Framework – our knowledge production is situated within particular epistemic contexts – the 1ACs valorization of the Western academy props up the hegemonic search for Truth
Grosfoguel , Professor Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, ‘7 (Ramon, “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn”
Cultural Studies, Vol 21 Issue 2-3, p 211-223, T&F Online)//JAG
Epistemological Critique The first point to discuss is the contribution of racial/ethnic and feminist subaltern perspectives to epistemological questions.
The hegemonic Eurocentric paradigms that have informed western philosophy and sciences in the ‘modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system’ for the last 500 hundred years assume a universalistic, neutral, objective point of view
. Chicana and black feminist scholars (Moraga &
Anzaldua 1983, Collins 1990) as well as thirdworld scholars inside and outside the United States (Dussel 1977, Mignolo 2000) reminded us that we always speak from a particular location in the power structures
.
Nobody escapes the class, sexual, gender, spiritual, linguistic, geographical, and racial hierarchies of the
‘modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system’
. As feminist scholar Donna Haraway (1988) states, our knowledges are always situated. Black feminist scholars called this perspective ‘afro-centric epistemology’ (Collins 1990) (which is not equivalent to the afrocentrist perspective) while Latin
American Philosopher of Liberation Enrique Dussel called it ‘geopolitics of knowledge’ (Dussel 1977) and following Fanon (1967) and Anzaldúa (1987) I will use the term ‘bodypolitics of knowledge’. This is not only a question about social values in knowledge production or the fact that our knowledge is always partial. The main point here is the locus of enunciation, that is, the geo-political and body-political location of the subject that speaks.
In Western philosophy and sciences the subject that speaks is always hidden, concealed, erased from the analysis
.
The ‘ego-politics of knowledge’ of Western philosophy has always privilege the myth of a non-situated ‘Ego’. Ethnic/racial/gender/sexual epistemic location and the subject that speaks are always decoupled. By delinking ethnic/racial/gender/sexual epistemic location from the subject that speaks, Western philosophy and sciences are able to produce a myth about a Truthful universal knowledge that covers up, that is, conceals who is speaking as well as the geo-political and body-political epistemic location in the structures of colonial power/knowledge from which the subject speaks
. It is important here to distinguish the ‘epistemic location’ from the ‘social location’. The fact that one is socially located in the oppressed side of power relations, does not automatically mean that he/she is epistemically thinking from a subaltern epistemic location. Precisely, the success of the modern/colonial world-system consist in making subjects that are socially located in the oppressed side of the colonial difference, to think epistemicaly like the ones on the dominant positions.
Subaltern epistemic perspectives are knowledge coming from below that produces a critical perspective of hegemonic knowledge in the power relations involved
. I am not claiming an epistemic populism where knowledge produced from below is automatically an epistemic subaltern knowledge. What I am claiming is that all knowledges are epistemically located in the dominant or the subaltern side of the power relations
and that this is related to the geo- and body-politics of knowledge.
The disembodied and unlocated neutrality and objectivity of the ego-politics of knowledge is a Western myth.
Rene Descartes, the founder of Modern Western Philosophy, inaugurates a new moment in the history of Western thought. He replaces God, as the foundation of knowledge in the Theo-politics of knowledge of the European Middle Ages, with (Western)
Man as the foundation of knowledge in European Modern times. All the attributes of God are now extrapolated to (Western) Man.
Universal Truth beyond time and space, privilege access to the laws of the Universe, and the capacity to produce scientific knowledge and theory is now placed in the mind of Western Man
. The
Cartesian ‘ego-cogito’ (‘I think, therefore I am’) is the foundation of modern Western sciences. By producing a dualism between mind and body and between mind and nature,
Descartes was able to claim non-situated, universal, God-eyed view knowledge. This is what the Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gomez called the ‘point zero’ perspective of Eurocentric philosophies (Castro-Gomez 2003).
The ‘point zero’ is the point of view that hides and conceals itself as being beyond a particular point of view
, that is, the point of view that represents itself as being without a point of view.
It is this ‘god-eye view’ that always hides its local and particular perspective under an abstract universalism. Western philosophy privileges ‘ego politics of knowledge’ over the ‘geopolitics of knowledge’
and the ‘body-politics of knowledge’. Historically, this has allowed
Western man
(the gendered term is intentionally used here) to represent his knowledge as the only one capable of achieving a universal consciousness
, and to dismiss non-Western knowledge as particularistic and, thus, unable to achieve universality.

This epistemic strategy has been crucial for Western global designs. By hiding the location of the subject of enunciation, European/Euro-American colonial expansion and domination was able to construct a hierarchy of superior and inferior knowledge and, thus, of superior and inferior people around the world
. We went from the sixteenth century characterization of ‘people without writing’ to the eighteenth and nineteenth century characterization of ‘people without history’, to the twentieth century characterization of ‘people without development’ and more recently, to the early twenty-first century of ‘people without democracy’. We went from the sixteenth century ‘rights of people’ (Sepulveda versus de las Casas debate in the school of Salamanca in the mid-sixteenth century), to the eighteenth century ‘rights of man’ (Enlightment philosophers), and to the late twentieth century ‘human rights’. All of these are part of global designs articulated to the simultaneous production and reproduction of an international division of labor of core/periphery that overlaps with the global racial/ethnic hierarchy of Europeans/non-Europeans. However, as Enrique Dussel (1994) has reminded us, the Cartesian ‘ego cogito’ (‘I think, therefore I am’) was preceded by 150 years (since the beginnings of the European colonial expansion in 1492) of the European ‘ego conquistus’ (‘I conquer, therefore I am’).
The social, economic, political and historical conditions of possibility for a subject to assume the arrogance of becoming God-like and put himself as the foundation of all Truthful knowledge was the Imperial Being, that is, the subjectivity of those who are at the center of the world because they have already conquered it
. What are the decolonial implications of this epistemological critique to our knowledge production and to our concept of world-system?
This is particularly true in the context of Latin America – their use of Area
Studies props up a US-centric approach to fact-gathering that ensures Latin
America remains academically isolated and distinct
Alverez, Arias, and Hal ’11 – respectively - Director, Center for Latin American, Caribbean and
Latino Studies; Professor of Latin American Literature University of Texas at Austin; Professor of
Anthropology and of African and African Diaspora Studies University of Texas at Austin (Sonia E., Arturo, and Charles R., Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, “Re-visioning Latin American Studies in the United States,” Vol. 17, No. 2, December 2011, 131-145
We maintain that
Latin American Studies must be de-centered if it is to continue to
¶
thrive in this transformed environment
.
Demographic shifts, diasporas, labor migrations, the movements of global capital and media, and processes of cultural circulation and ¶ hybridization have brought into question the nature of areas’ identities and composition.
Globalization, space/time compression, and greater international mobility have created an intensification of overlaps and brought together intellectual travelers that were formerly kept largely separate. What has come into question is the notion that the world can be divided into knowable, self-contained
‘areas of study’
.
¶
Indeed. Latin America is today a global reality. As Walter Mignolo said at a 2001 retreat to
¶
formulate the LASA ‘Strategic Plan,’ now the perspective, not the area of
¶
study
. By this Mignolo meant that
Latin America is
Latin America is no longer a geographical entity to be
¶
studied; rather. it now signifies a reorientation of knowledge, an epistemology that looks at
¶
global concerns from a Latin American perspective, independently of who is doing the
¶
looking, from where, and what is being looked at
.
¶ At the same time. there is greater complexity in the boundaries that define the area of ¶ study.
Traditionally Latin American Studies have embodied and respected disciplinary
¶
boundaries,
and in most cases Latin Americanists have been primarily organized by ¶ discipline.
But disciplinary divisions no longer work as well as in the past.
Increasingly
¶
Latin
Americanists find themselves both anchored in a disciplinary formation, and, at the
¶ same time, crossing disciplinary boundaries into cognate areas
—in effect becoming trans-
¶
disciplinary. While there are still relatively few academic interdisciplinarians and teaching
¶
or training programs that purposely prepare interdisciplinary specialists, many Latin
¶
Americanists today deliberately adopt either trans-disciplinary or interdisciplinary ¶ approaches in addressing the intellectual issues they face. One can readily observe today ¶ an intensification of the expectation that intellectual activity be addressed in an ¶ interdisciplinary fashion, whether by individuals or by teams of individuals with different ¶ skills working together. This may be so especially in the sciences, but major funding ¶ agencies are requiring interdisciplinary approaches above single-disciplinary ones in ¶ many areas of study. Latin Americanists now have the opportunity to synthesize this new ¶ intellectual reality. and to create new and meaningful disciplinary intersections and ¶ configurations that will help in knowledge production, and in making this knowledge more
¶
readily accessible and applicable to communities and constituencies so as to confront real
¶
world problems and situations
.
¶ A related challenge has to do with articulations of local. regional. national. and even ¶ post-national identities. 11re 2008 conferences ‘Times of Change and Opportunities for the ¶ Afro
Colombian Population‘ at Howard University. ‘The African Diaspora in the ¶ Americas: Political and Cultural Resistance’ at the University of Minnesota. ‘Afro¶ Latinos: Global Spaceslbocal Struggles‘ at UCLA. and ‘Reconfigurations of Racism and ¶ New Scenarios of Power Afler 200l ’ at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. as well as the 2009 conference on indigenous and Afro-descendant issues at the University of Texas
¶
at Austin. are reflections of the reconfiguration of non-‘Latin’ American subjectivities
¶
within transnational frameworks. Afro-Latinidades are an example of a theme that must be
¶
framed beyond conventional LAS parameters. in a larger landscape of hemispheric and
¶
global geopolitics. cultural politics. and political economy. New areas of knowledge are
¶
continually being opened by Latin Americanists. both those from Latin America and the ¶ US. as well as across the globe. Many scholars today are inclined to extend beyond the ¶ North-South dichotomy. incorporating theoretical ideas and frameworks that circulate ¶ globally with applicability well beyond Latin America proper. One example here is the ¶ great influence of the subaltern studies school of South Asia on Latin America scholarship; ¶ another is the
‘coloniality of power‘ group, and the general growth of work in what might ¶ be termed ‘comparative colonialities.'
These and other analogous movements signal the
¶
transformations of disciplinary fields worldwide despite the continued existence of formal
¶
disciplines as organizing principles of scholarly work. The Latin

Americanists‘ challenge
¶
is not to abandon the established disciplines. but rather. to bring them fully into critical
¶
dialogue
with these transformed intellectual and geopolitical landscapes. Ultimately.
¶ remaking the field is not an event but a process
. one that we hope to advance with this ¶ article. Our contention is that Latin American Studies will remain vibrant to the extent that ¶ institutions and individual scholars engage fully with these challenges.
¶ What De-centering Latin American Studies Entalls ¶ Though we concur with Paul Drake and Lisa I-liIbink's assessment that many in Latin ¶
American Studies have made a sincere and sustained effort to be make the field a ¶ ‘cooperative endeavor between US scholars and their counterparts south of the border‘ '2.
¶ we maintain that,
States.
Historically, moreover. the field has developed under the
¶ as an institutionalized knowledge formation, LAS remain largely
¶
centered in the United
hegemony of its founding US-based disciplinary formations, with early 20"‘ century work
¶ concentrated in history and literature, while political science rose to predominance after ¶ the l960s. One survey of the field's foremost US-based journal, Latin American Research ¶ Review (LARR), found that by the late 1970s, fully one-third of submissions to LARR ¶ came from political science. which remained first into the 1990s and beyond. History
¶
maintained a solid second, while ‘Languages/Literature and Anthropology submissions
¶
were displaced by those from Economics and Sociology’.'3
¶
Disciplines. of course. shape how knowledge is produced and who is authorized to
¶ produce it. The predominance of US-based disciplinary formations within the field of
¶
LAS. therefore, meant that research and knowledge production were largely driven by
US-centric assumptions and political imperatives
. As we noted above. even the Left of
¶
LAS tended to be more concerned with US foreign policy in the region and its
¶
consequences than with interrogating the often Anglo-Euro-centric epistemological
¶
foundations of the disciplines
. ln some of these cases, the problem was not a lack of focus ¶ on subaltern peoples; rather, it was the fact that these interventions. though critical of US
¶
geopolitical dominance. in other respects retained dominant disciplinary and
¶
epistemological assumptions.
Area studies is inseparable from the militaristic knowledge that views Latin
America in terms of its usefulness to the US – their knowledge-gathering only shows us a target to be destroyed by US bombs, making nuclear genocide inevitable
Chow , Professor Comparative Lit at Brown, ‘ 6 (Rey, “The Age of the World Target” p 40-42)//JAG
Often under the modest and apparently innocuous agendas of fact gathering and documentation, the "scientific" and "objective" production of knowledge during peacetime about the various special "areas" became the institutional practice that substantiated and elaborated the militaristic conception of the world as target
.52 In other words, despite the claims about the apolitical and disinterested nature of the pursuits "I higher learning, activities undertaken under the rubric of area studies
, such as language training, historiography, anthropology, economics, political science, and so forth, are fully inscribed in the politics and ideology of war.
To that extent, the
disciplining
, research, and development of so-called academic information are part and parcel of a strategic logic
. And yet, if the production of knowledge
(with its vocabulary of aims and goals, research, data analysis, experimentation, and verification) in fact shares the same scientific and military premises as war
‚—if, for instance, the ability to translate a difficult language can be regarded as equivalent to the ability to break military codes53‚— is it a surprise that it is doomed to fail in its avowed attempts to "know" the other cultures
?
Can
"knowledge" that is derived from the same kinds of bases as war put an end to the violence of warfare, or is such knowledge not simply warfare's accomplice, destined to destroy rather than preserve the forms of lives at which it aims its focus? As long as knowledge is produced in this self-referential manner, as a circuit of targeting or getting the other that ultimately consolidates the omnipotence and omnipresence of the sovereign "self"/"eye"‚— the "I"‚—that is the United States, the other will have no choice but remain just
that‚— a target whose existence justifies only one thing, its destruction by the bomber.
As long as the focus of our study of Asia remains the United States, and as long as this focus is not accompanied by knowledge of what is happening elsewhere at other times as well as at the present, such study will ultimately confirm once again the self-referential function of virtual worlding that was unleashed by the dropping of the atomic bombs, with the United
States always occupying the position of the bomber, and other cultures always viewed as the military and information target fields
. In this manner, events whose historicity does not fall into the epistemically closed orbit of the atomic bomber‚—

such as the Chinese reactions to the war from a primarily anti-Japanese point of view that I alluded to at the beginning of this chapter‚—will never receive the attention that is due to them.
"Knowledge," however conscientiously gathered and however large in volume, will lead only to further silence and to the silencing of diverse experiences.54 This is one reason why,
as Harootunian remarks
, area studies has been, since its inception, haunted by "the absence of a definable object"‚—and by "the problem of the vanishing object.
"55 As Harootunian goes on to argue, for all its investment in the study of other languages and other cultures, area studies missed the opportunity, so aptly provided by Said's criticism of Oriental ism, to become the site where a genuinely alternative form of knowledge production might have been possible. Although, as Harootunian writes, "Said's book represented an important intellectual challenge to the mission of area studies which, if accepted would have reshaped area studies and freed it from its own reliance on the Cold War and the necessities of the national security state,"56 the challenge was too fundamentally disruptive to the administrative and instrumentalist agendas so firmly routinized in area studies to be accepted by its practitioners. As a result, Said's attempt to link an incipient neocolonial discourse to the history of area studies was almost immediately belittled, dismissed, and ignored, and his critique, for all its relevance to area studies' future orientation, simply "migrated to English studies to transform the study of literature into a full-scale preoccupation with identity and its construction."57
Reject the aff’s Eurocentric epistemology – embracing a decolonial epistemology is the best way to rupture current conceptions of Area Studies that guarantee intellectual exploitation
Grosfoguel , Professor Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, ‘7 (Ramon, “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn”
Cultural Studies, Vol 21 Issue 2-3, p 211-223, T&F Online)//JAG
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. Without denying the importance of the endless accumulation of capital at a world scale and the existence of a particular class structure in global capitalism, I raise the following epistemic question:
How would the world-system looks like if we move the locus of enunciation from the European man to an Indigenous women in the Americas, to
, say
Rigoberta Menchu in Guatemala or to Domitila in Bolivia
? I do not pretend to speak for or represent the perspective of these indigenous women. What I attempt to do is to shift the location from which these paradigms are thinking.
The first implication of shifting our geopolitics of knowledge is that what arrived in the
Americas in the late fifteenth century was not only an economic system of capital and labor for the production of commodities to be sold for a profit in the world market
. This was a crucial part of, but was not the sole element in, the entangled ‘package’.
What arrived in the Americas was a broader and wider entangled power structure that an economic reductionist perspective of the worldsystem is unable to account for. From the structural location of an indigenous woman in the Americas what arrived was a more complex world-system than what politicaleconomy paradigms and world-system analysis portrait. A
European/capitalist/military/christian/patriarchal/white/heterosexual/male arrived in the Americas and established simultaneously in time and space several entangled global hierarchies
that for purposes of clarity in this exposition I will list below as if they were separate from each other: a particular global class formation where a diversity of forms of labor (slavery, semi-serfdom, wage labor, petty-commodity production, etc.) are going to co-exist and be organized by capital as a source of production of surplus value through the selling of commodities for a profit in the world market; an international division of labor of core and periphery where capital organized labor in the periphery around coerced and authoritarian forms (Wallerstein 1974); an inter-state system of politico-military organizations controlled by European males and institutionalized in colonial administrations (Wallerstein 1979); a global racial/ethnic hierarchy that privileges European people over non-European people (Quijano 1993, 2000); a global gender hierarchy that privileges males over females and European patriarchy over other forms of gender relations (Spivak 1988, Enloe 1990); a sexual hierarchy that privileges heterosexuals over homosexuals and lesbians (it is important to remember that most indigenous peoples in the Americas did not consider sexuality among males a pathological behavior and has no homophobic ideology); a spiritual hierarchy that privileges Christians over non-Christian/non-Western spiritualities institutionalized in the globalization of the Christian (Catholic and later Protestant) church; an epistemic hierarchy that privileges Western knowledge and cosmology over non-Western knowledge and cosmologies, and institutionalized in the global university system (Mignolo 1995, 2000, Quijano 1991). a linguistic hierarchy between European languages and non-European languages that privileges communication and knowledge/theoretical production in the former and subalternize the latter as sole producers of folklore or culture but not of knowledge/theory
(Mignolo 2000). 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, Aníbal 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’
(‘patrón 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
.
This conceptualization has enormous implications
that I can only briefly mention here:
The old Eurocentric idea that societies develop at the level of the nation-state in terms of a linear evolution of modes of production from pre-capitalist to capitalist is overcome
. We are all encompassed within a capitalist worldsystem that articulates different forms of labor according to the racial classification of the world's population (Quijano 2000, Grosfoguel 2002).
The old Marxist paradigm of infrastructure and superstructure is replaced by a historical-heterogeneous structure
(Quijano 2000), or a ‘heterarchy’ (Kontopoulos 1993), that is, an entangled articulation of multiple hierarchies, in which subjectivity and the social imaginary is not derivative but constitutive of the structures of the world-system
(Grosfoguel 2002). In this conceptualization, race and racism are not superstructural or instrumental to an overarching logic of capitalist accumulation; they are constitutive of capitalist accumulation at a world-scale. The ‘colonial power matrix’ is an organizing principle involving exploitation and domination exercised in multiple dimensions of social life, from economic, sexual, or gender relations, to political organizations, structures of knowledge, state institutions, and households (Quijano 2000).
The old division between culture and political-economy as expressed in post-colonial studies and political-economy approaches is overcome
(Grosfoguel 2002). Post-colonial studies conceptualize the capitalist world-system as being constituted primarily by culture, while political-economy place the primary determination on economic relations.
In the ‘coloniality of power’ approach, what comes first, ‘culture or the economy’, is a false dilemma
, a chicken-egg dilemma that obscure the complexity of the capitalist world-system (Grosfoguel 2002). Coloniality is not equivalent to colonialism. It is not derivative from, or antecedent to, modernity. Coloniality and modernity constitute two sides of a single coin. The same way as the European industrial revolution was achieved on the shoulders of the coerced forms of labor in the periphery, the new identities, rights, laws, and institutions of modernity such as nation-states, citizenship and democracy were formed in a process of colonial interaction with, and domination/exploitation of, non-Western people. To call ‘capitalist’ the present world-system is, to say the least, misleading. Given the hegemonic Eurocentric ‘common sense’, the moment we use the word ‘capitalism’ people immediately think that we are talking about the ‘economy’. However, ‘capitalism’ is only one of the multiple entangled constellations of colonial power matrix of the ‘European modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system’. It is an important one, but not the sole one. Given its entanglement with other power relations, destroying the capitalist aspects of the world-system would not be enough to destroy the present world-system.
To transform this world-system it is crucial to destroy the historical-structural heterogenous totality called the ‘colonial power matrix’ of the ‘world-system’
. Anti-capitalist decolonization and liberation
cannot be reduced to only one dimension of social life. It requires a broader transformation of the sexual, gender, spiritual, epistemic, economic, political, linguistic and racial hierarchies of the modern/colonial world-system. The ‘coloniality of power’ perspective challenges us to think about social change and social transformation in a non-reductionist way.

Framework – our knowledge production is situated within particular epistemic contexts – the 1ACs valorization of the Western academy props up the hegemonic search for Truth
Grosfoguel , Professor Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, ‘7 (Ramon, “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn”
Cultural Studies, Vol 21 Issue 2-3, p 211-223, T&F Online)//JAG
Epistemological Critique The first point to discuss is the contribution of racial/ethnic and feminist subaltern perspectives to epistemological questions.
The hegemonic Eurocentric paradigms that have informed western philosophy and sciences in the ‘modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system’ for the last 500 hundred years assume a universalistic, neutral, objective point of view
. Chicana and black feminist scholars (Moraga &
Anzaldua 1983, Collins 1990) as well as thirdworld scholars inside and outside the United States (Dussel 1977, Mignolo 2000) reminded us that we always speak from a particular location in the power structures
.
Nobody escapes the class, sexual, gender, spiritual, linguistic, geographical, and racial hierarchies of the
‘modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system’
. As feminist scholar Donna Haraway (1988) states, our knowledges are always situated. Black feminist scholars called this perspective ‘afro-centric epistemology’ (Collins 1990) (which is not equivalent to the afrocentrist perspective) while Latin
American Philosopher of Liberation Enrique Dussel called it ‘geopolitics of knowledge’ (Dussel 1977) and following Fanon (1967) and Anzaldúa (1987) I will use the term ‘bodypolitics of knowledge’. This is not only a question about social values in knowledge production or the fact that our knowledge is always partial. The main point here is the locus of enunciation, that is, the geo-political and body-political location of the subject that speaks.
In Western philosophy and sciences the subject that speaks is always hidden, concealed, erased from the analysis
.
The ‘ego-politics of knowledge’ of Western philosophy has always privilege the myth of a non-situated ‘Ego’. Ethnic/racial/gender/sexual epistemic location and the subject that speaks are always decoupled. By delinking ethnic/racial/gender/sexual epistemic location from the subject that speaks, Western philosophy and sciences are able to produce a myth about a Truthful universal knowledge that covers up, that is, conceals who is speaking as well as the geo-political and body-political epistemic location in the structures of colonial power/knowledge from which the subject speaks
. It is important here to distinguish the ‘epistemic location’ from the ‘social location’. The fact that one is socially located in the oppressed side of power relations, does not automatically mean that he/she is epistemically thinking from a subaltern epistemic location. Precisely, the success of the modern/colonial world-system consist in making subjects that are socially located in the oppressed side of the colonial difference, to think epistemicaly like the ones on the dominant positions.
Subaltern epistemic perspectives are knowledge coming from below that produces a critical perspective of hegemonic knowledge in the power relations involved
. I am not claiming an epistemic populism where knowledge produced from below is automatically an epistemic subaltern knowledge. What I am claiming is that all knowledges are epistemically located in the dominant or the subaltern side of the power relations
and that this is related to the geo- and body-politics of knowledge.
The disembodied and unlocated neutrality and objectivity of the ego-politics of knowledge is a Western myth.
Rene Descartes, the founder of Modern Western Philosophy, inaugurates a new moment in the history of Western thought. He replaces God, as the foundation of knowledge in the Theo-politics of knowledge of the European Middle Ages, with (Western)
Man as the foundation of knowledge in European Modern times. All the attributes of God are now extrapolated to (Western) Man.
Universal Truth beyond time and space, privilege access to the laws of the Universe, and the capacity to produce scientific knowledge and theory is now placed in the mind of Western Man
. The
Cartesian ‘ego-cogito’ (‘I think, therefore I am’) is the foundation of modern Western sciences. By producing a dualism between mind and body and between mind and nature,
Descartes was able to claim non-situated, universal, God-eyed view knowledge. This is what the Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gomez called the ‘point zero’ perspective of Eurocentric philosophies (Castro-Gomez 2003).
The ‘point zero’ is the point of view that hides and conceals itself as being beyond a particular point of view
, that is, the point of view that represents itself as being without a point of view.
It is this ‘god-eye view’ that always hides its local and particular perspective under an abstract universalism. Western philosophy privileges ‘ego politics of knowledge’ over the ‘geopolitics of knowledge’
and the ‘body-politics of knowledge’. Historically, this has allowed
Western man
(the gendered term is intentionally used here) to represent his knowledge as the only one capable of achieving a universal consciousness
, and to dismiss non-Western knowledge as particularistic and, thus, unable to achieve universality.

This epistemic strategy has been crucial for Western global designs. By hiding the location of the subject of enunciation, European/Euro-American colonial expansion and domination was able to construct a hierarchy of superior and inferior knowledge and, thus, of superior and inferior people around the world
. We went from the sixteenth century characterization of ‘people without writing’ to the eighteenth and nineteenth century characterization of ‘people without history’, to the twentieth century characterization of ‘people without development’ and more recently, to the early twenty-first century of ‘people without democracy’. We went from the sixteenth century ‘rights of people’ (Sepulveda versus de las Casas debate in the school of Salamanca in the mid-sixteenth century), to the eighteenth century ‘rights of man’ (Enlightment philosophers), and to the late twentieth century ‘human rights’. All of these are part of global designs articulated to the simultaneous production and reproduction of an international division of labor of core/periphery that overlaps with the global racial/ethnic hierarchy of Europeans/non-Europeans. However, as Enrique Dussel (1994) has reminded us, the Cartesian ‘ego cogito’ (‘I think, therefore I am’) was preceded by 150 years (since the beginnings of the European colonial expansion in 1492) of the European ‘ego conquistus’ (‘I conquer, therefore I am’).
The social, economic, political and historical conditions of possibility for a subject to assume the arrogance of becoming God-like and put himself as the foundation of all Truthful knowledge was the Imperial Being, that is, the subjectivity of those who are at the center of the world because they have already conquered it
. What are the decolonial implications of this epistemological critique to our knowledge production and to our concept of world-system?
Despite their attempt to deconstruct current imperialist practices, the aff simply replaces the military with the academy – their knowledge production about the Latin American subaltern gives privilege to Western forms of thinking
Grosfoguel , Professor Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, ‘7 (Ramon, “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn”
Cultural Studies, Vol 21 Issue 2-3, p 211-223, T&F Online)//JAG
In October 1998, there was a conference/dialogue at Duke University between the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group and the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group. The dialogue initiated in this conference eventually resulted in the publication of several issues of the journal NEPANTLA. However, this conference was the last time the Latin
American Subaltern Studies Group met before their split. Among the many reasons and debates that produced this split, there are two that I would like to stress.
The
Latin American Subaltern Studies Group composed primarily by Latinamericanist scholars in the USA. Despite their attempt at producing a radical and alternative knowledge, they reproduced the epistemic schema of Area Studies in the
United States
. With a few exceptions, they produced studies about the subaltern rather than studies with and from a subaltern perspective. Like the imperial epistemology of Area
Studies, theory was still located in the North while the subjects to be studied are located in the South
.
This colonial epistemology was crucial to my dissatisfaction with the project. As a Puerto Rican in the United States, I was dissatisfied with the epistemic consequences of the knowledge produced by this Latinamericanist group.
They underestimated in their work ethnic/racial perspectives coming from the region, while giving privilege to Western thinkers
. This is related to my second point: they gave epistemic privilege to
what they called the ‘four horses of the apocalypse’,2 that is,
Foucault, Derrida, Gramsci and Guha
. Among the four main thinkers they privilege, three are Eurocentric thinkers while two of them (Derrida and Foucault) form part of the poststructuralist/postmodern Western canon.
By privileging Western thinkers as their central theoretical apparatus, they betrayed their goal to produce subaltern studies.
This is not an essentialist, fundamentalist, anti-European critique. It a perspective that is critical of both Eurocentric and Third World fundamentalisms, colonialism and nationalism.
What all fundamentalisms share (including the Eurocentric one) is the premise that there is only one sole epistemic tradition from which to achieve Truth and Universality
. However, my main points here are three: (1) that a decolonial epistemic perspective requires a broader canon of thought than simply the Western canon
(including the Left Western canon); (2) that a truly universal decolonial perspective cannot be based on an abstract universal
(one particular that raises itself as universal global design), but would have to be the result of the critical dialogue between diverse critical epistemic/ethical/political projects towards a pluriversal as oppose to a universal world
;
(3) that decolonization of knowledge would require to take seriously the epistemic perspective/cosmologies/insights of critical thinkers from the Global South thinking from and with subalternized racial/ethnic/sexual spaces and bodies.
Postmodernism

and postructuralism as epistemological projects are caught within the
Western canon reproducing within its domains of thought and practice a coloniality of power/knowledge
.
Area studies is inseparable from the militaristic knowledge that views Latin
America in terms of its usefulness to the US – their knowledge-gathering only shows us a target to be destroyed by US bombs, making nuclear genocide inevitable
Chow , Professor Comparative Lit at Brown, ‘ 6 (Rey, “The Age of the World Target” p 40-42)//JAG
Often under the modest and apparently innocuous agendas of fact gathering and documentation, the "scientific" and "objective" production of knowledge during peacetime about the various special "areas" became the institutional practice that substantiated and elaborated the militaristic conception of the world as target
.52 In other words, despite the claims about the apolitical and disinterested nature of the pursuits "I higher learning, activities undertaken under the rubric of area studies
, such as language training, historiography, anthropology, economics, political science, and so forth, are fully inscribed in the politics and ideology of war.
To that extent, the
disciplining
, research, and development of so-called academic information are part and parcel of a strategic logic
. And yet, if the production of knowledge
(with its vocabulary of aims and goals, research, data analysis, experimentation, and verification) in fact shares the same scientific and military premises as war
‚—if, for instance, the ability to translate a difficult language can be regarded as equivalent to the ability to break military codes53‚— is it a surprise that it is doomed to fail in its avowed attempts to "know" the other cultures
?
Can
"knowledge" that is derived from the same kinds of bases as war put an end to the violence of warfare, or is such knowledge not simply warfare's accomplice, destined to destroy rather than preserve the forms of lives at which it aims its focus? As long as knowledge is produced in this self-referential manner, as a circuit of targeting or getting the other that ultimately consolidates the omnipotence and omnipresence of the sovereign "self"/"eye"‚— the "I"‚—that is the United States, the other will have no choice but remain just
that‚— a target whose existence justifies only one thing, its destruction by the bomber.
As long as the focus of our study of Asia remains the United States, and as long as this focus is not accompanied by knowledge of what is happening elsewhere at other times as well as at the present, such study will ultimately confirm once again the self-referential function of virtual worlding that was unleashed by the dropping of the atomic bombs, with the United
States always occupying the position of the bomber, and other cultures always viewed as the military and information target fields
. In this manner, events whose historicity does not fall into the epistemically closed orbit of the atomic bomber‚— such as the Chinese reactions to the war from a primarily anti-Japanese point of view that I alluded to at the beginning of this chapter‚—will never receive the attention that is due to them.
"Knowledge," however conscientiously gathered and however large in volume, will lead only to further silence and to the silencing of diverse experiences.54 This is one reason why,
as Harootunian remarks
, area studies has been, since its inception, haunted by "the absence of a definable object"‚—and by "the problem of the vanishing object.
"55 As Harootunian goes on to argue, for all its investment in the study of other languages and other cultures, area studies missed the opportunity, so aptly provided by Said's criticism of Oriental ism, to become the site where a genuinely alternative form of knowledge production might have been possible. Although, as Harootunian writes, "Said's book represented an important intellectual challenge to the mission of area studies which, if accepted would have reshaped area studies and freed it from its own reliance on the Cold War and the necessities of the national security state,"56 the challenge was too fundamentally disruptive to the administrative and instrumentalist agendas so firmly routinized in area studies to be accepted by its practitioners. As a result, Said's attempt to link an incipient neocolonial discourse to the history of area studies was almost immediately belittled, dismissed, and ignored, and his critique, for all its relevance to area studies' future orientation, simply "migrated to English studies to transform the study of literature into a full-scale preoccupation with identity and its construction."57
Reject the aff’s Eurocentric epistemology – embracing a decolonial epistemology is the best way to rupture current conceptions of Area Studies that guarantee intellectual exploitation
Grosfoguel , Professor Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, ‘7 (Ramon, “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn”
Cultural Studies, Vol 21 Issue 2-3, p 211-223, T&F Online)//JAG
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. Without denying the importance of the endless accumulation of capital at a world scale and the existence of a particular class structure in global capitalism, I raise the following epistemic question:
How would the world-system looks like if we move the locus of enunciation from the European man to an Indigenous women in the Americas, to
, say
Rigoberta Menchu in Guatemala or to Domitila in Bolivia
? I do not pretend to speak for or represent the perspective of these indigenous women. What I attempt to do is to shift the location from which these paradigms are thinking.
The first implication of shifting our geopolitics of knowledge is that what arrived in the
Americas in the late fifteenth century was not only an economic system of capital and labor for the production of commodities to be sold for a profit in the world market
. This was a crucial part of, but was not the sole element in, the entangled ‘package’.
What arrived in the Americas was a broader and wider entangled power structure that an economic reductionist perspective of the worldsystem is unable to account for. From the structural location of an indigenous woman in the Americas what arrived was a more complex world-system than what politicaleconomy paradigms and world-system analysis portrait. A
European/capitalist/military/christian/patriarchal/white/heterosexual/male arrived in the Americas and established simultaneously in time and space several entangled global hierarchies
that for purposes of clarity in this exposition I will list below as if they were separate from each other: a particular global class formation where a diversity of forms of labor (slavery, semi-serfdom, wage labor, petty-commodity production, etc.) are going to co-exist and be organized by capital as a source of production of surplus value through the selling of commodities for a profit in the world market; an international division of labor of core and periphery where capital organized labor in the periphery around coerced and authoritarian forms (Wallerstein 1974); an inter-state system of politico-military organizations controlled by European males and institutionalized in colonial administrations (Wallerstein 1979); a global racial/ethnic hierarchy that privileges European people over non-European people (Quijano 1993, 2000); a global gender hierarchy that privileges males over females and European patriarchy over other forms of gender relations (Spivak 1988, Enloe 1990); a sexual hierarchy that privileges heterosexuals over homosexuals and lesbians (it is important to remember that most indigenous peoples in the Americas did not consider sexuality among males a pathological behavior and has no homophobic ideology); a spiritual hierarchy that privileges Christians over non-Christian/non-Western spiritualities institutionalized in the globalization of the Christian (Catholic and later Protestant) church; an epistemic hierarchy that privileges Western knowledge and cosmology over non-Western knowledge and cosmologies, and institutionalized in the global university system (Mignolo 1995, 2000, Quijano 1991). a linguistic hierarchy between European languages and non-European languages that privileges communication and knowledge/theoretical production in the former and subalternize the latter as sole producers of folklore or culture but not of knowledge/theory
(Mignolo 2000). 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, Aníbal 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’
(‘patrón 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
.
This conceptualization has enormous implications
that I can only briefly mention here:
The old Eurocentric idea that societies develop at the level of the nation-state in terms of a linear evolution of modes of production from pre-capitalist to capitalist is overcome
. We are all encompassed within a capitalist worldsystem that articulates different forms of labor according to the racial classification of the world's population (Quijano 2000, Grosfoguel 2002).
The old Marxist paradigm of infrastructure and superstructure is replaced by a historical-heterogeneous structure
(Quijano 2000), or a ‘heterarchy’ (Kontopoulos 1993), that is, an entangled articulation of multiple hierarchies, in which subjectivity and the social imaginary is not derivative but constitutive of the structures of the world-system
(Grosfoguel 2002). In this conceptualization, race and racism are not superstructural or instrumental to an overarching logic of capitalist accumulation; they are constitutive of capitalist accumulation at a world-scale. The ‘colonial power matrix’ is an organizing principle involving exploitation and domination exercised in multiple dimensions of social life, from economic, sexual, or gender relations, to political organizations, structures of knowledge, state institutions, and households (Quijano 2000).
The old division between culture and political-economy as expressed in post-colonial studies and political-economy approaches is overcome
(Grosfoguel 2002). Post-colonial studies conceptualize the capitalist world-system as being constituted primarily by culture, while political-economy place the primary determination on economic relations.
In the ‘coloniality of power’ approach, what comes first, ‘culture or the economy’, is a false dilemma
, a chicken-egg dilemma that obscure the complexity of the capitalist world-system (Grosfoguel 2002). Coloniality is not equivalent to colonialism. It is not derivative from, or antecedent to, modernity. Coloniality and modernity constitute two sides of a single coin. The same way as the European industrial revolution was achieved on the shoulders of the coerced forms of labor in the periphery, the new identities, rights, laws, and institutions of modernity such as nation-states, citizenship and democracy were formed in a process of colonial interaction with, and domination/exploitation of, non-Western people. To call ‘capitalist’ the present world-system is, to say the least, misleading. Given the hegemonic Eurocentric ‘common sense’, the moment we use the word ‘capitalism’ people immediately think that we are talking about the ‘economy’. However, ‘capitalism’ is only one of the multiple entangled constellations of colonial power matrix of the ‘European modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system’. It is an important one, but not the sole one. Given its entanglement with other power relations, destroying the capitalist aspects of the world-system would not be enough to destroy the present world-system.
To transform this world-system it is crucial to destroy the historical-structural heterogenous totality called the ‘colonial power matrix’ of the ‘world-system’
. Anti-capitalist decolonization and liberation
cannot be reduced to only one dimension of social life. It requires a broader transformation of the sexual, gender, spiritual, epistemic, economic, political, linguistic and racial hierarchies of the modern/colonial world-system. The ‘coloniality of power’ perspective challenges us to think about social change and social transformation in a non-reductionist way.

Our Epistemology of Latin America is flawed
Castro-Gomez ‘98 a philosopher known for his work on colonial legacies herd in Colombia, He studied philosophy at St. Thomas
University in Bogota, where he was a pupil of faculty members of the Group of Bogotá (Philosophy) , main distributors in Colombia for the Latin American Philosophy . He then traveled to Germany where he graduated in philosophy at the University of Tübingen and later a doctorate in the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in
Frankfurt. On his return to Colombia was a professor at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota and Thinking
Institute investigator. (Santiago, Latin American postcolonial theories, Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice,
10:1, 27-33, http:l/dx.doi.org/10.1080/10402659808426118)
During the late 1970s a new field of investigation called "postcolonial studies" began to consolidate itself in Western universities, especially those in Britain and the United States .
The discourses emerged from influential university chairs held by refugees or sons and daughters of foreigners and immigrants. These individuals were socialized in two worlds differing in language, religion, traditions, and socio-political organization. They were acquainted with both the world of colonized nations, which they or their parents abandoned for some reason or another, and the world of industrialized countries in which they live and work today as intellectuals or academics. At a time when postmodern, structuralist, and feminist theory enjoyed a privileged position in the intellectual Anglo-
Saxon world, these people considered themselves to be "Third World intellectuals of the First World," thus defining the form in which they began to reflect on problems relating to colonialism. Departing from institutionally accepted studies such as anthropology, literary criticism, ethnology, and historiography, postcolonial theorists articulated a critique of colonialism which substantially differs from anticolonial narratives of the 1960s and 1970s. During that period academic circles popularized a type of discourse which emphasized the revolutionary rupture from the capitalist system of colonial domination.
Working within the geopolitical spaces opened by the Cold War, as well as the environments created by Asian and
American independence movements, this discourse focused on the fortification of national identities of colonized countries and the construction of a society free from class antago nism.
The critique of colonialism was understood as a rupture from the structures of oppression which had impeded the "Third World" from realizing the European project of modernity . However, anticolonialist narratives never pondered the epistemological status of their own discourse. Such criticism arose from methodologies pertaining to the social sciences, the humanities, and philosophy-fields of study that had been developed by European modernism since the 19th century. Economic dependence, the destruction of cultural identity, the growing poverty of the majority of the population, and the discrimination of minorities were all phenomena considered to be "deviations" from modernity. All of these maladies, it was thought, could be rectified through revolution and the popular sector's seizure of power.
These popular sectors, not the bourgeoisie, would be the true "subjects of history," those who would carry out the project of "humanizing humanity," which in turn would be realized within colonized nations themselves .¶ What postcolonial theorists began to realize is that the very language of¶
1040-2659/98/010027-07 © 1998 Carfax Publishing Ltd modernity, with which anticolonialists expressed themselves, is essentially located within the totalizing practices of European colonialism. Third World critiques of colonialism, narratives theoretically based on sociology, economics, and the political sciences, could not leave behind the space in which these disciplines reiterated the hegemonic language of modernity in colonized countries. Follow­ ing the thesis of Jacques Derrida, the Indian philosopher Gayatri Spivak affirms that no socially diagnostic discourse can transcend the homogenizing structures of modem rationality
.
Scholars study revolutions ineffectively-leads to bad policymaking in Latin
America
Brass , Tom (Social and Poltical Sciences Faculty at the University of Cambridge, “On which side of the barricade? Subaltern Resistance in Latin America and Elsewhere”, The Journal of Peasant Studies)
9/8/ 10 , http:/ldx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150412331311109

This theory about 'passive revolution' - the view linking the rise of
¶
fascism to the lack of a bourgeois revolution, and consequently a 'weak' national bourgeoisie and bourgeois democracy, and the absence of a peasant
¶
'voice' in national politics - is wrong on a number of counts
.
First,
as has¶ been argued in the preceding section, not only were peasants not excluded from nationalism but they were projected by those on the political right as the very embodiment of the nation itself.
Second, it is a theory which decouples capitalism from fascism, and thus exonerates the former from any blame for the latter: if fascism was a feudal reaction against capitalism, then capitalism is recast as an innately progressive systemic form
.115 This idea, as Trotsky, showed throughout the 1930s, is nonsense: fascism was a specifically capitalist reaction against the working class, and thus unconnected with feudalism. The latter critique notwithstanding
, it was ideas about 'passive revolution' (fascism = feudal reaction) which lay behind the disastrous policy of the Popular Front, or agency which represents the epitome of 'subaltern resistance'.
Discourse is key to reshape the representations and challenge the
Affirmative’s instruments of power
Crow 10 -
Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at the University of Bristol (Joanna,
“Introduction: Intellectuals, Indigenous Ethnicity and the State in Latin America”, 8/28/10, Latin American and
Caribbean Ethnic Studies Volume 5 Issue 2, www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17442221003787068#.UfwgaW15Oks)//BZ
Finally, one of the principal themes connecting all of the articles and indeed all of the discussion points above, either explicitly or implicitly, is power . As Andermann and Rowe proposed in their recent book on state iconography in the Southern Cone, there is a challenge to ‘t hink about images not solely as representations of cultural history , but as depositories and instruments of power ’ (2005, p. 3). Images matter: they are inherently political and they tell us a great deal about social relations.
As stated at the beginning of this introduction, assumptions about indigenous ethnicity –which contribute towards the creation of images , or are based on the images one is confronted with– affect the way that indigenous people are treated . Andermann and Rowe concentrate on the images created and propagated by the state, but intellectuals too have a critical role to play.
Intellectuals As Wade has remarked, the concepts of race and ethnicity are ‘part of an enterprise of knowledge’ (1997, p. 6), and knowledge is intimately related to power. As producers of knowledge and, in our case, enunciators of indigenous ethnicity, intellectuals are important arbiters of power . Their discourses and images of indigeneity may function as part of, in negotiation with, or in opposition to , the dominant representation regime , or indeed entirely outside the sphere of state authorities, although the latter is rare. All the intellectuals considered in this volume have sought to lead processes of ‘discursive transformation’ (like Florencia Mallon's [1995] ‘local intellectuals’ in Peasant and Nation) and to influence the organization of the society in which they live.
Beyond this–and the fact that most of the contributors use ‘intellectual’ in the broader Gramscian sense of the term–it becomes rather difficult to summarize them. Indeed, what stands out most clearly is the great diversity of intellectuality being discussed.

Critiques of Western imperialism are self-defeating – they reify Western norms and domination over marginalized cultures by simply trying to situate non-Western knowledge into an Western epistemic framework**
Jenko , Professor PolSci National University of Singapore, ’11 (Leigh, Fall, “Recentering Political
Theory: The Promise of Mobile Locality” Cultural Critique, Vol 79, ProjectMuse)//JAG
Destabilizing the Local
In claiming to offer a distinct approach to cross-cultural engagement that takes historically marginalized
(often coded as “non-Western”) traditions seriously
as sources of theory production, my call
to recenter theory implicitly criticizes existing alternatives for stopping short of this more radical goal
. In much scholarly literature on cross-cultural theorizing, solutions to the problem of Eurocentrism aim primarily to draw attention to the limits and contingency of those “master signifiers” inscribed within and by dominant
(often coded as “Western” or “Europeanized”) social scientific and humanistic discourse
(e.g., Euben 2006).
This
effort, pioneered and articulated by postcolonial studies, defines Eurocentrism as the projection of “the West
” and its disciplinary categories as a universal measure of knowledge against which all other lifeworlds or cultures must be compared (Prakash, 1475 n.1; Chakrabarty, 29, 43).
Confronting Eurocentrism so understood thus entails recognizing the closures, contingencies, and silences enacted within
Europeanized discourse as its local categories become inscribed as universal ones.
This kind of “critical work seeks its basis not without but within the fissures of dominant structures” (Prakash, 1486–87). It thus aims more to mitigate what Fred
Dallmayr calls the “bland universalism” accompanying colonialism and first-world capital flows (1996, 99), than to engage foreign discourses as potential outside replacements for the problematic categories of Europeanized knowledge. Precisely because this confrontation with Eurocentrism aims at its “fissures” rather than its alternatives, the critical stance that undermines the certainty of Europeanized categories
—and so enables the entry of more cosmopolitan renderings of human life-worlds— also returns the theorist to the very audience and discourse whose terms originally prompted the critique. Although addressing Eurocentrism on one level, it reconstitutes it on another: the analysis chastens Europeanized categories only insofar as it continues to inhabit them
(Jenco).
Those theorists who explicitly urge the inclusion of non-Western voices
[End Page 30] in our debates about political life
, including political philosophers such as Charles Taylor as well as comparative theorists such as Roxanne Euben, ground this move in an understanding of knowledge as local and rooted
. In contrast to an older cosmopolitanism that promoted indiscriminate tolerance or rootless eclecticism, this “new cosmopolitanism” is characterized by its resistance to imperializing universalism
, on the one hand, and its unwillingness to sacrifice the “rootedness” of individual persons within their particular cultural backgrounds, on the other (Malcomson, 233–35). In this way they can resist both functionalist equivalences and universalizing ambitions—Archimedian vantage points that transform localized insight into general, “universal” knowledge—and instead seek a new space for communication across cultural differences (Benhabib; Euben 1999). Many culturally sensitive political thinkers analogize this cosmopolitan negotiation of rooted selves to a conversation that takes place between differently situated interlocutors to encourage mutual transformation—whether in the form of convergence, as for Bikhu Parekh and Charles Taylor (1999), or of accommodation without strict consensus, for James Tully and Fred
Dallmayr (1996). Charles Taylor calls what emerges “a language of perspicuous contrast,” in which rather than imposing “our” terms on “them” we “formulate both their way of life and ours as alternative possibilities in relation to human constraints at work in both
” (1985, 125). Hans-Georg Gadamer and those comparative political theorists influenced by him such as Fred Dallmayr invoke a similar process that encourages a “fusion of horizons.”
These dialogic, supposedly mutually transformative encounters are conducted as often between texts as between people, and mean to facilitate mutual sympathy, grounded in the credibility of differently situated ways of life, as a means of combating universalist hegemony and hierarchical power relations
(Dallmayr 2004; Euben 1999, 13). The dialogic approach further develops the postcolonial articulation of Eurocentrism by showing how critique can flow from both cultural locales without asserting the singular dominance that characterizes more
“homogenizing” approaches.
There are problems with this position
, however, despite its important role in correcting imperializing narratives fueled by unreflective, often Western-centric universalism
. Pratap Mehta, speaking of the cosmopolitan viewpoint that underlies these and other approaches to [End Page 31] cultural

difference in political theory, has insightfully pointed out that its “hermeneutic potential is greater than its transgressive possibilities
” (633). That is, the encounter with otherness has enhanced the interpretive richness of our self-reflections by making us ever more aware of the silences and contingency of “our” own sources of knowledge. But it has ignored possibilities for fundamental transformations in knowledge production prompted not only by the inclusion of cases and voices that our own theories marginalize, but also from shifts in the very audience, language, and resources assumed in the production of intellectual work
. Roxanne Euben’s analysis of “Muslim and Western travelers in search of knowledge,” for example, gathers Muslim perspectives not to set political theory on a new track addressed to Muslim audiences disciplined by their terms of debate, but to make a tripartite argument notably independent of any particular Muslim viewpoint: that “the association of travel and the pursuit of knowledge is not confined to any particular cultural constellation or epoch”; that “knowledge about what is familiar and unfamiliar is produced comparatively,” and finally that “the course and consequences of exposures to the unfamiliar are unpredictable” (2006, 15–16). Farah
Godrej’s plea for including non-
Western perspectives within a cosmopolitan political theory
, similarly, does not expect to advance political theory along non-Western lines so much as enhance the discipline’s capacity for self-reflection
. She recommends an immersive interpretive understanding of texts situated in non-Western cultural frames to thereby “disturb or dislocate our familiar understandings of politics,” working from the assumption that “the very movement of [a] Western reader within the ‘Western tradition’ of political theory . . . may allow her to find familiarity in these [Western] texts that eludes her in the encounter with a non-Western text” (138, 139). Godrej and Euben are representative, but certainly not exhaustive, of how the attempt to unmask
Western universalistic ambitions through localizing or “rooting” knowledge in culturally specific contexts ends up effacing the ability of historically excluded traditions or debates to discipline our own inquiry
.
Despite the fact that these theorists
all recognize
such others as
theory-producing, self-reflective beings
—hence their inclusion within political theory and philosophy— they paradoxically prohibit the often long-standing strains of
[End Page 32] thought that lay behind their claims from displacing the very debates or categories in Western thought recognized to be problematic
. Rather, frameworks of comparison confine theoretical claims to their communities of origin, resulting in the paradoxical insistence by cross-cultural theorists that any project of inclusion cannot transcend its own origins in European
Enlightenment thought
. This is not only for the reason that European thought dominates global knowledge production—a key motivation for postcolonial theorists, whose project turns in large part on exposing the aporia of Western modernity in global settings—but because the individual Western researcher is assumed to be rooted in her local, Europeanized categories to such an extent that his or her understanding of non-Western ideas is permanently constrained
. Indeed, this embeddedness is
seen by many, including Charles Taylor, as the constitutive problem of learning across cultures
(1985, 130–31; Godrej, 158, 159), on the assumption that the only other alternative would be a “view from nowhere” that reinforces existing power relations by according the status quo a claim to neutrality
(Euben 2006, 27).
The starting assumption
of these analyses is revealed to be precisely that we cannot transcend our own situated particularity radically enough to do more than
, in Euben’s words, “ negotiate” these other particulars
, as we “disclose commonalities in the cross-cultural production of knowledge” (45). As Anglophone political theorists, we are situated always-already within the putative tradition that constitutes political theory, and always-already outside of any other possibilities.

Postmodernist lens skews our view of Latin America
Sanchez and Pita ’99, Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature at UC San Diego,
Lecturer at UC San Diego, respectively (Rosaura, Beatrice, “Mapping Cultural/Political Debates in Latin
American Studies”, Cultural Studies, Volume 13:2, Pgs. 290-318, Taylor and Francis Online) EC
What is purportedly a characteristic postmodernist feature, as previously
¶
indicated, is the tendency to see everything as fragmented, heterogeneous,
¶
ephemeral and contingent (Harvey, 1989: 285). Given the rejection of foundationalism
¶
and essentialism, there is a tendency to see everything as  at and to
¶
reject not only deep structures but the very notion of the subject
. Little if any ¶ room is left for a notion of history, only ‘nostalgia’, pastiches of the past, ¶ expressed through representations of representations or, what is perhaps more ¶ the case, there is now an inability to distinguish simulacra from ‘the real’.
This is
¶
so since it is assumed that there are no longer any originals, only copies, endless
¶
replication in an imageproducing society in which cultural production becomes
¶
central precisely because of its quality of self-consuming artefacts and its creation
¶
of a market eager to consume more and more products
. The rei cation of the ¶ sign, the multiplicity or ‘cannibalization’ of styles, the loss of boundaries between ¶ the elite and popular, the notion of multiple identities or positionalities, the ¶ abstraction of space, all are described as postmodernist traits (Harvey, 1989: ¶ 284–307; Jameson, 1988a: 18), along with political notions of pluralism and ¶ radical democracy, that entail a longing for collectivity and ‘groupuscules’. These
¶
are all cast together ahistorically by privileged fractions, who fancy, for example,
¶
that inclusion of minority or Third World literature within their literary canon
¶ is a great equalizer, and that insertion of Third World cultural products within ¶ their markets makes them postmodernist.
¶
Of all of these features, only a select few could be said to characterize Latin
¶
American cultural production, for there undeniably remains today in Latin
¶
America a modernist ‘structure of feeling’.
This stage of modernity produced by ¶ ‘incomplete modernization’,with all its incongruities and ruptures, accounts for ¶ Latin America’s still modernist (and not ‘modernista’) literature with an emphasis ¶ on the divided self, an anguished subject, a fragmented structure marked by
¶
ambiguity and complexity, simultaneous time spaces, an elitist concept of art
¶
(despite allegations to the contrary), all qualities present in modernism that have
¶
all too often also been linked to postmodernism
(Harvey, 1989: 273; Jameson, ¶ 1991:
6–66; Perloff, 1992: 158). Postmodernism cannot, as a result, be seen to this reason and citing ‘the
¶ be anything other than a fuzzy concept; at best it is an ideological  eld marked ¶ by overlapping and slippages of meaning. Perhaps for
¶ heterogeneous local forms produced within and sometimes against its logic’, ¶ Colás, for example, takes issue with postmodernism and  nds it ‘an unsatisfactorily ¶ homogenizing term’ (Colás, 1992: 267). It is, as we have previously indicated, ¶ and as even a cursory glance at the literature will demonstrate, a lax term, ¶ used at times to describe anything and everything.
The utilization of the label ‘postmodernism’ is furthermore increasingly
¶
unsettling as one sees minority literature in the US and Third World literature
¶ in general grasped and inserted within the network of cultural commodity circulation ¶ and classi ed as postmodernist examples of ‘difference’. In a time–space ¶ dimension where it is ‘the thing’ to be ‘ethnic’ and ‘different’,
First World critics
¶ sometimes ‘forget’ to examine the Third World cultural work within a peripheral
¶ context, eviscerating the text in the process
. Menchú’s testimonial again ¶ serves as a good example in this regard, although equally as good, although less ¶ in vogue, perhaps because her class interests are less palatable (to proponents of ¶ new social movements, for example) is that of Domitila Barrios de Chungara (Let ¶ Me Speak!) (1978).
Yet if we further examine the Menchú text
, we are struck not
¶ only by its mediated format, its arrangement according to the anthropologist’s ¶ questions and scheme, but also by its historicity, its call upon collective memory,
¶
its discourses of resistance and social transformation, its concern with the survival
¶
of Quiché culture, its denunciation of the exploitation of both indigenous
¶
and Ladino farm workers and the dispossession of the Indians. Clearly there is no
¶
crisis of historicity here and no absence of revolutionary discourses. The way
¶
Menchú and her people feel about themselves and their world has little to do
¶
with ‘identity politics’ in the First World or with the consciousness of middleclass
¶
consumers in the United States – or elsewhere – within this period of postmodernity.
¶
Much as critics may attempt to force the work into new
¶ representational models and into a framework of pluralism and difference, it
¶
clearly results in an uncomfortable
 t.The dimension of class and political/economic ¶ disparity is still paramount in Menchú’s testimonial, and the alliances that ¶ Menchú sees developing with labour unions, students, peasants and a variety of
¶
Indian groups are not modelled after the ‘alliance politics’ theorized in ‘advanced
¶
countries’ but are instead a continuation of alliances forged within and as a result ¶ of both colonial and capitalist development.

“Postmodernism” does not accurately depict the state of Latin America
Sanchez and Pita ’99, Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature at UC San Diego,
Lecturer at UC San Diego, respectively (Rosaura, Beatrice, “Mapping Cultural/Political Debates in Latin
American Studies”, Cultural Studies, Volume 13:2, Pgs. 290-318, Taylor and Francis Online) EC
That the goal of hegemony is the absorption and recon guration of dissent does
¶
not imply that this is a fait accompli in Latin America today nor
, we would hold, ¶ does it imply that all
Latin American cultural production or ‘lived experience’
¶
can be reductively classi ed as ‘postmodernist’
. Alongside an informal sector of
¶
labour practices, there are coexisting modes of cultural production, subordinated
¶
practices and counter-practice s that need to be mapped out. It is in this regard ¶ that most theoretical writing on newly developing countries is in effect caught ¶ in a transcultural double-bind, constantly having to straddle the general and the ¶ particular, the global and the local.
¶ The concept of postmodernism is in fact a pre-eminent example of this engagement
¶
with categories that con gure both consent and dissent and shape identity
¶
and difference in Latin American theoretical writing, even as theorists endeavour
¶ to create a sense of themselves as separate and distinct from the centre, albeit tied
¶
to a global economic system.Tracing the emergence and proliferation of the terms
¶
of these debates during the decade of the
1980s and early 1990s are a plethora of ¶ publications, including several dealing speci cally with Latin America.6
At the
¶
core of the problematic deployment of the term ‘postmodernism’, and its attendant
¶
corollaries, one  nds, for the most part, a collapsing of differences between
¶
the postmodern period of capitalism, postmodernity, and postmodernism and, secondarily,
¶
we would venture to say, in some cases at least, an eagerness to  t cultural
¶
practices of Latin America within schemata born in and authorized by the First
¶
World. The problem of inclusion and exclusion, as well as frame of reference, is
¶
clearly central to any engagement with these theoretical categories.
Postmodern scholars study Latin America through a structuralist perspective
Brass, Tom (Social and Poltical Sciences Faculty at the University of Cambridge, “On which side of the barricade? Subaltern Resistance in Latin America and Elsewhere”, The Journal of Peasant Studies)
9/8/ 10, http:/ldx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150412331311109
More important than this, however, is the fact that the postmodern
¶
epistemology of the Subaltern Studies project is rooted in structuralism, which
in tum informed the ¶ reactionary linguistic/cultural tum of the 'New philosophers' in France, who emerged in the ¶ mid-1970s and in tum refigured the political right."' The rightwards political trajectory of the ¶ few Philosophers', for the most part ex-Maoists who participated in the ay events of 1968, is ¶ linked invariably and simply to a disillusion which sulted from the chronicling by Solzhenitsyn of ¶ prison life in the Soviet gulag, a discovery which permitted them tu affix the institution of ¶ the concentration camp - associated hitherto solely with fascism - firmly ithin a Marxist
¶
lineage, and thus to condemn socialism as irretrievably
inted (Marxism = the State = the Gulag).'" ¶ However, it is equally clear on the views expressed at that conjuncture by Jean-Marie Benoist, one ¶ of e
'New Philosophers', that their political roots go much deeper, and are to¶ e found in an espousal of structuralism/{postmodernism), and thus also in e theoretical ¶ objections of such theory to Marxism. His structuralist argument is symptomatic, and
¶
anticipates all the classic oppositions of postmodem theory: on the one hand, a facile
¶
dismissiveness of eurocentrism' coupled with an antagonism towards Marxism, historical materialism, science, development and history, and on the other an
¶
endorsement of Heidegger,
Neitzsche, an innate concept of
¶
difference!'otherness', aporia and the lingnistic/cultural tum.
""

Postcolonial epistemology relies on assumptions about Latin American culture- blurs the line between fact and fiction, ruins our ability to understand the struggle of the impoverished in Latin America and creates an imbalance of power
Brass, Tom (Social and Poltical Sciences Faculty at the University of Cambridge, “On which side of the barricade? Subaltern Resistance in Latin America and Elsewhere”, The Journal of Peasant Studies)
9/8/ 10, http:/ldx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150412331311109
Beverley attempts to get round this problem by invoking two forms of
¶
Postmodern aporia (narrative hybridity, subaltern unknowability). Accordingly, much of his analysis is devoted to the conceptual habilitation of testimonio, or 'narrative ... told in the first person by a narrator who is also a real protagonist or witness of the events he or she counts',
as he applied it originally to Rigoberta MenchU, an icon of Latin merican subaltern 'otherness'." On discovering that hers was not stimonio in the sense he had defined it, however,
Beverley reverses its eaning: testimonio
, he announces, no longer has to consist of a first-hand witness account but can now involve 'a kind of narrative hybridity'." In there words, it is composed of a mixture of truth and non-truth.
There is no merit to this kind of inflation
: how long before
one is told that testimonio imposed entirely of falsehoods is still acceptable as testimonio?
Perhaps such a moment will also mark the annexation by literary studies of social cience and history, a process whereby all fact finally becomes its 'other', fiction, and the litersry critic is accordingly installed as the only true subject of struggle, which he himself constitutes in the realm of literature, the fictional but nevertheless only 'real' world'."
¶ A second fom1 of postmodern aporia involves the claim that, as the subaltern is unknowable, he/she cannot be represented, in effect not only abolishing the intellectual accessibility of peasants and labourers but converting them into the mysterious 'other' of conservative discourse.
hose such as Spivak and Kristeva link the
'unrepresentability' of subaltern ulture to the 'unknowability' of the subaltern him/herself: a subject thus efined cannot be represented by someone 'other' (= intellectuals) than im/herself, a view that verges on the solipsistic."
A consequence of ristine subaltern 'otherness' being both unknowable and intellectually accessible, moreover, is that it is unalterable
. Just such an epistemology
is voked by conservatives who clainl that, as the subaltern likes the way he/she is, and feels empowered by his/her culture (of which the economic is erely a part), consequently no one- and especially not intellectuals on the ft - should presume to advise bim/her otherwise. This of course leaves power and control in the hands of the bourgeoisie,
since according to this ¶ ind of argument it is impermissible for an intellectoal even to put to a ubaltern a non-subaltern idea: because the subaltern is unknowable, the atore of the subaltern and therefore of its 'other' cannot even be posed. ven if it could, intellectuals are disbarred from this, because to do so is to privilege a non-subaltern discourse.
Postcolonial research of Latin American culture is done through a capitalist scope- leads to exclusion of important viewpoints and cultures
Brass, Tom (Social and Poltical Sciences Faculty at the University of Cambridge, “On which side of the barricade? Subaltern Resistance in Latin America and Elsewhere”, The Journal of Peasant Studies)
9/8/ 10, http:/ldx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150412331311109
Many examples from Latin America, North America and elsewhere¶ confirm that mass culture is as much a 'from above' as a 'from below' product, a point underlined by the depoliticization \repoliticization of much current popular culture.
The case of Disney comics demonstrates both the longevity of and the extent to which
'popular cultore' is formed not 'from below' but rather 'from above', and also how the reproduction of the agrarian myth is a central aspect of this process, resulting in the formation of what amounts to false consciousness.
"
Control exercised 'from above' over what precisely constitutes the 'from below' agenda of 'popular culture', together with its reproduction, has always been a political
¶
objective pursued globally both by imperial states and by multinational corporations
. “There is accordingly a remarkable overlap between what are usually represented as being

politically divergent processes: on the one hand, the 'natural' identity which both postmodern theory and the subaltern studies project currently insist is culturally empowering for those at the rural grassroots; and on the other, the similarly 'innate'/'authentic'/non-ratioual­ yet palpably disempowering - form of consciousness which capital has attempted historically to create/reproduce 'from above' for its own economic and political ends.¶ As even commentators sympathetic to post-colonial studies themselves
¶
admit, the burgeoning 'alterity' industry in the academy is based on complicity: namely, between local oppositional discourses and capitalism itself, an arrangement whereby the latter commodities the 'marginality' of the former as 'cultural difference'
. In the course of being processed as an ideological commodity, therefore
, 'non-Western' identity is rendered
¶
'exotic' (= 'other'), and literary representations of this exoticism are
¶ consumed within Western capitalism as one more product.
“Nor should the role within metropolitan capitalist contexts of travel writing - a widely read genre and hugely influential form of 'popular culture' - in reproducing the agrarian myth about rural populations in the so-called Third
World be underestimated." To claim, as Beverley does, that all one has to do in such cases is to 'resubalterni2e' the issue is to avoid this question, not to answer it. Not the least of the difficulties is that
'resuhalternization' will amount in the majority of instances merely to the discursive reinstatement of nationalism, and with it the enduring historical opposition between a stereotypically pristine national identity on the one hand and an all­ embracing imperialism on the other.
In other words, agency licensing struggle not between classes but between nations, and within the latter between ethnicities.

United States based research reinforces our flawed epistemology
Castro-Gomez ‘98 a philosopher known for his work on colonial legacies herd in Colombia, He studied philosophy at St. Thomas
University in Bogota, where he was a pupil of faculty members of the Group of Bogotá (Philosophy) , main distributors in Colombia for the Latin American Philosophy . He then traveled to Germany where he graduated in philosophy at the University of Tübingen and later a doctorate in the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in
Frankfurt. On his return to Colombia was a professor at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota and Thinking
Institute investigator. (Santiago, Latin American postcolonial theories, Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice,
10:1, 27-33, http:l/dx.doi.org/10.1080/10402659808426118)
In the early 1990s, thinkers in the United States like Walter Mignolo, John Beverley, Alberto
Moreiras, Ileana Rodriguez, and Norma Alarcon began to reflect upon the political function of
Latin American studies in the North American university and society. They adopted
Indian criticism and established a postcolonial restoration aptly named "Latin American
Studies." According to the aforementioned authors, "Area Studies," and "Latin American
Studies" in particular, have traditionally functioned as ¶ ¶ 30 Santiago Castro-Come;:;¶ discourses inscribed in a bureaucratic-academic rationality that homogenizes the social, economic, political, and sexual differences of Latin American societies. Latin
Americanism, that is, the consolidation of theoretical representations of Latin America produced from the human and social sciences, is identified as a disciplinary mechanism in accord with the imperialist interests of North America's foreign policy. The emergence of the United States as the triumphant power during the Second World War, the financial aid programs for the modernization of the "Third World," the postmodern globalization of the American way of life during the phase called "late capitalism," the political struggle against the expansion of communism in the southern part of South
America-all of these factors must have acted as empirico-transcendental conditions of possibility for Latin Americanist discourse in North American universities.
¶ Similarly to the misrepresentation of India, the United States' "official historiography" of Latin America, presented as a series of literary, philosophical, and sociological representations, structurally conceals difference. In fact, humanist epistemologies, with their emphasis on the centrality of intellectuals and erudition, find themselves symbiotically incorporated in literature programs present in almost all universities. They seek to formulate a critique of modernity's epistemological strategies of subalternization in hopes of moving toward the locus enuntiationis (the site of enunciation) from which subaltern subjects may articulate their own representations.
In the following pages I would like to examine closely the specific premises of two members of the group: John Beverley and Walter
Mignolo.¶ Beverley's criticisms are mainly directed toward the type of literary and humanistic discourse which predominates in Latin American literature depart ments in the U.S. Following Foucault's thesis,
Beverley argues that structures of the university apparatus offer professors and students material that is already reified, "packaged," into rigid canonical schemata that have defined Latin American literature.
Beverley reveals that the institutional organization of such literature programs follows the hegemonic ideology of imperialism. Thus, Spanish, English, and French literature departments exist because Spain, Eng­ land, and France had important empires. Polish and
Romanian literatures, on the other hand, are not given whole departments. In many universities
Latin American literature exists as a subdivision of the "Romance languages," while at the same time literatures from Romania and Poland are studied within the context of
"Slavic Languages ."

The way we try to know the Other has concrete political implications – the production of knowledge aids colonialism and ensures a relationship with alterity founded in violence
Dutta , Professor English at Gauhati University, ‘ 4 (Nandana, November, “The Face of the Other: Terror and the Return of Binarism” Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Vol 6 No 3, p 442-443, T&F Online)//JAG
The implicit ethical pressure would seem to point towards reciprocity, communication, and knowledge as necessary elements of a response to the other. But
‘ knowledge’ is the means through which discipline has been practiced
(as Foucault shows in his famous critiques of the discourses of medicine, penology, etc.).
The problem of knowledge is most acutely brought before us in the discourse of colonialism.
Stephen Greenblatt’s thesis that ‘wonder’ is ‘the central figure in the initial European response to the New World, the decisive emotional and intellectual experience in the presence of radical difference’ (1991: 14) is particularly worthy of notice here. Wonder, which could have sustained otherness, actually becomes a means not to see.
Because ‘the discoverer uses only a fragment and then imagines the rest in the act of appropriation . . . the bit that has actually been seen becomes by metonymy a representation of the whole’
(ibid.: 122). And the recognition that a supplement is active in such
‘other constructions’ is hardly adequate preparation for redress, though its acceptance in our perceptual exercises draws attention to the limits of what we see
. For example when Husserl speaks of the sphere, he indicates the use of the idea of the sphere that offers a short cut to its visualization: Like a flash there appears with the word the representation of a ball, in which the shape alone is specifically attended to. This accompanying representation, whose property crudely approximates to the intended concept and thereby symbolizes it, may then disappear once again, leaving only the word remaining. (Husserl 1994: 32) Such symbolic representation / the sign, the word ‘sphere’ / works through ‘that practical equivalence between authentic representations and their symbols which makes possible the use of the latter in place of the former’.
The natural next step is the possibility of forming ‘symbolic representations which are not founded through prior authentic representations’
(Husserl 1991: 35).
In our discursive exercises ‘the other’ has become just such a sign, calling up preconceived ideas about what constitutes it, intentionality and imaginative fulfillment working overtime, in the process camouflaging and preventing the other from being seen as ‘what one does not know’; and resulting in the glib use of the term in newspaper reports and articles, in student essays, and in everyday conversation. So the problem perhaps needs to be refigured: can the self know the other? What kind of knowledge would this be? Can knowledge be separated from violation? Can/ should alterity be reduced to the familiarity of knowledge?
‘
Communication’ could
also degenerate into power over the other, through a panoptic, unidirectional thrust, as was evident in colonial educational and administrative practice, but, closer to us, demonstrated in the media, in the use of satellite television, when the other can be transformed by the sheer barrage of forceful images emitted
(the media coverage of the
WTC explosions and their aftermath, the percolation of the same rhetoric into journalistic reports of events following September 11, like the attacks on the Jammu and Kashmir assembly or the December 13 attack on the Indian Parliament, the Godhra-Gujarat carnage, the particular polarization of narratives, images of ‘good’ and ‘evil’
), in the universalization of knowledge practice through quicker and more effective circulation.
The question here: should we shift from ‘seeing’ to ‘listening’?
‘Reciprocity’, which may mean exchange with the other, in such a situation could turn out to be extremely superficial
. The idea of intersubjectivity (for example, in Lacan 1988), merely suggests an interchangeability of subject/object positions, just as critiques of Althusser’s
(1971) conception of unidirectional subject construction through hailing and interpellation retains the polarity of subject and object. This is rather unfortunately brought home to us in the ‘application’ of literary theory to a literary text: in most instances the theory simply finds itself in the literary text; the difference is only in the degrees of sophistication of the methods of application, not in the reciprocal relationship of theory and literary text. Implicit in these issues is the persistence of binarism, in disguise and without.
If binarism characterized structuralism and was shaken off by poststructuralism, our worlds, our contexts, and the accompanying rhetoric nudge it back into our thought horizons. Modern brands of terror contribute to this polarization in particularly emphatic ways, disabling us to live with otherness, evoking in us the desire to either convert or kill the other. If
, however, the material conditions of our world force the return of binarism, it becomes imperative to search for a redeeming version that will grow out of it.

The historical “knowledge” we have of Latin American culture is seen through a European perspective-blurs the truth and hurts plebian struggle
Brass, Tom (Social and Poltical Sciences Faculty at the University of Cambridge, “On which side of the barricade? Subaltern Resistance in Latin America and Elsewhere”, The Journal of Peasant Studies)
9/8/ 10, http:/ldx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150412331311109
¶ ¶
It is the acceptability to landlords and rich peasants alike of the pro-peasan
¶
discourse informing the agrarian myth, together with the close link between the latter and the politics of nationality and tradition, that poses difficulties for Latin American subalternists
. Because the views of those on the ultra­ nationalist political right in 1930s
Latin America were from the 1920s onwards influenced strongly by the writings and ideas of their European counterparts
(Jose Ortega y Gasset, Jose Calvo Sotelo and Jose Antonio Primo de
Rivera among them), many commentators equate reactionary discourse in Latin America simply with a harkening back to European culture and tradition
(Hispanidad)." Whilst true in part, this argun1ent overlooks the extent to which a specifically populist form of right-win reactionary discourse about rural society locates its nationalism in idealized forms of popular culture and indigenous tradition within
Latin America itself.
" Not the least of the many difficulties faced by those who attempt to apply a subaltern framework to Latin America, therefore, is the crucial role played by the peasantry in the discourse of the political right, where it takes the form of a specifically plebeian national identity deployed by conservatives and reactionaries as a weapon in their struggle with the left.
¶
In describing the subaltern studies project as a new approach
Beverle
¶
ignores the long history of such ideas in Latin America generally and in the Andean region in particular." Grouped under the rubric indigenismo, the lineage in question extends from adllerents such as Jose Carlos Mariategui Hildebrando Castro Pozo and
Hugo Blanco, whose formal position on the Peruvian left masked their populism, to explicitly populist organizations ¶
Exporting radical democracy treats the third world as an object from which to extract information resources – their knowledge production is indistinguishable from colonialism in form
Kapoor , Professor Enviro Studies at York University, ‘ 8 (Ilan, “The Postcolonial Politics of
Development” p 46-47)//JAG
Universities
have tended to pride themselves as institutions where knowledge can be pursued for its own sake, and
where education is delivered in a neutral and objective manner
. But of late, these claims have fallen into disrepute. Far from being pure and unmotivated, knowledge and learning are shown to be subject to myriad institutional demands
(Bérubé & Nelson 1995; Kuhn 1970; Miyoshi 2000): pressures to ‘publish or perish’
(for faculty tenure and/or promotion); the imperative for prestige and ‘originality’; competition
(among students
and faculty) for research funding and grants; jockeying
between students for
high grades
; or ‘turf wars’ among researchers
.
These institutional demands are shaped
, in turn, by external factors, such as government funding or cutbacks to education, corporatization of the university
, the relative availability of research funds for humanities/social sciences versus natural sciences, or state policies on immigra- tion or multiculturalism (that may affect pedagogical content and style, for exam- ple).
Spivak encapsulates this intersection of academic learning and will to power, this knowledge framing according to institutional demands and pressures, under the rubric of
‘teaching machine’ (1993; cf. 1990a: 5). But she casts a particularly critical eye on how this knowledge framing intersects, in turn, with Third World. She is concerned primarily with the politics of knowledge production, specifi- cally the way fieldwork and collect data. She calls this in
which Western university researchers, armed with personal/ institutional interests, go to the South to do a process of ‘information retrieval’
(1990a: 59), wherein the Third World becomes a ‘repository of an ethnographic “cultural difference
”’ (1999: 388).10
It is
, for her, another form of imperialism, the Third World once again providing ‘resources’ for the First
World
; but unlike classical imperialism, it is ‘extraction of surplus-value without extra-economic coercion’ (Spivak 1988a: 290; cf. Best 1999: 486, 492). Seen in this light,
Western intellectual production mirrors, and is
many ways complicit with, Western imperialism
. Cultural imperialism supple- ments classical (socioeconomic) imperialism, with the Third World producing both ‘the wealth and the possibility of the

cultural self-representation of the “First World”’ (1990a: 96; cf. 1988a: 271). Spivak picks up two specific dimensions of this cultural imperialism
. The first is
what she refers to as the ‘benevolent first-world appropriation and reinscription of the Third World as an Other’ (1988a: 289). She means by it the retrieval of information from the South, not to encounter the Third World on its own terms, but for other, usually First World, purposes
. To illustrate, she takes Julia Kristeva, the noted French feminist scholar, to task over her book, About
Chinese Women (1977). Ostensibly a feminist book about ancient Chinese matriarchal institutions, Spivak reproaches it for being ahistorical (for too easily extrapolating the category of ‘woman’ to ancient Chinese social institutions), romantic (for implying that contemporary China has ‘declined’ relative to the former idyllic age), and colonialist (for benevolently using the Chinese example, but to argue for the ultimate Western feminist political agenda — a non-patriarchic feminist utopia). For Spivak, Kristeva is not interested in Chinese women per se, but in appropri- ating them for her own purposes. This amounts to exoticizing and orientalizing the women, treating the ‘margin’ as tourist
(1988b: 134-53).

Notions about “development” stress the need for a change in view and discourse
Sanchez and Pita ’99, Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature at UC San Diego,
Lecturer at UC San Diego, respectively (Rosaura, Beatrice, “Mapping Cultural/Political Debates in Latin
American Studies”, Cultural Studies, Volume 13:2, Pgs. 290-318, Taylor and Francis Online) EC
What is particularly contested
, in part or entirely, is the use of Eurocentric
¶
paradigms to refer to economic, political and cultural spheres in the
¶
peripheral world
(Nelson Osorio, cited in Yúdice, 1989:
106). For other critics ¶ not only is the notion itself of ‘centre/periphery’ or even the category of
‘Third
¶
World’ taken to task
, wholly or in part, but so too the very notion of ‘development’
¶ (Escobar,
1992) or what Chakrabarty calls the ‘transition narrative’, used ¶ to explain the periphery in terms of an incomplete transition, a lack or an absence ¶
(Chakrabarty, 1992a: 4–5).3 Although discrediting of the ‘development’ model ¶ is not unique to the periphery (see Touraine’s critique in the 1981 translation), ¶
Third World theorists in particular reject discourses of modernity that have led
¶ to the representation of their continents as ‘underdeveloped’, stressing the need
¶
for
new discourses and new forms of representation
(Escobar, 1992: 48).
¶ Whether the posited alternative discourses challenge the foundations of capitalism ¶ or merely construct new local discourses that sustain the power of capital is, ¶ however, a key question
.
¶
The move away from totalizing paradigms and towards ‘multiple
¶ responses/propositions
’ (Yúdice, 1992: 4), however fashionable today, suggests
¶
analyses framed in terms of the particular and the local, a microsocial approach
¶ that, while potentially in opposition to ‘globalism’
, not only tends towards ¶ formulations in terms of ‘the very fragmentation which a mobile capitalism and ¶ exible accumulation can feed upon’ (Harvey, 1989: 303) but
also ignores the
¶
fact that particular ‘master narratives’ are strategically important for guiding particular
¶
social struggles
(Fraser and Nicholson, 1990: 26), acknowledged or not.4
¶
Postmodern social theories posited to displace prior analytical categories mus t, ¶ in any case, take
the nondiscursive into account
; that is, the impact of globalization
¶
on a multitiered cultural spher e. Harvey, for example, suggests that the ¶ restructuring taking place in this period of late capitalism, with its multinational ¶ corporations, high-tech informatization, international working class, transition ¶ to  exible accumulation in the midst of a weakening to some extent of the autonomy ¶ and power of nation-states, has compressed time and space to the point ¶ where volatility and a growing homogenization are the rule and not the exception, ¶ within the centre as much as on the periphery (Harvey, 1989: 191). Thus ¶ envisioned, we are all within ‘the culture of postmodernism’.
The idea of “modernizing” undermines ties to previous ways of life
Sanchez and Pita ’99, Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature at UC San Diego,
Lecturer at UC San Diego, respectively (Rosaura, Beatrice, “Mapping Cultural/Political Debates in Latin
American Studies”, Cultural Studies, Volume 13:2, Pgs. 290-318, Taylor and Francis Online) EC
In developing countries,‘modernization’ is still a project
¶
to be realized rather than something taken for granted. The past,
meaning not a ¶ pre-colonial past but the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
, is not yet an
‘object
¶
of nostalgia’ in the Third World but rather still very much a part of today’s
¶ reality
; the resulting incongruities are of course jarring. For example, the adobe
¶
Indian huts of the Ecuadorian sierra, although now disappearing, are still visible
¶
to anyone driving on the now paved Pan American highway, from which, moreover,
¶
one can also glimpse an occasional satellite dish. To account for these juxtapositions, ¶ one must realize, as Chakrabarty explains, that ‘ history exists in
¶
Third World societies precisely because it has not yet been devoured by consumerist
¶
social practices’
(Chakrabarty, 1992a:
57). Something similar could ¶ perhaps likewise be said about the First World itself,where internal Third World ¶ and/or ethnic spaces lend credence to the idea that the death of history has been,
¶
to say the least, greatly exaggerated.

Euro-American’s views on Latin America based on upheavals
Timothy Smith, 06- Assistant Professor of Anthropology (“Views from the “South”: Intellectual
Hegemony and Postmodernism in Latin America,” Taylor and Francis Online, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00938150500535554#tabModule)//NG
Throughout the last two decades, the research of many anthropologists working in Latin America has been framed by the social, political, and economic upheavals that have marked a number of countries devastated by armed conflicts, counterinsurgency wars, economic crises, corrupt governments, and foreign intervention.
In moves towards peace and reconciliation, however, emerging governments and their foreign aid donors have strategically used the international rhetoric of “democratic transition” and “democratic openings”—many times based on a Euroamerican model
—as well as focusing on decentralization and the attempt to reconcile multiculturalism with the national project
.
Included in this process is a celebration of human rights, increased tolerance of ethnic claims, and the challenge of guaranteeing minority rights within a neoliberal framework.
Moreover, an emerging acknowledgment of ethnic and cultural diversity is forcing accommodating states to reformulate their definition of citizenship
in order to maintain the appearance of their willingness to cooperate in the stable institution of democratic forms of government (Kymlicka 2001).¶ For nearly forty years, scholars of (and from)
Latin America have pointed to the importance and necessity of intellectuals to cover these issues, and to provide an understanding of a region that has been marked by utopian revolutions, foreign intervention, troubled economies, military repression, and a failed modernist paradigm of development.
In No
Apocalypse, No Integration, Martín Hopenhayn (2001) attempts to lay out what he considers the defining failures of Latin American social planning and the roles of those intellectuals involved with or against the ill-formed models of development narratives. Both utopian movements and the vanguards of development failed to meet the challenges of countries whose populations escaped the violence of war, genocide, and state repression.
Instead, they were met with development policy, orthodox Marxism, and dependency theory. However, from the ashes of these paradigms, visions of the Left, and the dismantled state project come new alternatives for social transformation and the creation of new and viable channels for change. Hopenhayn punctuates the argument by claiming that, while the energies and beliefs in participatory responsibility continue to exist in new social movements, albeit fragmented and dispersed at the present, they must be given new meaning in order to survive. Participation in alternative pathways must be relevant and have importance in daily life. The role of the intellectual is not to be abandoned. Rather, intellectuals can make themselves relevant by framing new objects of study in their projects, by making use of Latin
America's historical contingencies, and by abandoning the search for any one new paradigm; social scientists must advocate an epistemological pluralism if they are to understand the complexities of postrevolutionary Latin America.
Intellectuals bad- see the fight against oppression as a sign of inferiority rather than the road to rights
Sanchez and Pita ’99, Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature at UC San Diego,
Lecturer at UC San Diego, respectively (Rosaura, Beatrice, “Mapping Cultural/Political Debates in Latin
American Studies”, Cultural Studies, Volume 13:2, Pgs. 290-318, Taylor and Francis Online) EC
At the level of political debate, it becomes increasingly clear that there is at
¶
times an
intolerance and even impatience today among some Latin American
¶
intellectuals with the very notion of revolution and with those who would continue
¶
to assert the centrality of class location and who seek macrosocial transformations.
¶
This is evident in Monsiváis’ recent article, translated and published ¶ in the L.A. Times, giving his reaction to the Chiapas Zapatista (EZLN) guerrillas, ¶ who rejected the government’s  rst proposed peace plan. reveal
¶
His comments
disappointment verging on exasperation with ‘their unrealistic reasoning’
(Monsiváis, ¶
1994).
Monsiváis does not support the Zapatistas’ armed struggle nor does
¶
he see the need to continue it, despite admiring ‘their sense of community’ and
¶
sharing many of their grievances: ‘the high-level corruption, the imperial presidency,
¶
the state party, the terrible abandonment of indigenous communities and
¶
the rejection of democracy
.’ As is clear,

Monsiváis sees the problems of the ¶ indigenous populations in Chiapas in political terms and views the struggle in ¶ cultural terms.
The political battle which he credits them with winning is the
¶
media war.
We would have to agree that sub-comandante Marcos has made it a ¶ point to voice his demands in terms of more palatable discourses, such as subalternity ¶ (giving ‘a voice to the voiceless, a face to the faceless’, etc.); yet, what in ¶ effect the Indians claim is land, health bene ts, education, work and political ¶ reform.
The coinciding of the Chiapas revolt with the signing of NAFTA makes
¶
the point that the leaders explicitly meant to tie their grievances with the larger
¶
concerns of Mexican workers and citizens
. Their call for democracy however
¶
leads Monsiváis to question their ‘posing as national representatives’ and their
¶
appropriation of the expression ‘civil society’, which he himself elsewhere used
¶
to describe non-state-linked urban movements
(Monsiváis, 1992: 13), as if claims ¶ to
‘civil society’ were reserved to a select civilian sector and not to others.
¶ of cultural and
¶
It is perhaps an ironic and telling sign of the self-delusion
political critics that while some see armed struggle as passé, as a stage superseded
¶
by new social movements,
‘
U.S. policy makers envision more rather than less
¶
armed confrontation with Third World “enemies
” (Marxist-Leninists , terrorists,
¶
drug-traf ckers, religious fundamentalists, etc.)’
(Jonas, 1990: 21).
Reactions to
¶
social conditions themselves, which the United Nations Economic
Commission
¶
for Latin America estimates leave 44 per cent of the region’s population
(183
¶
million) living in poverty and 44 per cent of the workforce unemployed or underemployed,
¶
are a key issue.
Latin American countries, following the neo-Liberal
¶
economic policies imposed by the IMF and the World Bank have in recent years ¶ imposed brutal austerity programmes reducing government expenditures, in ¶ effect instituting a process of pauperization for many (Petras and Vieux, 1992: ¶ 10–14). Thus from this drastic  scal retrenchment could be
¶ fundamental questions of economic disparity and widespread conditions
¶
of human misery resulting
said to contribute to continued popular mobilization and struggle
, this (not surprisingly, ¶ perhaps) despite the defection of a number of leftist intellectuals to neo¶ Liberal policies. As Petras and Vieux indicate (1992:
19):
The aff’s liberal approach to conflict resolution reduces peace to an end – their discourse reinscribes a rigid universalism
Richmond , Professor IR Intercollege in Cyprus, ‘ 6 (Oliver, “Patterns of Peace” Global Society, Vol 20
No 4, p 367-394, InformaWorld)//JAG
These critical arguments carry important policy implications for the construction of peace, contrary to received wisdom that such approaches cannot engage with the policy world
. For example, if, as the liberal peace argument dictates, peace is generalisable, universalisable, and can actually be constructed, then the critical project of a universal emancipation indicates that the current development of the liberal peace project may lead to further emancipatory refinements, perhaps relating to human security issues. The more radical criticism associated with post-structuralism would argue that this is not a viable project, but this offers little for policy makers other than a greater sensitivity to the unintended consequences of their own actions. Either way, what these
approaches indicate is the need to uncover these
unintended consequences, and to respond to them in order to enhance the sustainability of peace
. Even better, this peace should not just be externally sustainable but also self-sustainable
. Yet reframing peace as communicative action based upon Habermasian dialogic relations underlines the negotiation and mediation that is played out in any discussion of peace between actors, interests, norms, and values—past, present, and future—as well as the role of individuals in claiming agency in their emancipation.73 This type of process—of learning and of feedback—does not seem apparent in most theorisations and practices that contribute to peacebuilding and the peacebuilding consensus. Indeed, this development of a “fourth generation” in peace and conflict theory seems to be a counter-discourse to the mainstream dogma of peace.74 However, it is also problematic because the sort of universalism inherent even in an emancipatory discourse such as in critical theory, which privileges liberal
positions, may tend towards the notion that one actor in a relationship has better
knowledge or more expertise in a particular area and therefore must act to emancipate the other
. In one sense,
this is exactly the conundrum faced by the liberal peace and its associated peacebuilding consensus. From this perspective, peace is
simply a “differend”, which, whatever its creators’ best intentions, simply
reproduces injustice and conflict for some of its constituents
.75 What these emancipatory approaches to understanding peace underline is that some of the conceptualisations of peace tend to fall into mainstream, orthodox and conservative discourses, whereas others76 are effectively counter-discourses, which in critical fashion indicate that the notion of peace simply cannot be deployed without an adjective specifying what type of peace is being referred to, who defines it, and for what reasons. The
liberal peace is a classic example of this, and indicates that built into its implicit theorisation is an acknowledgement of its limitations. In effect such orthodox conceptualisations of peace as an ideal form, obtainable or unobtainable, represent a discursive game in which the use of the term often disguises or legitimates baser objectives. The liberal peace and the emancipatory notion of peace are often equated, although there are significant

differences.
Yet it is a characteristic of most discussions of, claims about, and conceptualisations of peace that its emancipatory qualities are claimed and
emphasised, mainly because it is such a powerful normative concept.
Perception of Latin America as failing lead to neoliberalism- increases social division
Sanchez and Pita ’99, Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature at UC San Diego,
Lecturer at UC San Diego, respectively (Rosaura, Beatrice, “Mapping Cultural/Political Debates in Latin
American Studies”, Cultural Studies, Volume 13:2, Pgs. 290-318, Taylor and Francis Online) EC
Neo-Liberal projects are also no doubt a response to the perceived failures
¶
of several revolutionary struggles, and the incapacity of Third World nations to
¶
survive as socialist states, given the crushing blockades, embargoes and destabilizing
¶
counter-insurgency, backed overtly or covertly by the United States.
The
¶
odds have been overwhelmingly against any small Third World nation seeking to
¶
delink itself from transnational corporate and US military domination, especially
¶
in the absence of regional alliances to provide support
; the unviability of these ¶ efforts has led to a rethinking of social change and revolution among the Left.
¶ For this reason many have traded in socialism for neo-Liberal calls for redemocratization
¶
and have grounded hopes for political action in the new social movements,
¶
forgetting that liberal democracy is the handmaiden of modernization
; ¶ that is, the consolidation of bourgeois democracy, which tends, if anything, to ¶ preclude social transformation, much as has been historically the case in the
¶
United States, with its increasingly polarized class and racially divided society.

We control impact uniqueness – the dichotomized knowledge of the aff ensures endless warfare because otherness can only be encountered as a target for US bombs – their epistemology rigs the game in favor of imperialist conclusions**
Chow , Professor Comparative Lit at Brown, ‘ 6 (“The Age of the World Target” p 36-39)//JAG
In the decades since 1945, whether in dealing with the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, North Korea, Vietnam, and countries in Central America, or during the Gulf Wars, the United States has been conducting war on the basis of a certain kind of knowledge production, and producing knowledge on the basis of war.
War and knowledge enable and foster each other primarily through the collective fantasizing of some foreign or alien body that poses danger to the "self" and the "eye" that is the nation. Once the monstrosity of this foreign body is firmly established in the national consciousness, the decision makers of the U.S. government often talk and behave as though they had no choice but war.38
War
, then, is acted out as a moral obligation to expel an imagined dangerous alienness from the United States' self-concept as the global custodian of freedom and democracy. Put in a different way, the "moral element," insofar as it produces knowledge about the "self" and "other"‚—and hence the "eye" and its "target"‚—as such, justifies war by its very dichotomizing logic. Conversely, the violence of war, once begun, fixes the oilier in its attributed monstrosity and affirms the idealized image of the self.
In this regard, the pernicious stereotyping of the Japanese during the Second World War—not only by US military personnel but also by social and behavioral scientists‚—was simply a flagrant example of an ongoing ideological mechanism that had accompanied Western treatments of non-
Western "others" for centurie s. In the hands of academics such as Geoffrey Gorer, writes Dower, the notion that was collectively and "objectively" formed about the
Japanese was that they were "a clinically compulsive and probably collectively neurotic people, whose lives were governed by ritual and 'situational ethics,' wracked with insecurity, and swollen with deep, dark currents of repressed resentment and aggression."39 As Dower points out, such stereotyping was by no means accidental or unprecedented: The Japanese, so "unique" in the rhetoric of World War Two, were actually saddled with racial stereotypes that Europeans and Americans had applied to nonwhites for centuries: during the conquest of the New World, the slave trade, the Indian wars in the United States, the agitation against Chinese immigrants in America, the colonization of Asia and Africa, the U.S. conquest of the Philippines at the turn of the century. These were stereotypes, moreover, which had been strongly reinforced by nineteenth-century Western science. In the final analysis, in fact, these favored idioms denoting superiority and inferiority transcended race and represented formulaic expressions of Self and Other in general.40 The moralistic divide between "self" and "other" constitutes the production of knowledge during the U.S. Occupation of Japan after the Second World War as well. As Monica Braw writes, in the years immediately after 1945, the risk that the United States would be regarded as barbaric and inhumane was carefully monitored, in the main by cutting off Japan from the rest of the world through the ban on travel, control of private mail, and censorship of research, mass media information, and other kinds of communication. The entire Occupation policy was permeated by the view that"the United States was not to be accused; guilt was only for Japan":41 As the Occupation of Japan started, the atmosphere was military. Japan was a defeated enemy that must be subdued. The Japanese should be taught their place in the world: as a defeated nation, Japan had no status and was entitled to no respect. People should be made to realize that any catastrophe that had befallen them was of their own making. Until they had repented, they were suspect. If they wanted to release information about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it could only be for the wrong reasons, such as accusing the United States of inhumanity. Thus this information was suppressed.42 As in the scenario of aerial bombing, the elitist and aggressive panoramic "vision" in which the other is beheld means that the sufferings of the other matter much less than the transcendent aspirations of the self. And, despite being the products of a particular culture's technological fanaticism, such transcendent aspirations are typically expressed in the form of selfless universalisms.
As Sherry puts it, "
The reality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seemed less important than the bomb's effect on 'mankind's destiny,' on 'humanity's choice,' on 'what is happening to men's minds,' and on hopes (now often extravagantly revived) to achieve world government.
"43
On Japan's side, as Yoneyama writes, such a
"global narrative of the universal history of humanity" has helped sustain "a national victimology and phantasm of innocence throughout most of the postwar years
." Going one step further, she remarks: "
The idea that Hiroshima's disaster ought to be remembered from the transcendent and anonymous position of humanity . . .might best be described as 'nuclear universalism.'
"44 Once the relations among war, racism, and knowledge production are underlined in these terms, it is no longer possible to assume, as some still do, that the recognizable features of modern war‚—its impersonality, coerciveness, and deliberate cruelty‚—are "divergences" from the "antipathy" to violence and to conflict that characterize the modern world.45 Instead, it would be incumbent on us to realize that the pursuit of war‚—with its use of violence‚—and the pursuit of peace‚— with its cultivation of knowledge‚—are the obverse and reverse of the same coin, the coin that I have been calling "the age of the world target." Rather than being irreconcilable opposites, war and peace are coexisting, collaborative functions in the continuum of a virtualized world.
More crucially still, only the privileged nations of the world can afford to wage war and preach peace at one and the same time. As Sherry writes, "The United States had

different resources with which to be fanatical: resources allowing it to take the lives of others more than its own, ones whose accompanying rhetoric of technique disguised the will to destroy
."46 From this it follows that, if indeed political and military acts of cruelty are not unique to the United States—a point which is easy enough to substantiate—what is nonetheless remarkable is the manner in which such acts are, in the United States, usually cloaked in the form of enlightenment and altruism, in the form of an aspiration simultaneously toward technological perfection and the pursuit of peace
. In a country in which political leaders are held accountable for their decisions by an electorate
, violence simply cannot‚—as it can in totalitarian countries‚—exist in the raw.
Even the most violent acts must be adorned with a benign, rational story.
It is in the light of such interlocking relations among war, racism, and knowledge production that I would make the following comments about area studies, the academic establishment that crystallizes the connection between the epistemic targeting of the world and the "humane" practices of peacetime learning.
This logic of visibility transforms the globe into a picture whose existence is defined in terms of its very representability. It is precisely this logic which necessitates atomic annihilation as the end point of this process of presencing otherness.
Chow , Professor Comparative Lit at Brown, ‘ 6 (Rey, “The Age of the World Target” p 29-31)//JAG
I should make clear that what I am suggesting is not simply that hard science was replaced by a visual gimmick, that the "real thing" was replaced by a mere representation. Instead, it is that the dropping of the bombs marked the pivot of the progress of science, a pivot which was to continue its impact on all aspects of human life long after the Second World War was over. Science has
, in modernity, reached the paradoxical point whereby it is simultaneously advanced and reduced
.
Having progressed far beyond the comprehension of nonspecialists and with complexities that challenge even the imagination of specialists, science is meanwhile experienced daily as the practically useful, in the form of miniscule, convenient, matter-of-fact operations that the lay person can manipulate at his or her fingertips.
This is the situation to which Martin Heidegger refers in a passage such as this one from his well-known essay "The Age of the World Picture": Everywhere and in the most varied forms and disguises the gigantic is making its appearance. In so doing, it evidences itself simultaneously in the tendency toward the increasingly small. We have only to think of numbers in atomic physics.
The gigantic presses forward in a form that actually seems to make it disappear—in the annihilation of great distances
by the airplane in the setting before us of foreign and remote worlds in their everydayness, which is produced at random through radio by a flick of hand. Our daily uses of the light switch, the television, the computer, the cell phone and other types of devices are all examples of this paradoxical situation of scientific advancement, in which the portentous what Heidegger calls "the gigantic"‚—disappears into the mundane, the effortless, and the intangible. We perform these daily operations with ease, in forgetfulness of the theories and experiments that made them possible.
Seldom do we need to think of the affinity between these daily operations and a disaster such as the atomic holocaust. To confront that affinity is to confront the terror that is the basis of our everyday life.
For Heidegger, hence, the explosion of the atomic bomb is "the mere final emission of what has long since taken place, has already happened"15‚—a process of annihilation that began with the very arrival of modern science itself. From a military perspective, the mushroom cloud of smoke and dust signals the summation of a history of military invention that has gone hand in hand with the development of representational technologies
, in particu lar the technologies of seeing. As Paul Virilio asserts, "For men at war, the function of the weapon is the function of the eye."16
Virilio argues time and again in his work that close affinities exist between war and vision. Because military fields were increasingly reconfigured as fields of visual perception, preparations for war were increasingly indistinguishable from preparations for making a film: "The Americans prepared future operations in the Pacific," Virilio writes, "by sending in film-makers who were supposed to look as though they were on a location-finding mission, taking aerial views for future film production."17 In the essay cited above, Heidegger argues that in the age of modern technology, the world has become a "world picture." By this, he means that the process of (visual) objectification has become so indispensable in the age of modern scientific research that understanding‚—"conceiving" and "grasping" the world‚—is now an act inseparable from the act of seeing‚— from a certain form of "picturing."
However, he adds, "picture" in this case does not mean an imitation. As he explains:
World picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as a picture. What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth. Wherever we have the world picture, an essential decision takes place regarding what is, in its entirety. The Being of whatever is, is sought and found in the representedness of the latter."
For Heidegger, the world becoming a picture is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age, and he emphasizes the point "that the world becomes picture is one and the same event with the event of man's (sic)

becoming subiectum in the midst of that which is."
19 By the word subiectum, he is referring to "that-which-lies-before, which, as ground, gathers everything onto itself."20
As such "ground," men (sic) struggle to conquer the world as their own particular pictures, bringing into play an "unlimited power for the calculating, planning, and molding of all things." As is clearly demonstrated by the case of the United States, science and research have become "an absolutely necessary form of this establishing of self in the world
."21
Imperialism Bad- leads to indebtedness, unemployment, increased imports, insufficient pay, greater social gap, poverty, and illiteracy
Sanchez and Pita ’99, Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature at UC San Diego,
Lecturer at UC San Diego, respectively (Rosaura, Beatrice, “Mapping Cultural/Political Debates in Latin
American Studies”, Cultural Studies, Volume 13:2, Pgs. 290-318, Taylor and Francis Online) EC
Contemporary
Latin American testimonials
, for example, are
, at one level, ¶ indisputably commodities produced within this postmodern period
; that is,within
¶
the transnational phase of capitalism, for a world market
.
This global restructuring
¶
of capitalist production
(cultural and otherwise) is said to signal the triumph ¶ of modernization and the end of the modernist developmental or historical paradigm ¶ (Jameson, 1991: 324).
But in fact, within the Third World, modernization ¶ is an ongoing project having a tremendous impact on the restructuring of Latin
¶
American economies, although not in the sense of ‘emancipation from want’
and ¶ full integration into a mass economic and political democracy, but rather of its
¶
penetration by massive foreign investment, multinationals, informational technology
¶
and hardware and its insertion within a global circuit of consumption
, ¶ especially of cultural commodities. It goes without saying that whatever processes ¶ are at work at the cultural level, the postmodern period of capitalism has in fact
¶ meant increased capitalist penetration, indebtedness, balance-of-payment dif -
¶ culties, in ation, rising unemployment and underemployment, the growth of an
¶ informal sector of the economy, the restructuring of local cultures, and of course,
¶ increased consumption
, especially by local middle and upper classes, with access ¶ to videorecorders, radios, televisions and other cultural artefacts. Attendant to ¶ this widening consumer society, to which we will return below, is an intensi cation ¶ of uneven development itself, for the installation of growing numbers of ¶ assembly plants and manufacturing subsidiaries, especially from the
US, motivated
¶
by local market penetration and the availability of cheap labour, has in good
¶
measure intensi ed marginality, poverty and, in some instances, illiteracy
.

Isolation of regions in area studies creates North/South binaries and marginalizes Latinos in the United states
Alverez, Arias, and Hal ’11 – respectively - Director, Center for Latin American, Caribbean and
Latino Studies; Professor of Latin American Literature University of Texas at Austin; Professor of
Anthropology and of African and African Diaspora Studies University of Texas at Austin (Sonia E., Arturo, and Charles R., Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, “Re-visioning Latin American Studies in the United States,” Vol. 17, No. 2, December 2011, 131-145
Questions of how theory travels, of translations and multiple positionalities within¶ contemporary LAS are further complicated by the burgeoning numbers of diasporic Latin¶ American-origin intellectuals who today work in academic institutions of the North, as¶ compared to our/their scarce numbers during the heyday of Cold War Area Studies.”¶ In that respect, Southeast Asian/ist scholar
Vincent Raphael argues that the presence of
¶ what he calls
the ‘immigrant imaginary’ has increasingly complicated the practice of Area¶ Studies in the United States, calling ‘into question the integrationist logic inherent in¶ liberal conceptions of area studies’.“’
The growing participation of diasporic intellectuals¶ in Area Studies, he further contends, makes it ‘harder to determine where exactly the¶ “home” of such scholarship lies and who its privileged practitioners or audiences might¶ be’.' ° The connection between the Latin
American immigrant imaginary and that of¶ multi-generation US Latinas/os within institutionalized Latin
American and Latina/o¶
Studies formations is further highlighted , and at the same time confounded, by the fact that¶ ‘lclontemporary diasporic humanities
faculty teach, in relative terms, literature, politics,¶ anthropology, ethnography, and
“areas” to those from “there” who are now permanently¶ “here ” and who constantly have to think themselves in relation to those
Others who came¶ here earlier , under considerably different conditions’.2°¶ It is this inexorable confounding of ‘here’ and ‘there’ in the Latina/o Américas that has¶ spurred some of the most exciting cross-border, interdisciplinary work in recent decades , a¶ third vital force in the de~centering and revitalization of LAS. Transmigration and¶ accelerated flows of people, ideas, and capital across the America s has forced a¶ re-imagining of both ‘Latin America’ and US ‘Latinas/os.’ Further incorporating the¶ voices and perspectives of Latina/os in the United States and of other historically¶ marginalized groups in the Latinalo Américas, therefore, is vital to the enterprise of de-¶ centering Latin American
Studies. Indeed
, in (historically belated) recognition that Latin¶ America and the Caribbean stretch well into the
North of the Américas , that there is no¶ inside/outside, that borders within and without countries in our hemispheres are¶ increasingly fluid , Latina/o Studies/Diaspora Studies constitute a set of miradas/epis-¶ temologies which should be a requisite to a genuinely revitalized LAS.
Representations create state policies that oppress and coerce indigenous people
Crow 10 -
Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at the University of Bristol (Joanna,
“Introduction: Intellectuals, Indigenous Ethnicity and the State in Latin America”, 8/28/10, Latin American and
Caribbean Ethnic Studies Volume 5 Issue 2, www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17442221003787068#.UfwgaW15Oks)//BZ
The state is a crucially important classifier and manager. It enacts policies that affect indigenous people, determines who is given what rights , and creates and promotes images of indigenous peoples (through museums, schools, official national symbols, etc.). It also has an impact on intellectuals’ representations of indigenous peoples : it can endorse certain people's work, thereby securing the dissemination of that work and often providing a salary (e.g. Diego Rivera in
Mexico); it can allow people a space to operate without sanctioning their work (e.g. José Carlos
Mariátegui during Augusto Leguía's oncenio in Peru); it can repress those individuals who go too far in their defense of indigenous rights (in Colombia a number of intellectual–activists have been eliminated by forces linked to the government). Possibly Foote's article here provides the most compelling

example of the state's role in the dissemination of images (or histories) of indigenous peoples. In some cases, the link is not so direct but nonetheless important. For example, Wood notes how critical technological developments have been for the production of indigenous cinema ; these are not controlled by the state , but they can be encouraged , disseminated and – more importantly – financed by the state . However, it is also important to underline the impact that intellectuals can have on the state, for it is not a one-way relationship. Baud recently made a pertinent point in this regard: The coercive and authoritarian elements of Latin American state formation have obscured not only the developmentalist and sometimes even benevolent policies of the state , but also the different ways in which subaltern politics penetrated and influenced these same state policies . (2009, p. 37) Intellectuals, of course, are not necessarily concerned with subaltern politics, but this is usually the case if they are dealing with indigenous issues or, indeed, are indigenous themselves. The Maya community organizers that are the focus of Arias’ perspectives piece are part of the most marginalized sector of Guatemalan society. As he puts it, indigenous communities
‘remain outside the purview of the state’, yet–and this is the crucial point–they are also ‘the dynamic new forces transforming it’. In a similar vein, García tells us that doctors from the Guatemalan Ministry of
Culture changed their views about the scientific (or what they thought was non-scientific) nature of Maya medicine and healing practice after lengthy discussions with his research team, and even discussed creating a new style of training to incorporate Maya knowledge.
Scholars evaluate social movements incorrectly-leads to oppression
Brass, Tom (Social and Poltical Sciences Faculty at the University of Cambridge, “On which side of the barricade? Subaltern Resistance in Latin America and Elsewhere”, The Journal of Peasant Studies)
9/8/ 10, http:/ldx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150412331311109
The political implications of this inability to conceptualize false
¶
consciousness and the consequent problems with rural grassroots
¶
mobilization based on this are profound
. To begin with, the labelling by postmodern theory of all
¶
grassroots cultore as 'authentic' and
'innate', and mobilization on the basis of this as
¶
empowering, is a direct effect of a view that regards subaltern identity/agency as perpetually
¶
'there', and thus
¶
'naturally' desired by its subject."
Not only is such a view epistemologically misplaced - ideologically, nothing is or can be 'natural'¶ -but it misinterprets as 'from below' or 'a uthentic' grassroots phenomena forms of identity/behaviour/culture/consciousness that are actually 'from above' creations." In doing
¶
this, postmodernism exhibits a gullibility exploited in a systematic fashion from the late
¶
1920s onwards by a nascent public relations industry, which demonstrated clearly how public opinion
¶
in the U nited
S tates could
successfully be
constructed/ channelled
." The object was sinlple: ¶ consciously to stimulate anti-rational desire, which could then be harnessed by capitalism for
¶
two particular ends. First, to generate additional demand for its commodities; and second, to
¶
disguise the 'from above' origin of this initiative, by presenting it as a 'natural' or
¶
'from below' cultoral emanation that empowers its subject.
Euroameican scholars ignorant of Latin America’s complexities
Timothy Smith, 06- Assistant Professor of Anthropology (“Views from the “South”: Intellectual
Hegemony and Postmodernism in Latin America,” Taylor and Francis Online, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00938150500535554#tabModule)//NG
Euroamerican scholars mark Latin America as a site of utopian revolutions, foreign intervention, troubled economies, military repression, and a failed modernist paradigm of development.
Four recent books critically assess this construction by addressing its source in the international imaginary. They advocate a subaltern perspective on colonial difference and argue that postmodernity as promulgated by Euroamerican scholars may become yet another intellectual trend ignorant of Latin America's particularities and complexities.

Latin American scholars have embraced postmodernity far longer than their Euroamerican counterparts, whose relatively recent applications remain problematic.

Castro-Gomez ‘98 a philosopher known for his work on colonial legacies herd in Colombia, He studied philosophy at St. Thomas
University in Bogota, where he was a pupil of faculty members of the Group of Bogotá (Philosophy) , main distributors in Colombia for the Latin American Philosophy . He then traveled to Germany where he graduated in philosophy at the University of Tübingen and later a doctorate in the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in
Frankfurt. On his return to Colombia was a professor at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota and Thinking
Institute investigator. (Santiago, Latin American postcolonial theories, Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice,
10:1, 27-33, http:l/dx.doi.org/10.1080/10402659808426118)
This means that no sociological theory can "represent" objects found outside the totality of signs that configure the institutionality of knowledge in modem societies. It is always anticipated that scientific knowledge is codified within the interior of a fabric of signs that regulate the production of "meaning," such as in the creation of objects and subjects of knowledge. It is from a certain "politics of interpretation," then, (actualized in universities, publishing houses, centers of investigation, etc.) that a theory's "effects of truth" are produced. Furthermore, the politics of interpretation define the frontiers that separate one scientific discipline from another and assign determined parcels of knowledge.
.¶ Anticolonialist narratives discursively generated a "marginalized,"
"exteriorized" space which agreed with the reconfiguration of intellectual strongholds experienced by institutions responsible for creating new knowledge.
In many metropolitan universities "marginality," "alterity," and "Third World­ ism" were even converted into new fields of academic investigation capable of mobilizing a considerable amount of financial assistance. The institutional implementation of these new objects of knowledge/investigation demanded the importation of "practical examples" from the "Third World," such as magical realism, liberation theology, and any other subjects that could be classified within the space of "otherness." From this point of view, the emphasis of anticolonial narratives on opposition, such as the divisions between the oppressors and the oppressed, the powerful and the meek, center and periphery, civilization and barbarism, succeeded in strengthening the binary system of classification inherent to metropolitan apparatuses that produce knowledge

Their criticism can never do anything to challenge the violence of imperialism as it exists only to supplement and strengthen the very modes of understanding it seeks to criticize—their theoretical interventions are grounded in the very logic of referentiality which must purge all otherness which does not present itself as knowable—the 1AC is merely the completion of the colonial gaze
Chow , Professor Comparative Lit at Brown, ‘ 6 (Rey, “The Age of the World Target” p 11-15)
The developments of poststructuralist theory in the Anglo-American academy in the past few decades have led to a situation of considerable irony, in which theoretically sophisticated studies of the wretched of the earth tend to be undertaken by those in the most wealthy and prestigious institutions of learning
.17 As some of the pages to follow (specifically, in the chapter "The
Interruption of Referentiality") will argue, this aporia between the mode of address
(well-informed and often self-conscious academic language) and the harsh, downtrodden worlds it purports to be concerned about is
, to be sure, by no means attributable
purely
to poststructuralist theory
, but the latter's focus on the self-referential capacity of language and signification, as well as its radical suspension and deferral of referentiality as such, does make certain questions ineluctable
. For instance, are we to consider such an aporia a kind of revelation that has been made all the more acute by the theoretical understanding of the temporally belated or displaced nature of linguistic signification, or are we to think of it as characteristic of the social divide between the economically comfortable and the disenfranchised? Or both? Are not the two seemingly disparate phenomena‚—one having to do with the technical nuance of academic language, the other having to do with "vulgar" economics‚—mutually inscribed in each other, in the sense that the more glaring the economic divide is, the more it tends to become a motor for the kind of truth that language unveils by being profoundly, painfully aware of itself, of its own rules of intelligibility? Conversely, if the ineluctability of linguistic self-referentiality has stemmed from a historical awareness of language-as-fundamental-dislocation
‚—as Foucault and other poststructuralist theorists have argued‚— can such self-referentiality, however patient and vigilant, in any way help ameliorate the problems of social inequity and injustice, or does it simply become‚—and continue to derive its legitimacy as‚—such inequity and injustice's symptom
?
Where does the incessant bracketing of referentiality leave those cultures and identities that remain peripheralized
?
Can poststructuralist theory deal with exclusion
‚— and how? What happens when poststructuralist theory confronts the demands of critical multiculturalism? This is the point at which self-referentiality, as a problematic emerging from a particular epistemic rupture, needs to be understood in terms that go beyond the drama of avant-garde language and theory in modernity. As I will argue in the chapter "The Age of the World Target," some of Martin Heidegger's work, insofar as it challenges the dominance of the modern technological attitude‚—namely, an exploitative, ordering attitude that sees human beings as the center of the universe for whose use everything else exists‚—serves as a good point of departure for a broader critique.
Heidegger's analysis in the essay "The Age of the World Picture" offers valuable insights into the philosophical underpinnings of the United States' hegemony as a military superpower and its will to world domination in the twentieth century. In 1945, toward the end of the Second World War, the United States dropped its entire inventory of two atomic bombs on Japan. What politics of vision‚—of viewing the world‚—accompanied the strategic decision to drop the bombs? The technologies of atomic warfare, inseparable from those of seeing, have far-reaching ramifications. Following Heidegger's suggestion that in modernity the world has come to be grasped and conceived as "a picture," we may say that in the wake of the atomic bombs the world has come to be grasped and conceived as a target to be destroyed as soon as it can be made visible.18
If the rise of modern self-referential writing has functioned as a "mad" and "poetic" resistance to the steady instrumentalization of the world, one that is dominated by the manifestation or unveiling of techne in the form of destructive technological forces, what does this madness, this poetry, have to say about catastrophes such as that caused by the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
In the context of Anglo America, this question embeds another, one that concerns the place of America in contemporary cross-cultural transactions: how, in the wake of the institutionalization of poststructuralist theory, which arrived from Europe (and is derived from the undoing of European though from within itself), have we dealt with historical events on the Pacific side of the United States? Does the literary-theoretical consciousness/writing that rebels against the demotion of language ever see these events other than casting them as signs of the decline and sunset of the
West? From Nietzsche and Heidegger to Derrida and Foucault, Western philosophy and theory's pronouncements of the West's demise and loss of meaning have continued with relative indifference to and ignorance of the histories and languages elsewhere. As Shu-mei Shih writes: "
Poststructuralist theory exercised and strengthened the muscles of Western thought, rendering that thought even more able to reproduce itself through discursive self-criticism"; at the same time it "has not attempted to seriously confront the non-West" except through negligence and silence
.19 As a scholar from Asia working closely with European theory in America, I find myself habitually returning to the implications of this disjuncture: between the self-reflexive and
(fashionably) mournful/melancholy postures of contemporary theory, on the one hand, and the strange complacency of its provincial contents (its habit to tell the story only about certain languages, cultures, and histories), on the other, is there not... a persistent epistemic scandal? One may perhaps counter: life is short; you can't expect specialists of

ancient Greek tragedy, the Italian Renaissance, German semiotics of the eighteenth century, the English novel, or the French nouveau roman to know about happenings in the
Pacific region. But that alibi‚—of not having enough time or not being available to know everything‚—is precisely the heart of the matter here because it is, shall we say, a oneway privilege. Such an alibi is simply not acceptable or thinkable for those specializing in non-Western cultures. They, by contrast, must know quite a bit more than their own specialties
‚—in the form of languages, histories, and texts‚—in order to pass as credible academic professionals. Few scholars of Asian languages and literatures, for instance, have not read or studied something by Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Austen, Dickens, Freud, and Woolf; fewer still have not heard of Sartre, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Benjamin, Adorno, and Habermas in recent decades. On these scholars, the pressure is that of an imperative to acquire global breadth‚—to be cosmopolitan in their knowledge‚—even if they choose to specialize in esoteric languages and subject matters. (Time and again, the contrast between those who specialize in the West and those who specialize in the Rest comes to the fore at international conferences held in Asia, Australia, Latin America, and elsewhere. In my own experience with such conferences, local participants often have read the latest theory published in North America or Europe, whereas those specializing in North America or
Europe, unless they happen to be ethnically or culturally related to the Rest, often can only speak of their own specialties with little knowledge of the local languages or cultural traditions. If language is used as a metaphor, the locals in this instance tend by and large to be multilingual‚—in the sense that they [are obligated to] know more than their own specialty/language, whereas specialists of the West tend by and large to be monolingual‚—in the sense that they often speak only from within their own specialty/language.)
Read against issues raised in the present discussion, the atomic bombs that were dropped in August 1945 on two Japanese cities suggest much more than the malice that is an inevitable product of warfare. Above all, the unleashing of the bombs was perhaps the crowning event of the ascendance of the United States to the position of supreme world power. Designed with the help of European scientists as part of the war for control of Europe, the bombs were, nonetheless, deployed to annihilate population centers in Asia. If the self-referential turn of modern literature and theory is inherent to the tortuous but necessary process in which the supremacy of the Western logos (and, by extension, Western imperialism and colonialism) is deconstructed, then the consequences of the United States' ascendancy as superpower by the mid-twentieth century, certainly, would need to be part of such deconstruction
, whether or not it is consciously intended by the individual writer. In other words, would not the concerted efforts at disconnecting the signifier and signified‚—at interrupting, bracketing, and dismantling so-called referentiality‚—need to be rethought from this supplemental perspective,
one that understands America not as just the land of Disney and McDonald's but also as the successor to and advancer of Europe and European imperialist intentions and tendencies over the course of modern history?
In terms of knowledge production, the shift of the center of geopolitical power to America and an increasingly English-language-dominant world means that the unleashing of the bombs must be historicized in conjunction with the post-Second World War development of area studies, the peacetime information-retrieval machinery that complements the
United States' self-aggrandizing foreign policy
.
Area studies capitalize on the intertwined logics of the world-as-picture and the world-as-target, always returning the results of knowing other cultures to the point of origin, the “eye”/”I” that is the American state and society
. As H. D. Harootunian and Masao Miyoshi write: "
More than fifty years after the war's end, American scholars are still organizing knowledge as if confronted by an implacable enemy... Area studies as it was implanted in colleges and universities and their adherents still ceaselessly seek to maintain the received structure of operations with new infusions of cash in a world more global and culturally borderless than the one that existed at the inception of the Cold War
."20 In this instance, in which a binary of self and other is reinforced as government policy, the epistemic ground that poststructuralist theory methodically takes apart‚—reveals to be unstable‚—is reestablished both with brute force
(military conquests, followed by the stationing of U.S. troops in various bases throughout the Pacific) and with flourishing civil apparatuses
(funding agencies, educational programs, culture and information bureaus, religious missions, publishing houses, and so forth).
Knowledge of the other
‚—often coded as native or indigenous knowledge‚— is now part of the enforcement of self-referentiality in a direct sense.
Rather than being a problematic emerging from the ashes of the demise of language, to be self-referential is, from the perspective of U.S. foreign policy, a straightforward practice of aggression and attack.21 As was the case with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in the more recent wars on Afghanistan and Iraq this self-referentiality means bombing‚— and eradicating‚—those others who are not like "us."

The alternative is to reject the 1AC to de-center Latin American studies – the alternative is key to open up the academic realm
Alverez, Arias, and Hal ’11 – respectively - Director, Center for Latin American, Caribbean and
Latino Studies; Professor of Latin American Literature University of Texas at Austin; Professor of
Anthropology and of African and African Diaspora Studies University of Texas at Austin (Sonia E., Arturo, and Charles R., Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, “Re-visioning Latin American Studies in the United States,” Vol. 17, No. 2, December 2011, 131-145
We maintain that
Latin American Studies must be de-centered if it is to continue to¶ thrive in this transformed environment. Demographic shifts , diasporas, labor migrations,¶ the movements of global capital and media, and processes of cultural circulation and¶ hybridization have brought into question the nature of areas’ identities and composition
.¶ Globalization, space/time compression, and greater intemational mobility have created an¶ intensification of overlaps and brought together intellectual travelers that were formerly¶ kept largely separate.
What has come into question in the wake of contemporary¶ approaches about population and cultural movements across regions and nations is the¶ notion that the world can be divided into knowable, self-contained ‘areas of study’
.¶ Indeed. Latin America is today a global reality. As Walter Mignolo said at a 2001 retreat to¶ formulate the LASA ‘Strategic Plan ,’ Latin America is now the perspective, not the area of¶ study.
By this Mignolo meant that
Latin America is no longer a geographical entity to be¶ studied; rather. it now signifies a reorientation of knowledge, an epistemology that looks at¶ global concems from a Latin American perspective, independently of who is doing the¶ looking, from where, and what is being looked at .
¶
At the same time. there is greater complexity in the boundaries that define the area of¶ study. Traditionally Latin American Studies have embodied and respected disciplinary¶ boundaries, and in most cases Latin Americanists have been primarily organized by¶ discipline. But disciplinary divisions no longer work as well as in the past.
Increasingly¶ Latin
Americanists find themselves both anchored in a disciplinary formation, and, at the¶ same time, crossing disciplinary boundaries into cognate areas—in effect becoming trans-¶ disciplinary. While there are still relatively few academic interdisciplinarians and teaching¶ or training programs that purposely prepare interdisciplinary specialists, many Latin¶ Americanists today deliberately adopt either trans-disciplinary or interdisciplinary¶ approaches in addressing the intellectual issues they face . One can readily observe today¶ an intensification of the expectation that intellectual activity be addressed in an¶ interdisciplinary fashion, whether by individuals or by teams of individuals with different¶ skills working together.
This may be so especially in the sciences, but major funding¶ agencies are requiring interdisciplinary approaches above single-disciplinary ones in¶ many areas of study.
Latin
Americanists now have the opportunity to synthesize this new
¶
intellectual reality. and to create new and meaningful disciplinary intersections and
¶
configurations that will help in knowledge production, and in making this knowledge more
¶
readily accessible and applicable to communities and constituencies so as to confront real
¶
world problems and situations.
New discourse on Latin America is key to understanding their struggle
Sanchez and Pita ’99, Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature at UC San Diego,
Lecturer at UC San Diego, respectively (Rosaura, Beatrice, “Mapping Cultural/Political Debates in Latin
American Studies”, Cultural Studies, Volume 13:2, Pgs. 290-318, Taylor and Francis Online) EC
Proliferating notions of ‘endism’, like post-histor y, post-industrial , postcolonial,
¶
post-
Marxism, post-development and postmodernism are very much a
¶
part of the latest economic/political and cultural phraseology
. Aside from blatant ¶ grandstanding from the most reactionary quarters, these categories and this
¶
reconguring of explicatory frameworks are a response to an epistemological
¶
crisis closely linked to poststructuralism, to a rejection of metanarratives, in particular
¶
of the Marxist paradigm, and to new formulations of

political struggle
¶
within late capitalism
(in what Touraine calls ‘post-industrial ’ societies (Touraine, ¶ 1981: 6)) carried out by heterogeneous ‘groupings’ or social actors. The proliferation
¶
of works theorizing these new social movements during the 1980s in Latin
¶
America, as well as throughout the world, is a primary example of cultural production
¶
within postmodernity.
Key to most if not all these writings is a ‘retreat
¶
from class’ as the fundamental division in society
(Meiksins Wood, 1986
). At
¶
bottom lies an assumption about the end of ‘old polarities’ (i.e. class antagonisms)
¶
and a ‘new world order’ and a call for new strategies substituting ‘the political for
¶
the economic’, replacing ‘the question of capitalism with that of state power’
¶ (Jameson, 1993a: 174) and privileging cultural discourses and manifestations as ¶ the object of study. Modernization (i.e.‘consumer society’), democratization and ¶ popular culture thus become the new ‘foundations’ of ‘pluralism’.
What is lacking,
¶
ironically, in these presumably antifoundationalist writings is a radical critique of
¶
liberalism, that is, of bourgeois democracy
(Chakrabarty, 1992: 20).
¶ Central to the body of literature on new social movements is the work of ¶ Laclau and Mouffe (1987), whose discursive model, like the sociology of action ¶ of
Touraine (1981: 27, 139), focuses on constructs of identity, collectivity,
¶
democracy, historicity, as well as on social actors and alliance politics.
Latin
¶
American theorists, like Escobar, interested in adapting these models for alternative
¶
social projects, posit the struggle at the level of discourse. For Escobar, ‘in
¶
Latin America, social movements are economic, political and cultural struggles,
¶
that is, struggles over meanings, from the nature of national development to
¶
everyday practices’
(Escobar, 1992: 41). For that reason, Escobar argues, the task
¶ for Latin American intellectuals is both to resist Eurocentric epistemologies and
¶
to construct ‘collective imaginaries capable of orienting social and political
¶
action’
(Escobar, 1992: 41); that is, new political discourses that allow for a rede
¶
 nition of Latin America and which enable the mobilization of emerging new
¶
social actors. For this task Escobar signals three major discourses ‘with the potential
¶
to articulate . . . forms of struggle’: the discourse of democracy, the discourse
¶
of difference, and anti-development discourses
(Escobar, 1992: 48), all,
¶
ironically, one would have to note, Eurocentric constructs as well.

We must reject the borders of area studies to bridge all forms of disciplinary fields
Alverez, Arias, and Hal ’11 – respectively - Director, Center for Latin American, Caribbean and
Latino Studies; Professor of Latin American Literature University of Texas at Austin; Professor of
Anthropology and of African and African Diaspora Studies University of Texas at Austin (Sonia E., Arturo, and Charles R., Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, “Re-visioning Latin American Studies in the United States,” Vol. 17, No. 2, December 2011, 131-145
But as Jonathan Fox, Pedro Cabran and Frances Aparicio rightly insist, we must¶ acknowledge the distinctive intellectual genealogies. political trajectories, and¶ bureaucratic moorings of LAS and
Chicana/Puerto Rican/Latina-0 Studies at US¶ universities in striving to bridge rather than merge the two .
2' Many contributors to the¶ Forum urge scholars, activists and practitioners alike to move beyond the binary¶ opposition between Latina/o and Latin American Studies and analyze the manifold trans-¶ border flows and points of intersection, as well as points of tension, between these fields.
¶
Given that the US is already the fourth largest Spanish-speaking nation in the world and in¶ light of large and growing populations of Portuguese and Haitian Creole speakers and¶ indigenous and Afro-descendent migrants from Latin America , a de-centered Latina/o¶ American Studies would be uniquely poised to promote innovative, policy-relevant¶ knowledge about transmigrations and diasporas.¶ Producing knowledge relevant to meeting the challenges facing the Latina/o Americas¶ in the 21*‘ century also requires furthering genuinely interdisciplinary—rather than simply¶ multidisciplinary—perspectives and cross-disciplinary collaboration, the fourth vital¶ dimension of de-centering LAS. Yet. interdisciplinarity itself is in dire need of being¶ re-visioned and updated. Latin American Studies, like other Area Studies, historically has¶ been largely a ‘multi-’ rather than an ‘inter-’ (much less ‘trans-’) disciplinary enterprise.¶ insofar as traditionally it has aggregated disciplines but has not always actively fostered¶ the creative convergence of discipline-based knowledges.
Area Studies Centers and¶ programs too often have resembled sandboxes, as Latin
American historian Florencia¶ Mallon aptly puts it, wherein colleagues in different disciplines
, like small children in a¶ sandbox, engage in ‘parallel play’ but do not actually engage with one another of¶ our common agenda as officers in LASA was to contribute to changing the prevailing¶ culture of multi-disciplinarity, encouraging faculty and students to think in terms of¶ ‘playing across disciplinary boundaries’ in our ongoing pedagogical and
.” Part research projects.¶ ln fact,
LAS entails not just inter-disciplinary dialogue but also promoting conversations¶ and collaboration with other inter/trans-disciplinary fields, such as feminist studies.¶ critical race studies. LGBTII studies, cultural studies. social movement studies. and¶ postcolonial studies
.¶ Finally, unsettling historically hegemonic forms and practices of LAS requires that we¶ promote productive dialogues between universitybased and non-university-based or¶ ‘alternative’ knowledge producers . We must be more attentive and responsive to the fact¶ that knowledge about the Latin/o-a Américas is produced in an ever wider range of places¶ and spaces within and without the academy
—from professionalized non-governmental¶ organizations and autonomous feminist collectives to barrio organizations in Chicago¶ linked to the altemative globalization movement. to Juntas de Buen Gobierno (Good¶ Government) in Chiapas. As LASA officers, we made special effons to open spaces for¶ what we termed ‘altemative knowledge producers’ and ‘collaborative research methods.‘¶ through new categories of paper submissions, and LASA supported initiatives such as¶ ‘Otros Saberes.’23
The contention here is that to foment dialogue across the borders that¶ conventionally have separated academic and non-academic sites of theory production can¶ only prove mutually enriching.¶

Postmodern aporia and flawed knowledge about culture marginalizes Latin
Americans-evaluating a new ‘peasant conciousness’ is key to solve
Brass, Tom (Social and Poltical Sciences Faculty at the University of Cambridge, “On which side of the barricade? Subaltern Resistance in Latin America and Elsewhere”, The Journal of Peasant Studies)
9/8/ 10, http:/ldx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150412331311109
A second form of postmodern aporia involves the claim that, as the¶ subaltern is unknowable, he/she cannot be represented, in effect not only abolishing the ¶ intellectual accessibility of peasants and labourers but converting them into the ¶ mysterious 'other' of conservative discourse . those such as Spivak and Kristeva link the ¶
'unrepresentability' of subaltern culture to the 'unknowability' of the subaltern him/herself: a ¶ subject thus defined cannot be represented by someone 'other' (= intellectuals) than im/herself, ¶ a view that verges on the solipsistic." A consequence of pristine subaltern
'otherness' ¶ being both unknowable and intellectually inaccessible, moreover, is that it is unalterable.
Just ¶ such an epistemology is invoked by conservatives who claim that, as the subaltern likes the wayhe/she is, and feels empowered by his/her culture (of which the economic¶ merely a part), consequently no one- and especially not intellectuals on t left - should presume to ¶ advise him/her otherwise. This of course leaves¶ power and control in the hands of the bourgeoisie, since according to t kind of argument it is ¶ impermissible for an intellectual even to put t subaltern a non-subaltern idea: because the ¶ subaltern is unknowable, the nature of the subaltern and therefore of its 'other' cannot even be posssible ¶ Even if it could, intellectuals are disbarred from this, because to do so is privilege a
¶ nonsubaltern discourse.
¶
Theorized in this manner, both the subaltern and his/her culture become essentialized and a-temporal ¶ forms of existence. Each remains socio¶ economically hermetic and ahistorical, immune to external change a challenge: neither can be ¶ analyzed, only reported." This innate a unmediated subaltern consciousness of course forbids its ¶ characterization false, which in tom prevents not ouly the transcendence but also a political critique ¶ by those who are not themselves subalterns of existing culture identity and agency based on
¶ this. Denying the efficacy of 'false consciousness' on the grounds that 'Western
Marxism
¶
[refuses] class consciousness to the pre-capitalist Subaltern', therefore, Beverley ag follows
¶
Spivak and maintains that it is necessary to recognize the existention of a specifically subaltern form
¶ of peasant consciousness." Not the le problematic aspect of such an epistemology is that it
¶ depoliticizes the li between consciousness and action. Like postmodernism generally, it al licenses
¶ the reification of every form of belief, which can then be subsum within an all-embracing rubric of
¶
'subaltern consciousness'.
Trapped wit this epistemology, Latin American subaltemists are forced to ¶ conclude the since there is no such thing as false consciousness, all from-bel ¶ consciousness which exists must therefore be an 'authentic' grassro manifestation. Within this ¶ nonjudgemental framework, subaltern agent based on any and every conceivable kind of political ¶ consciousness conservative and reactionary as well as socialist and progressive -become empowering ¶ for its subject, and consequently is regarded not just legitimate but also as unchallengeable .

Perm fails – have to supplant current forms of knowledge production about marginalized cultures to reconfigure Eurocentrism
Jenko , Professor PolSci National University of Singapore, ’11 (Leigh, Fall, “Recentering Political
Theory: The Promise of Mobile Locality” Cultural Critique, Vol 79, ProjectMuse)//JAG
Recentered Political Theory: Two Examples Two examples from recent scholarly work on Asian thought begin to illustrate (but by no means exhaust) what this recentered political theory may look like. I have chosen to analyze the work of scholars who are “Western” in terms of nationality and academic location because their position belies the necessity of their own Eurocentrism, and inverts the much more common direction of intellectual influence from the “West” to the “East.” The first is Stephen C. Angle’s recent book Sagehood: The Contemporary Significance of Neo-Confucian Philosophy. Although Angle ultimately grounds his argument in analytic philosophical discourse without directly problematizing “philosophy” as a field of knowledge organization, his analysis is exemplary of recentering in other important ways. Angle’s primary goal is “to flesh out and push forward a contemporary Confucianism based on Neo-Confucian orientations” to their defining but contested goal of sage-hood (sheng), understood as a character ideal that cultivates moral spontaneity in accord with the ethical-political principles of the Way (dao) (26). He argues that a viable extension of neo-Confucian sage-hood in the modern world is centered on reverence for harmony (he), interpreted as respect for the interdependence of self and world indicated by the neo-Confucian value of li(coherence).
In elaborating his argument, Angle does not ignore counterarguments or insights from contemporary Anglo-American analytic philosophy, but he identifies their relevance in terms of the neo-Confucian ideals at issue, rather than as independently valuable or definitive paradigms of what “philosophy” or “moral character” should look like or be compared to (22–25). Writing in English but drawing more extensively on Sinophone sources than Anglophone ones, Angle problematizes the issue of audience by explaining that his argument addresses, in addition to his “colleagues in the West,” “fellow scholars of Confucianism, and perhaps a broader Chinese audience as well.” He notes his indebtedness to the Chinese scholars he engaged (in Chinese) while doing research at Beijing University and presenting his work at universities across China, Hong Kong, and
Taiwan (8, vii–viii). It is precisely by working within the internal threads of neo-Confucian tradition and engaging its contemporary advocates that Angle defends its unique contributions to the ideals of the contemporary world. He holds that it can be [End Page 47] taken seriously by everyone, “whether or not their ancestors could have been
Confucians,” but without suborning it to the terms or concerns of analytic political philosophy (179). Although Angle does not address the possibility of how or if his project implies disciplinary displacement, other projects have come to interrogate the modes and foci of knowledge production within political science and philosophy. The elaboration of alternative “disciplines” to structure knowledge in different but productive ways offers another illustration of recentering. Ingrid Jordt, a Buddhist yogi haun(i.e., established meditator) and anthropologist, shows how the phenomenon of Buddhist mass lay meditation in Burma reconfigures political legitimacy along Buddhist lines by authorizing the laity “to verify the activities of both sangha[Buddhist monastic community] and state” (2007, 212). In the process, participants in this movement develop new ways to verify the interior knowledge gained from meditation (such as if and to what degree political leaders, monks, and lay people have progressed toward nyanzin, or stages of insight) that in
Jordt’s view cultivates a distinct disciplinary enterprise. Likening this discipline to Western psychology or cognitive science, Jordt suggests that it poses compelling and heretofore unexplored connections between how ethical training such as meditation can cultivate particular beliefs and verifiable mental transformations in its practitioners
(2006, 195). Although conventional political science has typically ignored interior mental states, Jordt argues that they are essential components for the “moral empirical theory of knowing, praxis, and being” in Burmese Buddhism and thus are at least partly constitutive of the political actions that contest and affirm the legitimacy of political rulers
(2007, 61). These two examples show how recentering
, although ultimately a collective and ongoing project, can begin to take shape when individual scholars address diverse communities of scholarship and participate in the production of knowledge in accord with their disciplinary conventions
. As Angle and Peng argue, these very local environments and resources that make such communities possible and relevant do not preclude their applicability
(through some form of explicit or implicit translation) to the more general questions that circulate within the circumferences of other “local” communities
, whether they be disciplinary, cultural, or intellectual.
It is on the basis of precisely such
[End Page 48] resources, in fact, that local circumferences are often reconfigured
—but without suborning them to dominant
Eurocentric practice.
Jordt’s experience as an advanced Buddhist meditator and her careful attention to Burmese theorizations of meditation is another example: reconceptualizing in Buddhist terms what constitutes political authority includes not only identifying its particular components (including nyanzin discernment by the laity, as well as their recognition of leaders’ pon, the accumulation of merit from past lives) but also reframing the very idea of “political authority” to work across and reflect the influence of multiple past and future lifetimes (2007, 183, 197). Jordt thus belies social science attempts to read the military junta in Burma in conventional terms, as a regime of purely coercive compliance beyond the reach of effective popular critique that takes the exclusive form of democratic voting and protection of human rights. Just as importantly, she also gestures toward an ambitious new frame for political life that ruptures both temporal and spatial boundaries that usually contain it, requiring explanation by way of the
“native epistemology” of vipassana meditation that constructs political meanings in Burma (60, 191).
Her project
, like Angle’s, affirms the viability of alternative non-Anglophone knowledge communities to pose questions about and solve contemporary political problems, even as both deny through example the inevitability of the hold of any particular kind of local thought
(including and especially that of Europe and
America) on the academic production of scholars in American and European universities and elsewhere
.
The potential of such radically mobile locality is all the more possible if, over time, the training for political theorists no longer emphasizes conversance with a set of
Euro-American texts, themes, and (almost purely) Anglophone conversations, but instead centers its students within other, equally rich thought traditions that
, while demonstrating provisional relevance to political life, are guided by distinct concerns
(such as sagehood or nyanzin), disciplined by particular canons
(Zhu Xi’s compilation of the “Fourteen Books” and its subsequent commentarial amendments, Buddhist sutras of the Theravada tradition), and addressed to other, possibly non-Anglophone or multilingual audiences (Sinophone academia, the global Buddhist intellectual community). Acknowledging that other intellectual traditions throughout time and space have organized and analyzed knowledge [End Page 49] very differently, the very notion of what it is we are doing when we do “political theory” will come under scrutiny from new, diverse audiences—perhaps culminating in the radical supplanting (rather than merely
supplementing ) of dominant streams of political-theoretic discourse by currently

existing alternatives
. Angle’s and Jordt’s projects address multidisciplinary and multilingual audiences, but each is centered in distinct communities of knowledge production that make their resulting insights possible even as they expose existing disciplines to risk.
Incorporation of subaltern voices into current hegemonies of social studies ensures marginalization
Mignolo , Professor Romance Studies and Cultural Anthropology at Duke, ’99 (Walter, “I Am Where I
Think: Epistemology and the Colonial Difference” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol 8 No 2, p 235-245)//JAG9
By definition, loci of enunciation are not marginal. Yet making them visible also makes it possible to underline that epistemology is not just a happy universal spaces which everybody can join
. As with any thing else, joining something that is hegemonic means to accept the rule of the game
.
If you play the game, but not exactly according to the rules, chances are that you will be somewhat on the margins
. However, I am not interested in either playing the role of the 'Hispanic' victim or of the successful marginal who publishes in English in American university presses and works at Duke. I am interested in making the (epistemic) colonial difference visible. I did not word it like that in The Darker Side of the Renaissance. It is, however, a key-word in the sequel to The Darker Side of the Renaissance, entitled Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (1999). In this book, I try to clarify the notion of 'colonial difference' by thinking through it. (Hulme is right, by the way, that I do not make an effort to define theoretical concepts in The Darker Side of the Renaissance; I just use them.) Let us go back to Bourdieu for a moment and pursue the equation texts-national languages-coloniality of power and cultures of scholarship. In an effort to elucidate the theoretical frame of his own thinking, Bourdieu honestly pursues a comparison with the German philosophical tradition. The comparison is necessary in order to justify the transferability of scientific thinking from the sciences of nature to the human sciences, a step which is more difficult to take in the German philosophical legacy because, according to Bourdieu, the distinction 'erklaren-Verstehen (explanation-understanding)' builds a wall between the natural and the human sciences. French legacies, he concludes, 'propose, then, a reflection which is much more general, from which I have drawn an epistemological program that can be summed up in one statement: "The scientific fact is conquered, constructed, confirmed. The conquest of the given is a central concept in Bachelard's thought, and he sums it up in the term epistemological break. Why is this phase of scientific research important, and why does it separate, as seems to me to be the case, the tradition I represent from the dominant Anglo-Saxon tradition? It is because to say that the scientific fact has to be fought for is radically to defy, in this regard, all of the givens that social scientific researchers find before them"' (Bourdieu, 1992, p. 43) This brief description of Bourdieu's self-location (e.g. framing his own locus of enunciation in the social sciences and in the European tradition) makes clear the inseparability between epistemology and politics of location. What should I do, identify and assume the tradition Bourdieu represents or the dominant Anglo- Saxon tradition he differentiates from?
Obviously neither of them, unless I decide to think from categories, frames and problems that were put in place to deal with the issues of coloniality and the colonial difference in which I am interested. If I follow the first route, I have two choices. Either to become a social scientist according to the rules of the game that were defined in 'a tradition (to which) I do not belong', and therefore to be marginal, or to 'apply' Bourdieu's (or any other) 'model' to deal with and analyse coloniality of power and the colonial difference. In either case, I will be epistemologically marginal, that is, epistemologically subaltern. This was precisely 'Chakrabarty's dilemma' in the domain of historiography: as long as you are a historian, you cannot be a "Third World' historian because history is an activity, institution, and way of thinking that was instrumental in the colonization of memory
. The basis of 'Chakrabarty dilemma' is that writing subaltern 'histories' means to remain in an epistemically subaltern position in the domain of cultures of scholarship
. This is because one of the invisible places in which the coloniality of power operates is the domain of epistemology
. Consequently, if you 'study' colonialism or the subaltern but you maintain the rules of the social sciences and humanities game, you maintain the coloniality of power that reproduces the epistemic colonial difference
. Epistemic loci of enunciation are stubborn and, as in the case of Garcia Canclini (1989), you can describe and 'study' the hybridy of society and culture in a specific place like Tijuana, while maintaining a pure, non-contaminated, non-hybrid loci of enunciation
. This is why I attempted to think from models and theories provided by Chicano/a thinkers and Latin American philosophers, such as Enrique Dussel and Rodolfo Kusch. Yet, I also used the models provided by 'complementary dichotomies' in Amerindian thoughts (Mignolo, 1995). I believe that Hulme intuitively understood this when he says, on page 223, T had the strange impression that Mignolo actually wanted to be doing something rather different and even more ambitious'. 'Pluritopic hermeneutics' was a necessary step to avoid the 'non-complementary dichotomy' between the knowing subject and the known, the disciplines and the object of study.
Their thoughts and works were and are in a constant struggle with the epistemic colonial difference, not as an object of study but as loci of enunciation defined by the coloniality of power—that is, with thinking from a subaltern epistemic perspective
(or Voices from the margins' as Hulme's title states). Dussel's latest work confronts the issue openly (Dussel,
1994, 1996, 1998; Mignolo, forthcoming). My not so kind remarks on Gordon Brotherston's article, though not on his magnificent book (Brotherston, 1992), were prompted by epistemic, not nationalist, considerations. National histories are local histories, certainly, but they cannot be confused with them. Thus, Brotherston's discussion of Amerindian knowledge of a system of writing, taking position on a dispute between Derrida and Levi-Strauss (that Hulme rightly critiques on page 225), reminded me of Las Casas and
Sepulveda discussing the 'Amerindian Question'. Amerindians themselves having nothing to say, as they have not been invited to participate in a debate in which they themselves are objects of consideration. That is the epistemic colonial difference from whence emerged Amerindians in the sixteenth century, Chicano/as in the US today, and white, mestizo, and immigrant créole intellectuals like Kusch, Dussel, and myself.
'Voices from the margins' are voices from and dealing with the colonial epistemic difference
. This explains the connection between 'darker' and 'hybrid' (a concept I truly do not use very often in the book) that Hulme notices on page 222 of his review. Today, this relationship would be recast in terms of the making of colonial (epistemic) differences.
This is what the humanists and men of letters did in the sixteenth century, and this process continues, through 'Orientalism' and 'Area Studies', to today.

Solution: redefine postmodernism
Sanchez and Pita ’99, Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature at UC San Diego,
Lecturer at UC San Diego, respectively (Rosaura, Beatrice, “Mapping Cultural/Political Debates in Latin
American Studies”, Cultural Studies, Volume 13:2, Pgs. 290-318, Taylor and Francis Online) EC
To grapple with this complex and slippery set of notions
, it would be useful
¶
to attempt to disarticulate the term
‘postmodernism’, and stress that it variously,
¶
and according to its users,means to encompass three different areas: (l) the world
¶
system of late capitalism, that is, a postmodern global economy; (2) postmodernity
¶
as the general overall ‘condition’ and
(following Jameson’s comments on ¶ modernity (1991: 310)), as what Raymond Williams calls a ‘structure of feeling’, ¶ that is, a particular ‘lived experience’ or logic of space and time (see Harvey, ¶ 1989: 39) that is political as much as cultural/ideological (West, 1988: 272), and ¶
(3) a cultural aesthetic, an artistic and intellectual dimension composed of different
¶
strands of postmodernism
(sans quotation marks).
Underpinning all three
¶
related categories,
implicitly or explicitly
, is of course the term ‘modernization’,
¶
the key notion implicitly being rejected but which, however imprecise and contradictory,
¶
best describes the globalization phenomenon presently underway in
¶
accelerated fashion in an ever more highly urbanized Latin America.
¶ Thus whether one disagrees on matters of degree or substance and despite ¶ its many and serious shortcomings, this construct ‘postmodernism’ has to be
¶
dealt with.
At worst it is a catch-all marketable, facile and fashionable term; at
¶
best it is symptomatic of the period and grapples with perceived shifts
(however ¶ slight) in economic, political and cultural structures and practices. Once we are ¶ disposed to look at these three overlapping areas, we can examine contradictory
¶
assignments of the term
‘postmodernist’ to particular cultural products, like testimonials
, ¶ using the genre as a test case around which to critically view the handling ¶ of the ‘postmodernist’ designation.
Even critics questioning the adoption of
¶
the postmodernist paradigm
, such as Larsen, insist on calling recent testimonials
¶
postmodernist
(Larsen, 1990: 88). The testimonial can in fact serve as a useful ¶ way of considering different spheres encompassed by ‘postmodernism’ and of ¶ examining its position within literary spaces while at the same time noting its ¶ relation to the market and links to various social movements.

Situation in Western knowledge forums is not inevitable – alternative allows for tying knowledge to localized knowledge communities
Jenko , Professor PolSci National University of Singapore, ’11 (Leigh, Fall, “Recentering Political
Theory: The Promise of Mobile Locality” Cultural Critique, Vol 79, ProjectMuse)//JAG
Recentering Political Theory Both indigenization movements and the practices of Sinology suggest that the real dilemma for political theory as it confronts non-Western thought may not be how to avoid the imposition of Western universalism or how to respect local difference, but how to take differently localized claims seriously as the constituents, and not simply the targets, of potentially generalizable reflections on political (and other slices of) life
. Many comparative political theorists would presume that this more radical regrounding of political theory is impossible, despite the evidence adduced above. They often cite the
Gadamerian [End Page 42] insight that existing understandings are negotiable but ultimately non-transcendable components of all knowledge and learning. Even those scholars such as Andrew March, who urge us to take foreign traditions seriously by engaging them on their own grounds, insist that “direct argumentation from within an alien ethical tradition” is ill advised and unlikely to meet with success (238). Similar views about the limits of understanding are also articulated within the Chinese academic community. He Peizhong, drawing on his own research into how foreigners study
China, has repeatedly insisted that foreigners can offer an important “outsider” perspective on Chinese issues but cannot themselves provide “insider” insights. Only by studying what outsiders say about us can we learn more about ourselves, He insists, partly because “they” have put “our” culture to such obvious use in advancing their own civilization and scholarship (2008). It may be true that “Western” forms of learning shape the prejudices of these “outsider” investigators and theorists as individuals, many of whom were thoroughly trained in Europeanized academic disciplines before turning their gaze toward the others that those disciplines, including political theory, have historically excluded. Yet it remains a largely unanswered question— especially in light of attempts around the world to overcome what are seen to be unduly pervasive foreign influences on native scholarly production—to what extent those intellectual prejudices have anything to do with national or ethnic cultures rather than with training, institutional incentives, expectations, or intellectual resources. Although these latter conditions often channel intellectual effort into recognizable localized patterns (sometimes conflated with, but not reducible to, nationally defined “cultures”), the mistake is to think that the contingently local clustering of particular concerns, methods, and agendas confines a theorist of a particular ethnic or cultural background to those traditions of reflection her society happens to have produced. In an influential article, Peng Guoxiang suggests the hubris—and contradictions—of a purely insider/outsider dichotomy like the one He
Peizhong (and advocates of the new cosmopolitan position) presume when he asks, “Don’t we, who are in the very middle of all this, sometimes not completely understand Chinese philosophy ourselves? . . . We do not want to excessively claim that researching our own history and culture is a special
[End Page 43] advantage, but ought to use truly ‘original research’ as the means of manifesting ourselves” (Peng). Peng acknowledges the capacity of original research by Chinese to speak for itself within an international community of scholars, just as He grounds the value of foreign China studies in the absorption by Westerners of Chinese civilization, but both fail to consider the broader implications at stake here: if work by Chinese scholars is intelligible and compelling to outsiders, so too can Chinese scholarship itself constitute a basis for, rather than be a target of, philosophical and theoretical work done by non-Chinese—indeed, Chinese research on Chinese studies in Korea and Japan recognizes this very possibility by highlighting their contributions to Chinese thought. Of course, most thinkers do come to see those traditions circulating in their place of residence as more relevant to their lives and concerns than other global alternatives, given that the former are often more tightly linked to the actual dilemmas of the society in which they live. These localized places may and often do evidence historically close relationships with the theoretical creativity of their (alwayschanging) residents, and these relationships are important for connecting people to ideas and arguments they care about. It remains unclear, however, how, if at all, the fact of localized knowledge production can predict the presence of any given perspective in particular human minds, on the one hand, or decisively preclude the adoption and development of what are perceived to be culturally alien modes of thought, on the other. This is not to ignore the very important power dynamics at work in structuring the access of scholars to one agenda or opportunity over another; rather, it draws attention to them as objects of reform, precisely by suggesting that knowledge production is tied more closely to contingent structures of power, inclination, and commitment than to inevitably overpowering cultural background conditions. The need to gain traction on such structures, in fact, specifies the project of recentering as a multigenerational, interdisciplinary, and collective effort to target not simply the research subjects of individual scholars, but also the modes and sites of training, constitutive practices, and target audiences of the entire disciplinary enterprise.
Taking cues from Sinology, we can think of ways to reorganize political theory around
[End Page 44] localized communities of knowledge
, supplying to individual researchers the linguistic, historical, and cultural proficiency in particular thought traditions that constitute many of the individual “prejudices” that shape theorizing in the first place.
These research initiatives need not be dictated necessarily by the nation-state territorialization that now organizes area studies, but by the concentrations of primarily scholarly audiences and concerns within—and across— particular regions of the globe
. This shift in focus does not mean to provide perfect insight into some indelible cultural essence; rather, it simply suggests that we facilitate access, by way of linguistic and other forms of training, to diverse fields of interconnected knowledge and schools of thought abiding in particular locales. Of course, postcolonial and democratic theorists have pointed out repeatedly how institutionalized regional divisions, such as those promoted by area studies, impose on a hybrid and fluid world a particular “strategic geopolitical ecology” subservient to the interests of dominant (read: American) powers (Palat, 69). Edward Said, in particular, argues that the “area studies” of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and American researchers had the effect of constructing “the Orient” into a category that “is not so much a way of receiving new information as it is a method of controlling what seems to be a threat to some established view of things” (59). We need not supply a full defense of area studies’ particular disciplinary history, however, in order to make the less stringent claim that a focus on localized scholarly communities rather than texts or people offers important benefits to the field of political

theory. This is especially true if, unlike contemporary critics of area studies, we recognize that and how scholars in those “areas” themselves draw and redraw political, intellectual, and geographic boundaries—including those imposed on them by others.
Localized debate does not entail a sacrifice of self-critique; it simply recenters it by turning it to internal purposes
. The study of “foreign Sinology” (guoji Hanxue) in Chinese academic communities, for instance, interrogates boundaries by retaining Chinese civilization at the center of inquiry and evaluating the success of foreign and domestic boundary-drawing in those terms.
5Regionalized discourses by non-Westerners
(such as variously deployed Japanese constructions of
“East Asia” in the twentieth century) also demonstrate
[End Page 45] how boundaries can empower as much as dominate indigenous intellectual production
.6 At the very least, such burgeoning scholarship on how regionalization discourses inform and enable knowledge from within those very same regions belies claims that a localized approach necessarily implies a unilateral reification of arbitrary boundaries, particularly those of nationalism, or that imposed or internal regionalized notions preclude critical engagement
. As Taiwanese scholar Chen Kuan-hsing argues, these regional imaginaries can serve as critical “ anchoring points
” (212) for multiplying frames of reference to facilitate comparisons that bypass Euro-America as a necessary source of universal theory
(226).
Reinscribing local particulars as sites of general knowledge-production
, in turn, recognizes that local communities of inquiry and audience offer already-existing epistemological frameworks that themselves ground self-critique, rather than stand as passive objects of analysis.

Scholars have flawed views of Latin America – state interference proves.
Crow 2010 (Joanna Crow, Lecturer of Latin American Studies at Bristol University, PhD from
University College London, “Introduction: Intellectuals, Indigenous Ethnicity and the State in Latin
America, 7/28/2010, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17442221003787068)//JL
As Wade has remarked
, the concepts of race and ethnicity are ‘part of an enterprise of knowledge’
(1997, p. 6
), and knowledge is intimately related to power
.
As
producers of knowledge and, in our case, enunciators of indigenous ethnicity
, intellectuals are important arbiters of power. Their discourses
and images of indigeneity may function as part of, in negotiation with
, or in opposition to
, the dominant
representation regime, or
indeed entirely outside the sphere of state authorities, although the latter is rare
.
All the intellectuals considered in this volume have sought to lead
processes of ‘ discursive transformation’
(like Florencia Mallon’s [1995] ‘local intellectuals’ in
Peasant and Nation) and to influence
the organization of the society in which they live
. Beyond this – and the fact that most of the contributors use ‘intellectual’ in the broader Gramscian sense of term
– it becomes rather difficult to summarize them. Indeed, what stands out most clearly is the great diversity of intellectuality being discussed.
States corrupt scholars through salary – indigenous cinema proves.
Crow 2010 (Joanna Crow, Lecturer of Latin American Studies at Bristol University, PhD from
University College London, “Introduction: Intellectuals, Indigenous Ethnicity and the State in Latin
America, 7/28/2010, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17442221003787068)//JL
The state is a crucially important classifier and manager. It enacts policies that affect indigenous people
, determines who is given what rights, and creates and promotes images of indigenous peoples
(through museums, schools, official national symbols, etc.).
It
also has an impact on intellectuals’ representation of indigenous peoples: it can endorse certain people’s work
, thereby securing the dissemination of that work and often providing a salary
(e.g. Diego Rivera in
Mexico); it can allow people a space to operate without sanctioning their work
(e.g. José Carlos
Mariátegui during Augosto Lenguía’s oncenio in Peru); it can repress those individuals who go too far in their defense of indigenous rights
(in Colombia a number of intellectual-activists have been eliminated by forces linked to the government). Possibly Foote’s article here provides the most compelling example of the state’s role in the dissemination of images (or histories) of indigenous peoples. In some cases, the link is not so direct out nonetheless important
. For example,
Wood notes how critical technological developments have been for the production of indigenous cinema
; these are not controlled by the state, but they can be encouraged, disseminated and
– more importantly – financed by the state
.

Politicians will ignore the K – seen as not dealing with reality*
Beverley , Professor Hispanic Language and Literature at UPitt, and Sanders , Grad Student at
UPitt, ’97 (John and James, “Negotiating with the Disciplines. A Conversation on Latin American
Subaltern Studies” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol 6 No 2, T&F Online)//JAG
Now, when historians like Mallon criticize us for being 'textcentric'
, I think I know what they're worried about. worried about a kind of theoretical prattle they find confusing and obscurantist
They're
. Spivak gets a lot of the blame for this, since her writing is so difficult to understand—it's like consulting the Delphic oracle. I know professional historians would much prefer to go to the archives and pick through dusty legajos than read Spivak. Most of them probably would rather be tortured than have to read Spivak. On the other hand, I think that historians, and in general people in the social sciences, have been closed to the implications for their own work of a book like Rama's La ciudad letrada. Now, it so happens that La ciudad letrada is about the state. It's true that it looks at the state from the perspective of the role of literature in constructing
Elites. But this is precisely where the question of what Raymond Williams called 'cultural materialism' comes in. What Williams and Althusser were interested in, in different though I think complementary ways, was how ideology was not just 'ideas' but material practices located in the school, the family, the workplace, institutions ... In Althusser's famous definition, ideology is what interpellates individuals as subjects.
What cultural studies does is essentially make culture homologous with ideology. So that if you can show a genealogy of the Latin American state
that traces the role in it of the letrado and a certain literary ideal, maybe you can explain a lot about Latin American states, about Latin American politics, about the particular ideological form that the Latin American bourgeoisie assumes
, that it isn't simply a pure mercantile or capitalist bourgeoisie, it's a bourgeoisie that likes to think, or used to anyway, that it's cultured, reads both Rod6 and Marti, identifies itself with a Romantic literary image. Then you have a more Gramscian understanding of hegemony and Latin American elites and Latin American politics, in which culture is a key element. At the same time though, you have got away from the 'culturalist' conception of culture—the conception that basically identifies culture with the Sunday supplement of the newspaper. It was to get that idea of a cultural determination of class and power relations that Guha insisted on taking the concept of the subaltern from Gramsci. Gramsci was posing a challenge to historians. The challenge is that if you're doing a book like Murdo MacLeod's Spanish Central America (1973), which is full of all kinds of information about social and economic institutions/you also need to talk about how the people who are acting in those institutions as historical subjects were formed as subjects. And since some of them were formed as subjects in part through literature and the humanities in Spanish or colonial schools, you have to talk about that. But MacLeod doesn't say much in that 500 or 600 page book about who was reading in colonial Central America, what they were reading, what they were being taught, how the cultivation of letras—that is, of literature and history—marked a distinction between subaltern and dominant subject positions. He takes it for granted that his actors always already existed as subjects, had pre-established interests and pursued rational choice strategies for maximizing those interests. But to me, that is a liberal and psychologistic way, of looking at subjects, subaltern or otherwise: subjects are already there, all the historian has to do is figure out from the archives what they did. Whereas the problem we wanted to try to get at was how people are produced as the subjects who act in relations of production, in gender and ethnic relations, in given historical and social conjunctures. How is it that they're constructed as subjects in the first place? JS:
But isn't there a political risk here? Disciplines like economics and political science
or the professional schools are probably never going to pick this up. Right now in economics you don't even have very many Marxists left, much less subaltern studies approaches ... It's getting
very conservative ... JB:
More technocratic
... JS: More technocratic. Developmentalism is still king, albeit now in a neoliberal mode, and feeds into NGOs and transnational entities like the World Bank. Political science may be a battle ground for theory, but political scientists are going to find it much easier than historians or anthropologists to dismiss
what you are doing as not dealing with 'reality', as they understand it. The danger one might imagine then is that in pursuing subaltern studies we'll abandon the study of what subjects actually do
—as opposed to their creation— to the economists and
policy-administration people. And we won't like the consequences!
Right-wing backlash to abstract approach to Latin America**
Mallon , Professor History at University of Wisconsin-Madison, ’94 (Florencia, December, “The
Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History” The American
Historical Review, Vol 99 No 4, p 1491-1515, JSTOR)//JAG
Joseph struck a nerve
, especially in
Richard
Slatta
, who edited the volume on Latin American bandits extensively discussed in the original review essay.
Slatta had a particularly sharp barb ready for anything that smacked of "Foucaultism or other strains of poststructuralism
. Serious philosophical differences divide the practitioners," he wrote. "
The cacophony of conflicting discourses and competing projects often is too abstract, rarified, and sectarian to help working historians
... Philosophers are still working on what Foucault means by dispositif and other concepts.
How, then, can practicing historians employ his ideas with any confidence?" In the footnote to this statement, he also summarily disposed of Gramsci: "Similar problems face historians taking up Gramscian hegemony. The term suffers confusing 'slippage' at the hands of the master and his disciples."'8 So
Joseph's effort to link questions of textual analysis, subaltern agency, and recent advances in agrarian history to the history of banditry received a slap on the wrist from a "working historian" who found all the theories associated with Foucault and Gramsci to be too confusing and half-baked
. In order to dismiss methodological criticisms associated with an overreliance on typology, an underemphasis on social analysis, and an uncritical use of official records, Slatta invoked the twin ghosts of poststructuralist and Gramscian slippage. Although the celebration of the linguistic turn was never Joseph's purpose in the first place, it is interesting to note that his attempt to use the dual purposes of Subaltern Studies to overcome a dead end in Latin American bandit studies was answered by an attempt to

collapse both purposes into a morass of postmodern confusion
.'9 Not long after the debate on banditry, the
Subaltern Studies Group was once again invoked in the pages of the Latin American Research Review. In a review essay on colonial and postcolonial discourse, Patricia Seed stated that, in the historical field, "members of the subaltern studies movement have been the leaders of the postcolonial discourse movement." Although Joseph's original article on banditry had appeared in the same journal a year before, Seed did not demonstrate an awareness of it, or of other recent discussions on politics, ethnicity, and the state that had begun to appear in various subfields of Latin American history. In works that spanned the geographical and temporal spectrum from the early colonial period to the twentieth century, historians had begun to show that all subaltern communities were internally differentiated and conflictual
and that subalterns forged political unity or consensus in painfully contingent ways
. Some scholars had also uncovered the multiple ways in which oppressed peoples had engaged and used state institutions and the law, demonstrating that the same strategy increased people's room to move and made impossible a frontal assault on the existing balance of power. Authors actively questioned more linear or top-down renditions of major transitions, such as the conquest, the abolition of slavery, or the Nicaraguan Revolution, engaging in dynamic debate with other historians over the importance of subaltern political struggles in these transitions. It was only by ignoring this literature that Seed was able to conclude that " historians have been relatively reluctant to consider any form of reflexivity or reflexive
selfcritique of their practices.
"20
Seed shared
with Richard Slatta an impatience for
what can be loosely termed resistance studies
. [A]nthropologists’ and historians' versions of what happened were usually tales of either heroic resistance in which natives dramatically defended their homelands or accounts of manipulative accommodation in which colonial goals were maneuvered to serve the interests of the native community or some combination of the two story lines. In the late 1980s, these tales of resistance and accommodation were being perceived increasingly as mechanical, homogenizing, and inadequate versions of the encounters between the colonizers and the colonized. In contrast to Slatta, however, who warned against postmodern slippage, Seed saw poststructuralism as the answer. "As narratives of resistance and accommodation were losing credibility," she wrote, "a major new intellectual movement was emerging in association with thinkers loosely grouped as poststructuralists." But she also agreed with Slatta when she linked poststructuralism, the linguistic turn, and postcolonial discourse studies directly to Subaltern Studies, once again collapsing the linguistic and textual analysis methods of the school into their more political goals and purposes, neatly covering over their Gramscian genealogy.2' In a sense, it could not have been otherwise for her. Openly to discuss the Gramscian project of Subaltern Studies would have led back into a part of the resistance studies literature Seed had summarily dismissed. It would have necessitated a more careful reading and analysis of the last generation of historical studies on subaltern practices, culture, politics, and resistance in Latin America.22 It would have made the panacea of the linguistic turn seem less complete and therefore less attractive. And it would have led back into the deep creative tension centrally present in the Subaltern Studies Group itself. Here we encounter
, to my mind, the gravest problem with the kind of conceptual and methodological borrowing that the application of Subaltern Studies to other parts of the world entails
.
In the process of the dialogue itself, either or both sides can be flattened out, simplified, misrepresented
. If this occurs, the nuances, internal tensions, and contradictions-in short, the very stuff of which meaningful academic discussion is made-are pushed aside in favor of defining the correct way
.
Once this has been done, it is no longer necessary to understand what has gone before, since it has become entirely irrelevant
.
Latin
Americanists
who rediscovered Marxism and its many varieties in the 1960s and 1970s also tended to fall into this methodological trap
. Dismissing earlier traditions and works as irrelevant and passe, we often missed important clues concerning the explanatory power of ethnicity, race, family, ecology, and demography because our newly discovered theoretical correctness told us that it all came down to class and mode of production.23
Besides, what better way to circumvent entire literatures, often prohibitive in size and overwhelming in detail. and complexity, than by lumping them into categories that were no longer theoretically current? Especially in today's academic world, with its notorious overproduction, such techniques of dismissal are especially attractive. They make it possible for scholars such as
Patricia Seed to pretend that a single approach to
an issue such as resistance and accommodation-in the African, Asian, and
Latin
American fields
, for the colonial and postcolonial periodsdooms the entire project and makes it irrelevant
. "Such tales of 'adaptation and response,"' Seed concluded in her response to a query by Rolena Adorno, relying on notions of oppositional identity as untouched, authentic, and unproblematically created, coincided well with the narratives that were being produced by the leaders of emergent postcolonial states as well as by those opposing the largely economic domination and occasional direct political domination of the United States in Central and South America. Often producing a political redemptive narrative based on liberation from an evil oppressor, such tales found congenial readerships not simply in Latin America but throughout current and former colonial worlds.

They set the bar too high – perfect scholarship of Latin America unnecessary
Paton et al , Professor Caribbean History at Newcastle, ‘ 4 (Diana Paton, John Beck- Professor Cultural
Studies at Newcastle, Gemma Robinson- Professor English at Newcastle, Spring, “Teaching ‘The
Americas’” Radical History Review, Issue 89, p 218-229, ProjectMuse)//JAG
One of the difficulties
in designing a program on something as vast as the Americas was
our constant awareness of
our own ignorance, of the impossibility of providing “coverage” of even a fraction of the important questions and problems that arise
in studying the Americas.
Could our program be legitimate given that we had no specialist on
Canada or
Venezuela, for example?
In the end, we answered yes
to this question, even while recognizing that our graduates would not be able to claim a
“complete” knowledge of the “histories, societies, and cultures
” we were teaching them about.
Complete coverage is an illusory goal
anyway, we concluded, even were we to limit ourselves to an examination of
, say, the Caribbean
, Brazil, or the United States.
Recognition of the blank spaces in our own program forced us and our students to see that what we taught and they learned was neither representative
(in the sense of providing a key to all aspects of American societies and cultures) nor canonical
(in the sense of introducing students to the “best” or “most significant” aspects of these histories and cultures). Indeed, we began to stress that our purpose was
precisely the opposite of a canonical one—even while the necessity of providing syllabi and reading lists forced us to include some things and exclude others
.

Using US knowledge production as a starting point doesn’t guarantee imperialism – just provides a basis for comparison
Paton et al , Professor Caribbean History at Newcastle, ‘ 4 (Diana Paton, John Beck- Professor Cultural
Studies at Newcastle, Gemma Robinson- Professor English at Newcastle, Spring, “Teaching ‘The
Americas’” Radical History Review, Issue 89, p 218-229, ProjectMuse)//JAG
Thus we resolved our anxieties about coverage and representativeness by adopting a thematic approach. And yet these anxieties would have been less easily assuaged had the blank spaces in our map been where the United States, rather than Venezuela and Canada (among others), should be.
For all our recognition of the constructedness of regional knowledges, an “Americas” program without “Americanists” would have simply been another Latin American/Caribbean studies degree. The United
States
, then, turns out not to be simply one nation among many in the Americas, but the crux of the comparison
.
This
results in part from the prior configuration of Latin American and Caribbean studies (which were already comparative) on the one hand, and American studies (which was not, although in the United Kingdom the existence of “U.S. and Canadian studies programs” is in itself suggestive) on the other, but it is
also a manifestation of a U.S. cultural dominance that we could try to understand but could not ignore
. The absence of U.S. specialists was not a practical problem for us, nor would it be at any British university, given the extent of resources in Britain devoted to the study of the United States in comparison with any other part of the Americas. To give a crude example, few British history departments lack a U.S. historian, but few include a historian of any other part of the Americas. But in trying to see the Americas whole, we did confront an important intellectual and political issue: the geopolitical, economic, and cultural dominance of one part of what we are trying to compare over all the others
.
Obviously, we should not be teleological about this
. One of the optional courses in our program, “The Renaissance in the Atlantic World” examines Anglo- American and Latin American texts from a period when future U.S. dominance over Latin America was neither envisioned nor inevitable. And yet the fact of global U.S. power sets the parameters of what we do in many ways
.
Our students
(who so far have been mainly British, although students from Spain and Cyprus have also studied with us), while lacking the “insider” knowledge that comes from growing up in any of the cultures they are studying, have far greater everyday cultural knowledge of the
United States than of Latin America or the Caribbean
. Like us, they watch American films and TV, listen to American music, and buy the products of American consumer-capitalist culture (even if these are more likely to be made in Mexico or Taiwan than in the United States itself). The actions of U.S. politicians might transform their lives by throwing the world into war. In contrast, although they may listen to some styles of
Cuban and Jamaican music
, could see Mexican or Argentine films if they went to an art house cinema, and (with our encouragement) will follow
Brazilian politics, their knowledge of Latin America and the Caribbean comes far more exclusively via an academic route. Even in terms of academic knowledge, most of our students have taken many more undergraduate courses about the United States than they have about the Caribbean or Latin America
.

Subaltern studies destroys policymaking by focusing only on textual deconstruction
Mallon , Professor History at University of Wisconsin-Madison, ’94 (Florencia, December, “The
Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History” The American
Historical Review, Vol 99 No 4, p 1491-1515, JSTOR)//JAG
It was in the light of such a deductive analysis of politics that the need for a Subaltern Studies approach made the most sense. A hegemonic alternative for the future needed to be built with what already existed.
Activists and intellectuals concerned with building an alternative needed to know, through investigation, what traditions they had to work with
. They could not deduce them simply through the application of Marxist categories. "Every trace of independent initiative on the part of subaltern groups should therefore be of incalculable value for the integral historian," Gramsci wrote. "Consequently, this kind of history can only be dealt with monographically, and each monograph requires an immense quantity of material which is often hard to collect."'13
Herein lies the deepest, most irresolvable , and also the most
fertile tension in the Subaltern Studies project. The recovery of subaltern practices, beliefs, and actions necessitated the use of new documents but especially of new methods for reading old documents. This laborious and methodologically complex task led many members of the group increasingly into semiotics, literary criticism, and many forms of textual analysis. Yet, by encouraging the deconstruction of texts along lines of power and hierarchy and by decentering all subjects that emerged in the documents, these techniques have ultimately questioned two assumptions central to the group's political purpose: that subaltern practices had some autonomy from elite culture and that subaltern politics had a unity and solidarity of its own.
14 By January 1986, when the second Subaltern Studies conference was held in Calcutta, this tension came out into the open. As summarized by David Hardiman, himself a contributor to the project from its inception, the school was "standing at something of a crossroads . . . One road leads towards greater concentration on textual analysis and a stress on the relativity of all knowledge; another towards the study of subaltern consciousness and action so as to forward the struggle for a socialist society." As reported by Hardiman, both positions received well-argued support.
The proponents of textual analysis emphasized the value of the group's deconstruction of existing theories and pointed out the inevitable relativism of such an endeavor
; Guha himself stressed that the school was "born under a sign of negation-'negation' is inscribed on the subaltern banner." The proponents of a more openly political purpose, however, emphasized the constructive rather than deconstructive aspects of the school's original purpose, the need to focus on politics and on the interactions of elites and subalterns over time. If, indeed, the Subaltern School sought to "make the subaltern classes the subjects of their own history," some scholars argued, deconstruction was of necessity a tool rather than a goal.
Guha also supported the need for an ultimately political purpose
, and he suggested that this division might be a strength rather than a weakness.
Hardiman, however, concluded his report by suggesting that this division could very well prove difficult to overcome in the long run
, especially since "the debate during the conference served more to reveal these differences rather than to work towards their resolution
."'15
Can these differences be resolved?
Is resolution in one direction or the other even the most desirable goal? I think not. In an essay published in 1985, Gayatri Spivak reflected on the productive aspects of these contradictions. By insisting that subalterns possessed positive human agency and could be thinking and autonomous historical subjects, she argued, the Subaltern Studies school was placing itself in a subaltern position within historiography. Yet the very act of doing so, Spivak insisted, could be "reinscribed as a strategy for our times." Subaltern identities and consciousness will always remain slightly out of reach, resisting attempts to fit them into a linear narrative. But historians must persist in their efforts at recovering subaltern subjectivity, even though they know it is an ultimately impossible task. "It is a hard lesson to learn," Spivak concluded. "[B]ut not to learn it is merely to nominate elegant solutions to be correct theoretical practice."
By continuing to explore the politically positive, liberating potential of subaltern histories, then, by marshaling semiotics and postmodern techniques for emancipatory purposes that they can never entirely meet, by persisting in these apparently impossible attempts at combination, the Subaltern Studies Group can continue to make its greatest and broadest contribution.16

Subaltern authors use carnivalesque thinking
Brass, Tom (Social and Poltical Sciences Faculty at the University of Cambridge, “On which side of the barricade? Subaltern Resistance in Latin America and Elsewhere”, The Journal of Peasant Studies)
9/8/ 10, http:/ldx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150412331311109
Celebrated not just by Latin Americanist subalternism but also in
¶ postmodern frameworks
(resistance theory associated with the work of J.C.
¶
Scott) and non-postmodern theory (the 'moral economy' approach of E.P.
¶
Thompson) alike as powerexercised-from-below, the 'primordial' rituals of¶ 'crowning/decrowning' associated with Bakhtinian concepts of carnival and¶ carnivalesque discourse/performance are currently presented as the¶ 'natural' voice of the people at the rural grassroots in many so-called Third¶ World contexts, a politically unmediated (~ 'authentic') form of 'from
¶ below' resistance to any/all types of injustice/oppression/exploitation
¶ exercised 'from above' .17 Broadly speaking, carnival and the carnivalesque¶ entail the inversion - and thus the negation - of existing hierarchy and its¶ structures of control/domination, a situation which licenses in turo a ritual¶ challenge to those who exercise power and its symbolic overturning." In
¶ specifically
Thompsonian terms, this involves the application of 'moral economy' in a carnivalesque form known as 'rough musicking' (= 'a¶ ritualised expression of hostility')." Such a view, however, overlooks the¶ extent to which carnival not merely does not challenge but actually¶ reinforces and justifies the existing social structure, and is therefore -pace
¶
Canclini - more accurately categorized as a form of social control (or
¶ power-exercised-from-above)."
And, this Carnivalesque thinking inhibits our ability to truly understand the subject
Brass, Tom (Social and Poltical Sciences Faculty at the University of Cambridge, “On which side of the barricade? Subaltern Resistance in Latin America and Elsewhere”, The Journal of Peasant Studies)
9/8/ 10, http:/ldx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150412331311109
For this reason, it is important to remember a number of things about the¶ role of carnival in general, and its particular manifestation as the fiesta in rural Latin America, in the reproduction of the wider socio-economic system." To begin with, the fact that in Latin America
(as elsewhere ) the main impact of carnivalesque discourse/performance is ideological and not material, and as such involves nothing more than a ritual and symbolic overturning, and one moreover that is ouly of short duration." Furthermore, insofar as carnival is the site of laughter, this serves not to reinforce but to defuse the anger that prefigures class struggle.
"In other words, the function of carnival is much rather that of a 'safety valve' mechanism: any grassroots opposition that exists is doubly displaced, from potentially threatening arenas (the labour process) and organizational forms (strikes, trade unions), thus rendering it safe." Opposition is permitted, therefore, but channelled in what is an essentially harmless form (antagonism = symbolic) into an equally harmless site (carnival, the fiesta) in which its manifestation is and remains systemically non-threatening.
Equally significant in this regard is the fact that, where disputes over title or access to property have been concerned, often it was poor peasant farmers or labourers who were targets of carnivalesque discourse initiated by authorities or landowners in the vicinity.
" Far from being a break with the existing socio-economic order, the carnival (and carnivalesque discourse) in some instances ensures its continuation, and allows the dominant class in the context concerned to reproduce the social relations of production and thus to perpetuate its rule.