Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate (review)

Edited by Moraña and Jáuregui, foremost scholars of Latin American colonial literature and anthropology, and Enrique Dussel, the most important Latin American philosopher today, the massive, and canonical Coloniality at Large, constitutes a major contribution to the crucial conversations concerning post-colonial studies, and more specifically, colonialidad or coloniality—the term that gives the volume its title. It sets out among many other things to establish a connection between coloniality and modernity (the latter understood in the extra-European sense); and a way of dealing with questions of race that borrows from Edward Said's critique of the construction of the subaltern subject (Orientalism 1978). "The 'peoples without history' who, according to G.W.F. Hegel, would constitute the new frontier of European civilization were conceptualized as the tabula rasa on which the principles and accomplishment of Western rationality … could and should be inscribed," write the editors in the introduction (7).

This volume, they say, seeks "to incorporate into current postcolonial debates the fundamental inputs made by Marxist thought, dependence theory, and liberation theology to the study and understanding of Latin America's coloniality," and indeed, this is what the volumes delivers. And it does so by centering the different debates around three key concepts: Aníbal Quijano's coloniality of power, and Immanuel Wallerstein's dependency theory and modern world-system. Of the three, however, coloniality guides the other two, while most of the authors of the collection respond to Quijano's concept in one way or another. And so it is in this sense that the editors have framed the debates under the rubric of "coloniality at large." According to Quijano, modernity which cannot be exclusively equated with European culture is in fact the product of a world system that came into existence with the encounter between Latin America and Europe. Without Latin America, Quijano argues, modernity would be unthinkable. In contradistinction to the traditional Marxist position, Quijano holds that the modern world system was first an epistemology before becoming a political economy. And race (literally color: black, white, mestizo) was one of the first constructs of this new epistemology, now based on biology.

Establishing phenotopic differences between the conquerors (white) and the conquered (non-white), the latter were conceived as inferior, and this way "race became the fundamental criterion of the distribution of the world population into ranks, places, and roles in the new society's structure of power" (183). Constitutive then of the coloniality of power was the "racist distribution of labor in the interior of colonial/modern capitalism," says Quijano (185). And lastly, Quijano collapses the Wallersteinean notion of a modern world-system unto his own view of economic power based on race (rather than the workings of abstract capital), when he writes: "the modern world-system that began to form with the colonization of America has in common three central elements that affect the quotidian life of the totality of the global population: the coloniality of power, capitalism, and Eurocentrism [the Hegelian notion that the history of the world is the history of Europe as it unfolds, destined to dominate the barbarian non-European, white on the world's stage]" (193).

Walter Mignolo, who follows Quijano with an essay on geopolitics and "the colonial difference," takes Slavoj Žizěk to task for subscribing to the notion of a "true European legacy," now in danger of being destroyed by all kinds non-Western European forms of fundamentalism. Žizěk "alludes to 'forms of fundamentalist hatred' as if the 'fundamental European legacy' were excused and excluded from any form of 'fundamentalism'" observes Mignolo (255). At no point, remarks Mignolo, does Žizěk stop to consider the racial, religious, and political fundamentalism that greased the machinery of power in the colonial world. Caught up in the "unversalism" of the Eurocentric perspective, Žizěk and others have failed to see that "diversality" may be a better response to capitalist globalization than the supposedly ethical...