CENTRAL 20TH-CENTURY EVENTS—WORLD War II, the Jewish Holocaust, and Third World independence struggles—all simultaneously delegitimized the West as axiomatic center of reference and affirmed the rights of non-European peoples emerging from the yoke of colonialism. Although resistance to colonialism has existed since the very beginnings of colonization, this resistance reached critical mass in the postwar period. In the wake of centuries of struggles, decolonization achieved climactic expression with Indian independence in 1947, the Chinese revolution in 1949, Algerian independence in 1962, up through the independence of Mozambique and Angola in the mid-1970s. Thus, if Nazism, fascism, and the Holocaust revealed in all their horror the “internal” sickness of Europe as a site of racism and totalitarianism, the Third World liberation struggles revealed the “external” revolt against Western domination, provoking a crisis in the taken-for-granted narrative of European-led Progress. What we call the “seismic shift” refers to the intellectual/discursive fallout of these events, seen as catalytic for a broad decolonization of knowledge and academic culture. But in order to prepare the ground for our critique in later chapters, we must first outline what this shift was reacting against.
Embedded in our attempt to posit a genealogy for the culture wars is a concept foundational to our critique: Eurocentrism. As we argued in Unthinking Eurocentrism, Eurocentrism is the discursive-ideological precipitate of colonial domination. Eurocentrism enshrines and naturalizes the hierarchical stratifications inherited from colonialism, rendering them as inevitable and even “progressive.” Although forged as part of the colonizing process, Eurocentrism’s links to that process are obscured through a buried epistemology. Eurocentrism does not refer to Europe in its literal sense as a continent or a geopolitical unit but rather to the perception of Europe (and its extensions around the world) as normative. In this sense, it might better be called “Euro-hegemonism” or the “occidental world view” or “coloniality” (Anibal Quijano) or “European planetary consciousness” (Mary Louise Pratt).1 Eurocentrism has little to do with positive feelings about Europe; it has to do, rather, with assumptions about the relationship between the West and the non-West. It is not Eurocentric to love Shakespeare or Proust, but it is Eurocentric to wield these cultural figures as “proof” of an innate European superiority.
Our coinage “Eurotropism,” meanwhile, calls attention to an orientation, a tendency to turn toward the West as an ideal Platonic Sun, much as phototropic plants turn toward the literal Sun for their sustenance. Indeed, Hegel develops precisely this solar metaphor in The Philosophy of History: “It is in the West that the inner Sun of self-consciousness rises, shedding a higher brilliance.”2 Tropes of light (enlightenment, rayonnement) envision democracy, science, and progress as emanating outward from a luminously radiating European source. Rather than a systematic philosophy, Eurocentrism consists in an interlocking network of buried premises, embedded narratives, and submerged tropes that constitute a broadly shared epistemology. Eurocentrism is not usually a conscious political stance but rather an implicit positioning and a dominant “common sense” or “monoculture of the mind” (Vandana Shiva).3 Far from being a European monopoly, Eurocentrism is often shared with non-Europeans. Even the creators of the first black republic in Haiti, as Michael Dash points out, idealized Europe and denigrated an Africa they had been taught to despise.4
Some of the basic principles of Euro-hegemonism can be found in remarkably explicit form in the writings of some of the most celebrated Enlightenment thinkers. Hegel, often regarded as the progressive John the Baptist who prepared the way for Marx, offers a striking example. On the one hand, the Hegel of the Phenomenology of Spirit engendered the progressive lineage that leads out to Marx, Kojève, Sartre, Jameson, and Butler. On the other hand, the Hegel of The Philosophy of History leads out to Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington. For that Hegel, world history “travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History.” Asia for Hegel represents the “childhood of humanity,” while Jews, Africans, and indigenous Americas are “outside of history.” At times, Hegel’s rendering of human suffering becomes chillingly matter-of-fact. Native America, Hegel tells us, “has always shown itself physically and psychically powerless, and still shows itself so. For the aborigines, after the landing of the Europeans in America, gradually vanished at the breath of European activity.”5 In this naturalization of ethnocide, the indigenous peoples simply disappear, not because of colonial guns, massacres, and microbes but only because of a preternaturally powerful European “breath” or “spirit.”
Hegel baldly states in his Encyclopedia that “against the absolute right of that people who actually are the carriers of the world Spirit [i.e., Europeans], the spirit of other peoples has no other right.”6 In a formulation that recalls the Dred Scott decision’s claim that “the Negro has no rights that the white man need respect,” Hegel argues in Philosophy of Right that Europe knew that “the rights of barbarians [were] unequal to its own and treats their autonomy as only a formality.”7 Declaring blacks “incapable of development or culture,” Hegel in The Philosophy of History seems to deny even the existence of black subjectivity:
In Negro life the characteristic point is the fact that consciousness has not yet attained to the realization of any substantial objective existence—as for example God or Law—in which the interest of man’s volition is involved and in which he realizes his own being…. The Negro … exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state…. There is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character.8
Unlike those who discerned black critical capacity, Hegel sees a generic intellectual and moral handicap:
Among the Negroes moral sentiments are quite weak, or more strictly, nonexistent. Parents sell their children, and conversely children their parents, as either has the opportunity. Through the pervading influence of slavery all these bonds of moral regard disappear, and it does not occur to the Negro mind to expect from others what we are enabled to claim.9
In a particularly egregious case of what Foucault called the “indignity of speaking for others,” Hegel portrays the enslaved, but not the enslavers, as lacking in moral feeling. Unacquainted with Africans and untraveled on the continent, presumably basing his judgments on secondary sources such as travel literature, Hegel grants himself the sovereign right to generalize about the intimate feelings of millions of Africans. We are not suggesting, of course, that Hegel was “nothing but a racist” or that there were no progressive aspects of his work as a theorist of freedom. The problem is that the freedom he theorized was usually meant only for Europeans. Hegel’s provincial prejudices have migrated and “settled” in diverse regions of thought. We hear explicit somewhat euphoric echoes of Hegelianism in Fukuyama’s End of History, with the idea of the inevitably planetary victory of neoliberal democracy.10 And even though George W. Bush has clearly never read Hegel, his declaration that “freedom is God’s gift to the world” reveals him to be an unwitting (and inarticulate) vulgar Hegelian.
Hegel’s philosophy of history can be understood through philosopher Charles Mills’s concept of the “racial contract,” defined as
that set of formal or informal agreements or meta-agreements (higher level contracts about contracts, which set the limits of the contracts’ validity) between the members of one subset of humans, henceforth designated by (shifting) “racial” (phenotypical/genealogical/cultural) criteria … as “white,” and coextensive (making due allowance for gender differentiation) with the class of full persons, to categorize the remaining subset of humans as “nonwhite” and of a different and inferior moral status, subpersons, so that they have a subordinate civil standing in the white or white-ruled polities the whites either already inhabit or establish.11
White supremacy, for Mills, is the “unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today.”12 Although no longer explicitly racial, the “color line” still runs through all these forms of domination. Paul Gilroy speaks of a “hemispheric order of racial domination,” while Mills speaks of “the metaphysical infrastructure of global white supremacy.”13 African and African American philosophers such as Mills have thus called attention not only to the Eurocentric blind spots inherent in Hegel’s views on Africa but also to his ethnocentric conception of freedom.
Marxism, meanwhile, although progressive in many respects, mingles Eurocentrism with its critique. While egalitarian in economics and politics, Marxism still privileges the historical agency of Europe and Europeans. For many Marxists, an intrinsically European capitalism, despite the cruelty so lucidly noted by Marx himself, opened the way for the global liberation of productive forces. The subalternization of Asia, Africa, and the Americas ultimately served to advance human progress. At the same time, Kevin B. Anderson makes a strong case, partly on the basis of previously untranslated texts, that Marx posited a strong connection between capitalism and slavery. In articles written in French, Marx argued that slavery was “an economic category of paramount importance,” since slavery “in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America [are] the pivot on which our present-day industrialism turns…. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery that has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade.”14 The “veiled slavery of the wage-laborers in Europe,” for Marx, formed the “pedestal” for “the unqualified slave labor of the New World.”15 Marx threw himself into the antislavery struggle and saw the fight against racism as crucial in the creation of a strong labor movement in the United States. W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, Eric Williams, Angela Davis, Cedric Robinson, and Robin Kelley. are among the black Marxists who furthered this trend within Marxist thought.
Although Eurocentric historiography invokes classical Athenian democracy as the unique and originary fount of European democracy, Jack Goody speaks of parallel forms of democratic representation in Phoenicia and in Carthage, which voted annually for its magistrates. The desire for some form of representation, he suggests, is “intrinsic to the human situation.”16 Amartya Sen, similarly, has spoken of the “global” as opposed to exclusively European roots of democracy. Rather than seeing democracy as synonymous with formal elections and representative government, Sen focuses on cultural pluralism, minority rights, and the variegated forms of “public reason.” He quotes Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom on the subject of indigenous African forms of public reason and deliberative consensus. Mandela describes the local meetings held in the regent’s house in Mqhekesini as “democracy in its purest form. Despite a hierarchy of importance among the speakers, everyone was heard, chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, shopkeeper and farmer, landowner and laborer…. All men were free to voice their opinions and equal in their value as citizens.”17 Venerable traditions of public reason and pluralism, Sen argues, can be found in India, China, Japan, Korea, Iran, Turkey, the Arab world, and many parts of Africa.18
In the 20th century, we find Eurocentric formulations even in the writings of a philosopher such as Edmund Husserl. Here is a passage from his Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy: “[In Europe we find] something unique, which all other human groups, too, feel with regard to us, something that, apart from all considerations of expediency, becomes a motivation for them … constantly to Europeanize themselves, whereas we, if we understand ourselves properly, will never, for example, Indianize ourselves.”19 Husserl here articulates what is often assumed: that Europeans display a unique mental vitality and purpose, that Europe is the fundamental source of new ideas, and that both Europeans and non-Europeans agree that this is the normal and proper order of things. What Husserl has done, as Emmanuel Eze points out, is to naturalize within the terms of transcendental philosophy the power effects of colonialism, rendered as a racial superiority.20 It is precisely the universalization of one provincial set of cultural values that provokes the need to “decenter” Europe.
Eurocentrism does not designate the consistently expressed beliefs of individuals or of a group of people, however. Nor do all elements in the system appear at the same time. Rather, Eurocentrism is an analytical construct pointing to a structured set of protocols or discursive tendencies disseminated around the globe. “The current dimensions of both time and space,” as Jack Goody puts it, “were laid down by the west … because expansion around the world required time-keeping and maps which provided the frame of history as well as geography.”21 At this point in history, with the United States in precipitous decline and Asia and Latin America in the ascendant, Eurocentrism has a vestigial, out-of-sync quality, yet it still exercises immense discursive and mediatic power. Although Eurocentrism is complex, contradictory, and historically specific, its composite portrayal as a mode of thought might point to a number of mutually reinforcing operations.
Expanding on our very brief analysis in Unthinking Eurocentrism, an “ideal portrait” might posit the following patterns: (1) Eurocentrism’s narrative is diffusionist; it assumes that Europe generates ideas that then spread around the world thanks to their inherent power of persuasion. Eurocentrism roots Europe’s putative superiority in intrinsic traits such as rationality and curiosity, engendering a fictitious sense of superiority and entitlement. Within the Kantian conception, the enlightened nations give out the laws that eventually reach “the others.” (2) Eurocentric temporal discourse develops an evolutionary narrative within which the West is figured as “ahead” and its others as “behind.” In this metanarrative of progress, a linear (“Plato-to-NATO”) teleology sees progress as an express train moving inexorably north-by-northwest from classical Greece to imperial Rome on to the metropolitan capitals of Europe and the United States. A “presentist” historiography writes history backward so that Europe is seen as always tending toward the progressive and innovative, while the periphery is always in danger of reverting to the backward and static. (3) Eurocentrism operates through a figurative substratum of embedded metaphors and allegorical motifs that encode Western superiority through interlocking binarisms such as center/periphery, order/chaos, depth/surface, light/darkness, maturity/immaturity, activity/passivity, and self-reflexivity/blindness. (4) Eurocentric discourse denies the political, religious, juridical, and cultural agency of colonized peoples, treating the indigenous peoples of the Americas, for example, as characterized by a primordial lack through a production of nothingness that decrees native land terra nullius and native culture cultura nullius. (5) Eurocentric political discourse attributes to the West an inherent drive toward democratic institutions. The Inquisition, King Leopold II, Mussolini, Hitler, Pétain, Franco, Salazar, and other European despots, within this narrative, are mere “aberrations” to be edited out within an amnesiac logic of selective legitimation. The West’s antidemocratic practices—colonialism, slave trading, imperialism—are seen as contingent “accidents” rather than as evidence of oppressive historical patterns. (6) As a corollary to the Europe-equals-democracy formula, Eurocentric discourse elides the democratic traditions of non-Western peoples, while obscuring both the manipulative limits of Western formal democracy and the West’s not infrequent role in subverting democracies (often in collaboration with local kleptocrats) in the Global South. Non-Western social systems are seen as in excess (Oriental despotism) or in deficit (societies without states). (7) Eurocentric ethics, meanwhile, is nonreciprocal. It demands of others what it does not itself perform. It places the West as moral arbiter, preaching nuclear nonproliferation, ecological stewardship, corruption-free elections, and other values that the West has practiced only intermittently.
Eurocentric literary discourse (8) emplots literary history as emerging out of biblical Hebraism and classical Hellenism, all retroactively projected as “Western,” even though the Bible was rooted in Mesopotamia, Canaan, and Egypt, and ancient Greece was impacted by Semitic, Phoenician, Egyptian, and Ethiopian cultures. A provincial narrative has the novel beginning in Europe—with Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe often posited as origins—although one could just as easily see the novel, defined as fiction in prose, as emerging from outside of Europe and then spreading to Europe. (9) The Eurocentric narrativization of artistic modernism, similarly, has the West generating artistic forms such as Cubism and collage, which then spread to the “rest of the world.” The non-West provides unsigned raw materials to be refined by named Western artists, while Western museums retain the power not only to own non-Western artifacts but also to define what qualifies as “art.” (10) A white-supremacist “aesthetic corollary” grants whites a monopoly on beauty, while associating people of color with darkness and moral ugliness. (11) Eurocentric philosophical discourse traces philosophical thinking to the “Greek miracle,” with the history of philosophy as working out the problematics formulated from the pre-Socratics up to the present. It cultivates the myth of self-critical reflexivity as a Western monopoly, whence the self-aggrandizing claim that only the West has had the reflexive capacity to criticize its own practices. Eurocentric philosophical discourse inscribes Western thought as Universal and non-Western thought as Particular. Western thinkers address universal subjects; non-Western thinkers address only their “particular” concerns. (12) Eurocentric religious discourse determines that the entire world lives by the Christian periodization (BC/AD) and the Christian calendar. The Enlightenment enshrines a secularism that remains subliminally Christian, recoding divine Providence as Progress and Sin as Unreason. While placing Christianity at the apex, Eurocentrism also hyphenizes Christianity with Judaism (Judeo-Christian) while deleting the Judeo-Muslim hyphen, and marginalizing the third Abrahamic “religion of the book” (Islam). (13) Eurocentric narrations of nationalism contrast the older, mature, civic, and inclusive forms of Western nationalism with the young, irresponsible, and exclusivist forms of non-Western nationalism. Forgetting the nation-state’s definitional tendency to monopolize legitimate violence (Weber) both toward otherized indigenous peoples and toward internal minorities, Eurocentrism projects the “new” nationalisms as unprecedentedly violent.22 (14) Eurocentric discursive and mediatic practices devalue non-Western and nonwhite life in a media-saturated world where white, Western lives are taken as more precious than the lives of people of color. Within the algorithms of human devalorization, people of color have to die en masse for the Western media to take notice.
(15) Eurocentric economics attributes Europe’s spectacular success to its enterprising spirit, forgetting that European advantages derived largely from the immense wealth that flowed to Europe from the Americas and other colonized regions. Eurocentric political economy in its various mutations (free-trade imperialism, modernization take-off theory, and neoliberal globalization discourse) develops a diffusionist “trickle-down” economics on a global scale. Just as wealth supposedly trickles down from rich to poor within Western nation-states, so the wealth of the Global North trickles down to the Global South. Eurocentrism does not acknowledge that this one-way narrative can be reversed, that the West became developed thanks to precious metals, fertile land, and enslaved and indentured labor from the non-West. European progress is seen as self-generated, autonomous, unrelated to the appropriation of wealth or ideas from colonized regions. The “Northern” nations, after pursuing protectionist policies in their own interest, discourage such policies in the Global South. Economic crises in the South are seen as serious only when they impact the North. In the 2008 financial crisis, Wall Street exported not prosperity but rather what were oxymoronically called “toxic assets.”
In sum, a Eurocentric perspective systematically upgrades one side of the civilizational ledger and systematically downgrades the other. As a form of hubris, it rigs the historical balance sheet by sanitizing Western history while patronizing and even demonizing the non-West and the nonwhite. It thinks of the non-West in terms of its deficiencies, real or imagined, but thinks of itself in terms of its noblest achievements—science, progress, humanism—while forgetting to add that “science” was often racist science, that “progress” could be genocidal, and that humanism could be a mask for barbarism. All of which is not to say that Eurocentrism is the only “-ism” plaguing the world or that generic social ills cannot be found in other cultural locations or that some other “-centrism” is not lurking around the corner. We do not believe in the inverted narcissism that posits Europe as the source of all evil in the world and exempts non-Western patriarchal elites from all responsibility. Our narrativization of the debates does not emphasize the “virtue” of non-European peoples but rather their cultural and intellectual agency in relation to historically configured relations of power. The point is not to demonize Europe but to relativize and relationalize Europe (lato sensu) as a (multi)culture alongside and interacting with other (multi)cultures. The point is not to disqualify Western perspectives per se but rather to multiply looks and to analyze the power relations that inform them. (These issues lie in the background of our later critique of figures such as Bourdieu/Wacquant, Slavoj Žižek, and Walter Benn Michaels).
What we are calling the postwar seismic shift shook to their foundations many of the Eurocentric axioms just outlined, yet they persist, on the right and sometimes, as we shall see, on the left. While anticolonial movements began to transform relations between nations, minority liberation movements began to transform relations within nations. Just as newly independent Third World nations tried to free themselves from colonial subordination, so First World minorities challenged the white-supremacist protocols of their own societies.
The seismic shift brought to the surface the tensions inherent in centuries of literal and discursive struggle. Hundreds if not thousands of writers and activists in the early postwar period participated in this shift. Indeed, philosopher Simone Weil anticipated the shift even during World War II. Writing in 1943, shortly before she died, she foresaw the coming storm, warning with a terrible prescience that France would “have to choose between attachment to its empire and the need once more to have a soul…. If it chooses badly, … it will have neither one nor the other, but simply the most terrible affliction, … and all those capable of speaking or wielding a pen will be eternally responsible for a crime.”23 Another early warning of the shift came in 1948 with Sartre’s “Orphée Noir” incendiary preface to Senghor’s Anthologie de la Nouvelle Poesie Nègre et Malgache de Langue Française: “What would you expect to find, when the muzzle that has silenced the voices of black men is removed? That they would thunder your praise? … Do you expect to read adoration in their eyes?”24 Here the collective self-image of Europeans was being challenged by the changing self-image of the colonized, leaving both a severe narcissistic wound and, at times, new openness to the non-European other. Jean-François Lyotard, in his account of the effects of decolonization, in tandem with Sartre’s account of the return of the colonial gaze, speaks of the psychic fallout of decolonization: “One cannot understand the European’s anguish in the face of Algerian resistance without placing it within the context of a self-placating paternalism in which colonials tried to live…. Can you imagine the stupefaction of well-heeled Frenchmen! It was not even any longer their world in question, it was—exactly—their world reversed.”25
According to Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, three antiracist public discourses predominated in the immediate postwar period: (1) the critical analysis of anti-Semitism; (2) the discussions of the oppression of colonized peoples and racism against African Americans; and (3) the critique of sexism.26 The latter critique goes back to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and to the Women’s Liberation movement. At times, a discursive crossover transpired, as when Beauvoir spoke of the:
deep similarities between the situation of woman and that of the Negro. Both are being emancipated today from a like paternalism, and the former master class wishes to “keep them in their place.” … The former masters lavish more or less sincere eulogies, either on the virtues of the “good Negro” with his dormant, childish, merry soul—the submissive Negro—or on the merits of the woman who is “truly feminine”—that is, frivolous, infantile, irresponsible—the submissive woman. In both cases the dominant class bases its argument on a state of affairs that it has itself created.27
These polemics inevitably revisit the Enlightenment debates. Were human rights universal or reserved for a privileged few? Was slavery, or its latter-day correlatives such as discrimination, legitimate in “certain climes” or to be everywhere condemned? Were women truly the equal of men? Did sorority coexist with fraternity? Was the Social Contract also racial and sexual?
While building on the progressive wing of the Enlightenment, and on the anticolonial thinkers and activists who preceded them, figures such as Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah, Sékou Touré, Amílcar Cabral, Malcolm X, Patrice Lumumba, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Aimé Césaire began to dismantle taken-for-granted racial hierarchies and the colonial architecture of the world. Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, first published in 1950, for example, challenged the racist currents within dominant discourse in France, drawing examples from a wide spectrum of politicians, geographers, theologians, psychologists, and novelists.28
In the background of the U.S. culture wars, meanwhile, were the first Civil Rights marches and massive antiwar demonstrations. After having helped defeat Nazism in Europe, African American veterans confronted apartheid-style racism in the United States itself. In 1954, the Supreme Court struck down the law dictating “separate but equal” schools on the grounds that “separate” could never be “equal.” Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of the bus, “freedom riders” turned Greyhound buses into vehicles for protest, and many blacks (and a few white supporters) were murdered by white racists. In Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, thousands of protesters faced police clubs, dogs, and high-powered water hoses. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his struggle against segregation, drew on the taproot of two foundational American rhetorics—first the biblical language of justice, exodus, and the “promised land” and second the Enlightenment language of the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence—in order to move the larger public toward the Preamble’s “more perfect union.”
As the postwar years witnessed the waning of a French empire second only to Britain’s, France too became a key site in the postwar shift in thinking about race and colonialism. At first, the French government maintained an intransigent colonial posture in the immediate postwar period, first in Southeast Asia, where the French suppressed Vietnamese independence until the 1954 French army defeat at Dien Bien Phu—when it was replaced by U.S. “advisers”—and then in Algeria, where colonialism ended in 1962 after bitter political battles in France itself. Much of the French contribution to the intellectual shift formed part of these battles, as anticolonial writers such as the Martinicans Césaire and Fanon, Algerians such as Gisèle Halimi, and the Tunisian Albert Memmi, alongside African American expatriates such as Richard Wright, found white French allies in figures such as Henri Alleg, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Edgar Morin, Francis Jeanson, and François Maspero. At the same time, the postwar economic expansion of France itself led to the recruiting of colonial subjects as workers. First seen as temporary guests by the majority population, the immigrants were expected to return home after a brief stint of factory work. But the attraction of the postwar prosperity of Les Trente Glorieuses, combined with postindependence instability in Algeria, resulted in massive dislocations. At the end of the 1960s there were 600,000 Algerians, 140,000 Moroccans, and 90,000 Tunisians in France, along with thousands of West Indian French people and French West Africans.
France, Brazil, and the United States all had their anti-imperialist, anticapitalist, antiracist, antisexist, antihomophobic, and antiauthoritarian movements. Such projects were not only allied metaphorically but also concretely linked in transnational networks of activism. The movements varied in their emphases, however, depending on whether they took place in the formerly imperial and now authoritarian France of de Gaulle or in a neocolonized Brazil oppressed by a U.S.-supported dictatorship or in what José Martí called the “Belly of the Beast” (the United States). In France, the vociferously Third Worldist May ’68 movement offered its support to revolutions (in China, Vietnam, Cuba, Algeria, Cuba) and minority U.S. “internal colony” movements (the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the Young Lords), seeing them as partial models for First World revolutionaries. A “tricontinental” united front combined a left-tinged revolutionism with an ardent anticolonialism.
The postwar shift in Brazil, meanwhile, took forms both similar to and different from those in France and the United States. Since Brazil, unlike the United States and France, was not an imperialist power, there was no need for a movement against “Brazilian imperialism,” only one against U.S. imperialism. And since Brazil was not a legally segregated country, there was no need for massive Civil Rights marches against de jure segregation. In Brazil, unlike in France, issues of racial difference had always been part of the debate about national identity, whether in the form of romantic “Indianist” discourses or of racist theories of “degeneracy” or of “racial democracy” discourses. In political terms, the post– World War II period was a time of relative democratization after the demise of Getúlio Vargas’s authoritarian New State. Right-wing “Integralism” was on the defensive, and democratic movements were on the upswing. Many left Brazilian intellectuals sympathized with anticolonial movements, including in the Portuguese colonies (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and São Tomé). It was also in this postwar period that Brazilian intellectuals, influenced by dependency theory, began to speak of Brazil’s status as a “dependent,” “peripheral,” and “neocolonized” nation.
Here we briefly focus on Frantz Fanon as an exemplary figure who embodies the seismic shift and who deeply impacted intellectual life and activism in all three zones. Fanon serves here as both metonym and metaphor for a paradigmatic shift generated by many thinkers. Fanon, whose work built on Césaire’s call for “Copernican revolution” in thought, became best known as an eloquent critic of colonial oppression and as an astute diagnostician of the twinned pathologies of whiteness and blackness. Forging a link between colonialism and racism, Fanon called attention to metropolitan racial tensions, in Black Skin, White Masks, and to Third World revolutions, in The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon inspired black liberation thinking around the diaspora, even while he himself was inspired by the Algerian revolution.
A kind of posthumous wrestling over Fanon’s legacy has triggered a resurgent interest in his work, with lively debates about the gendered politics of the veil, about Fanon’s “therapeutic” theory of violence, and about the relative merits of the psychoanalytically oriented Black Skin, White Masks versus the revolutionary socialism of The Wretched of the Earth.29 Contemporary scholars have been disentangling what now seems archaic and retrograde in Fanon’s work from what seems anticipatory and prescient. A “postnationalist” era has become more aware of Fanon’s limitations: his occasional romanticization of violence, his idealization of the peasantry, his slender knowledge of Arab/Muslim culture, his blind spots concerning forms of oppression rooted in gender and sexuality. At the same time, an anti-Fanon backlash has sometimes caricatured him (1) as an advocate of violence for its own sake, (2) as a crypto-totalitarian accomplice of the “Third World gulag,” and (3) as the Manichean partisan of simplistic colonizer/colonized dichotomies. Fanon’s denunciation of the binarist character of the colonial situation—for example, of an Algeria ripped in two by checkpoints and ghettoization—has occasionally been exploited to charge Fanon himself with binarism. Still another trend turns Fanon into a proto-poststructuralist analyst of sinuous postcolonial hybridities.
Yet a contemporary rereading of Fanon also reveals his extraordinary farsightedness as a precursor for a number of intellectual movements. In his lapidary phrases, we find the germ of many radical theoretical developments in various fields of relevance. Fanon’s anticolonialist decentering of Europe in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) can now be seen to have both provoked and foreshadowed Derrida’s claim (in “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” 1966) that European culture has been “dislocated,” forced to stop casting itself as the exclusive “culture of reference.”30 What Fanon called “socialtherapy,” similarly, clearly anticipated the “antipsychiatry” of such figures as David Cooper, R. D. Laing, and Felix Guattari. With his questions, Fanon pushed the Eurocentric envelope of psychoanalysis. How can Freud’s “talking cure” facilitate a transition to “ordinary unhappiness,” he asked, in a situation where social oppression itself generates “extraordinary unhappiness”? How can psychoanalysis help the patient “adjust” when colonialism provokes unending maladjustment? How can patients feel “at home” in their environment when colonialism turns the colonized into strangers in their own land?31
It was in this same spirit that Fanon criticized psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni, who argued in his Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization that colonized peoples suffered from a “dependency complex” that induced them to identify with the father-like colonizer. But for Fanon, the colonized did not identify with Shakespeare’s colonizing Prospero but rather with the angry and rebellious Caliban. Indeed, Fanon’s fellow Martinican and mentor Césaire pursued this same identificatory logic in his revisionist version of The Tempest, in which Caliban becomes Caliban X, the black militant who denounces Prospero for teaching him to jabber his language well enough to follow orders but not enough to study science. A profound complementarity, in this sense, links the antiracist psychology of Black Skin, White Masks and the revolutionary sociology of The Wretched of the Earth. Although Fanon occasionally cited Lacan, as David Macey points out, he was not a Lacanian. While Lacan opposed “ego-psychology,” Fanon stressed the need to strengthen the ego of the colonized.32 At the same time, Fanon himself did help shape a discourse very much inflected by psychoanalysis, to wit, the academic field of “postcolonial discourse,” both through his analysis of metropolitan racism and in his trenchant critique of nationalism in the “Pitfalls of National Consciousness” chapter in The Wretched of the Earth.33
Although Fanon never spoke of “Orientalist discourse,” his critiques of colonialist imagery provided proleptic examples of what would later be called “anti-Orientalist critique” à la Edward Said. When Fanon argued that the colonizer could not speak of the colonized without invoking the bestiary, he was calling attention to the animalizing trope by which the colonizing imaginary rendered the colonized as beast-like and animalic. Fanon’s foiling of the dynamic settler who makes history against the background of torpid creatures mired in tradition anticipated Johannes Fabian’s critique of classical anthropology’s projection of the colonized as “allochronically” mired in a putatively inert “tradition” seen as modernity’s antithesis.34 For Fanon, as for Fabian, the colonizer and the colonized are contemporaneous and coeval. Rejecting the “progressive,” Eurocentric two-speed paradigm of progress, Fanon insists that the colonized do not want to “catch up” with anyone.
Fanon can also be seen as a precursor of “cultural studies,” “critical race studies,” and even “whiteness studies.” Although cultural studies had not yet been formulated as a project, Fanon certainly practiced a version of what later went by that name. Already in the 1950s, he took all aspects of cultural life—the veil, dance, language, trance, radio, and film—as legitimate objects of study and overdeter-mined sites of social and cultural contestation. Although Fanon has often been caricatured as a racial hardliner, he in fact anticipated the antiessentialist critique of race. “Lumping all Negroes together under the designation of ‘Negro people,’” Fanon writes in Toward the African Revolution, “is to deprive them of any possibility of individual expression.”35 In Fanon’s relational view in Black Skin, White Masks, the black man not only is obliged to be black, but “he must be black in relation to the white man.”36 The black man, as Fanon puts it, is “comparison.”37 Nor was race a preeminent category; colonialism, he argues, “was only accidentally white.”38 Race was an imposed artifact, not a matter of intrinsic traits. Perceptions of race and of color were inflected even by language; “the black,” he wrote in Black Skin, White Masks, “will be the proportionately whiter … in direct relation to his mastery of the French language.”39 Like the later poststructuralists, Fanon saw identity as languaged, situated, constructed, projected. “When the West Indian goes to France,” he writes, “his phenotype undergoes a mutation.”40 (Jean Genet evoked this instability in The Blacks when he asks, “What then is a black, and first of all, what is the black’s color?”)41 As someone who became acutely aware of his own blackness only in France and who was regarded by some Algerians as culturally European, Fanon inevitably had an acute sense of the conjunctural, malleable character both of racial categorizations and of communitarian self-definition.
Fanon’s work also foreshadowed what is variously called “dependency theory,” “systems theory,” and “center/periphery theory.” His claim in The Wretched of the Earth that “Europe is literally the creation of the Third World,42—that is, that the wealth and prosperity of an overstuffed Europe were extracted from the misery and impoverishment of the Third World—anticipated in stereographic form the arguments of later theorists such as Andre Gunder Frank and James Petras (for Latin America), Walter Rodney (for Africa), Manning Marable (for Afro-America), and Samir Amin and Immanuel Wallerstein (for the world in general). Fanon’s remark that “for the colonized subject, objectivity is always directed against him,”43 similarly, provides a historically precocious example of the anti-imperialist and anticapitalist media critique that became so pervasive during the 1960s and 1970s and beyond.
Fanon’s work was subsequently disseminated not only in France and the Francophone world but also in the Arab and Muslim world and throughout much of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. In Brazil, Fanon became a key reference for the black movement, as represented by such figures as Abdias do Nascimento, Clóvis Moura, Lelia Gonzalez, Amauri Mendes Pereira, and Yedo Ferreira.44 Fanon’s work helped inspire the “pedagogy of the oppressed” developed by Paulo Freire, the “theatre of the oppressed” staged and theorized by Augusto Boal, and anticolonialist artistic manifestoes such as filmmaker Glauber Rocha’s “Aesthetics of Hunger.” In the United States, Fanon’s work became exceedingly well known both among black activists and among academics, who regularly assigned his work in a wide array of fields. Speaking more generally, Fanon provided a formative text for Latin American intellectuals articulating the neocolonial dimension of their histories. In intellectual-academic terms, Fanon’s key anticolonial concepts radiated outward, impacting feminism (which “gendered” Fanon’s three-stage theory of disalienation), situationism (which denounced the metaphorical “colonization” of everyday life), and sociological radicalism (which saw French peasants as “the wretched of the earth”).
Continuing the legacy of the anticolonial thinkers, countless intellectuals in all three sites have worked to decolonize knowledge production. The earlier Third Worldist and the later critical race, multicultural, ethnic studies, and postcolonial projects can be seen as forming the scholarly wing of the seismic shift, serving both to support and to theorize social movements. In the U.S. academy, a number of institutional and demographic changes favored this decolonizing move. The end of de jure segregation and the rise of a black middle class led to greater black access to education. Changes in immigration laws (especially the 1965 Hart-Cellar Immigration Act), meanwhile, facilitated the granting of citizenship to Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans, resulting in community pressures on the academy to include these populations both as students and as professors. Native American, black, Chicano/a, Asian American, and Euro-American radicals assumed roles as teachers, leading to new programs and courses incorporating the histories, theories, and perspectives of people who had been traditionally marginalized by patriarchal Eurocentric elites. Professors began to integrate issues of race, class, gender, nation, sexuality, and empire into their pedagogy and scholarship, leading to an ideological battle royal both on and off campuses.
Many scholars also began to rethink their disciplines in terms of the global changes triggered by decolonization and by minority struggles. Disciplines in which the West was assumed to be both the speaking subject and the object of study were subjected to critique. The challenges to the protocols of Eurocentrism clearly impacted most of the academic disciplines, but at different times and in diverse ways. Critical and even insurgent proposals were expressed in recombinatory coinages such as “revisionist history,” “critical law,” “radical philosophy,” “reflexive anthropology,” and “critical pedagogy”—where the qualifiers suggested a reconceptualization of a canonical discipline from the periphery and from below. The thrust was doubly critical, first of the presence of Eurocentric perspectives and second of the absence of non-European and nonwhite faculty, students, and cultural topics. Decolonizing projects called for more inclusionary educational systems, more culturally diverse political representation, more racially equitable justice systems, and greater indigenous, immigrant, gay, and women’s rights. The goal was to create egalitarian social formations, where the state was not dominated by a single ethnicity but rather represented the totality of its citizens, all with an equal claim to both recognition and redistribution. This meant, inevitably, taking into account the historical practices that had generated the structural inequalities in the first place.
Here we sketch out a few examples of direct challenges to the protocols of Eurocentric knowledge production, as they emerge both from within disciplines and through the formation of interdisciplines. A decolonizing economics discipline, for example, moved away from the standard modernization and free-market-based development theories that saw Western financial investments as fueling prosperity in the Third World. Dependency theory rejected the “development” discourse that conceived a Promethean West as catalyzing an economic “takeoff” that would recapitulate the historical sequencing of Western development. Such a view, for dependency theorists, falsely assumed that the world’s resources were available to the Third World as they had been “available” to the colonizing powers during what Marx called the “rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.”45 An amalgam of the radical ideas of an international group of thinkers such as Raúl Prebisch, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Celso Furtado, Andre Gunder Frank, James Petras, and Paulo Singer, dependency theory saw world poverty and wealth as dialectically intertwined. The same hierarchical world system controlled by metropolitan capitalist countries and corporations simultaneously generated both the wealth of the First World and the poverty of the Third World, as opposite faces of the same coin. Wealth implies poverty, just as a North implies a South.
Dependency theory both critiqued and extended Marxism by transposing the analysis of class within nations to the economic relationships between classes of nations, ranked as subordinate and superordinate. Thus, it moved beyond class struggle as exclusive focus to envision subordinated nations as protagonists of world-historical progressive change. Initially associated with Latin America, dependency theory was extrapolated for Africa in Walter Rodney’s How Africa Underdeveloped Africa and for Afro-America in Manning Marable’s How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America. The theory was also popularized in a widely disseminated book by Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano, whose title—The Open Veins of Latin America—metaphorically sums up the drift of dependency theory as a narrative of vampiric exploitation and Christ-like suffering, within which Center and Periphery are locked in mortal struggle.
Dependency theory was subsequently criticized for its “metrocentrism,” for its incapacity to conceptualize the interplay of the local and the global, and for its blindness to the modernizing power even of reactionary regimes. Although the drift of the movement was clearly anti-imperialist, dependency theory sometimes purveyed an unconscious Prometheanism that still saw the Third World as the passive victim of an all-powerful First World. Future Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso therefore called for a more nuanced theory allowing for the very varied “situations” of dependency.46 In any case, any thoroughgoing analysis of North-South relations requires at least partial recourse to an updated dependency theory, refashioned as “world systems theory” (Wallerstein) and “delinking” and “center/periphery theory” (Samir Amin). While rendering the dependency thesis more subtle and flexible, the new incarnations of the theory still saw colonialism and neocolonialism as constitutive factors in present-day economic inequalities.47
The decolonizing project also challenged the protocols of historiography. Instead of one-track, single-rhythm narratives of modernization, revisionist historians began to see parallel yet differentiated narratives of multiple modernities. In the United States, revisionist historians focused on the “underside” of American history by calling attention to the foundational dispossession on which the U.S. nation-state was built. Scholars such as Richard Slotkin, Richard Drinnon, and Francis Jennings rewrote the “Conquest of the West” as an exemplum of colonial expansionism. Rejecting cheerleading versions of U.S. history, the practitioners of “social history,” “radical history,” and “bottom-up history” called attention to genocide, antiblack racism, and imperialism as well as to black and indigenous rebellions. African American scholars such as John Hope Franklin, Darlene Clark Hine, Cedric Robinson, Manning Marable, Thelma Wills Foote, Angela Davis, and Robin D. G. Kelley, meanwhile, foregrounded the central role of racism in American history and the black struggle for freedom and justice. At the same time, scholars adopted new research methods for rendering audible the subaltern voices of history, for example, by reading court records “against the grain” to unearth the secret histories of resistance. (Some of this radical work took the form of best-seller popular histories such as Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States and James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me).
Revisionist history questioned U.S. exceptionalist ideologies concerning the “frontier,” a euphemism for the indigenous land being occupied by European intruders. Richard Drinnon traced the process by which white hostility toward “savages” has been recycled throughout American history. The process began with the “proto-victims,” the Pequots massacred in 1637, when the Puritans made some four hundred of them “as a fiery oven” in their village near the Mystic River and later finished off three hundred more in the mud of Fairfield Swamp, in an early example of the “righteous massacres” that have constituted one very violent strain within American history.48 This aggressivity subsequently expanded through “Manifest Destiny” to the “Conquest of the West.” With the Monroe Doctrine, the U.S. power elite established Latin America as its “sphere of influence,” a concept later extended during the “imperialist binge” at the turn of the century to the Philippines, where many of the commanding generals had previously fought in the Plains and Apache Wars.49 Indeed, the model of frontier conquest provided a paradigm for the relations between the United States and much of the world. With the neoconservative “Project for a New American Century,” the frontier became the world itself, bringing to an exhausted climax a territorial and capitalist expansionism whose origins trace back to the formative years of the U.S. nation-state.
Within the legal field, meanwhile, “critical law,” “critical race,” and feminist legal scholarship questioned the universality of the dominant masculinist forms of Western legal theory and practice. As represented by scholars such as Derrick Bell, Patricia Williams, Richard Delgado, Regina Austin, Roberto Unger Mangabeira, Paulette Caldwell, Randall Kennedy, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, among others, the fields of Critical Law and especially critical race theory disinterred the class, gender, and racial protocols underlying a U.S. legal system rigged against the poor, the black, and the female, while assuming capitalist regimes of ownership as normative. Writing with passionate precision and literary power, critical race theorists demonstrated that racism in U.S. law and society was not aberrant but rather normal and hegemonic.
Philosophy, long one of the whitest, most masculinist, and most Eurocentric of disciplines, also did not escape critique. Rather than assume that Europe always generates ideas, critical philosophers such as Lewis Gordon, Anibal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, Adrian Piper, Lucas Outlaw, Charles Mills, and Emmanuel Eze discerned reverse currents in the non-European critiques of Western philosophy. Rather than accept the myth of the uniqueness of Western self-reflexivity, critical philosophers suggested that the West itself should be more reflexive, as it were, about its own reflexivity. Rather than inscribe the West as universal and the non-West as particular, critical philosophers suggested that the universal can be thought and addressed from any location. Afro-diasporic philosophers called attention to the racist and colonialist dimension of Enlightenment thought. The clearly racist ethnological writings of a Kant or a Hegel, they argued, could no longer be neatly cordoned off from their philosophy. Critical philosophers began to speak of “counter-Enlightenments” and “para-Enlightenments.” Black and Chicana feminists, meanwhile, stressed a politics of location, while feminist-inflected standpoint theory suggested that race and gender inescapably impacted the supposedly neutral philosophical and scientific gaze.
In the field of education, the proponents of radical pedagogy, some influenced by Brazilian philosopher-pedagogue Paulo Freire’s theories of conscientização (consciousness raising), challenged the ideological conservatism of the educational systems of the Americas. In the hands of such figures as Ivan Illich, Chandra T. Mohanty, Peter Maclaren, and Henry Giroux, pedagogy became a subversive project. In many fields, scholars began to question the positivist, objectivist, and scientistic assumptions regnant in their fields, for example the notion of an objective and dispassionate history, supposedly unperturbed by the identity and experience of the historian or by the political and ideological currents of the moment. The field of anthropology, similarly, once a locus of the colonial nexus of power and knowledge, meanwhile, was critiqued by figures such as Talal Assad, Johannes Fabian, Renato Rosaldo, Angela Gilliam, Mick Taussig, Ann Laura Stoler, Terence Turner, and Faye Ginsburg. Going against the grain of the colonialist tradition, anthropologists in all three zones came to speak of “shared anthropology,” “reflexive anthropology,” “symmetrical anthropology,” “reverse anthropology,” and “dialogical anthropology.” Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, within this spirit, redefined the mission of anthropology as the “permanent and unending decolonization of thought.” In tandem with similar moves elsewhere (e.g., “provincializing Europe” and “Third Worldizing at home”), Viveiros de Castro speaks of “anthropologizing the Center,” in a situation where the anthropologist merely “relationalizes interpretations” and where the goal is not objectification but subjectification.50
Apart from engendering a salutary crisis within traditional disciplines, the seismic shift also generated new “interdisciplines” and “transdisciplines.” In North America, these transdisciplinary trends took institutionalized form in “ethnic studies,” an umbrella term that came to embrace programs and departments in Native American studies, African American studies, Asian American studies, Latino Studies, e.g. Chicano studies (in the Southwest), and Puerto Rican studies (in the East). According to Manning Marable, by 1996 there were nearly one hundred ethnic studies departments in the United States, with roughly forty-five black studies departments, seventeen Chicano/Puerto Rican studies departments, and eight Asian studies departments.51 Ethnic studies created new institutional spaces for decolonized forms of knowledge, opening the way for new courses, texts, and canons.
The political/academic transformations linked to the various social identities were products of bottom-up and top-down forces, with varying coefficients of hegemony and resistance. Ethnic studies programs/departments emerged as responses to community activism, yet they were helped along by philanthropic foundations. Partly as a response to the 1960s urban rebellions, the Ford Foundation, beginning in 1968, funneled money into African American studies programs/departments. Between the founding of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the strident demands for black studies, as Noliwe Rooks puts it, “the country lurched reluctantly toward a semblance of racial equality in an atmosphere of assassinations, lynchings, war, urban rebellions, campus upheavals, and police riots.”52 Black studies became a site of contestation between radical community activism and those who would “manage” that activism. While Black Power advocates saw black studies as “a revolutionary groundswell capable of overturning the existing order,” liberals usually saw it “as a means of racial integration and access to increased opportunity.”53 Those who speak derisively of self-indulgent “campus quarrels” often forget the politically consequential clashes at the origin of these debates. The institutional challenge for ethnic studies has been that it become a synergistic coalition rather than a competitive cockfight in which hyphenated Americans fight for the leftovers from the master’s table. The intellectual challenge has been to produce a lateral conversation between the marginalized, rather than a pageant of subalterns of color revolving around a white center within the boundaries of the United States.
While ethnic studies was formed institutionally as part of the 1960s and 1970s battles, in the 1980s and 1990s the more established disciplines came under multicultural and Affirmative Action pressures. The canon debate in literature departments, on one level, continued and extended the ethnic studies effort to embrace minoritarian perspectives, but now within the canonical disciplines themselves. In parallel moves, academic umbrella organizations such as the MLA (Modern Language Association) and SCS (Society for Cinema Studies) began to multiculturalize the canon and diversify their membership, leading to significant quarrels not only between the multicultural left and the monocultural right but also within the left concerning the relative importance of class, race, gender, and sexuality and the shifting relations between the various theoretical grids such as Marxism, feminism, and poststructuralism.
Impacted by ethnic studies, American studies took a multicultural turn in the late 1980s. Scholars questioned the American exceptionalist Anglo-normativity that had informed the field, calling attention to U.S.-based literature written in languages other than English and exposing the imperialist undercurrents in canonical literature. At the same time, the multicultural turn highlighted the anti-imperial thrust of writing by figures such as Melville, Thoreau, Twain, and Du Bois. In a subsequent transnational turn, impacted by the transnational feminist studies represented by scholars such as Caren Kaplan, Inderpal Grewal, Chandra Mohanty, Minoo Moallem, and Jacqui Alexander, the field has emphasized cross-border flows of people and cultural information across all the Americas, while still acknowledging the hierarchical “channels” of these flows. As scholars in other fields began to cite and incorporate the insights of ethnic studies scholars, issues of race, colonialism, and multiculturality came to be seen as relevant to all fields of inquiry and to all communities, even if the issues were experienced in uneven ways.
Another set of interdisciplinary formations, based on geographical regions, was designated “area studies,” composed of Latin American/Caribbean studies, Asian/Pacific studies, African studies, and Middle East studies. (Western Europe and the United States, symptomatically, did not constitute an area; rather, they formed the quietly normative headquarters from which all the other areas were strategically mapped.) Although the origins of area studies trace back to 19th-century imperial mappings of the disciplines, the field took off with the advent of the Cold War. A clear thematic complementarity operated between ethnic studies and area studies. U.S. minorities “back here” were clearly linked to majorities “over there”: African Americans to Africa, Latinos to Latin America, and so forth. But if the themes of the two fields were complementary, their genealogies and political drift were clearly divergent. While “ethnic studies” emerged out of the activism of racialized communities, “area studies” was decreed from above by the U.S. government, reflecting a hunger for expertise in the various regions where U.S. hegemony was being challenged by nationalist and communist insurgencies.
Various ironic turnabouts in this process, however, led to a partial convergence between progressive scholars from the two interdisciplines. If Latin American studies began as a government-supported effort, many of the academic beneficiaries of government grants, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, were not at all inclined to get with the program; many became outspoken critics of U.S. government policy. Historian Warren Dean noted that the U.S. government reduced its grants to Latin Americanists because “95% of the recipients of the grants were against the dictatorships.”54 Brazilianist Robert Levine describes the situation in the 1970s as follows:
The younger academics [in the United States], many of whom had struggled in the Civil Rights Movement or served in the Peace Corps or demonstrated against the Vietnam War, were sympathetic to the aims of the Cuban revolution and critical of the foreign policy of the United States…. With the increased repression in Brazil after 1968, most of the young foreign scholars in Brazil showed solidarity with the opponents of the regime.55
Historian James Green traces this process in telling detail in his We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States.56 In a 2001 talk, historian Barbara Weinstein recalled the feelings of the period:
At that time, I fervently believed that a worldwide socialist transformation was a historical possibility. And I felt that Latin America would be in the vanguard of this global revolutionary process. I regarded as elitist or hidebound my peers who opted to study US political history or European intellectual history. In contrast, my choice of Latin America highlighted my political identification with the Third World over the First.57
Weinstein’s recollections foreground a built-in asymmetry between North and South in the political roles of left intellectuals pressured by nation-state governmentality. The very meaning of “left” changes its valence and affect. For Latin Americans, coming from the Global South, to be “left” is to be nationalist and anti-imperialist, a participant in a struggle to affirm one’s nation’s rightful place in the concert of nations. Adversary scholarship becomes part of a “national allegory” (Jameson, Xavier), in which the scholar writes the nation within a narrative of resistance. For North Americans, coming from an imperializing country, in contrast, to be “left” is to be a dissident, to be in a sense anti-U.S. nationalist and anti-imperialist, a participant in the struggle to combat Americano-centrism and restrain American power abroad.58
What often gets lost in the culture war polemics is the actual scholarly work—what might be awkwardly called the “decolonizing corpus”—generated by the seismic shift. The broader corpus includes work practiced under diverse names and rubrics and performed by hundreds of scholars in many countries. At this point, the corpus includes such diverse currents of thought as Third Worldism, the modernity/coloniality project, anti-imperialist media studies, critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, Latin American subaltern studies, (multi)cultural studies, transnational feminism, “minor” and feminist Francophone studies, Latino studies, Asian studies, visual culture, social-movement analysis, cross-racial and cross-national literary history, race-conscious queer theory, critical science theory, radical pedagogy, reflexive and experimental anthropology, post-modern urbanism and geography, counter-Enlightenment philosophy, border theory, alter-globalization theory, and postcolonial studies, to name just a few of the many adversarial currents and formations. Indeed, each of these categories opens up onto others, and we could easily swell the list with more subfields.59 Although our rubrics are schematic, and although there are tensions between and even within the diverse modes of critique, what all these heterogeneous fields have in common is a critical engagement with the historical legacies of colonial and racial oppression.
In the 1980s and the 1990s, two keywords—“multiculturalism” and “identity politics”—came to crystallize these trends. Just as the American right had opposed Third Worldism and Civil Rights in the 1960s, it opposed multiculturalism and identity politics in the 1980s. What provoked the right’s howls of execration in this period was not the indisputable fact of the dappled variety of the world’s cultures—what we call multiculturality—but rather the larger decolonizing project. As one academic face of the late 20th-century decolonizing project, “multiculturalism” became a kind of shorthand to designate a vast array of initiatives. For those leftists who invested the term with hope, what one might call “the desire called multiculturalism” aimed to restructure the ways knowledge was produced and cultural resources were distributed. Emerging out of the eclipse of the somewhat euphoric Third Worldist discourse that imagined an imminent tricontinental revolution lying in wait around the next bend of the dialectic, radical versions of the multicultural project challenged power relations in a less direct way. The germ of radicalism in some versions of multiculturalism, in the United States at least, trace back to the long tradition of anticolonial, antiracist, and anticapitalist movements among leftists of color and their white allies, jointly forming a coalition that Cynthia A. Young calls the “U.S. Third World Left.”60
Although multiculturality defines any situation where various ethnic cultures interact within the same nation-state, multiculturalism celebrated precisely those cultures and perspectives that had been suppressed and stigmatized by the dominant culture. In this sense, it provided an umbrella for diverse projects and constituencies, translating the seismic shift into a language deemed more appropriate during the ebb tide of Third Worldism. Multicultural discourse was above all protean, plural, conjunctural, existing in shifting relation to various institutions, discourses, disciplines, communities, and nation-states. Despite rejection by the right as well as by some on the left, it is useful to recall the term’s advantages at the time: (1) its very inclusiveness favored a broad progressive coalition, something lacking in terms such as “Latino liberation” that applied to only one band on the radical spectrum; (2) its strategic vagueness equipped it to prod cultural institutions such as museums and universities into hiring more minorities and diversifying programming and curricula; (3) the polysemy of its constituent terms embraced the “multi-” that evoked a fundamental heterogeneity based on multiple axes of identification, and a “culture” that addressed a silent rebuke to reductionist Marxists blind to the centrality of culture and race alongside class, as well as to feminists blind to the importance of race alongside gender. The term contained within itself the move from an undeniable demographic reality to a break with the institutional status quo.
The “culture” in multiculturalism opened the way to the celebration of the many vibrant cultural expressions emerging from the interstices of oppression, a dimension often missing from economistic accounts that saw culture as merely superstructural. Orchestrating critique and celebration, words such as “colonialism” and “race” evoke a dystopia of oppression, while words such as “multiculturalism,” “interculturalism” “alter-globalization,” “multitude,” and “the commons” evoke utopias of justice and conviviality. While history, as “that which hurts” (Jameson) is undeniably painful, art and popular culture sometimes manage to transfigure historical pain through the incomparable creativity of, for example, Afro-diasporic music.61 Furthermore, the term “multiculturalism” embedded the memory of two historically interrelated source movements: the decolonizing independence movements in the “Third World” and the minority struggles in the “First World.” The linguistic performative of putting “multi-” and “cultural” together, meanwhile, verbally enacted a coalitionary strategy transcending the binarism of “race relations” discourse.
Over time, the concept of “multiculturalism” became a dissensual matrix or code, to use Jamesonian language, within which different discourses competed for hegemony. Since the word “culture,” as Raymond Williams had long before pointed out in Keywords, already embraced a multitude of significations—ranging from the elite Arnoldian sense of the “best that has been thought and written” to the anthropological sense of shared ways of life—the “multi-” could only further amplify that initial polysemy into a veritable cacophony of meanings.62 As a term designating a social and intellectual project produced at the intersection of critical knowledges, “multiculturalism” was open to various interpretations and subject to various political force fields; it became a slippery term onto which diverse groups projected their hopes and fears. Intrinsically polysemic, the word simply pointed to a debate. Its very open-endedness made it susceptible, as we shall see, to both idealization and demonization by both the left and the right.
As a transnationally situated utterance, “multiculturalism” altered its drift and valence in diverse situations.63 In the United States, it emerged against the backdrop of minority struggles, Civil Rights, and U.S. neoimperialism; in Canada, against the backdrop of Anglo-French biculturalism and native Canadian rights; in Australia, against the backdrop of aboriginal dispossession and immigration from Asia and the Mediterranean; in Mexico, against the ideological backdrop of la raza cósmica and mestizaje and the demographic reality of quasi-autonomous indigenous groups such as the Maya and the Zapotec. In Brazil, it entered a discursive field where the keywords had been “miscegenation, “racial democracy,” and “social exclusion.” The English word “multiculturalism,” meanwhile, migrated to Holland and Germany, where Multi-Kulti struggled against Leitkultur normativity. Unlike France, where tensions revolved around postcolonial immigration, German tensions had to do with a Gastarbeiter Turkish/Kurdish minority unconnected to any prior German colonization yet marginalized by blood-and-soil definitions of national identity. In the international arena, meanwhile, a 2003 UN report on “cultural liberty in today’s diverse world” posited “multicultural democracy” as an alternative to two mistaken options: (1) ethnic separatism and (2) assimilation.64 The UN formulation was striking because critics had often rejected multiculturalism in contradictory ways as either separatist or assimilationist, while the UN report defined it as rejecting both, suggesting that there was no consensus even about the core meaning of the term itself.65
If multiculturalism became quasi-official policy in Australia and Canada, in the United States it was part of a coalitionary opposition politics. Nonetheless, some African Americans saw it as drowning black specificity in a bland minestrone rather than serving up a spicy Afro-diasporic gumbo. Some Native Americans, meanwhile, were reluctant to be seen as just one more oppressed “minority” rather than as the heirs of sovereign nations belonging to a preexisting panindigenous continental majority. In this sense, Native American and African American intellectuals have formulated slightly different critiques. For African Americans, the fear was of a loss of specificity of oppression that would undermine the rationale for compensatory measures for slavery and discrimination. Native Americans, meanwhile, feared the loss of the specificity grounded in being the only aboriginal (but displaced) sovereigns of the land.
The more radical versions of these projects provoked rightist ire because they called for seeing world history and contemporary social life from a decolonizing perspective. But these projects also provoked anxiety on the left, as more co-optive versions, or “multiculturalism light,” came to evoke corporate-managed (united colors of Benetton) pluralism whereby established power marketed difference for commercial purposes. A submerged ethnocentrism sometimes resulted in what we have called “star-striped multiculturalism,” or “nationalism with a tan.” Educational institutions sometimes envisioned the issues through an exceptionalist lens that celebrated difference without deconstructing either class hierarchies or nationalist paradigms. The celebration of multicultural diversity became meaningless when not articulated together with a critique of the political economy of racism and imperialism and when not conjoined with political projects of justice, empowerment, and redistribution. Without such articulations, multiculturalism risked becoming the feel-good diversity pabulum derided by some leftists.
Over the past two decades, much of the decolonizing work has been performed under the rubric of “postcolonial studies,” defined as an interdisciplinary domain of inquiry—embracing and synthesizing such disciplines as literature, geography, history, and media studies, among others—which explores the colonial archive and postcolonial identity, often in work inflected by poststructuralism. The post-colonial field, in Brett Christophers’s succinct summary, offers a “wide-ranging critique of the political-economic conditions and the ways of thinking, seeing and representing that empire instilled, and which … continue to persist to one degree or another after the formal dismantling of empire.”66 If the key axes of discussion during decolonization had been empire and nation, postcolonialism multiplied the axes to include race, gender, class, region, religion, sexuality, and ethnicity, without nation and empire ever disappearing from view. The rise of “postcolonialism” coincided with the partial eclipse of the “Third World” revolutionary paradigm. The genealogy of the field traces back to the anticolonial struggles themselves and to the accompanying debates about postindependence policies and theories. The postcolonial existed in germ in the anticolonial. The “Pitfalls of National Consciousness” chapter in Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), written during the twilight of French colonialism in Algeria, was an anticipatory gesture toward the postcolonial field. And while Fanon mobilized the theoretical idioms available in his day—phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and so forth—postcolonialism mobilizes the theoretical (largely poststructuralist) idioms available in its period. Within the academy, the founding text of postcolonial studies is usually thought to be Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), with its deployment of Gramsci’s idea of hegemony and Foucauldian notions of discourse and the power-knowledge nexus to examine the ways that Western imperial power, in affiliation with colonizing institutions, constructed a stereotypical “Orient.”67 Although anticipated by Fanon and Anouar Abdul Malek, Said’s method highlighted questions of representation in a poststructuralist manner. Postcolonialism thus brings on board a new idiom in which “discourse,” the “knowledge-power nexus,” and “hegemony” figure prominently.
While “multiculturalism” and “critical race” can conceivably (but not ideally) apply to single nation-states, postcoloniality is necessarily inscribed in a relationality between at least two national geographies: the colonizing metropolis and the colonized nation. At the same time, the race/coloniality debates are linked to larger global patterns and thus exceed even binational analytical categories. Indeed, postcolonial studies often addresses much larger relationalities that go beyond a single metropole and colony, to wit, those broadly obtaining between the diverse metropolitan countries in general (the Global North) vis-à-vis the colonized or formerly colonized or peripheralized countries in general (the Global South). While critical race studies and (multi)cultural studies have a mediated relation to anticolonial struggles, postcolonialism references them directly, even when urging a move beyond anticolonial politics and discourse.
Postcolonial theoretical discourse often practices a rhetoric of destabilization. Within this discursive mutation, tropes of “roots” mutate into metaphors of “routes” and “passages” and “rhizomes.” A rhetoric of unsullied purity gives way to tropes of mixing, whether religious (syncretism), genetic (miscegenation), linguistic (creolization), botanical (hybridity), or culinary (masala, bouillabaisse, gumbo, feijoada). The visible checkpoints of The Battle of Algiers become the invisible barriers between banlieue and city center in the France of La Haine. Rather than the presumably binary oppositions of anticolonialism, postcolonial theory focuses on continuous spectra. Notions of ontologically referential identity metamorphose into a multifaceted play of identifications. Rigid paradigms collapse into sliding metonymies. Erect, militant postures give way to a supple play of mutually invaginated positionalities. Revolution with a capital R transmutes into a lower-case resistance. Teleological narratives of linear progress are replaced by zigzagging interrogations of change. Notions of progressive, stagist development give way to tropes of simultaneity and counterpoint. The nation, losing its unitary form, is now seen as palimpsestic, as embodying multiple times, rhythms, and perspectives. The idea of the originary nation—expressed in biological metaphors of growth and evolution—is replaced by the nation as imagined, narrated, figured, constructed, troped.
The flowering of postcolonial studies in the late 1980s partly derives from the entry of intellectuals from the formerly colonized countries into the Anglophone academy as well as from the increased visibility of immigrant-descended populations in the United States and Europe. Although Francophone thinkers such as Césaire and Fanon were seminal thinkers for postcolonial thought, many French intellectuals, for reasons that we explore in a later chapter, have until recently been reticent about the project. Latin American intellectuals, meanwhile, have been somewhat ambivalent, saying in effect that postcolonialism is “old news.” If Latin America was in some ways “behind” Europe—for example, in technology or indus-trialization—in other ways it was culturally “ahead” of European thinking, having the “advantages of their disadvantages,” that is, the double, parallax vision that comes with knowing both center and periphery. The Anglo-American–Indian orientation of much of postcolonial studies, meanwhile, too often relegated Latin American intellectuals to the theoretical sidelines. At the same time, Latin American and Latino scholars (Enrique Dussel, Fernando Coronil, Walter Mignolo, Arturo Escobar, Anibal Quijano, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, and Ramón Grosfoguel, among others) have been formulating the “colonial/modernity project,” which takes the critiques developed by indigenous peoples, and by Latin American anti-imperialists, as fundamental to any thoroughgoing postcolonial project.68
Postcolonial theory has been critiqued for (1) an elision of class (sometimes linked ad hominem to the elite status of some of the key theorists themselves); (2) a tendency to subjectivize large-scale political struggles by reducing them to intrapsychic tensions; (3) an avoidance of political economy in a globalized age when neoliberal economics drives many of the cultural changes registered by the theory; (4) an obsessive antibinarism that ignores the intractable binarism of the colonial situation itself; (5) a supercilious attitude toward “ethnic studies,” projected as lacking the aura of theory but which often constituted a more direct challenge to established power through its links to potentially insurgent communities; (6) a tendency to focus on faded European empires and to forget actually existing American neoimperialism; (7) a kind of Commonwealth centrism that privileges the British-Indian relation as paradigm for colonialism in general; (8) an insufficient theorization of postcolonial theory’s own conditions of emergence; (9) the adoption of a highly theoretical idiom that projects the reader into a rarefied atmosphere of vertiginous slippage, allowing little sense of precise time or place except when the theoretical helicopter “lands” on a random historical example or literary citation; and (10) the overprivileging of themes of hybridity, diaspora, and cosmopolitanism, to the detriment of the power dynamics inherent in colonial and neocolonial violence. Some theorists linked to Latin America prefer a “decolonial” and “colonial difference” approach that stresses manifold colonial and postcolonial contexts in an attempt to foreground an “epistemic diversality of world decolonial interventions.”69 Needless to say, many of the criticisms of postcolonial theory do not apply to all versions of postcolonial studies, and the criticisms themselves arguably form an integral part of the larger field. Indeed, the postcolonial field is the site of incessant self-questioning and ramifying autocritique, where every new book or essay seems to correct some sin of omission or commission by earlier scholars. The point now, as formulated in the call for papers for a 2010 conference at York University titled “What Postcolonial Theory Doesn’t Say,” is not to denounce postcolonialism for its inevitable oversights but rather to dynamize the field’s enormous cultural and institutional capital for progressive ends.
The postcolonial privileging of “hybridity” has particular implications for indigenous communities. Indeed, the indigenous issue throws into question some of the favored topoi of postcolonial discourse and cultural studies. First, indigenous thinkers often see their situation as colonial rather than postcolonial, or as both at the same time. While a certain postcolonial theory celebrates cosmopolitanism, indigenous discourse often valorizes a rooted existence rather than a cosmopolitan one. While postcolonial and cultural studies revels in the “blurring of borders,” indigenous communities often seek to affirm borders by demarcating land against encroaching squatters, miners, corporations, and nation-states. While the poststructuralism that helped shaped postcolonialism emphasizes the inventedness of nations and “denaturalizes the natural,” within an idiom that surrounds “nature” with protective scare quotes, indigenous thinkers have insisted on love of a land regarded as “sacred,” another word hardly valued in the post- discourses. What Eduardo Viveiros de Castro calls indigenous “multinaturalism”70 challenges not only the rhetorical antinaturalism of the “posts” but also what might be called the primordial Orientalism that separated nature from culture, animals from human beings.
“Hybridity” is also often associated with the peregrinations of diasporic elites, with little space for the more hazardous itineraries of desperate refugees, including those exiled on their own land in trails of tears. For indigenous peoples, “hybridity” is especially double-edged. On the one hand, indigenous nations were borrowing from one another long before Columbus, as objects, ideas, and populations traveled around the Americas, a process only intensified by the Conquest. The post-Columbian indigenous appropriation of European technique began as early as 1503, when the French captain Paulmier de Gonneville brought the young Carijó Indian Essmoricq from Brazil to France to study munitions technology to help his tribe in their struggles back home.71 On the other hand, “hybridity” has just as often been used as a weapon against indigenous peoples of mixed heritage, sometimes dismissed, in both Brazil and the United States, as not “real” Indians deserving of rights.
The British Empire/Commonwealth focus of postcolonial theory, meanwhile, has resulted in the overlooking of the long-term antecedents of hybridity discourse in the work of Latin America and Caribbean intellectuals. A 1971 essay by Brazilian novelist/literary critic Silviano Santiago calling attention to the “in-between of Latin American culture,” for example, clearly anticipated Homi Bhabha’s formulations concerning the “interstitial,” the “in-between” and the “third space of negotiation.”72 While the wide circulation of race/postcolonial work is partly due to the global reach of the English language and the power of the Anglo-American academy, it would be misleading to chart a linear trajectory whereby these movements “originated” in Anglo-America and then “traveled elsewhere.” Conquest, colonialism, slavery, U.S. imperialist policies, military interventions, expulsions, immigration, and the “brain drain” brought a translocated and hybridized mix of peoples and ideas, helping to shape the various progressive projects. In discursive terms, these projects were impacted by anticolonialist discourse, by the poststructural theory associated with France but also with the North African Jacques Derrida, by the black British cultural studies associated with the United Kingdom, by the subaltern studies associated not only with India but also with postcolonial diasporas, by the hegemony theory associated with Gramsci and Italy, by the dependency theory associated with Latin America, and by the center/periphery and world systems theory associated with many different sites.
Walter Mignolo and others have usefully summarized the underlying philosophical/historical drift of postcolonial projects as the critical thinking together of coloniality and modernity, seen as inseparable and mutually shaping concepts. Insisting, as we do, on the intellectual agency of the victims of colonialism, Mignolo borrows Valentin Mudimbe’s coinage “border gnosis” to refer to “knowledge from a subaltern perspective, … conceived from the exterior borders of the modern/colonial world system,” and uses “border gnoseology” to refer to discourse about colonialism “conceived at the conflictive intersection of the knowledge produced from the perspective of modern colonialisms.”73 These forms of knowledge are often not recognized by academic institutions, whether out of sheer ignorance or because they are associated with stigmatized peoples assumed to be “disappeared” or as lacking in cultural agency.
Parallel to work performed under other rubrics, the modernity/coloniality group, largely formed by Latin American and Latino scholars, highlights the interconnectedness of modernity and coloniality, postmodernity and postcoloniality. Arturo Escobar highlights the following axioms that guide the modernity/coloniality research project: (1) there is no modernity without coloniality; coloniality is constitutive of modernity; (2) the modern/colonial world and the colonial matrix of power originates in the 16th century and has two almost opposite “faces”: on the one hand, the dispossession of native peoples and the enslavement of Africans and, on the other, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment; (3) the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution are derivative movements that further transform this colonial matrix; (4) coloniality, as the dark side of modernity, is simply another name for Europe’s “progress” toward world hegemony; (5) capitalism is essential to both progress and coloniality; and (6) coloniality/modernity underwent a further transformation when the United States took over the leadership of global imperial processes.74
As a mutation in global capitalism, globalization both shuts down and opens up political possibilities. The World Social Forum, the activist congress on alternatives to globalization, was at first a Franco-Brazilian project, conceived by the Parisian editors of Le Monde Diplomatique but first carried out in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Designed to counter Davos as the conference of the financial elites, the Social Forum became the discursive mediator for the massive antiglobalization “movement of movements” that generated huge protests in Seattle, Genoa, Davos, New York, Cancun, Miami, and elsewhere. Although radical scholarship is not a specific focus in the Forum documents, the Forum offers many parallels to the scholarly work. The Charter of Principles (quoted by Cassen) declares that the Forum is “open to the plurality of genders, ethnicities, cultures, [and] generations [and] seeks a “truly democratic and participatory practice, characterized by egalitarian and pacific relations of solidarity between persons, races, sexes, and peoples.” Race, colonialism, and slavery are also concerns. In the “Appeal for Future Mobilizations” (January 2001), the authors denounce the role of neoliberalism in worsening racism, “in continuity with the genocide caused by centuries of slavery and colonialism, which have destroyed the foundations of the black civilizations and societies of Africa.” Indigeneity as well makes its mark, as the document calls for solidarity with “indigenous peoples in their historic combat against genocide and ethnicide, in defense of their rights, their natural resources, their culture, their autonomy, their land and their territory.”75
With an alert eye to the possibilities of dialectical jiujitsu within a situation of globalized domination, Portuguese scholar Boaventura de Sousa Santos, an intellectual deeply familiar with the Portuguese, French, Brazilian, and Anglo-American academic scenes, points to five “fields” in which counterhegemonic globalization creates viable opportunities: (1) participatory democracy, (2) alternative systems of production, (3) multicultural justice and citizenship, (4) biodiversity and communitarian knowledge versus corporatized intellectual property rights, and (5) new working-class transnationalism. While provoking new forms of transnational racism, globalization can also create new conditions for the emergence of transnational resistance. Globalization can therefore be oppressive or resistant, conservative or emancipatory. To our minds, all of these issues are imbricated in race/multicultural/coloniality issues: “participatory democracy” is an answer to “master race democracy,” biodiversity is linked to the cultural diversity and intellectual agency of indigenous peoples, a transnational working-class solidarity depends on transcending racism and xenophobia, and so forth.76
A good deal of energy has been expended in the search for terminological panaceas, as if finding the right label would in itself provide a solution. Concepts such as “multiculturalism” and “postcoloniality,” in our view, cannot stand alone; they must be articulated together with companion concepts such as “Eurocentrism,” “white supremacy,” “colonialism,” “capitalism,” “master race democracy,” “border gnosis,” and “modernity/coloniality.” Each term highlights a different aspect of the issues: “colonialism” refers to the actual historical practices of domination; “modernity/coloniality” refers to the mutually imbricated processes of Western hegemony and non-Western otherization; “white supremacy” highlights the color-line aspects of this domination; “capitalism” refers to the system first spread around the world by colonialism and later by neocolonialism and globalization; “border gnosis” and the Nahuatl word neplanta refer to “the liminal state in between worlds, in between realities, in between systems of knowledge”;77 “master race democracy” emphasizes the racialized oppression that plagues sometimes even apparently democratic political and social institutions and practices; and “Eurocentrism” highlights the unstated, taken-for-granted doxa of occidental entitlement. Other terms—“polycentrism,” “para-Enlightenment,” “alter-globalization”—point to alternative discourses and utopias.
No single term can simultaneously evoke such diverse fields as “revisionist history,” “critical race studies,” “whiteness studies,” “postcolonial discourse theory,” “subaltern studies,” “border theory,” “transnational feminism,” and the “coloniality/modernity project.” Most terms bring both advantages and disadvantages. In the 1990s, some scholars constructed a kind of adjectival cordon sanitaire around multiculturalism and identity politics through prophylactic qualifiers such as “critical,” “radical,” “counterhegemonic,” and “polycentric” as antidotes to potential co-optation. (Prophylaxis also works in reverse when critics predefine multi-culturalism a priori as “neoliberal.”) Manuela Boatcă and Sérgio Costa propose “interculturality” as an option, especially as defined and implemented by indigenous movements in Latin America, seen as entailing a deeper questioning and transformation of hegemonic models of power.78
Contrarian words such as “antiracist” and “anticolonialist,” meanwhile, sum up the drift of much of the work but remain too reactively locked into the paradigms being contested. “Postcolonial studies” designates an important field of research but remains too exclusively academic, with all the problems of a “post-” that is not really yet “post-.” “Critical race theory” references an extremely innovative and consequential field but one very much tied up with the legal discipline in a single national context. “Transnational studies” is useful and suggestive but politically tainted through its association with “transnational” corporations, and it risks eliding national and infranational forms of oppression. A kind of “battle of the prefixes” also forms part of this discussion—the conventional sequencing being from “multi-” and “inter-” and “post-” to “trans-”—and of the suffixes, with the programmatic ideological thrust of “-ism” giving way to a more distanced and abstract “-ity.” The “-ism” in “multiculturalism,” meanwhile, claims too much by inserting itself in the same paradigm as other “-isms” referring to systematic explanatory grids (Marxism), historical epochs (postmodernism), systems of production (capitalism), and ideologies (socialism).
All these proliferating revisionist (inter)disciplines, whatever their precise character, share a strong anticolonial and egalitarian thrust. They unpack hegemonic discourses of racism, colonialism, Orientalism, and Eurocentrism while simultaneously engaging the mantra of race, nation, gender, class, and sexuality. What matters, in the end, is not the specific label but rather the decolonizing thrust of the work itself, not the exact rubric but the depth of the engagement with questions of coloniality. In any case, no term is pure or unproblematic; each gets buffeted about by the winds of history, which is why analysts distinguish between co-optive “top-down” and radical “bottom-up” versions of the multicultural, the postcolonial, or the transnational. All the terms, while problematic, cast some light on a very complex subject. It is crucial to examine their relationality, their syntagmatic deployment, and their social/historical positionality, deploying them in a differential, contingent, and relational manner. It is not that one term is “wrong” and the other “right” but, rather, that each term only partially illuminates the issues. Rather than simply correct or incorrect, the terms can be seen as productive or unproductive, as generating or not generating liberatory energies and concepts in specific historical conjunctures. In the end, no single term can possibly represent such variegated work, and it is misleading to use single terms such as “multiculturalism” or “identity politics”—as critics such as Bourdieu/Wacquant and Žižek do—to designate a wide array of fields. We can use all the terms, but under partial erasure, as part of a more mobile set of grids, a more flexible set of disciplinary and cross-cultural lenses adequate to the complex politics of contemporary location, while maintaining openings for agency and resistance.