And of course, I once again acknowledge deeply the companionship, patience, and curiosity of Peter Klaren, who although not a literary scholar has read every draft in order to offer his critical appraisal and act in the place of the ideal reader of this Companion.
CODA. Companion 2022: As the World Turns…
Sara Castro-Klaren
Codas are by definition short interventions. Codas constitute an attempt to reach a satisfactory, though perhaps always temporary, closing to the musical piece unfolding. A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture did, in the first edition as it does in this second edition, represent a kind of musical composition where pleats fold and unfold into inner and forward creases, tucks, and crevices that seem never ending. Conceived as such, a coda at this moment in history acquires the hue of a paradox, in that it both closes and opens the discussion on Latin American culture writ large.
Great change has occurred in Latin America in the last quarter century. Besides a turn to the left that never took place, people in Brazil and Spanish America along with many Indigenous communities living within the borders of various nation-states have experienced and continue to undergo the transformation brought about by the digital forces in play today. The forces of globalization, of which the digital age is only a part, have been exacerbated during the 2020 pandemic as people have been forced to communicate and interact more intensely via the internet, making use of every platform available for multiple purposes of exchange. Together, the pandemic and the digital transformation have repositioned subjects, fractured borders, reconfigured modes of production and realigned personal, social, and political relations. In this context, the paradoxical valance of a coda, as both summary ending but also opening onto uncharted waters, seems justified as a brief introduction to the new and enlightening chapters that comprise the volume in this second edition.
The last time I wrote in this space, we had just entered the new millennium. I suggested then that one of the best ways to understand the history of the unfolding of Latin America was to keep in sight its colonial genealogy and so, the concept of colonial semiosis, imagined as a deep, permanent, and pervasive exchange of signs across all human practices and experiences, seemed to be a good place to start. The unfettered exchange of signs and systems of signs that colonial situations entail – despite restrictions and hegemonic rules imposed by the colonizers – opens the way for the appearance of new forms, unsuspected places of enunciation, agencies, the formation of new subjects, new modes of communication and, of course, the emergence of new forms of oppression and dominance as well. Colonial semiosis is never separate from struggle, from loss, from resistance, and from appropriation. However, it is precisely in the space of contention, fraught with epistemological violence, where new subjects, voices, and practices arise. In a way, the multiple and divergent processes and experiences of colonial semiosis reside at the gate of modernity for both the colonizer, who takes “back” the experience and goods from the colonies, and the colonized who struggle to muster the forces necessary to resist and maybe even survive as well as lay the foundations of the variegated modernities that we have come to know and grapple with.
The theorization of these deep processes of colonization has led to the development of one of the most influential concepts we have seen arise in the last 30 years. Colonial semiosis has been absorbed and/or subsumed under the “coloniality of power,” a concept first developed by Anibal Quijano in Peru – not in France or England – and later expanded and further theorized by Walter Mignolo. Quijano stresses the conflict of knowledge and structures of power implicit in his term the “coloniality of power” as he developed it from the perspective of a subject living not at center of modernity but rather experiencing and assessing the epistemological hold of colonialism over the people ruled by empires. Writing in his Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (2000), Mignolo explains that in the “classification and reclassification of the planet’s population” – the sine qua non of the coloniality of power – “the concept of culture becomes crucial” (17). As Quijano points out, institutional structures become necessary to manage the classifications, distinctions, and hierarchies that organize the modern/colonial system. A powerful deployment of the knowledges sustains both the established order as well as the institutions that hold up its unassailable legitimacy. Most important within this matrix is the development of an epistemological perspective from which to constantly articulate the meaning and shape of the grid of power from which the production of knowledge is to emerge in order to maintain the coloniality of power in the hands of its managers (Mignolo 2000, 17). It is significant to stress here that the coloniality of power constitutes an analysis carried out outside the boundaries of any given discipline. Its analytic perspective was first put forth by Jose Carlos Mariátegui, a Gramscian intellectual concerned with understanding the clutch of coloniality in postcolonial Peru and, by extension, Latin America. He lived his short life far from the academic centers in the United States or Europe. Mariátegui labored every day immersed in the granular reality of the local and widely open to the possible meaning of world history and the forces that sustained the grip of the colonial domination in the clothing of modernity. However, neither Mariátegui nor Quijano could be said to work outside and beyond the broad and multiple umbrella of Western thinking, precisely because of the pervasive reach of the deep coloniality experienced in Latin America.
Rather, Quijano, Mariátegui, and many other trail-blazing Latin American intellectuals and artists should be thought to work from what Borges, in his “El escritor argentina y la tradicion” (1932, Obras completas 1972), posits as the web of thinking within which or against which, or beyond which, a Latin American intellectual operates. That is to say, the whole of Western tradition with special emphasis on its traditions of critical thinking, or thinking irreverently. Borges begins to make his point by asking: “Cual es la tradicion argentina?” (272). He replies by making a claim not for local traditions alone and not for the classical canon but rather for the whole world’s traditions taken, seen, and transformed from an irreverent perspective. The key is the irreverence as against any kind of orthodoxy. Taking the case of the Irish writers who write in English and in doing so transform the language and the traditions as an example of what he has in mind by “irreverence,” Borges states: “Creo que nuestra tradicion es toda la cultura occidental, y creo tambien que tenemos derecho a esta tradicion, mayor que el que pueden tener los habitants de una u otra nacion occidental . . . Creo que los argentinos, los sudamericanos en general, estamos en una situacion analoga [a la de los irlandeses en relacion a la tradicion inglesa]. Podemos manejar todos los temas europeos, manejarlos sin superticiones, con una irreverencia que puede tener, y ya tiene consecuencias afortunadas” (272–273). In closing the essay, Borges once again claims the whole universe as the patrimonio (heritage) for Latin American intellectuals who should thus not fear the future but rather march forth confidently and try out all topics and modalities irreverently. It is this irreverence practiced at the edge of empire that accounts for the originality and accuracy of the theses involved in the concept of the coloniality of power. To some extent, the first edition of the Companion bears witness to the impact and influence the “coloniality of power” had on many a discipline in the social sciences and humanities.
Given that nothing ever stays the same, or is subject for very long to the same set of influences and innovations, it goes without saying that the tenuously integrated and multifaceted field of “Latin American Studies,” as different from “Latin America” itself, would be, at the same time, open to theoretical developments stemming from various epistemological locations. In fact, “Latin American Studies” comprises many disciplines which more often than not do not dovetail as an inquiry developed under similar or compatible methodologies, perspectives, or set of assumptions. Fractures, contradictions, incoherencies, urgencies, and directions vary enormously from one discipline to the next. Even though one may be able to say that there was/is a linguistic turn or a cultural studies turn in history, or a visual studies turn in anthropology and gender studies appear everywhere, the scholarship in each of those fields of inquiry encompasses questions and answers set within the paradigm of its own. Nevertheless, the institutions that the coloniality of power necessitates