III
Parallel to the reconfiguration of the global order prompted by the end of the Cold War and the increasing interstates’ political and economic cultures’ confrontations of de-Westernization and re-Westernization, the turmoil impacts the sphere of public culture. Covid-19 has made it clear that the economic and political cultures managed by mainstream mass media spill over into the general sphere of culture in the public arena. The current global disorder is more than just another crisis in the linear unfolding of history in which change was the mantra of the era of Westernization (1500–2000). We are experiencing a change of era, no longer an era of changes. The general sphere of Culture (daily life, but also the so-called “high culture”: literature, art, cinema, museums, universities) is not detached from the impact of the global disorder.
The signs of the closing of the era of Westernization are mostly the emergence of a multipolar world order manifested in the political and economic cultures of the interstate system, on one hand, and on the other, the rise of the global political society active in the sphere of culture. “Social movements” was a useful concept during the era of changes but it is no longer appropriate to capture “people in movement” globally. Decoloniality is both a sector of the political society of people in movement and a conceptual and existential framework to understand the change of era. My own argument here is a decolonial one. While the cultures of the interstate system are displacing the unipolar world order dominant for the past 500 years, the culture of the people in movement is displacing the belief in abstract universals (truth, democracy, science, capitalism) and installing the pluriversal as the necessary global project. “Transition” is no longer a useful concept to account for the change of era, because the change of era cannot be narrated and encapsuled in a linear time frame. The “explosion” of the era of Westernization opens up a universe of possibilities, none of them reducible to a single abstract universal. “Latin” American Studies cannot be released from the responsibilities of thinking, acting, and confronting the change of era.
While in the 1990s the fall of the Soviet Union propelled neo-liberal dreams and designs to claim the end of history and modernity all the way down, another unfolding was taking place in the sphere of culture and, more specifically and closely related to the Companion, to cultures of scholarship. The very concept of Area Studies oriented the social sciences in the United States and aligned them to reorient global designs. Area Studies was a creation of the US academy in concomitance with state politics; the project of development and modernization launched in 1949 by Harry Truman required scholarship that would provide information about the underdeveloped areas and people that needed to be developed and modernized. The Latin American Studies Association (LASA), founded in 1966, was a consequence of the academic outgrowth of the social sciences. Indirectly, it impacted the humanities since the sphere of the humanities, dealing with foreign languages, literatures, arts, and cultures, now had a new horizon. The humanities that, since the European Renaissance, were devoted to Western European literatures, cultures, languages, art, and history were academically authorized to incorporate non-Western cultures into scholarly research, teaching, and writing. Latin American literatures and culture were incorporated to LASA, which until then was basically a sphere of the social sciences (the sphere of economic and political cultures). And toward the first decades of the twenty-first century, Francophone and Latinx literatures and cultures made their inroads in the sphere of the LASA.
However, by 2011, a turn of events in the culture of scholarship was taking place in both the social sciences and the humanities. The field of Area Studies that spans the 1960s to the 1990s was called into question once the geopolitical partitions of First, Second, and Third Worlds were no longer effective. The scholarly politics of Area Studies was critiqued for the distribution of scientific labor inherent in the creation and functioning of the field. An essay published by Carl Pletsch in 1981 that went almost unnoticed at the time gained traction after the collapse of the Soviet Union.9 Pletsch argued that the scientific distribution of labor concomitant with the Three Worlds division, and therefore with Area Studies, took for granted the unequal power differentials in the geopolitics of knowledge. According to Pletsch, the distribution of scientific labor works as follows: The First World is democratic and scientific and therefore objective. Consequently, economy, sociology, and history were the privileged disciplines to study the First World whose economy, society, and history should be taken as a model to pursue the development and modernization of underdeveloped countries and, by extension, of their people.
The Second World was considered scientifically solid but biased, not objective. In the Second World, according to the perspective of the social scientists of the First World, the social sciences were instead serving state ideology. Hence political sciences were assigned the study of the Second World. One can surmise – from this distribution of scientific labor according to a division created in the First World and the criteria of objectivity assigned to Western sciences – that the opinion about the social sciences in the Second World being at the service of the state was grounded in beliefs that First World social scientists have of their own praxes.
Last but not least and according to this perspective, the sciences were absent in the Third World. The Third World produced culture, not science. Consequently, the Third World was assigned to anthropology, a discipline founded in the study of non-Western cultures before the idea of the Third World was invented. The humanities located in the Third World the proper field of study once they were legitimately unpegged from the study of Western civilization. The “boom of the Latin American novel” was a singular case confirming the apportionment of scholarly labor. Which, of course, did not solve the problem of the power differentials embedded between the three worlds’ partitions: Third World humanities, in the US and European academy, were the lowliest member of the family.
But no one likes to be a lowly member of the family. Two paths are open. One is accepting the situation and considering that it is not all that bad being a member of a prestigious family, although docile and quiet within it. The other is to be disobedient and find ways out from a submissive position. Three paths open up this option. One was the reclamation of the Third World, that mutated into the Global South as a location of pride and creativity instead of submissiveness and obedience. Periodic publications devoted to Third World and Global South studies began to proliferate. Although a remnant of Area Studies persisted, there was a significant shift in the geopolitics of reasoning: Scholars based in the former Third World and the newly inaugurated Global South became active as they felt that the time had arrived to become knowledge-makers rather than objects of studies and natural resources for First World social sciences and humanities.10 The second disobedient path was the emergence of decolonial humanities. The strength of this designation was to make evident that there are no, and cannot be, scholarly humanities without a modifier. Consequently, the humanities are indeed Western (modern and postmodern) humanities. Decolonial humanities run parallel to reclaiming the Third World and the Global South as a place of pride as it affirms and does not confront or disobey the pretence of modern and postmodern humanities to be The Humanities, and rebuilds humanness grounded on experiencing coloniality and long periods of destitution.11
The third path, concurrent with reclaiming the Third World and decolonial humanities, is a proposal that encompasses both. With the title of Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (2010), Taiwanese scholar Kuan-Hsing Chen made a radical move.12 While Asia was an object of study for Area Studies and the social sciences, the humanities in this sector had traditions going back to Orientalism in the eighteenth century: Orientalism was, in the humanities, the forerunner of Area Studies in the social sciences. Hence, Western humanities had to confront the racial underpinnings of its past.13 Kuan-Hsing Chen turned the tables and took Asia out of the box, away from being an object and provider of natural resources. He returned the favor as a boomerang that returns to the First World: Asia is a method, not an object of natural resources. His proposal is not orientalism in reverse, not at all. Why? Because Kuan-Hsing did not fall in the trap of refuting the content