In Aníbal Quijano’s surgical analysis on the “coloniality of power” and its implications for the construction of the idea of race within a Eurocentric view, the author claims that racial differentiation arises intersected with hierarchical structures of production and labor division under capitalism, as well as determinant for the social and cultural relations in the Americas. For Quijano, “modernity was also colonial from its point of departure” (196).
In this sense, Aquille Mbembe argues that “any historical account of the rise of modern terror needs to address slavery, which could be considered one of the first instances of biopolitical experimentation” (21). Taking up the discussion laid by Foucault’s notion of biopower, Mbembe affirms that racism is “above all a technology aimed at permitting the exercise of biopower” (17), functioning as a regulator of the “distribution of death”, at the same time, making possible the murderous functions of the state. His argument resonates with our previous reading of Cesaré article, where the author claims that the logic of violence and racial differentiation perpetrated by the Nazism was already present in European culture since the beginning of colonialism. A view shared by Hannah Arendt as well.
However, Mbembe stresses that the contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death (necropolitics) creates what the author calls death-worlds, in which Foucault’s notion of Biopower is no longer sufficient. Sovereignty in the rise of the necropower is understood by Mbembe as the writing of new spatial and social relations on the territory occupied, a form of displacement that relegates the “colonized into a third zone between subjecthood and objecthood” (26).
This negative (and almost apocalyptical) view of Mbembe collides with Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s more propositive perspective regarding the colonized’s power of agency. For Cusicanqui, the paradoxical inscriptions of animals and indigenous deities carved in the portals of Churches, or embroidered in the mantas and costumes of the national festivities’ dancers count for the creation of “a new space of contestation and symbolic resistance” (n/p). Cusicanqui argues that the labor diaspora in scenarios of domination also contains a space of subjectivity and agency that lays beyond “the figure of the sacrificial victim” (n/p).
The diverse scenarios created by the Andean indigenous people correspond to a sense of “relationality”, in which Cusicanqui identifies “a gesture of continuous contextualization, integration, and re-signification of all the elements of lived or imagined experience. (…) a woven fabric of ethical valuations that combines parody, irony and corporal-aesthetic sensuousness” (n/p). They represent a “conscious miscegenation” between cultures “stained” by colonization, in the form of a “symbolic transaction” that takes place in the “experience of a lived contradiction”. Those scenarios also represent the creation of intermediary spaces that counts for the survival of the Andean’s ancestral culture and history under Colonialism, operating today as a form of creative energy, capable of altering the rhythm of the “neocolonial capitalist machine” through the reappropriation of its very own repertoire, methods and practices.
A few notes for class discussion:
1- There is an interesting notion of overlapping materiality and temporal displacement within Colonialism briefly approached by the authors that I believe is ultimately important for our understanding of the contemporary conditions of non-white people in the Americas.
2- Cusicanqui’s argument made me think about the importance of researching and mapping out ethical notions within non-Eurocentric cultures. This might be especially interesting for the “being with / ethical alliances” collaborative project theme.
3- This week’s readings made me remember Cacique Guaicaipuro Cuatemoc fictional speech (written by Luis Britto García) on Europe’s debt to the Americas.
Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. "The Potosí Principle: Another View of Totality." Decolonial Gesture 11. no. 1: 2014. Accessed 29 Sep 2018. Quijano, Aníbal. "Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America" Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate. 181-222. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2008. Mbembe, Achille. "Necropolitics." Public Culture 15. no. 1: 2003. Accessed 29 Sep 2018.