Epistemologies of the South

Justice Against Epistemicide

Boaventura de Sousa Santos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317260332
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores the concept of 'cognitive injustice': the failure to recognise the different ways of knowing by which people across the globe run their lives and provide meaning to their existence. Boaventura de Sousa Santos shows why global social justice is not possible without global cognitive justice. Santos argues that Western domination has profoundly marginalised knowledge and wisdom that had been in existence in the global South. She contends that today it is imperative to recover and valorize the epistemological diversity of the world. Epistemologies of the South outlines a new kind of bottom-up cosmopolitanism, in which conviviality, solidarity and life triumph against the logic of market-ridden greed and individualism.

Nuestra America Postcolonial Identities and Mestizajes

DOI: 10.4324/9781315634876-1

In This Chapter I argue that there were at least two twentieth centuries, the European American twentieth century and the Nuestra America twentieth century. I am aware that there were others in Africa and Asia and even in Europe, but I will focus here on the first two and mainly on the second. My argument is that the European American twentieth century, which carried so many promises of democracy and welfare and experienced devastating wars in Europe and elsewhere, ended with the disturbing rise of what I call societal fascism, very often disguised under the name of hegemonic globalization. On the margins of this century, another evolved, the Nuestra America century. I argue that the alternative to the spread of societal fascism is the construction of a new pattern of local, national, and transnational relations. Such a pattern entails a new transnational political culture embedded in new forms of sociability and subjectivity. Ultimately, it implies a new insurgent cosmopolitan politics, law, and culture. I see in the Nuestra America century the seeds of new emancipatory energies, which I have been calling counterhegemonic globalization (Santos 1995: 252–268).

The European American Century and the Rise of Societal Fascism

According to G. W. F. Hegel, we recall, universal history goes from the East to the West. Asia is the beginning, while Europe is the ultimate end of universal history, the place where the civilizational trajectory of humankind is fulfilled. The biblical and medieval idea of the succession of empires (translatio imperii) becomes for Hegel the triumphal way of the Universal Idea. In each era a people takes on the responsibility of conducting the Universal Idea, thereby becoming the historical universal people, a privilege that has in turn passed from the Asian to the Greek, to the Roman, and, finally, to the German peoples. America, or rather, North America, carries, for Hegel, an ambiguous future in that it does not collide with the utmost fulfilling of the universal history in Europe. The future of (North) America is still a European future, made up of Europe’s leftover population.

This Hegelian idea was behind the dominant conception of the twentieth century as the American century: the European American century. Herein implied was the notion that the Americanization of the world, starting with the Americanization of Europe itself, was but an effect of the European, universal cunning of reason, which, having reached the Far West and being unreconciled with the exile to which Hegel had condemned it, was forced to turn back, walk back upon its own track, and once again trace the path of its hegemony over the East. Americanization, as a hegemonic form of globalization, was thus the third act of the millennial drama of Western supremacy. The first act, to a large extent a failed act, was the Crusades, which initiated the second millennium of the Christian era; the second act, beginning halfway through the millennium, comprised the “discoveries” and subsequent European expansion. In this millennial conception, the European American century carried little novelty; it was nothing more than one more European century, the last of the millennium. Europe, after all, had always contained many Europes, some of them dominant, others dominated. The United States of America was the last dominant Europe; like the previous ones, it exerted its uncontested power over the dominated Europes. The feudal lords of eleventh-century Europe had and desired as little autonomy vis-à-vis Pope Urban II, who recruited them for the Crusades,¹ as the European Union countries of our time have vis-à-vis the United States, as illustrated by the multiple NATO missions in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Libya.

1. On the relations between the pope and the feudal lords concerning the Crusades, see Gibbon (1928: 6:31).

In these conditions it is hard to think of any alternative to the current regime of international relations, which has become a core element of what I call hegemonic globalization (Santos 1995). However, such an alternative is not only necessary but urgent, since the current regime, as it loses coherence, becomes more violent and unpredictable, thus enhancing the vulnerability of subordinate classes, social groups, regions, and nations. The real danger, as regards both intra- and international relations, is the emergence of what I call societal fascism. Fleeing from Germany a few months before his death, in 1940 Walter Benjamin (1968) wrote his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” prompted by the idea that European society lived at that time in a moment of danger. I think today we live in a moment of danger as well. In Benjamin’s time the danger was the rise of fascism as a political regime. In our time, the danger is the rise of fascism as a societal regime. Unlike political fascism, societal fascism is pluralistic and coexists easily with the democratic state; its privileged time-space is, rather than national, both local and global.

Societal fascism is a set of social processes by which large bodies of populations are irreversibly kept outside or thrown out of any kind of social contract. They are rejected, excluded, and thrown into a kind of Hobbesian state of nature, either because they have never been part of any social contract and probably never will (I mean the precontractual underclasses everywhere in the world, the best example of which are probably the youth of urban ghettos, the indignados, and participants in the Occupy movement) or because they have been excluded from or thrown out of whatever social contract they had been part of before (I mean the postcontractual underclasses, millions of post-Fordist workers, and peasants after the collapse of land-reform or other development projects).

As a societal regime, fascism manifests itself as the collapse of the most trivial expectations of the people living under it. What we call society is a bundle of stabilized expectations from the subway schedule to the salary at the end of the month to employment at the end of a college education. Expectations are stabilized by a set of shared scales and equivalences: for a given amount of work, a given amount of pay; for a given crime, a given punishment; for a given risk, a given insurance. The people who live under societal fascism are deprived of shared scales and equivalences and therefore of stabilized expectations. They live in a constant chaos of expectations in which the most trivial acts may meet with the most dramatic consequences. They run many risks, and none of them are insured. The case of Gualdino Jesus, a Pataxó Indian from northeastern Brazil, symbolizes the nature of such risks. It happened some years ago and is mentioned here as a parable of societal fascism. He had come to Brasilia to take part in the march of the landless. The night was warm, and he decided to sleep on a bench at a bus stop. In the early morning hours, he was killed by three middle-class youths, one the son of a judge and another the son of an army officer. As the youngsters confessed later to the police, they killed the Indian for the fun of it. They “didn’t even know he was an Indian, they thought he was a homeless vagrant.” Elsewhere I distinguish five main forms of societal fascism:² the fascism of social apartheid, contractual fascism, territorial fascism, the fascism of insecurity, and financial fascism (more on this in Chapter 4).

2. I analyze in detail the emergence of societal fascism as a consequence of the breakdown of the logic of the social contract in Santos (2002b: 447–458).

One possible future is therefore the spread of societal fascism. There are many signs that this is a real possibility. If the logic of the market is allowed to spill over from the economy to all fields of social life and to become the sole criterion for successful social and political interaction, society will become ungovernable and ethically repugnant, and whatever order is achieved will be fascistic, as indeed Joseph Schumpeter (1962 [1942]) and Karl Polanyi (1957 [1944]) predicted decades ago.

The Nuestra America Century

At the margins of the European American century, as I argue, another century, a truly new and American century, emerged. I call it the Nuestra America century. While the former carried hegemonic globalization, the latter contained in itself the potential for counterhegemonic globalizations. In the following section I analyze the baroque ethos, conceived of as the cultural archetype of Nuestra America subjectivity and sociability. My analysis highlights some of the emancipatory potential of a new insurgent cosmopolitan politics, culture, and law based not on the ideas of European universalism but rather on the social and political culture of social groups whose everyday lives are energized by the need to transform survival strategies into sources of innovation, creativity, transgression, and subversion. In the last sections of the chapter I try to show how this emancipatory counterhegemonic potential of Nuestra America has so far not been realized and how it may be realized in the twenty-first century. Finally, I identify five areas, all of them deeply embedded in the secular experience of Nuestra America, that in my view will be the main contested terrains of the struggle between hegemonic and counterhegemonic globalizations, thus the playing field for a new transnational political culture and the insurgent cosmopolitan law that legitimates it. In each of these contested terrains the emancipatory potential of the struggles is premised on the idea that a politics of redistribution of social and economic wealth cannot be successfully conducted without a politics of recognition of difference, and vice versa.

To my mind, the Nuestra America century has best formulated the idea of social emancipation based on the metaright to have rights and on the dynamic equilibrium between recognition and redistribution presupposed by it. It has also most dramatically shown the difficulty of constructing successful emancipatory practices on that basis.

The Founding Ideas of Nuestra America

“Nuestra America” is the title of a short essay by José Martí, published in the Mexican paper El Partido Liberal on January 30, 1891. In this article, which is an excellent summary of his thinking as found in several Latin American papers at the time, Martí expresses the set of ideas that I believe were to preside over the Nuestra America century, ideas later pursued by many others, among them José Mariátegui and Oswald de Andrade, Fernando Ortiz, and Darcy Ribeiro, and influential in many grassroots movements and revolutionary changes that occurred throughout the twentieth century.

The main ideas in this agenda are as follows. First, Nuestra America is at the antipodes of European America. It is the mestiza America founded at the often violent crossings of European, Indian, and African blood. It is the America that is capable of delving deeply into its own roots and thereby of edifying the kinds of knowledge and government that are not imported but rather are adequate to its reality. Its deepest roots are the struggle of the Amerindian peoples against their invaders, where we find the true precursors of the Latin American independentistas (Retamar 1989: 20). Asks Martí, “Is it not evident that America itself was paralyzed by the same blow that paralyzed the Indian?” And he answers, “Until the Indian is caused to walk, America itself will not begin to walk well” (1963–1966: 8:336–337). Although in “Nuestra America” Martí deals mainly with anti-Indian racism, elsewhere he refers also to blacks: “A human being is more than white, more than mulatto, more than black. Cuban is more than white, more than mulatto, more than black.… Two kinds of racist would be equally guilty: the white racist and the black racist” (1963–1966: 2:299).

The second idea about Nuestra America is that in its mixed roots resides its infinite complexity, its new form of universalism from below that made the world richer. Says Martí, “There is no race hatred because there are no races” (1963–1966: 6:22). In this sentence reverberates the same radical liberalism that had encouraged Simon Bolívar to proclaim that Latin America was “a small humankind,” a “miniature humankind.” This kind of situated and contextualized universalism was to become one of the most enduring leitmotivs of Nuestra America.

In 1928, the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade published his Anthropophagous Manifesto. By “anthropophagy” Andrade meant the American’s capacity to devour all that was alien to him and to incorporate all so as to create a complex identity, a new, constantly changing identity:

Only what is not mine interests me. The law of men. The law of the anthropophagous.… Against all importers of canned consciousness. The palpable existence of life. Pre-logical mentality for Mr. Levy-Bruhl to study.… I asked a man what is law. He said it is the guarantee of the exercise of possibility. This man’s name was Galli Mathias. I swallowed him. Anthropophagy. Absorption of the sacred enemy. To turn him into totem. The human adventure. Earthly finality. However, only the pure elites managed to accomplish carnal anthropophagy, the one that carries with itself the highest meaning of life and avoids the evils identified by Freud, the catechetical evils. (1990 [1928]: 47–51)

This concept of anthropophagy, ironic in relation to the European representation of the “Carib instinct,” is quite close to the concept of transculturation developed by Fernando Ortiz (1973) in Cuba somewhat later (1940). For a more recent example, I quote the Brazilian anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro in a burst of brilliant humor:

It is quite easy to make an Australian: take a few French, English, Irish, and Italian people, throw them on a deserted island, they kill the Indians and make a second-rate England, damn it, or third-rate, that shit. Brazil has to realize that that is shit, Canada is shit, because it just repeats Europe. Just to show that ours is the adventure of making the new humankind, mestizaje in flesh and spirit. Mestizo is what is good. (1996: 104)

The third founding idea of Nuestra America is that for Nuestra America to be built upon its most genuine foundations, it has to endow itself with genuine knowledge. Martí again: “The trenches of ideas are worth more than the trenches of stone” (1963–1966: 6:16). But, to accomplish this, ideas must be rooted in the aspirations of oppressed peoples. Just as “the authentic mestizo has conquered the exotic Creole … the imported book has been conquered in America by the natural man” (1963–1966: 6:17). Hence Martí’s appeal:

The European university must yield to the American university. The history of America, from the Incas to the present, must be taught letter perfect, even if that of the Argonauts of Greece is not taught. Our own Greece is preferable to that Greece that is not ours. We have greater need of it. National politicians must replace foreign and exotic politicians. Graft the world into our republics, but the trunk must be that of our republics. And let the conquered pedant be silent: there is no homeland of which the individual can be more proud than our unhappy American republics. (1963–1966: 6:18)

This situated knowledge, which demands a continuous attention to identity, behavior, and involvement in public life, is truly what distinguishes a country, not the imperial attribution of levels of civilization. Martí distinguishes the intellectual from the man whose life experience has made wise: “There is no fight between civilization and barbarism, rather between false erudition and nature” (1963–1966: 6:17).

Nuestra America thus carries a strong epistemological component. Rather than importing foreign ideas, one must find out about the specific realities of the continent from a Latin American perspective. Ignoring or disdaining them has helped tyrants accede to power, as well as grounded the arrogance of the United States vis-à-vis the rest of the continent. “The contempt of the formidable neighbor who does not know her is the major threat to Nuestra America; and he must know her urgently to stop disdaining her. Being ignorant, he might perhaps covet her. Once he knew her, he would, out of respect, take his hand off her” (Martí 1963–1966: 6:22).

A situated knowledge is therefore the condition for a situated government. As Martí says elsewhere, one cannot

rule new peoples with a singular and violent composition, with laws inherited from four centuries of free practice in the United States, and nineteen centuries of monarchy in Fra...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Manifesto for Good Living/Buen Vivir
• Minifesto for Intellectual-Activists
• Introduction Creating a Distance in Relation to Western-centric Political Imagination and Critical Theory
• Centrifugal Modernities and Subaltern Wests: Degrees of Separation
• Chapter 1 Nuestra America Postcolonial Identities and Mestizajes
• Chapter 2 Another Angelus Novus Beyond the Modern Game of Roots and Options
• Chapter 3 Is There a Non-Occidentalist West?
• Toward Epistemologies of the South: Against the Waste of Experience
• Chapter 4 Beyond Abyssal Thinking From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledges
• Chapter 5 Toward an Epistemology of Blindness Why the New Forms of “Ceremonial Adequacy” neither Regulate nor Emancipate
• Chapter 6 A Critique of Lazy Reason Against the Waste of Experience and Toward the Sociology of Absences and the Sociology of Emergences
• Chapter 7 Ecologies of Knowledges
• Chapter 8 Intercultural Translation Differing and Sharing con Passionalità
• Conclusion
• reference
• Index
• About the Author