-just the thing for adolescents or the relentlessly selfinterested subject of liberalism. Freedom of the kind that seeks to set the terms of social existence requires inventive and careful use of power
rather than rebellion against authority; it is sober, exhausting, and without parents. "For what is freedom." Nietzsche queries in Twilight of the
Idols but "that one has the will to assume responsibility for oneself. " ' Freedom is a project suffused not just with ambivalence
but with anxiety, because it is flanked the problem of power on all sides: the powers against which It arrays itself as well as
the power it must claim to enact itself. Against the liberal presumption that freedom transpires where power leaves off, I
want to insist that freedom neither overcomes nor eludes power; rather, it requires for its sustenance that we take the
full measure of power's range and appearances-the powers that situate, constrain, and produce subjects as well as
the will to power entailed in practicing freedom. Here again, freedom emerges as that which is never achieved; instead, it is a
permanent struggle against what will otherwise be done to and for us. "How is freedom measured in individuals
and peoples?” Nietzsche and answers, "according to the resistance which must be overcome, to the exertion
required to remain on top ... The free man is a warrior.'' If freedom is invariably accompanied by ambivalence and anxiety, these
concomitants are magnified today both because of the kind of subjects we arc and because of the particular figure of freedom required to
counter contemporary forms of domination and regulation. The dimensions of responsibility for oneself and one's world that
freedom demands often appear overwhelming and hopelessly unrealizable. They are overwhelming because
history has become so fully secularized: there is nobody here but us-no "structures," no supervening agent, no cosmic
force, no telos upon which we may count for assistance in realizing our aims or to which we may assign blame for
failing to do so. Yet they are hopelessly unrealizable for an apparently opposite reason: the powers and histories by which the
social, political, and economic world are knit together are so intricately globalized that it is difficult for defeatism
not to
preempt the desire to act. Moreover, bereft of the notion that history
''progresses," or even that humans learn from history's
most nightmarish
episodes, we suffer a contemporary "disenchantment of the world" more
vivid than Weber let alone Marx ever imagined.
This is not so much
nihilism-the oxymoronic belief in barely masked
despair about the meanings and events that humans have generated. It
is
as if, notwithstanding the pervasiveness of nonteleological discourses of
contingency, arbitrariness, and intervention, we were steeped in a
consciousness of antiprogess. “What a ghastly century we have lived in,” Cornel West ruminates, “there are misanthropic skeletons hanging in
our closer…[W]e have given up on the capacity of human beings to do anything right[,]…of human communities to solve any problem.” If
generic anxieties and ambivalence about freedom have intensified for the reasons sketched in this chapter, they make still
more understandable the tendency of late-twentieth-century “progressives” to turn back from substantive
ambitions of politics of freedom. But the consequences of such a retreat are traumatic for democratic thinking and
projects, and they are not limited to the uncritical statism and attachments to redistributive justice characteristics
of social democrats who call themselves radical. Rather, as chapters 2 and 3 of this work argue, the “instinct for freedom
turned back on itself” surfaces in the form of a cultural ethos and politics of reproach, rancor, moralism, and guilt—the constellation
detailed by Nietzsche’s account of ressentiment. Nietzsche regarded our fundamental ambivalence about freedom —its
demanding invocation of power and action—as capable of producing entire social formations, entire complexes or moral
and political discourses, that denigrate the project of freedom rather than attempt it . For Nietzsche, when the
negative moment in our ambivalence about freedom is ascendant, the will to power is redirected as a project of
antifreedom; it takes the form of re- crimination against action and power, and against those who affirm or embody the possibilities of
action and power. There is a second and related reason tor taking up with Nietzsche in the
ensuing reflections on contemporary forms of
political life. His thought
is useful in understanding the source and consequences of a contemporary tendency to
moralize in the place of political argument, and to understand the codification of injury and powerlessness-the marked turn away
from freedom's pursuit-that this kind of moralizing politics entails. Examples of this tendency abound, but it is perhaps nowhere more
evident than in the contemporary proliferation of efforts to pursue legal redress tor injuries related to social subordination by marked
attributes or behaviors: race, sexuality, and so forth,-16 This effort, which strives to establish racism, sexism, and homophobia
as morally heinous in the law, and to prosecute its individual perpetrators there, has many of the attributes of what
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Nietzsche named the politics of ressentiment: Developing a righteous critique of power from the perspective of the injured, it delimits
a specific site of blame for suffering by constituting sovereign subjects and events as responsible for the “injury” of
social subordination. It fixes the identities of the injured and the injuring as social positions, and codifies as well the
meanings of their actions against all possibilities of indeterminacy, ambiguity, and struggle for resignification or repositioning. This effort also
casts the law in particular and the state more generally as neutral arbiters of injury rather than as themselves invested
with the power to injure. Thus, the effort to “outlaw” social injury powerfully legitimizes law and the state as
appropriate protectors against injury and casts injured individuals as needing such protection by such protectors.
Finally, in its economy of perpetrator and victim, this projects seeks not power or emancipation for the injured or the subordinated, but the
revenge of punishment, making the perpetrator hurt as the sufferer does.
Their conceptions of freedom fail to grasp the modalities of domination,
reinforcing the structures that create unfreedom in the first place.
Brown 95 (Wendy Brown PhD Political Philosophy, professor of political science Berkeley “States of Injury: Power
and Freedom in Late Modernity” pp. 5-8)
“[W]hat the Left needs is a postindividualist concept of freedom, for it is still over questions of freedom and equality that the decisive
ideological battles are being waged.” So argues Chantal Mouffe in response to two decades of conservative political and theoretical efforts to
define and practice freedom in an individualist, libertarian mode, a phenomenon Stuart Hall calls "the great moving right show."5 Yet as Hall
keenly appreciates, "concepts" of freedom, posited independently of specific analyses of contemporary modalities of
domination, revisit us with the most troubling kind of idealism insofar as they deflect from the local, historical, and
contextual character of freedom. Even for philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, "freedom is everything except an 'Idea.' "6 Freedom is
neither a philosophical absolute nor a tangible entity but a relational and contextual practice that takes shape in
opposition to whatever is locally and ideologically conceived as unfreedom. Thus in slaveholding and male dominant fifthcentury Athenian "democracy," Arendt argues, freedom was conceived as escape from an order of "necessity" inhabited by
women and by slaves; what was called Athenian freedom thus entailed a metaphysics of domination and a necessary
practice of imperialism. Liberal freedom, fitted to an economic order in which property and personhood for some entails poverty and
deracination for others, is conveyed by rights against arbitrary state power on one side and against anarchic civil society
or property theft on the other. As freedom from encroachment by others and from collective institutions, it entails an atomistic
ontology. a metaphysics of separation, an ethos of defensiveness, and an abstract equality . Rendering either the ancient
or liberal formations of freedom as "concepts" abstracts them from the historical practices in which they arc rooted,
the institutions against which they are oriented, the domination they arc designed to contest, the privileges they are designed to protect.
Treating them as concepts not only prevents appreciation of their local and historical character but preempts
perception of what is denied and suppressed by them, of what kinds of domination are enacted by particular
practices of freedom. It would also appear that the effort to develop a new "postindividualist" concept of freedom responds less to the
antidemocratic forces of our time than to a ghostly philosophical standoff between historically abstracted formulations of Marxism and
liberalism. In other words, this effort seeks to resolve a problem in (a certain) history of ideas rather than a problem in history. Like a bat flying
around the owl of Minerva at dusk, it would attempt to formulate a philosophy of freedom on the grave of selected
philosophical traditions rather than to consider freedom in existing configurations of power-economic, social,
psychological, political. This is not to say that the contemporary disorientation about freedom is without theoretical dimensions nor is it
to suggest that freedom's philosophical crisis, about which more shortly, is merely consequent to a historical or "material" one. I want only to
register the extent to which the problematic of political freedom as it relates to democratizing power, while of profound philosophical interest,
cannot be resolved at a purely philosophical level if it is to be responsive to the particular social forces and institutions-the sites and sources of
domination-of a particular age. But this opens rather than settles the problem of how to formulate a dis- course of freedom appropriate to
contesting contemporary antidemocratic configurations of power. One of the ironies of what Nietzsche boldly termed the "instinct for
freedom" lies in its inceptive self-cancellation, its crossing of itself in its very first impulse. Initial figurations of
freedom are inevitably reactionary in the sense of emerging in reaction to perceived injuries or constraints of a
regime from within its own terms. Ideals of freedom ordinarily emerge to vanquish their imagined immediate
enemies, but in this move they frequently recycle and reinstate rather than transform the terms of domination that
generated them. Consider exploited workers who dream of a world in which work has been abolished, blacks who
imagine a world without whites, feminists who conjure a world either without men or without sex, or teenagers who fantasize a world
without parents. Such images of freedom perform mirror reversals of suffering without transforming the organization
of the activity through which the suffering is produced and without addressing the subject constitution that domination
efforts, that is, the constitution of the social categories, "workers," "blacks," "women," or "teenagers." It would thus appear that it Is
freedom's relationship to identity-its promise to address a social injury or marking that is itself constitutive of identity-that yields
the paradox in which the first imaginings of freedom are always constrained by and potentially even require the
very structure of oppression that freedom emerges to oppose. This, I think, is not only a patently Foucaultian point but is
contained as well in Marx's argument that "political emancipation" within liberalism conceived for- mal political indifference to civil particularity
as liberation because political privilege according to civil particularity appeared as the immediate nature of the domination perpetrated by
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feudal and Christian monarchy. "True human emancipation" was Marx's formula for escaping the innately contextual and historically specific,
hence limited, forms of free- dom. True human emancipation, achieved at the end of history, conjured for Marx not simply liberation from
particular constraints but freedom that was both thoroughgoing and permanent, freedom that was neither partial nor evasive but temporally
and spatially absolute. However, since true human emancipation eventually acquired for Marx a negative referem (capitalism) and positive
content (abolition of capitalism), in time it too would reveal its profoundly historicized and thus limited character.
Contemporary notions of resistance and empowerment rely on the very
regulatory norms it seeks to oppose: the freedom for which resistance
fights is formulated in the very same terms of liberal sovereignty that
produce oppressed subjects in the first place.
Brown 1995 [Wendy, Professor of Political Science at Berkeley, States of Injury, pp. 20-22]
For some, fueled by opprobrium toward regulatory norms or other modalities of domination, the language of
"resistance" has taken up the ground vacated by a more expansive practice of freedom. For others, it is the
discourse of" empowerment" that carries the ghost of freedom's val- ence. Yet as many have noted, insofar as
resistance is an effect of the regime it opposes on the one hand, and insofar as its practitioners often seek to void
it of normativity to differentiate it from the (regulatory) nature of what it opposes on the other, it is at best
politically rebellious; at worst, politically amorphous. Resistance stands against, not for; it is reaction to
domination, rarely willing to admit to a desire for it, and it is neutral with regard to possible political direction.
Resistance is in no way constrained to a radical or emancipatory aim, a fact that emerges clearly as soon as one
analogizes Foucault's notion of resistance to its companion terms in freud or Nietzsche. Yet in some ways this point
is less a critique of Foucault, who especially in his later years made clear that his political commitments were not
identical with his theoretical ones (and unapologetically revised the latter), than a sign of his misappropriation. For
Foucault, resistance marks the presence of power and expands our under' standing of its mechanics, but it is in this
regard an analytical strategy rather than an expressly political one. "Where there is power, there is resistance, and
yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority to power .... [T]he strictly relational
character of power relationships . . depends upon a multiplicity of points of resistance: these play the role of
adversary, target, support, or handle in power relations." This appreciation of the extent to which resistance is by
no means inherently subversive of power also reminds us that it is only by recourse to a very non-foucaultian
moral evaluation of power as bad or that which is to be overcome that it is possible to equate resistance with that
which is good, progressive, or an end to domination. If popular and academic notions of resistance attach,
however weakly at times, to a tradition of protest, the other contemporary substitute tor a discourse of freedom"empowerment"-would seem to correspond more closely to a tradition of idealist reconciliation. The language of
resistance implicitly acknowledges the extent to which protest always transpires inside the regime;
"empowerment," in contrast, registers the possibility of generating one's capacities, one's "self-esteem," one's life
course, without capitulating to constraints by particular regimes of power. But in so doing, contemporary
discourses of empowerment too often signal an oddly adaptive and harmonious relationship with domination
insofar as they locate an individual's sense of worth and capacity in the register of individual feeling, a register
implicitly located on something of an otherworldly plane vis-a-vis social and political power. In this regard. despite
its apparent locution of resistance to subjection, contemporary discourses of empowerment partake strongly of
liberal solipsism-- the radical decontextualization of the subject characteristic of liberal discourse that is key to the
fictional sovereign individualism of liberalism. Moreover, in its almost exclusive focus on subjects’ emotional
bearing and self-regard, empowerment is a formulation that converges with a regime's own legitimacy needs in
masking the power of the regime. This is not to suggest that talk of empowerment is always only illusion or
delusion. It is to argue, rather, that while the notion of empowerment articulates that feature of freedom
concerned with action, with being more than the consumer subject figured in discourses of rights and economic
democracy, contemporary deployments of that notion also draw so heavily on an underconstructcd subjectivity
that they risk establishing a wide chasm between the (experience of) empowerment and an actual capacity to
shape the terms of political, social, or economic life. Indeed, the possibility that one can "feel empowered" without
being so forms an Important element of legitimacy for the antidemocratic dimensions of liberalism.
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