Alejandro Villegas is a Professor of University of Oregon, and lectured us (and was lectured by us) about Colonialism – from the Latin American liberation of ways of thinking, and then on. Philosophy does not come from above, but from the social-cultural aspects surrounding the thinker. This project is a consequence of cultural domination that makes us think there is no, or little, space for thoughts. Prebisch and Wallerstein thought the world in a “world-system dependency”, echoed in Latin America by the CEPAL group. Enrique Dussel (articles, click here) changed this aspect, adding to the “I and the Other”(where “I” is the Western Modern Culture and its agents, and “the Other” as the periphery system), the Total Exteriority (the life of the marginalized, the marginal), allowing a dialogue “south-south”. This allows a self-critical behavior, an articulation of the structures and an articulation of identities. Castro-Gomes, for example, shows there are some articulations in South American societies that classify and determine social structures.
However, how to understand identities without a European concept? Starting from where you are: by Castro-Gomes example, society of Colombia is stratified in four levels, which correspond to a space in the city, to a degree of scholar year, to a level of employments and to a step in salaries and earnings.
Villegas suggests checking Juan Carlos Mariategui, philosopher, Anibal Quijano (other articles here and here), who creates the term “coloniality” (there is something besides colonialism: it has a distinctness that become categorized towards the race issue – Santiago Castro-Gomez wrote about it, too). Walter Mignolo designs the “Coloniality of Power” and Nelson Maldonado-Torres develops the “Colonization of Being”. Check the blog of the Latin American Critical Group here.There is also the “Coloniality of Time” (by Rolando Vázquez): while the Time would just move from Past to Future, the Rational Western Mind would create a distinct Present Time, which will hold the Future.
Too many interesting things being produced in Latin America and I didn’t know it! Complete audio of the lecture (but the Q&A in the end) here.
from the point of view of those from the underside of modernity, maritegui is still a white peruvian writing about the indigenous problem, but not indigenous himself. while it is true that he advocates for indians being given back their land, which many indigenous people also agree with, for instance, las y los indigenas de hoy en dia actually demand for the end of military occupation of their lands, and also often articulate a critique of the entire european system of understanding property, which grosfoguel referred in his talk the first day.
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