A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture. Группа авторов

By so doing, he did not contest the content with the same method, but made of the context of Western scholarship the method for Asian thinkers. Taken as a method, Asia is no longer a place to be observed but a place of observation, of itself and of the West. The West, the First World, and the Global North become an object of study once Asia is a method and the place for the restitution of pride. Asia as method is the place for thinking and the place of thoughts of Asians for themselves and for the world. The radical move consists of reclaiming the legitimacy of Asia as place of thinking and of thought instead of being a place whose culture is raw material for First World scholarship.

      The lessons for Latin American Studies should be at this point evident. While Latin America (as Asia) was and will continue to be an object of Area Studies/Third World/Global South studies offering raw material for First World scholarship, it has become already a place for thinking and a location of thought. Latin America could be thought out and reconstituted as method. The politics of scholarship (and, in my case, for the politics of decolonial investigations) is at stake. For social scientists and humanists of the Third World/Global South and decolonial thinkers, this could be the moment of its happening. It is already at work in Asia, as I mentioned, and in Africa.¹⁴ In South America, the period equivalent to decolonization during the Cold War was the nineteenth century and the constitution of the modern/colonial nation-states. And one of the outcomes of independence was precisely the idea of Latin America,¹⁵ the location of a genealogy of thinking that between 1930 and 1960 was manifested in the splendors of the essay as the genre where creative thinking was expressed, in the essay that was destituted by the advent of the social sciences and academic humanities that were part of the package of development and modernization in the 1960s.¹⁶ However, as a location of thinking, “Latin” America today is a sector or a larger compound next to Abya Yala and La Gran Comarca, as I explained in The Idea of Latin America.

      Notes

      1 1 Serge Latouche, L´occidentalization du monde. Paris: La Découverte, 1989.

      2 2 Walter D. Mignolo, “Nationalization of Natural Gas in Bolivia,” Counterpunch, May 9, 2006, www.counterpunch.org/2006/05/09/nationalization-of-natural-gas-in-bolivia.

      3 3 Walter D. Mignolo, “Hacia la desoccidentalización,” Página 12, Diciembre 6, 2011. www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/4-182727-2011-12-06.html.

      4 4 Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas, Islam and Secularism. Pakistan: Suhail Academy Lahore, 1978.

      5 5 Kishore Mahbubani, The New Asian Hemisphere. The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East. London: Public Affair, 2008.

      6 6 Peimin Ni, “The Silk Order: A Philosophical Perspective.” DOC Research Institute, March 2018.

      7 7 On Abya Yala, see Emil Keme and Adam Coon, “For Abyayala to Live the Americas must die: Towards a transhemisferic indigeneity.” Native American and Indigenous Studies, 5/1, 2018, 42–68. The essay is also available in Maya-Quiché and Spanish. On la Gran Comarca, see Catherine Walsh and Juan García, “El pensar del emergente movimiento afroecuatoriano: Reflexiones desde un proceso.” En: Daniel Mato (coord.), Estudios y Otras Prácticas Intelectuales Latinoamericanas enCultura y Poder. Caracas: Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales Universidad Central de Venezuela, 2002, pp. 317–326. www.ceapedi.com.ar/imagenes/biblioteca/libreria/39.pdf.

      8 8 World Economic Forum, “The Great Reset,” www.weforum.org/great-reset; International Monetary Fund, “From the Great Lockdown to the Great Transformation,” www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2020/06/09/sp060920-from-great-lockdown-to-great-transformation.

      9 9 Carl E. Pletsch, “The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, 1950–1975.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 4, 1981, 565–590.

      10 10 Third World Quarterly, www.tandfonline.com/loi/ctwq20; Journal of Third World Studies/Journal of Global South Studies, www.jstor.org/journal/jthirworlstud.

      11 11 Decolonial humanities, www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/26924865.pdf, decoloniality and the humanities, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1538192718790045 .

      12 12 Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method. Toward Deimperialization. durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

      13 13 Edward Said, Orientalism. London: Vintage Book, 1978.

      14 14 Felwine Sarr, Afrotopia. Paris: Édition Philippe Rey, 2016.

      15 15 Walter D. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America. London: Blackwell, 2005.

      16 16 Walter Mignolo, “Avatares de habitar y pensar en/las fronteras.” En “Resquebrajaduras del presente. Virus, neolibralismo y humanidades.” La Biblioteca. Buenos Aires, Primavera 2020, 427–499. https://vaconfirma.com.ar/archivos//archivos_0_1_201201_674421.pdf.

PART I Coloniality

1 Mapping the Geopolitics of Contact: Indigenous Peoples of the Americas and Western Knowledge

       Gustavo Verdesio

      The power of the first chronicles that told the stories of exploration and colonization of the Americas is still intact. They represent a land that appears to these authors as pristine and untouched by what the West has called civilization. If one were to believe this corpus of texts about lands that were at that time unknown to European subjects, those lands showed no evidence of significant traces of human labor. The predominance of this early perception of the Americas occurs in spite of both the existence of later chronicles and documents that describe, to a European audience, the wonders of human settlements as complex and sophisticated as Mexico-Tenochtitlán and Cuzco – just to mention the two most spectacular concentrations of people in the first half of the sixteenth century – and the constant presence of Indigenous peoples in the daily social lives of most American nations.

Why is it, then, that the myth that represents the Americas as a blank page where European settlers are free to leave their imprint still survives in the collective unconscious of Western culture? Why this inertia of collective memory that privileges only one of the different images of the past?¹ Why are stereotypes about Indigenous peoples – Charles C. Mann (2005, 4) asks – still reproduced by the textbooks used in the framework of the educational system?² There are, in my view, no simple answers to these questions. Maybe if we try to view this state of affairs as the result of a combination of factors we could understand it a little better. I will later address, briefly, said factors, but first I will go back in time and try to deal with the issue of how scholars and Indigenous peoples believe the Americas were populated, and since when.

      This is not a conflict-free matter. On the contrary, there are several contending versions from different camps. The main disagreement can be identified as the one that confronts, on the one hand, several Amerindian nations and, on the other, scholars who believe that Western disciplines can reveal the secrets of the distant past. In general, the latter can be found in the ranks of archaeologists and biological anthropologists. Many an Indigenous group claims to know where they come from and when they came to the Americas. In their oral traditions, we learn about stories of origins that present us with peoples who believe that they have occupied the territory of