Local HistoriesGlobal Designs by Walter Mignolo

Author:Walter Mignolo [Mignolo, Walter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Colonialism & Post-Colonialism, Social Science, Anthropology, General
ISBN: 9780691156095
Google: 8_G7M1zcZ_kC
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2012-08-26T04:00:42+00:00

Adapting and Housing Traveling Theories in/from the Third World

Theories traveling from the South have the colonial difference inscribed in their luggage, as we already saw in the case of Darcy Ribeiro. The South Asian Subaltern Studies Group has had a significant impact, since the early 1990s, among Latin Americanists in the United States and intellectuals and social scientists in Latin America. I’ll organize the following comments on three different and interrelated experiences: First, the constitution of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, the publication of the “Founding Statement” (Beverley, Oviedo and Aronna 1995; see Beverley 1996 for a narrative of the group constitution), and the special volume of Dispositio/n 46; second, an influential article by historian and Latin Americanist Florencia Mallon (1994) and her book on peasants and the nation in nineteenth century Mexico and Peru (1995); and, third, an introduction to subaltern studies, published in Bolivia and edited by sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and historian Rossana Barragán (1997). This volume contains translations of a dozen core articles by members of the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group, plus an introduction by the editors.

These three cases reveal a network of connections and hierarchies in the ratio between knowledge production and geohistorical locations. I insist that when I say geohistorical location I am not only talking about a particular geographical place but of a geographical place with a particular local history: La Paz, or Bolivia, is not Wisconsin or Pittsburgh. In La Paz, Spanish, Aymara, and Quechua become indispensable to understand both colonial and national histories, or the coloniality of power in the colonial and national history of Bolivia. Thus, while Rivera Cusicanqui and Barragán translated Spanish articles by members of the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group from English (for whom English is comparable with Spanish for Rivera Cusicanqui and Barragán as evinced in the parallel between “British India” and “Spanish America”) into Spanish, the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group and Mallon published their works in English. English for the South Asian Studies Group is like Spanish for Rivera Cusicanqui and Barragán. However, I do not anticipate a translation of Bolivian intellectuals into English. Why not? Of course, Spanish and English do not have the same clout and power today in the domain of knowledge (see chapters 5 and 6 for a more detailed discussion of this topic). If indeed theories travel and get transcultured, it is necessary first to specify, historically, from where they depart and to where they go, how they travel, how they get transcultured, and the language in which traveling theories are fabricated, packaged, and transculturated. Coloniality of power and the colonial difference are unavoidable “inconveniences” of the trip.

To start with, the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group consists mainly of literary and cultural critics, although it includes one historian, one anthropologist, and one political scientist. In any event, historiography as a disciplinary formation was never a crucial issue in the “adaptation” of South Asian to Latin American Subaltern Studies. Judging by Beverley and Oviedo’s (1993) introduction to a

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.