The (Re)articulation of Political Subjectivities and Colonial Difference in Ecuador: Reflections on Capitalism and the Geopolitics of Knowledge

It is to the zone of occult instability where the people dwell that we must come.

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1967 [1952])

To think and speak from the geopolitical and historical location of Ecuador and from the colonial difference formed within this location are processes that guide my reflections here. By “geopolitical . . . location” I mean not only the physical space, the place on the map, but also the historical, social, cultural, imagined, and what Walter Mignolo (2000a) refers to as the epistemologically diagrammed spaces that provide the ground for political subjectivities, colonial difference, and struggle. As Adrienne Rich (1987, 212) once commented, “A place on the map is also a place in history.” In the spacialities of geopolitical location, boundaries are formed, negotiated, and transgressed, power and politics played out on both national and transnational terrains. It is also here that diverse knowledges are generated, produced, and distributed.¹

The material conditions of subjectification are always intertwined with space and place. That is to say, the particular site and temporal junctures within which subjects (and difference) are both marked and constructed, where culture-as-political struggle is waged and authors write, matter. But locating ourselves in relation to places defined and taken up through experience, identity, and power (Mohanty 1987; Pile 1997), and in relation to the subjects/objects that we purport to study, is not usual practice in the academic world. Instead, modernist tendencies in the social sciences disembody the author from the text and split the subject and object of knowledge, thus contributing to what José Rabasa and Javier Sanjinés (1996 [1994], ix) refer to as “a series of forms of disciplining subjectivity.” This discipline recalls both the Foucauldian use of formulas of domination as well as the colonial experience: the discipline to organize and maintain control over the body, and the disciplining through knowledge to marginalize, exclude, and obliterate collective identities, memories, and alternative forms of knowing and living (Smith 1999). It also serves to obscure the power relations grounded in the epistemological apparatus and in the geohistorical confines of what Mignolo (2000a, 2000b) calls the modern/colonial world system, as well as the specific place of Latin America within it. The geohistorical colonial difference created by the coloniality of power (Quijano 1999) has subalternized not only ethnic-racial groups but also their knowledge. “To think from the colonial difference” and “from the ruins, the experiences and the margins created by the coloniality of power in the structuring of the modern/colonial world” as a way not to restore knowledges but to “make them intervene in a new epistemological, transmodern, and postoccidental horizon” (Mignolo 2000b, 23–24), is thus central.

In Ecuador, the complex nature of colonial difference constructs its meaning, in part, through a national ideology of mestizaje, the principal referent of a homogeneous national identity. The perpetuation of this national ideology marks indigenous people and blacks—who, according to some accounts, together constitute almost half of the population—as other. Concurrently, and in apparent contradiction with this ideology, inordinate value is placed on whiteness and on everything that comes from the North. In this context, my own subject positioning and embodiment (North American and white) becomes a necessarily conscious and daily act, as does the consideration of what it means to live and work in and write from this social and historic locality; what it means to position myself in the interstices necessarily created when one lives in a country that is not one's own but that is at the same time part of one's identity.

The opportunities afforded to me in the last ten years to collaborate with indigenous and Afro-descendent movements, and to live through uprisings, mobilizations, and popular rebellions that have resulted, among other changes, in the overthrow of two...