Achille Mbembe and Aníbal Quijano both interrogate the power structures that exist at the foundations of the modern nation-state. Mbembe challenges what he names the “normative theories of democracy” (13), turning instead to the exercise of sovereignty as a practice of the “generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations” (14), a process in which certain populations become disposable. Here, Mbembe invokes Foucault’s definition of racism as the division –or frame, to borrow from Judith Butler’s observations on what makes a life grievable– of “those who must live and those who must die” (17).
There is an interesting dialogue here with Quijano. Although Quijano explores the power structure behind the conception of the nation-state as built upon a “democratic participation in the distribution of the control of power” (205), he also traces a “coloniality of power” in Latin America through the lens of the racial classification of labor that found its roots in the creation of the Americas and extends to the creation of the nation-state, where “democratic” participation can transform into a process of homogenization through the exclusion of certain populations along racial lines.
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui provides an interesting perspective on the effects of the systematic displacement of these “disposable persons” (9) and points to a collective autopoiesis that “lives in permanent movement, articulating autochthonous with the alien in subversive and mutually contaminating ways” (10). I admire the way in which she brings the agency of the Aymaras into the picture, emphasizing the ways they weave in and out of the capitalist system while “staining the fabrics of a global industry with their pumas and their suns” (18). I am particularly interested in how hybridity comes into play here– returning to the idea of a collective autopoiesis, this chi’ixi subjectivity that is grounded on the ability to live in opposite worlds (10), I was surprised at the ease in which the image of the “China-man” entered the stage of the Fiesta of Guaqui, here as an emblem for globalization –“those little Chinese are so intelligent… they know how to…produce everything” (16)– as well as new economic relationships between the two communities.
I am still thinking about the image of the “China-man” here, especially its stereotypical connotations and connection to racialized labor. In Mexico and Peru, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries for example, the Chinese were predominantly contract laborers and endured violent processes of exclusion when the growing population of workers found success in other industries. While now the image may be tied to mass production (in which also exists many problematics), I am interested in the transmutation of the image, especially when considering the Chinese experience in Latin America.
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.