Some of the contributors to Anger’s Past disagree on the best date to assign as the inflection point, placing it centuries before Elias does. Others do not agree on the causes. Nevertheless, all are unanimous that the shift from the Middle Ages to the modern, especially in the sixteenth century, involved an interrogation of anger, which was gradually monopolized by royalty; villagers had to repress it in order to be “civilized.”
Charles Taylor agrees on this point. For him, the promotion of a “civilized” model of life began in the fourteenth century as a task of the feudal lords and of the princely courts. But in the sixteenth century, this model expanded into the other social spheres; for example, through religious reforms[38] and centralized monarchical policies. Among the characteristics of this new model of civilization, which Taylor calls the Modern Moral Order, was its opposition to a supposed primitive state of “raw, savage nature” and the promotion of a neo-stoicism that could control emotions in order to avoid a violent and disorderly society. In the social imaginary, warrior-knights in search of honor gave way to humanists, educated in the art of persuasion and conversation, who served a monarch and the rules of the court.
As was said before, the relaciones depict Aguirre as an incarnation of anger who feels affected by real decisions and therefore seeks both monetary and physical revenge. But the arguments of Elias and Taylor reveal an additional dimension of the picture. Aguirre led his rebellion in a context in which the European monarchies, like Spain’s, sought precisely to repress anger and to associate it with all that is savage and uncivilized.
To the idea that “modernity” is constituted within a European colonizing project we can now add the imperial desire to police anger, since it can trigger violence and rebellion. Aguirre, on the other hand, incarnates the wildness of that anger, with its power even to overthrow the monarchy. That is why it is legitimate to ask: do modern anti-imperial projects, which emerged in the sixteenth century, build on anger in order to break with the “Modern Moral Order” driven by European monarchies? If so, it would be all the more justifiable to present Aguirre as a gateway to the modern anti-imperial project. The detailed analysis of the texts selected in the following chapters may reveal new dimensions that go beyond the liberating/oppressive and anti-imperial/colonizing binaries. The inclusion of the study of emotions in the postcolonial/decolonial debate can enrich it and blaze new theoretical paths.
Overcoming Logocentrism
While in most cases one reacts angrily to a real and concrete assault, Aristotle emphasizes the importance of imagination in the experience of this emotion. Jan Plamper explains, “The power of imagination is also an element of anger: revenge is sweet, and the sweetness of revenge is something imagined; here, expectation blossoms in the domain of imagination.”[39] Meanwhile, anti-imperialism itself clearly has much to do with the imagination, as well. In 2015, the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) published a cultural study titled The Anti-imperialist Imagination in Latin America, which examined, among others, such books as Ariel and The Open Veins of Latin America; such political figures such as Sandino and Chávez; and various depictions of revolution in the visual arts and cinema. For the authors of these individual essays, anti-imperialism in Latin America is not a single doctrinal body or ideological system, but a social imaginary that widely permeates the continent’s varied cultural and political expressions of thought.[40]
Since Cornelius Castoriadis popularized the concept of the social imaginary, different definitions have been assigned to it, some mutually exclusive. The one most suitable for our work is Charles Taylor’s. Taking emblematic works such as Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities as a point of reference, Taylor writes:
By social imaginary . . . I am thinking . . . of the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underline these expectations . . . ordinary people “imagine” their social surroundings, and this is often not expressed in theoretical terms, but is carried in images, stories, and legends. . . . The social imaginary is that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.[41]
The anti-imperialist social imaginary is both foundational and omnipresent in the history of Latin America. The idea of Latin American unity has taken hold even on a continent of almost irreconcilable cultural diversity whenever the specter of an external, imperialist threat has appeared. This suggests that anti-imperialism could represent the primordial experience of what Latin America is, seeking its uniqueness in the face of such menacing Western assailants as modernity, capitalism, and so on.
What The Anti-imperialist Imagination does not contemplate or address is the connection that exists in the social imaginary between this anti-imperialist dimension and anger. The pain of imperial exploitation and genocide on the Latin American continent—repeated at different historical moments and at the hands of different empires—has engendered the desire (lived out through political rhetoric that appeals to the imagination) not only for independence but also for the pleasure of revenge. In that sense, the anti-imperial dimension shares the same characteristics of anger: both the pain of what Gloria Anzaldúa calls the colonial wound,[42] and the pleasure of a revenge exacted through rebellion.
Lope de Aguirre also operates in the field of this social imaginary—not only for the writers of colonial texts but also for those who would invoke his memory later—even to the point of becoming an archetype. Abel Posse, in his novel Daimon, elaborates a narrative in which Aguirre reincarnates again and again, up to the present day, in Latin America. Posse thus examines the direct and indirect echoes of the marañón rebellion on the continent.
While it is necessary to take into account the significant differences in context and political particularities of the various anti-imperial projects, it is no less important to note their similarities. For example, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the double dimension of the liberating/oppressive kingdom of Aguirre that covered Margarita Island and a large part of Venezuela could be associated with that of Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian revolution. This is just one instance in an endless list of political regimes and processes, both on the left and on the right, that reclaimed national sovereignty from imperial powers and answered the liberationist demands of their exploited people, while at the same time containing tyrannical and oppressive elements—in their rhetoric, if nowhere else. One thinks here of Henri Christophe, Porfirio Díaz, Fidel Castro, Leopoldo Galtieri, and many others.
This book does not propose to draw up a list of similarities and differences among the continent’s many anti-imperial movements—a task that would be at once arduous, contentious, and still simplistic—but to focus on the figure of Aguirre, suggesting possible connections with other historical contexts yet leaving any actual analysis to the reader. That said, this work has not only an analytical objective but also a practical one. For Aristotle, anger, like other emotions, can be educated, and a well-formed imagination plays a determining role.[43] Demonstrating the mechanisms of the Latin American anti-imperial social imaginary can serve as a basis for developing programs that can re-educate us about them and warn of their dangers.
Those who reject the possibility of educating the emotions and cleave instead to a theory of biological determinism may stake their positions on an anecdote told by Charles Darwin. The story goes that one day, Darwin saw a snake in a cage at a zoo and recoiled instinctively, even though he knew that there was a glass between him and