Coloniality at Large: The Western Hemisphere in the Colonial Horizon of Modernity

BEFORE THE COLD WAR, THE CLOSEST THE UNITED STATES HAD EVER COME to a permanent foreign policy was in our relationship with the nations of the Western Hemisphere. In 1823 the Monroe Doctrine proclaimed our determination to insulate the Western Hemisphere from the contests over the European balance of power, by force if necessary. And for nearly a century afterward, the causes of America's wars were to be found in the Western Hemisphere: in the wars against Mexico and Spain, and in threats to use force to end Napoleon III's effort to install a European dynasty in Mexico (Henry Kissinger, Years of Renewal,1999: 703).

On the Imaginary of the Modern/colonial World

The thesis that I propose and defend here is that the emergence of the idea of the "Western Hemisphere" gave way to a radical change in the imaginary and power structures of the modern/colonial world (Quijano and Wallerstein 1992). This change not only had an enormous impact in restructuring the modern/colonial world, but it also had and continues to have important repercussions for South-North relations in the Americas, for the current configuration of "Latinidad" in the United States, as well as for the diverse Afro-American communities in the North, South, and Caribbean.

I use the concept of "imaginary" in the sense in which the Martinican intellectual and writer Eduardo Glissant uses it (1996). For Glissant "the imaginary" is the symbolic world through which a community (racial, national, imperial, sexual, etc.) defines itself. In Glissant, the term has neither the common meaning of a mental image, nor the more technical meaning that it has in contemporary psychoanalytic discourses, in which the imaginary forms a structure of differentiation between the symbolic and the real. Departing from Glissant, I give the term a geo-political meaning and use it in terms of the foundation and formation of the imaginary of the modern/colonial world-system. The image of Western civilization that we have today is the result of the long process of constructing the "interior" of that imaginary, from the transition of the Mediterranean as center to the formation of the Atlantic commercial circuit, just as it constructed its "exteriority." In the West, men and women of letters, travelers, statesmen of every kind, ecclesiastical functionaries, and Christian thinkers have constructed the "interior" image. The interior image was always accompanied by an "internal exterior," which is to say, by an "exteriority" but not by an "exterior." European Christianity, until the end of the fifteenth century, was on the margins of the world system, and had identified itself with Japhet and the West, distinguishing itself from Asia and Africa. This Occident of Japhet was also the Europe of Greek mythology. From the beginning of the sixteenth century, with the triple concurrence of the defeat of the Moors, the expulsion of the Jews, and European expansion across the Atlantic, Moors, Jews, and Amerindians (and, with time, African slaves as well) all became configured, in the Western, Christian imaginary, as the difference (exteriority) in the interior of the imaginary. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, the Jesuit missions in China added a new dimension of "exteriority"—the outside that is within precisely because it contributed to the definition of itself. The Jesuits contributed, in the extremes (Asia and America), to constructing the imaginary of the Atlantic commercial circuit that, with various historical versions, came to shape the contemporary image of Western civilization, which I will return to in section iv. However, the imaginary about which I am speaking is not only constituted in and by colonial discourse, including colonial discourse's own internal differences (e.g., Las Casas and Sepúlveda; or the discourse from northern Europe, which from the end of the seventeenth century drew a border between itself and...