I want to address a thread that runs through all three texts: the connection between dualism and globalization. In “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Quijano delineates and challenges the logic of Eurocentrism, which has a particular “perspective on knowledge” formalized through “a peculiar articulation between dualism (capital-precapital, Europe-non-Europe, primitive-civilized, traditional-modern, etc.) and a linear, one-directional evolutionism from some state of nature to modern European society” (Quijano, 200-201). Dualism here implies a doing, an ongoing process of temporal division. Dualism is the never-ending project of Eurocentrism, which works to fix non-Europeans as behind and Europeans as ahead on a timeline that is enforced through the European idea of “rational knowledge” (Quijano, 203). Mbembe, in articulating the effects of the “age of global mobility,” describes how this linear timeline that constructs a traditional-modern dualism serves globalization: “The extraction and looting of natural resources by war machines goes hand in hand with brutal attempts to immobilize and spatially fix whole categories of people or, paradoxically, to unleash them, to force them to scatter over broad areas no longer contained by the boundaries of a territorial state” (Mbembe, 31, 34). Eurocentrism, therefore, creates a temporal dualism that rationalizes the expropriating work of war machines, while war machines continually produce spatial divisions that concentrate certain populations in camp-like spaces and forcefully disperse others. Whether concentrated or dispersed, these populations exist in states of total precarity. Cusicanqui’s “The Potosí Principle: Another View of Totality” asks what it means to embody dualism, even under precarious conditions: “Or rather, from an opposite pole of reasoning, can we say that we are assisting here to a new, globalized, and homogenizing citizenship, a kind of transnational mestizaje whose main asset would be its own ‘hybridity’ and indetermination?” Cusicanqui, in acknowledging the necropower of globalization, wants readers to consider duality. Where dualism is an ongoing process (a doing), duality is a state of being, but one that resists being fixed here vs. there, then vs. now. In a globalized world, where dualism launches many into precarity, what is the power of being dual? Can alliances be formed between precarious populations through duality? How is duality, rather than dualism, worth celebrating and what can be achieved through its celebration?
Quijano, Aníbal. "Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y Amércia Latina" La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas Latinoamericanas. Buenos Aires: CLACSO, Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, 2000. 201-246. Print.Mbembe, Achille. "Necropolitics." Public Culture 15. no. 1: 2003. Accessed 29 Sep 2018.