Ivonne
Del Valle, Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese
The series of lectures "Coloniality
of Power, Transmodernity and the Geopolitics of Knowledge
in the Modern/Colonial Capitalist World System" (Quijano/Mignolo/Dussel)
organized by the Department of Ethnic Studies, opened with
the presentation by Aníbal Quijano, professor at Universidad
de San Marcos (Peru), and Binghamton University (New
York). Quijano, a Peruvian sociologist and thinker, is the
author of Coloniality of Power, Globalization and Democracy,
among many other books. His lecture, "Coloniality of Power
in the Modern World," marked the central themes of the debate
of the following days: the extension of the colonial period;
the importance of the production of new, different knowledge
to fight the coloniality of globalization; and the important
role of this knowledge well beyond academic issues, since
it has a great impact on people's everyday lives.
Globalization, according
to Quijano, is simply the development of historical events
and ideological constructions which first emerged in the
16th century with the discovery of America. One of those
pivotal constructions is the invention of the concept of "race," which
continues to have important consequences today.
In Quijano's view, trends
such as the increasing polarization between rich and poor
and rising levels of unemployment are not new; what is new
is the acceleration and profundization of those processes
after what in the 1970s and 80s appeared as the total defeat
of the opposition to Europe's and the United States' imperialism.
Awareness of these processes seems especially new since for
many years all discussion of power and criticism of the current
system--appearing then as the only possible system--was excluded
from all public debate.
It has now become evident--the
facts are there, as Quijano points out--that the results
of globalization have been "catastrophic" for the majority
of people. We are confronted with 20% of the world controlling
80% of the world's production, whereas 80% of the people
have access to only 20% of world production. The continuity
of colonization can be seen in the way the victims of globalization
are the same as those of colonialism per se: the ex-colonies
and their people, even those who migrate to the center to
become "slaves."
To explain how power
functions in the current world system--coloniality being
its main characteristic--Quijano asserts that capitalism
as an economic system of exploitation is not sufficient as
an answer. An interdependent system functions with it: the
production of a world system of classification, non-existent
before the 16th century. Race, in Quijano's words, is the
bedrock of the entire history of domination. All the previous
forms of domination (e.g., gender) were then reconfigured
around the new system of race. This concept also organized
knowledge and society to the point of almost naturalizing
the division of labor: if one were black, slavery was the
type of extraction one was subjected to, and so on. The long-lasting
mental construct of race is related to the posterior formation
of a Eurocentric mode of knowledge.
The dualistic division
between soul and body was an ancient model, but from Descartes
on, points out Quijano, it became a complete separation/
This later allowed the division between peoples who were
regarded as almost pure body (the slave, the woman.) and
those who were envisioned as mostly spirit. In the center
of this dualism and evolutionism, the European subject placed
itself as the most spiritual and evolved of human beings,
relegating the rest of humanity to the status of primitivism.
To confront and to rethink this pervasive mental heritage,
which has invaded numerous local imaginaries, is one of our
tasks in overcoming colonialism.
Quijano emphasizes the
need to rethink all systems of exploitation, from the 16th
century on, in light of the characteristics of capitalism.
Slavery, serfdom, salary, and reciprocity (the forced labor
imposed on Indians, like the mita in Peru) were all
intentionally organized to produce commodities for the world
market. It is in this sense that from that period onward,
even though it had different faces, capitalism became the
new general system of exploitation. This system cannot be
linked to the promotion of democracy, an argument made by
its defenders that Quijano disputes. As he points out, it
has always been able to work within and with different kinds
of states, perhaps particularly non-nation-states, such as
Viceroyalties. Non-nation states did not represent the nation,
as understood as the totality of its participants: blacks,
Indians, mestizos, etc. This lack of representativity, these
de-nationalized states, are also related to the idea of race,
pivotal in Quijano's understanding of coloniality.
Quijano's lecture and
this series can be considered alternatives or complements
(depending on one's point of view) to post-colonial studies.
