Browsing by Author "Mignolo, Walter D"

This thesis explores the confluence and clashes between local and global cultural flows in Latin America through the multiple literary movements and tendencies for which the Colombian author, Fernando Vallejo, acts as a unifying agent. My analysis pulls from Decolonial, Aesthetic and World Literary theories, in order to analyze how cosmopolitanism and globalization resonate in contemporary Latin American letters through a survey of three geocultural categories: the Colombian local, the Latin American regional, and the literary global. My analysis of the local tracks the formal evolution of the Colombian Novela de la Violencia into the contemporary Novela Urbana and the parallel political challenge to the conventional Lettered City in Colombia after the Violencia. In terms of the regional, I critique the idea of a positive and universally stabilizing cosmopolitanism through a collective analysis of a generation of Latin American writers that were forced to travel to the cosmopolitan center through exile rather than as an act of freewill, a generation that I refer to in this project as the Generation of '72. And my evaluation of the global considers how a singular World Literary aesthetics and political economy of prestige weights negatively on contemporary Latin American authors. Through a survey of the roughly fifty novels and short stories that fall under the purview of both the Colombian Urban Novel and the Generation of `72, I conclude that aesthetic borders - the places where multiple forms of perception converge- open up spaces and forums of critique of rigid cultural models and century old aesthetic formulae, a tendency that I refer to as a poetics of globalism.

“Even Christ the Redeemer has turned his back to us” a young, Black female resident of the Baixada Fluminense told me. The 13 municipalities that make up this suburban periphery of Rio de Janeiro have suffered for decades from stigmatizing media narratives that cast the region as pathologically violent and culturally devoid due to its Blacker, poorer inhabitants. This has helped perpetuate government neglect, exacerbated by Rio’s hosting of the 2016 Olympic Games, through clientelist politics that thrive off the lack of jobs and basic public services in the region. My dissertation is an auto-ethnographic analysis of my three years of participatory action research with Black and brown youth in Rio de Janeiro’s stigmatized Baixada Fluminense. I argue that the music, films, social media driven journalism, and scholarly production of these youth contest the ways in which race, class, and place of origin often overlap through segregationist practices that attempt to maintain racial, socio-geographic hierarchies by relegating Black, brown, and poor bodies to the social and geographic periphery of a country than once proclaimed itself a “racial democracy.” Through transnational partnerships, these youth employ diasporic cultural forms and digital media to re-configure the Baixada and its 13 municipalities as a “Black place” that is inherently intersectional in its claims to collective access to urban and social mobility within this urban periphery.

This dissertation focuses on the intellectual and political trajectory of the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (THOA), an autonomous indigenous working group in which I participate, alongside other Aymaras and Quechuas from Bolivia. Grounding itself on the recuperation of ancestral knowledges of the ayllu and its reconstitution, this group has been seeking to decolonize knowledge and therefore society at large.

I have used an oral history methodology, revaluing the word and knowledge of the forefathers and foremothers. They are the inheritors and experts of the movement of caciques and representatives of communities and ayllus, who in the early twentieth century focused on defending their territorial rights on the basis of old colonial titles against the attacks of the landowning oligarchy. Using this methodology, I have questioned such principles of Western research as subject-object, Cartesian rationalism, the instrumental character of research, social discrimination, and epistemic racism in academia.

Guided by the Aymara axiom of qhip nayr uñtasis sarnaqapxañani, looking back to walk forth, as a pluriversal way of thinking that points the contemporaries to their immediate past and deep communal memory, out of whose relation critical sense emerges, it was possible to articulate the process of "Reconstitution and Strenghtening of the Ayllu," whose objective is the reconstitution of political and social organizing forms of thought, as well as the "renewal of Bolivia."

The concept of complementary duality is a salient aspect of Aymara and Quechua ontology, since together with triadic and tetralectic models, these are principles structuring ayllu knowledge, social organization, and politics. These principles are very different from the paradigms of dialectical materialism or the politics of "left" and "right." Despite colonial practices and colonialism, these principles still govern ayllu or communities, as paradigms learnt in the experience of work and needs, through the long observation of the cosmological movement and integration with animal and plant kingdoms, with mountains and vital or energetic fluids making up beings in the environment, all of which are considered as brethren and protecting parents.

Aymara and Quechua thought are wholistic and integral. Among their most important axes are parity and complementarity. These constitute a kind of vital codes, which in a way similar to deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) are found in almost all beings, in their most diverse modality, and therefore are the guarantors for the transmission of values and survival.

The THOA belongs to the range of lettered indiginous thinkers, such as Felipe Waman Puma de Ayala and Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti, as well as of the work Dioses y hombres de Huarochirí, the couple Katari-Amaru, or Eduardo Leandro Nina Qhispi - creator of the principle of brotherhood, who proposed the "renovation of Bolivia" -, among others who through our actions reivindicate the wisdom of the ayllus, which expresses a different way of doing politics. Bolivia's current President, Evo Morales, would be the starting point of that model, whose goal is the suma jaqaña or "good living".

The artists and writers of my dissertation -- Robert Smithson, Ed Roberson, Rodolfo Kusch, Alejandra Pizarnik, Nancy Holt, Lygia Clark, and Clarice Lispector -- teach us to feel the ground on which we stand as an earth that quakes, and this feeling implies a radical reconfiguration of our relation to the world, one which makes perception, language, art, and world otherwise. Against an aesthetics of representation, predicated on a regime of pleasurable feeling and form which neutralizes the world into an empty space filled with objects, and which I argue lingers as the hegemonic framework for the study of American literature, they offer an understanding art and literature as an embodied engagement with the weight of a world that presses in and pulls down. I call this feeling an aeisthesis of ground and offer it as a way to rethink the ethics of our relation to the world. From this trembling ground, these artists and writers struggle to make the world and our relation to it otherwise. In so doing, they contribute to the project of decolonizing the aesthetic imaginary of the Americas. They propose a different point of departure for the study of American literature, one which allows us to cultivate unlikely lines of kinship between authors and texts on both sides of the Rio Grande. Engaging the work of these authors and artists contributes to current work in the humanities which has turned to aesthetics as a way to rethink our human relation to the world in the face of our global ecological crisis. It, however, also radically departs from these efforts precisely in its point of departure, remaking this relation from the more unsteady ground of American art, letters, and life that these artists help us unfold.

La disertación no define un campo disciplinario, ni una construcción formal, ni una metodología que intente llegar a una verdad racional. Se desobedece la linealidad epistémica occidental y el enfoque en un tema específico. El manuscrito opta por navegar a través de rutas relacionales en conversación desde, con y entre varios saberes y experiencias personales, tribales y comunitarias. Localizamos el andar decolonial en un territorio expandido donde incorporamos una geo-­‐‑política trazada en la continuidad que ofrece la ancestralidad lingüística y cultural entre maya, seminole y loko, esta última conectada a la lengua madre arahuaca que se extiende desde la región amazónica del este de Los Andes, norte de Argentina y Paraguay desde 9000 A.C.

Al hilvanar experiencias y saberes otros, se establecen conexiones y rupturas más cercanas a los que entendimos como cosmos-­‐‑existencia y cosmoconvivencia en los imaginarios indígenas, afro y US latinxs. La disertación no podrá abarcar todas las rutas y encrucijadas que propician la decolonialidad del imaginario erótico kairibe, pero transito caminos sacbes desde donde los trazos de la memoria y la experiencia sanan la opresión colonial y nutren el andar del espíritu por los saberes inscritos en los relatos de creación indígenas y afro caribe, la oralidad de las lenguas maya yucateca y loko, la expresión de varixs creadores decoloniales, y las conversaciones e intercambios sociales con algunos de los miembros del proyecto decolonial.

A partir de la propuesta metodológica de Linda Tuhiwai Smith, en la cual se afirma que las metodologías indígenas son el resultado de la elaboración de un tejido, este manuscrito entrelaza una plataforma crítica, una encrucijada de saberes donde confluyen la variabilidad de los proyectos metodológicos propuesto por Tuhiwai Smith (1999), el pensamiento fronterizo de Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), la corpo-­‐‑política de Frantz Fanon (1987), la poética relacional de Edouard Glissant (1997), las pedagogía sagrada de Jacqui Alexander (2005), el desprendimiento, delinking de Walter D. Mignolo (2007), el poder erótico de Audre Lorde (1986), la transmodernidad de Enrique Dussel (2005) y la geopolítica del pensar propuesta por Catherine Walsh (2007).

Desde esta encrucijada de saberes, la disertación navega el racismo cognitivo eurocentrado, al mismo tiempo que efectúa el desligue epistémico y creativo hacia locaciones otras donde las experiencias y aprendizajes, conectados a las memorias ancestrales de lxs abuelxs, propician la decolonización del imaginario erótico kairibeafroxeri.

Imagined Islands: A Caribbean Tidalectics confronts islands -at once as a problem, a concept, and a historical and mythical fact and product- by generating a tidalectical encounter between some of the ways in which islands have been imagined and used from without, primarily in the interest of the advancement of western capitalist coloniality, and from within, as can be gathered from Caribbean literatures. The perspective from without, predominantly based on negation, is explored in Section 1 using examples of islands in the Mediterranean, the Pacific, and the Atlantic, as well as a few canonical texts in various academic discourses. Section 2 discusses the perspective from within, an affirmative and creative counter-imagination on/of islands. Emerging from literary work by Derek Walcott, Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá, Édouard Glissant, and Alejo Carpentier, the chapters in Section 2 are organized around three key concepts associated with insularity -tropical light, the coast, and the sea/ocean- and the ways in which they force a rearrangement of enduring philosophical concepts: respectively, vision and sense perception, time and space, and history.

Imagined Islands' Introduction establishes, (1) the stakes of a project undertaken from an immanent perspective set in the Caribbean; (2) the method, inspired chiefly by Kamau Brathwaite's concept of tidalectics; (3) the epistemological problems posed by islands; (4) an argument for a different understanding of history, imagination, and myth inspired by Caribbean texts; and, (5) an overview of the academic debates in which Imagined Islands might make a significant contribution. The first section, "Islands from Without," comprising Chapter 1, provides an account of a few uses and imaginations of islands by capitalist coloniality as they manifest themselves both in the historical and the mythical imaginary realms. I focus on five uses and imaginations of islands (entrepôt island, sugar island, strategic island, paradise island, and laboratory island), with specific examples from the Mediterranean, the Pacific, and the Atlantic, and from five canonical texts ascribed to different disciplinary discourses: Plato's "Atlantis," Thomas More's Utopia, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Charles Darwin's The Origin of the Species, and Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa. I argue, on the one hand, that a dominant idea of the island based on negation (lack, dependency, boundedness, isolation, smallness, remoteness, among other characteristics) has coalesced in the expansionist and exploitative interests of capitalist coloniality, despite the fundamental promiscuity of the concept of "island." On the other hand, I find in the analyzed examples, especially in those of the mythical imaginary, residues in flight that remain open for creative reappropriation.

Imagined Islands' second section, "Islands from Within," encompassing Chapters 2 through 5, relocates the discussion within the Caribbean in order to argue that some of the region's literatures have produced a counter-imagination concerning insularity. This counter-imagination, resulting from an immanent and affirmative engagement with Caribbean islands, amounts to a way of thinking about and living the region and its possibilities in terms other than those of the dominant idea of the island. Each chapter opens with a historical and conceptual discussion of the ways in which light (Chapter 2), the coast (Chapters 3 and 4), and the sea/ocean (Chapter 5) have been imagined and deployed by capitalist coloniality, before turning to Caribbean literary texts as instances of a re-conceptualization of the aforementioned insular features and their concomitant rearrangement of apparently familiar philosophical concepts. Chapter 2 focuses on tropical light, vision, sense perception, Walcott's book-length poem Tiepolo's Hound, and Rodríguez Juliá's novel El espíritu de la luz. Chapter 3 turns to the insular coast, time, space, and the novels El siglo de las luces by Carpentier and The Fourth Century by Glissant. Chapter 5 goes out to sea and history with the help of Rodríguez Juliá's chronicles "El cruce de la Bahía de Guánica y otras ternuras de la Medianía" and "Para llegar a Isla Verde," as well as of sections from Glissant's Poetics of Relation and some of his poems from The Restless Earth. Finally, Imagined Islands' Coda points to some of the ripples this project produces for future study, and defends the urgent need to "live differently" the Caribbean archipelagoes.

This dissertation is a preliminary attempt to define and theorize Spanish literature of the late nineteenth century from the perspective of the colonized. I take as my starting point the novels of the Filipino writer José Rizal: Noli me tángere and El filibusterismo. Although these novels are considered to be the foundational texts of the Philippine nation, I will instead focus on their relationship to Spain and the literature produced there around the same period. This analysis will be contrasted with a reading of Benito Pérez Galdós's novel Doña Perfecta, which, as many critics have claimed, bears a resemblance to Rizal's first novel. I will show how Galdós's novel demonstrates a colonizing mentality despite being nominally about an internal Spanish conflict. In conclusion, I will argue for the necessity of an understanding of Rizal's novels in order to better grasp the total context in which peninsular Spanish novels were produced.

Este trabajo estudia el proceso de invención del espacio en el México colonial durante el siglo XVI y XVII, entendiendo la invención del espacio como la inserción de una conceptualización del entorno ajena a la experiencia de las comunidades indígenas nahuas. Primero se define la idea particular de cosmos, territorio y tierra manejada por los nahuas previo a la llegada española entendida como tlacauhtli, y su conformación mediante los principios de cahuitl (tiempo), ollin (movimiento), nepantla (equilibrio), y tonalli (fuerza) por medio del análisis de documentos prehispánicos y coloniales concernientes a la cosmología nahua. Luego, utilizando la propuesta de Aníbal Quijano sobre la implementación de la matriz colonial de poder en América, se analizan los aspectos de esta matriz en su relación con los procesos de dominación del territorio, motor de la creación del espacio en el México colonial, mediante los procesos de estructuración de los pueblos indígenas coloniales, la economía y el trabajo de la tierra, la deshumanización del espacio mexicano y la cartografía novohispana. Finalmente, se desarrolla la idea de subsistencia de los principios fundamentales del tlacauhtli a pesar de la implementación del concepto de espacio y de la dominación del territorio mexicano por parte de la corona española. En cada ámbito de la matriz, se develan resistencias de la antigua percepción del entorno nahua frente a los cambios impulsados por el proceso colonial.

The dominant cartography of post-Revolutionary Mexico has relied upon strategic constructions of a unified and homogenized national and cultural consciousness (mexicanidad), in order to invent and map a coherent image of imagined community. These strategic boundaries of mexicanidad have also relied upon the mapping of specific codes of being and belonging onto the Mexican geo-body. I argue that these codes have been intimately linked to the discourse of mestizaje, which, in its articulation and operation, has been fashioned as a cosmic tool with which to dissolve and solve the ethno-racial and social divisions following the Revolution, and to usher a unified mestizo nation onto a trajectory towards modernity.

However, despite its rhetoric of salvation and seemingly race-less/positivistic articulation, the discourse of mestizaje has propagated an uneven configuration of mexicanidad in which the belonging of certain elements have been coded as inferior, primitive, problematic, and invisible. More precisely, in the case of Mexicans of African descent, this segment of the population has also been silenced and dis-placed from this dominant cartography.

This dissertation examines the coding of blackness and its relationship with mexicanidad in specific sites and spaces of knowledge production and cultural production in the contemporary era. I first present an analysis of this production immediately in the period following the Revolution, especially from the 1930's to the 1950's, a period labeled as the "cultural phase of the Mexican Revolution." This time period was strategic in manufacturing and disseminating a precise politics of culture that was used to reflect this dominant configuration and cartography of mexicanidad. That is, the knowledge and culture produced during this time imbedded and displayed codes of being and belonging, which resonated State projects and narratives that were used to define and secure the boundaries of a unified, mestizo imaginary of mexicanidad. And, it is within this context that I suggest that blackness has been framed as invisible, problematic, and foreign. For example, cultural texts such as film and comics have served as sites that have facilitated the production and reflection of this uneasy relationship between blackness and mexicanidad. Moreover, this strained and estranged relationship has been further sustained by the nationalization and institutionalization of knowledge and culture related to the black presence and history in Mexico. From the foundational text La raza cósmica, written in 1925 by José Vasconcelos, to highly influential corpuses produced by Mexican anthropologists during this post-Revolutionary period, the production of knowledge and the production of culture have been intimately tied together within an uneven structure of power that has formalized racialized frames of reference and operated on a logic of coloniality. As a result, today it is common to be met with the notion that "no hay negros en México (there are no blacks in Mexico).

Yet, on the contrary, contemporary Afro-Mexican artists and community organizations within the Costa Chica region have been engaging a different cultural politics that has been serving as a tool of place-making and as a decolonization of codes of being and belonging. In this regard, I present an analysis of contemporary Afro-Mexican cultural production, specifically visual arts and radio, that present a counter-cartography of the relationship between blackness and mexicanidad. More specifically, in their engagement of the discourse of cimarronaje (maroonage), I propose that these sites of cultural production also challenge, re-think, re-imagine, and re-configure this relationship. I also suggest that this is an alternative discourse of cimarronaje that functions as a decolonial project in terms of the reification and re-articulation of afromexicanidad (Afro-Mexican-ness) as a dynamic and pluri-versal construction of being and belonging. And, thus, in their link to community programs and social action initiatives, this contemporary cultural production also strives to combat the historical silence, dis-placement, and discrimination of the Afro-Mexican presence in and contributions to the nation. In turn, this dissertation offers an intervention in the making of and the relationships between race, space and place, and presents an interrogation of the geo-politics and bio-politics of being and belonging in contemporary Mexico.

“South as Method: From the ‘Southern Question’ to the ‘Southern Thoughts’” examines the emergence of narrative and rhetoric patterns within the context of the unclear and unstable meaning of race and nation-building discourses in Italy, Spain, Peru, and Argentina. My methodology combines a close reading of late nineteenth-century novels and short stories published in these countries with an analysis of the ways that the global editorial market and local sociological essays influenced the creation of local ‘social types’ in these texts. Bridging intersectional literary analysis with post- and decolonial theories, this study analyzes writers’ definitions of their novels rather than what critics or theorists have called ‘naturalist’ or ‘realist’ novels. It is an invitation to look inside the writers’ peculiar ways of producing novels in this style while prioritizing national concerns. The literary corpus analyzed spans from essays—Luigi Capuana’s L’isola del sole, Antonio Gramsci’s Quaderni del carcere, Cesare Lombroso’s L’uomo delinquente, José Carlos Mariátegui’s Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana, Ezequiel Martinez Estrada’s Radiografia de la pampa, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Civilización y barbarie—to novels and short stories—Emilia Pardo Bazán’s La tribuna, Mercedes Cabello’s Blanca Sol, Eugenio Cambaceres’s En la sangre, Clorinda Matto’s Herencia, Luigi Pirandello’s “L’altro figlio,” Benito Pérez Galdós’s Lo prohibido and Tormento, Giovanni Verga’s “Rosso Malpelo” and “L’amante di Gramigna.” In my analysis of these nineteenth-century texts, the concept of ‘social type’ is highlighted as a key framework and a descriptive tool that responds to the growing need for orientation within the unsteady national borders. In this sense, I analyze the osmotic relationship between social science and literature, which culminates in the responses articulated by Marxist theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, Ezequiel Martinez Estrada, and José Carlos Mariátegui, in the 1930s, through their original articulation of the south as a method rather than an object of study.

This dissertation explores the idea of “history” as a general theory of meaning in its rapport to Christian political theology and its liquidation into the secular idea of a world divided into “familial,” “civilizational,” “national,” “racial,” and “religious” entities and collectivities. The author attempts to demonstrate that the relevance of historical meaning expands globally with Christian colonialism and imperialism, and that historicization ultimately amounts to racialization. Acquisition of historical meaning is the rite of entry into the world of nations, and history ultimately figures the political collectivities that it founds and bestows meaning upon as “communities of blood,” or communities in possession of a sacred shared substance that persists over time, is often constituted by means of purging from it what is produced as “foreign,” and has to be protected and immunized against exterior contamination. The process of acquisition of modern racial-historical meaning and formation into a national situation is particularly explored with reference to Iran.

A variety of scholarly and literary texts are recited, alongside an exploration of postmodern war and democratic politics in an attempt to demonstrate the theological underpinnings of historical meaning. Interrelations of “religion” and “race” are particularly explored and the idea of “secularism” is questioned specially in its rapport to Christian imperialism, Orientalism, and the philological history of “Semitism” and anti-Semitism. The text is largely sui generis, self-referential and poetic in method: it explores the resonances and dissonances of various texts and strives to express the semantic noise of these juxtapositions all the while that it seeks to explore the obscene undersides of contemporary political ideas and ideals.