Topshelf

1NC (Policy Affs)

Framework our knowledge production is situated within particular
epistemic contexts the 1ACs valorization of the Western academy props
up the hegemonic search for Truth
Grosfoguel, Professor Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, 7 (Ramon, The Epistemic Decolonial Turn
Cultural Studies, Vol 21 Issue 2-3, p 211-223, T&F Online)//JAG

The
hegemonic Eurocentric paradigms that have informed western philosophy and sciences
in the modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system for the last 500 hundred
years assume a universalistic, neutral, objective point of view. Chicana and black feminist scholars (Moraga &
Anzaldua 1983, Collins 1990) as well as thirdworld scholars inside and outside the United States (Dussel 1977, Mignolo 2000) reminded us that we always
speak from a particular location in the power structures . Nobody escapes the
class, sexual, gender, spiritual, linguistic, geographical, and racial hierarchies of the
modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system. As feminist scholar Donna Haraway (1988) states, our knowledges
Epistemological Critique The first point to discuss is the contribution of racial/ethnic and feminist subaltern perspectives to epistemological questions.

are always situated. Black feminist scholars called this perspective afro-centric epistemology (Collins 1990) (which is not equivalent to the afrocentrist perspective) while Latin
American Philosopher of Liberation Enrique Dussel called it geopolitics of knowledge (Dussel 1977) and following Fanon (1967) and Anzalda (1987) I will use the term bodypolitics of knowledge. This is not only a question about social values in knowledge production or the fact that our knowledge is always partial. The main point here is the locus of

In Western philosophy and sciences

the subject that speaks is always hidden, concealed, erased from the
analysis. The ego-politics of knowledge of Western philosophy has always privilege the
myth of a non-situated Ego. Ethnic/racial/gender/sexual epistemic location and the
subject that speaks are always decoupled. By delinking ethnic/racial/gender/sexual
epistemic location from the subject that speaks, Western philosophy and sciences are
able to produce a myth about a Truthful universal knowledge that covers up, that
is, conceals who is speaking as well as the geo-political and body-political epistemic
location in the structures of colonial power/knowledge from which the subject speaks . It is
enunciation, that is, the geo-political and body-political location of the subject that speaks.

important here to distinguish the epistemic location from the social location. The fact that one is socially located in the oppressed side of power relations, does not

the success of the modern/colonial

world-system consist in making subjects that are socially located in the oppressed side
of the colonial difference, to think epistemicaly like the ones on the dominant positions.
Subaltern epistemic perspectives are knowledge coming from below that produces a
critical perspective of hegemonic knowledge in the power relations involved . I am not claiming an
epistemic populism where knowledge produced from below is automatically an epistemic subaltern knowledge. What I am claiming is that all knowledges are
epistemically located in the dominant or the subaltern side of the power relations and that this
is related to the geo- and body-politics of knowledge. The disembodied and unlocated neutrality and objectivity of
the ego-politics of knowledge is a Western myth. Rene Descartes, the founder of Modern Western Philosophy, inaugurates a new
automatically mean that he/she is epistemically thinking from a subaltern epistemic location. Precisely,

moment in the history of Western thought. He replaces God, as the foundation of knowledge in the Theo-politics of knowledge of the European Middle Ages, with (Western)

Universal Truth
beyond time and space, privilege access to the laws of the Universe, and the capacity to
produce scientific knowledge and theory is now placed in the mind of Western Man . The
Man as the foundation of knowledge in European Modern times. All the attributes of God are now extrapolated to (Western) Man.

Cartesian ego-cogito (I think, therefore I am) is the foundation of modern Western sciences. By producing a dualism between mind and body and between mind and nature,
Descartes was able to claim non-situated, universal, God-eyed view knowledge. This is what the Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gomez called the point zero

The point zero is the point of view that hides and

conceals itself as being beyond a particular point of view, that is, the point of view that represents itself as being without
a point of view. It is this god-eye view that always hides its local and particular perspective
under an abstract universalism. Western philosophy privileges ego politics of
knowledge over the geopolitics of knowledge and the body-politics of knowledge. Historically, this has allowed
Western man (the gendered term is intentionally used here) to represent his knowledge as the only one capable
of achieving a universal consciousness, and to dismiss non-Western knowledge as particularistic and, thus, unable to achieve universality.
perspective of Eurocentric philosophies (Castro-Gomez 2003).

This epistemic strategy has been crucial for Western global designs. By hiding the
location of the subject of enunciation, European/Euro-American colonial expansion and
domination was able to construct a hierarchy of superior and inferior knowledge and,
thus, of superior and inferior people around the world. We went from the sixteenth century characterization of people

without writing to the eighteenth and nineteenth century characterization of people without history, to the twentieth century characterization of people without development
and more recently, to the early twenty-first century of people without democracy. We went from the sixteenth century rights of people (Sepulveda versus de las Casas debate in
the school of Salamanca in the mid-sixteenth century), to the eighteenth century rights of man (Enlightment philosophers), and to the late twentieth century human rights. All
of these are part of global designs articulated to the simultaneous production and reproduction of an international division of labor of core/periphery that overlaps with the
global racial/ethnic hierarchy of Europeans/non-Europeans. However, as Enrique Dussel (1994) has reminded us, the Cartesian ego cogito (I think, therefore I am) was

The social,
economic, political and historical conditions of possibility for a subject to assume the
arrogance of becoming God-like and put himself as the foundation of all Truthful
knowledge was the Imperial Being, that is, the subjectivity of those who are at the center
of the world because they have already conquered it. What are the decolonial implications of this epistemological critique to
preceded by 150 years (since the beginnings of the European colonial expansion in 1492) of the European ego conquistus (I conquer, therefore I am).

our knowledge production and to our concept of world-system?

This is particularly true in the context of Latin America their use of Area
Studies props up a US-centric approach to fact-gathering that ensures Latin
America remains academically isolated and distinct
Alverez, Arias, and Hal 11 respectively - Director, Center for Latin American, Caribbean and
Latino Studies; Professor of Latin American Literature University of Texas at Austin; Professor of
Anthropology and of African and African Diaspora Studies University of Texas at Austin (Sonia E., Arturo,
and Charles R., Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, Re-visioning Latin American Studies in
the United States, Vol. 17, No. 2, December 2011, 131-145

Latin American Studies must be de-centered if it is to continue to thrive in this

transformed environment. Demographic shifts, diasporas, labor migrations, the movements of global capital and media, and processes of cultural circulation and
hybridization have brought into question the nature of areas identities and composition. Globalization, space/time compression, and
greater international mobility have created an intensication of overlaps and brought
together intellectual travelers that were formerly kept largely separate. What has come
into question is the notion that the world can be divided into knowable, self-contained
areas of study. Indeed. Latin America is today a global reality. As Walter Mignolo said at a 2001 retreat to formulate the LASA Strategic Plan, Latin America is
now the perspective, not the area of study. By this Mignolo meant that Latin America is no longer a
geographical entity to be studied; rather. it now signies a reorientation of knowledge,
an epistemology that looks at global concerns from a Latin American perspective,
independently of who is doing the looking, from where, and what is being looked at. At the
same time. there is greater complexity in the boundaries that dene the area of study. Traditionally Latin American Studies have
embodied and respected disciplinary boundaries, and in most cases Latin Americanists have been primarily organized by discipline.
But disciplinary divisions no longer work as well as in the past. Increasingly Latin
Americanists nd themselves both anchored in a disciplinary formation, and, at the
same time, crossing disciplinary boundaries into cognate areas in effect becoming trans- disciplinary. While there are still
We maintain that

relatively few academic interdisciplinarians and teaching or training programs that purposely prepare interdisciplinary specialists, many Latin Americanists today deliberately adopt either trans-disciplinary or
interdisciplinary approaches in addressing the intellectual issues they face. One can readily observe today an intensication of the expectation that intellectual activity be addressed in an interdisciplinary
fashion, whether by individuals or by teams of individuals with different skills working together. This may be so especially in the sciences, but major funding agencies are requiring interdisciplinary approaches
above single-disciplinary ones in many areas of study. Latin Americanists now have the opportunity to synthesize this new intellectual reality. and to create new and meaningful disciplinary intersections and

in making this knowledge more readily accessible and

applicable to communities and constituencies so as to confront real world problems and
situations. A related challenge has to do with articulations of local. regional. national. and even post-national identities. 11re 2008 conferences Times of Change and Opportunities for the Afro
congurations that will help in knowledge production, and

Colombian Population at Howard University. The African Diaspora in the Americas: Political and Cultural Resistance at the University of Minnesota. Afro- Latinos: Global Spaceslbocal Struggles at UCLA.
and Recongurations of Racism and New Scenarios of Power Aer 200l at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. as well as the 2009 conference on indigenous and Afro-descendant issues at the University
of Texas at Austin. are reections of the reconguration of non-Latin American subjectivities within transnational frameworks. Afro-Latinidades are an example of a theme that must be framed beyond
conventional LAS parameters. in a larger landscape of hemispheric and global geopolitics. cultural politics. and political economy. New areas of knowledge are continually being opened by Latin Americanists.
both those from Latin America and the US. as well as across the globe. Many scholars today are inclined to extend beyond the North-South dichotomy. incorporating theoretical ideas and frameworks that
circulate globally with applicability well beyond Latin America proper. One example here is the great inuence of the subaltern studies school of South Asia on Latin America scholarship; another is the

These and other analogous movements

signal the transformations of disciplinary elds worldwide despite the continued
existence of formal disciplines as organizing principles of scholarly work. The Latin
coloniality of power group, and the general growth of work in what might be termed comparative colonialities.'

Americanists challenge is not to abandon the established disciplines. but rather. to

bring them fully into critical dialogue with these transformed intellectual and geopolitical landscapes. Ultimately. remaking the eld
is not an event but a process. one that we hope to advance with this article. Our contention is that Latin American Studies will remain vibrant to the extent that
institutions and individual scholars engage fully with these challenges. What De-centering Latin American Studies Entalls Though we concur with Paul Drake and Lisa I-liIbink's assessment that many in Latin

as an
institutionalized knowledge formation, LAS remain largely centered in the United
States. Historically, moreover. the eld has developed under the hegemony of its founding US-based
disciplinary formations, with early 20" century work concentrated in history and literature, while political science rose to predominance
American Studies have made a sincere and sustained effort to be make the eld a cooperative endeavor between US scholars and their counterparts south of the border '2. we maintain that,

after the l960s. One survey of the eld's foremost US-based journal, Latin American Research Review (LARR), found that by the late 1970s, fully one-third of submissions to LARR came from political science.
which remained rst into the 1990s and beyond. History maintained a solid second, while Languages/Literature and Anthropology submissions were displaced by those from Economics and Sociology.'3

Disciplines. of course. shape how knowledge is produced and who is authorized to

produce it. The predominance of US-based disciplinary formations within the eld of
LAS. therefore, meant that research and knowledge production were largely driven by
US-centric assumptions and political imperatives. As we noted above. even the Left of LAS tended to be more
concerned with US foreign policy in the region and its consequences than with
interrogating the often Anglo-Euro-centric epistemological foundations of the
disciplines. ln some of these cases, the problem was not a lack of focus on subaltern peoples; rather, it was the fact that these interventions. though
critical of US geopolitical dominance. in other respects retained dominant disciplinary
and epistemological assumptions.
Area studies is inseparable from the militaristic knowledge that views Latin
America in terms of its usefulness to the US their knowledge-gathering
only shows us a target to be destroyed by US bombs, making nuclear
genocide inevitable
Chow, Professor Comparative Lit at Brown, 6 (Rey, The Age of the World Target p 40-42)//JAG
Often under the modest and apparently innocuous agendas of fact gathering and
documentation, the "scientific" and "objective" production of knowledge during
peacetime about the various special "areas" became the institutional practice that
substantiated and elaborated the militaristic conception of the world as target .52 In other words,
despite the claims about the apolitical and disinterested nature of the pursuits "I higher
learning, activities undertaken under the rubric of area studies, such as language training, historiography,
anthropology, economics, political science, and so forth, are fully inscribed in the
politics and ideology of war. To that extent, the disciplining, research, and development of so-called
academic information are part and parcel of a strategic logic . And yet, if the production of
knowledge (with its vocabulary of aims and goals, research, data analysis, experimentation, and verification) in fact shares the same scientific and
military premises as warif, for instance, the ability to translate a difficult language can be regarded as equivalent to the ability to break military codes53is it a
surprise that it is doomed to fail in its avowed attempts to "know" the other cultures ? Can
"knowledge" that is derived from the same kinds of bases as war put an end to the
violence of warfare, or is such knowledge not simply warfare's accomplice, destined to
destroy rather than preserve the forms of lives at which it aims its focus? As long as
knowledge is produced in this self-referential manner, as a circuit of targeting or getting
the other that ultimately consolidates the omnipotence and omnipresence of the
sovereign "self"/"eye" the "I"that is the United States, the other will have no choice
but remain just that a target whose existence justifies only one thing, its destruction by the
bomber. As long as the focus of our study of Asia remains the United States, and as long as this focus is not accompanied by knowledge of what is happening elsewhere at other times as well as at the
present, such study will ultimately confirm once again the self-referential function of virtual
worlding that was unleashed by the dropping of the atomic bombs, with the United
States always occupying the position of the bomber, and other cultures always viewed as
the military and information target fields. In this manner, events whose historicity does not fall into the epistemically closed orbit of the atomic bomber

such as the Chinese reactions to the war from a primarily anti-Japanese point of view that I alluded to at the beginning of this chapterwill never receive the attention that is due to them.

"Knowledge," however conscientiously gathered and however large in volume, will lead
only to further silence and to the silencing of diverse experiences.54 This is one reason
why, as Harootunian remarks, area studies has been, since its inception, haunted by "the absence of a
definable object"and by "the problem of the vanishing object. "55 As Harootunian goes on to argue, for all its investment
in the study of other languages and other cultures, area studies missed the opportunity, so aptly provided by Said's criticism of Oriental ism, to become the site where a genuinely alternative form of knowledge
production might have been possible. Although, as Harootunian writes, "Said's book represented an important intellectual challenge to the mission of area studies which, if accepted would have reshaped area
studies and freed it from its own reliance on the Cold War and the necessities of the national security state,"56 the challenge was too fundamentally disruptive to the administrative and instrumentalist agendas so
firmly routinized in area studies to be accepted by its practitioners. As a result, Said's attempt to link an incipient neocolonial discourse to the history of area studies was almost immediately belittled, dismissed,
and ignored, and his critique, for all its relevance to area studies' future orientation, simply "migrated to English studies to transform the study of literature into a full-scale preoccupation with identity and its
construction."57

Reject the affs Eurocentric epistemology embracing a decolonial

epistemology is the best way to rupture current conceptions of Area Studies
that guarantee intellectual exploitation
Grosfoguel, Professor Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, 7 (Ramon, The Epistemic Decolonial Turn
Cultural Studies, Vol 21 Issue 2-3, p 211-223, T&F Online)//JAG

Globalization studies, political-economy paradigms and world-system analysis , with only a few
exceptions, have not derived the epistemological and theoretical implications of the epistemic
critique coming from subaltern locations in the colonial divide and expressed in academia through ethnic studies
and woman studies. They still continue to produce knowledge from the Western man point zero
god-eye view. This has led to important problems in the way we conceptualize global
capitalism and the world-system. These concepts are in need of decolonization and this
can only be achieved with a decolonial epistemology that overtly assumes
the decolonial geopolitics and body-politics of knowledge as points of
departure to a radical critique. The following examples can illustrate this point. If we analyze the European colonial expansion from a
Eurocentric point of view, what we get is a picture in which the origins of the so-called capitalist world-system is primarily produced by the inter-imperial competition among
European Empires. The primary motive for this expansion was to find shorter routes to the East, which let accidentally to the so-called discovery and, eventual, Spanish
colonization of the Americas. From this point of view, the capitalist world-system would be primarily an economic system that determine the behavior of the major social actors
by the economic logic of making profits as manifested in the extraction of surplus value and the ceaseless accumulation of capital at a world-scale. Moreover, the concept of
capitalism implied in this perspective privileges economic relations over other social relations. Accordingly, the transformation in the relations of production produces a new
class structure typical of capitalism as oppose to other social systems and other forms of domination. Class analysis and economic structural transformations are privileged over
other power relations. Without denying the importance of the endless accumulation of capital at a world scale and the existence of a particular class structure in global

How would the world-system looks like if we move the locus

of enunciation from the European man to an Indigenous women in the Americas, to , say
Rigoberta Menchu in Guatemala or to Domitila in Bolivia? I do not pretend to speak for or represent the perspective of
these indigenous women. What I attempt to do is to shift the location from which these paradigms are thinking.
The first implication of shifting our geopolitics of knowledge is that what arrived in the
Americas in the late fifteenth century was not only an economic system of capital and
labor for the production of commodities to be sold for a profit in the world market . This was a
crucial part of, but was not the sole element in, the entangled package. What arrived in the Americas was a broader and
wider entangled power structure that an economic reductionist perspective of the worldsystem is unable to account for. From the structural location of an indigenous woman in
the Americas what arrived was a more complex world-system than what politicaleconomy paradigms and world-system analysis portrait. A
European/capitalist/military/christian/patriarchal/white/heterosexual/male arrived in
the Americas and established simultaneously in time and space several entangled global
hierarchies that for purposes of clarity in this exposition I will list below as if they were separate from each other: a particular global class formation where a diversity
capitalism, I raise the following epistemic question:

of forms of labor (slavery, semi-serfdom, wage labor, petty-commodity production, etc.) are going to co-exist and be organized by capital as a source of production of surplus
value through the selling of commodities for a profit in the world market; an international division of labor of core and periphery where capital organized labor in the periphery
around coerced and authoritarian forms (Wallerstein 1974); an inter-state system of politico-military organizations controlled by European males and institutionalized in
colonial administrations (Wallerstein 1979); a global racial/ethnic hierarchy that privileges European people over non-European people (Quijano 1993, 2000); a global gender
hierarchy that privileges males over females and European patriarchy over other forms of gender relations (Spivak 1988, Enloe 1990); a sexual hierarchy that privileges
heterosexuals over homosexuals and lesbians (it is important to remember that most indigenous peoples in the Americas did not consider sexuality among males a pathological
behavior and has no homophobic ideology); a spiritual hierarchy that privileges Christians over non-Christian/non-Western spiritualities institutionalized in the globalization of
the Christian (Catholic and later Protestant) church; an epistemic hierarchy that privileges Western knowledge and cosmology over non-Western knowledge and cosmologies,
and institutionalized in the global university system (Mignolo 1995, 2000, Quijano 1991). a linguistic hierarchy between European languages and non-European languages that
privileges communication and knowledge/theoretical production in the former and subalternize the latter as sole producers of folklore or culture but not of knowledge/theory

conceptualization of the world-system, from decolonial

perspectives of the South will question its traditional conceptualizations produced by
(Mignolo 2000). It is not an accident that the

thinkers from the North. Following Peruvian Sociologist, Anbal Quijano (1991), (1998), (2000), we could conceptualize the
present world-system as a historical-structural heterogeneous totality with a specific power matrix
that he calls a colonial power matrix (patrn de poder colonial). This matrix affects all dimensions of social existence such as sexuality, authority,
subjectivity and labor (Quijano 2000). The sixteenth century initiates a new global colonial power matrix that by the late nineteenth century came to cover the whole planet.
Taking a step further from Quijano, I conceptualize the coloniality of power as an entanglement or, to use US Third World Feminist concept, intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989,
Fregoso 2003) of multiple and heterogeneous global hierarchies (heterarchies) of sexual, political, epistemic, economic, spiritual, linguistic and racial forms of domination and

What is new
in the coloniality of power perspective is how the idea of race and racism becomes the
organizing principle that structures all of the multiple hierarchies of the world-system
exploitation where the racial/ethnic hierarchy of the European/non-European divide transversally reconfigures all of the other global power structures.

(Quijano 1993). For example, the different forms of labor that are articulated to capitalist accumulation at a world-scale are assigned according to this racial hierarchy; coercive
(or cheap) labor is done by non-European people in the periphery and free wage labor in the core. The global gender hierarchy is also affected by race: contrary to pre-European
patriarchies where all women were inferior to all men, in the new colonial power matrix some women (of European origin) have a higher status and access to resources than
some men (of non-European origin). The idea of race organizes the world's population into a hierarchical order of superior and inferior people that becomes an organizing

Contrary to the Eurocentric perspective, race,

gender, sexuality, spirituality, and epistemology are not additive elements to the
economic and political structures of the capitalist world-system, but an integral,
entangled and constitutive part of the broad entangled package called the European modern/colonial
capitalist/patriarchal world-system (Grosfoguel 2002). European patriarchy and European notions of sexuality,
epistemology and spirituality were exported to the rest of the world through colonial
expansion as the hegemonic criteria to racialize, classify and pathologize the rest of the
world's population in a hierarchy of superior and inferior races . This conceptualization
has enormous implications that I can only briefly mention here: The old Eurocentric idea that
societies develop at the level of the nation-state in terms of a linear evolution of modes
of production from pre-capitalist to capitalist is overcome . We are all encompassed within a capitalist worldsystem that articulates different forms of labor according to the racial classification of the world's population (Quijano 2000, Grosfoguel 2002). The old Marxist
paradigm of infrastructure and superstructure is replaced by a historical-heterogeneous
structure (Quijano 2000), or a heterarchy (Kontopoulos 1993), that is, an entangled articulation of multiple
hierarchies, in which subjectivity and the social imaginary is not derivative but
constitutive of the structures of the world-system (Grosfoguel 2002). In this conceptualization, race and racism are not
principle of the international division of labor and of the global patriarchal system.

superstructural or instrumental to an overarching logic of capitalist accumulation; they are constitutive of capitalist accumulation at a world-scale. The colonial power matrix is
an organizing principle involving exploitation and domination exercised in multiple dimensions of social life, from economic, sexual, or gender relations, to political

The old division between culture and

political-economy as expressed in post-colonial studies and political-economy
approaches is overcome (Grosfoguel 2002). Post-colonial studies conceptualize the capitalist world-system as being constituted primarily by culture,
while political-economy place the primary determination on economic relations. In the coloniality of power approach, what
comes first, culture or the economy, is a false dilemma, a chicken-egg dilemma that obscure the complexity of the
organizations, structures of knowledge, state institutions, and households (Quijano 2000).

capitalist world-system (Grosfoguel 2002). Coloniality is not equivalent to colonialism. It is not derivative from, or antecedent to, modernity. Coloniality and modernity
constitute two sides of a single coin. The same way as the European industrial revolution was achieved on the shoulders of the coerced forms of labor in the periphery, the new
identities, rights, laws, and institutions of modernity such as nation-states, citizenship and democracy were formed in a process of colonial interaction with, and
domination/exploitation of, non-Western people. To call capitalist the present world-system is, to say the least, misleading. Given the hegemonic Eurocentric common sense,
the moment we use the word capitalism people immediately think that we are talking about the economy. However, capitalism is only one of the multiple entangled
constellations of colonial power matrix of the European modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system. It is an important one, but not the sole one. Given its
entanglement with other power relations, destroying the capitalist aspects of the world-system would not be enough to destroy the present world-system.

To

transform this world-system it is crucial to destroy the historical-structural

heterogenous totality called the colonial power matrix of the world-system . Anti-capitalist
decolonization and liberation cannot be reduced to only one dimension of social life. It requires a broader
transformation of the sexual, gender, spiritual, epistemic, economic, political, linguistic
and racial hierarchies of the modern/colonial world-system. The coloniality of power
perspective challenges us to think about social change and social transformation in a
non-reductionist way.

1NC (K Affs)
Framework our knowledge production is situated within particular
epistemic contexts the 1ACs valorization of the Western academy props
up the hegemonic search for Truth
Grosfoguel, Professor Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, 7 (Ramon, The Epistemic Decolonial Turn
Cultural Studies, Vol 21 Issue 2-3, p 211-223, T&F Online)//JAG

The
hegemonic Eurocentric paradigms that have informed western philosophy and sciences
in the modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system for the last 500 hundred
years assume a universalistic, neutral, objective point of view. Chicana and black feminist scholars (Moraga &
Anzaldua 1983, Collins 1990) as well as thirdworld scholars inside and outside the United States (Dussel 1977, Mignolo 2000) reminded us that we always
speak from a particular location in the power structures . Nobody escapes the
class, sexual, gender, spiritual, linguistic, geographical, and racial hierarchies of the
modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system. As feminist scholar Donna Haraway (1988) states, our knowledges
Epistemological Critique The first point to discuss is the contribution of racial/ethnic and feminist subaltern perspectives to epistemological questions.

are always situated. Black feminist scholars called this perspective afro-centric epistemology (Collins 1990) (which is not equivalent to the afrocentrist perspective) while Latin
American Philosopher of Liberation Enrique Dussel called it geopolitics of knowledge (Dussel 1977) and following Fanon (1967) and Anzalda (1987) I will use the term bodypolitics of knowledge. This is not only a question about social values in knowledge production or the fact that our knowledge is always partial. The main point here is the locus of

In Western philosophy and sciences

the subject that speaks is always hidden, concealed, erased from the
analysis. The ego-politics of knowledge of Western philosophy has always privilege the
myth of a non-situated Ego. Ethnic/racial/gender/sexual epistemic location and the
subject that speaks are always decoupled. By delinking ethnic/racial/gender/sexual
epistemic location from the subject that speaks, Western philosophy and sciences are
able to produce a myth about a Truthful universal knowledge that covers up, that
is, conceals who is speaking as well as the geo-political and body-political epistemic
location in the structures of colonial power/knowledge from which the subject speaks . It is
enunciation, that is, the geo-political and body-political location of the subject that speaks.

important here to distinguish the epistemic location from the social location. The fact that one is socially located in the oppressed side of power relations, does not

the success of the modern/colonial

world-system consist in making subjects that are socially located in the oppressed side
of the colonial difference, to think epistemicaly like the ones on the dominant positions.
Subaltern epistemic perspectives are knowledge coming from below that produces a
critical perspective of hegemonic knowledge in the power relations involved . I am not claiming an
epistemic populism where knowledge produced from below is automatically an epistemic subaltern knowledge. What I am claiming is that all knowledges are
epistemically located in the dominant or the subaltern side of the power relations and that this
is related to the geo- and body-politics of knowledge. The disembodied and unlocated neutrality and objectivity of
the ego-politics of knowledge is a Western myth. Rene Descartes, the founder of Modern Western Philosophy, inaugurates a new
automatically mean that he/she is epistemically thinking from a subaltern epistemic location. Precisely,

moment in the history of Western thought. He replaces God, as the foundation of knowledge in the Theo-politics of knowledge of the European Middle Ages, with (Western)

Universal Truth
beyond time and space, privilege access to the laws of the Universe, and the capacity to
produce scientific knowledge and theory is now placed in the mind of Western Man . The
Man as the foundation of knowledge in European Modern times. All the attributes of God are now extrapolated to (Western) Man.

Cartesian ego-cogito (I think, therefore I am) is the foundation of modern Western sciences. By producing a dualism between mind and body and between mind and nature,
Descartes was able to claim non-situated, universal, God-eyed view knowledge. This is what the Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gomez called the point zero

The point zero is the point of view that hides and

conceals itself as being beyond a particular point of view, that is, the point of view that represents itself as being without
a point of view. It is this god-eye view that always hides its local and particular perspective
under an abstract universalism. Western philosophy privileges ego politics of
knowledge over the geopolitics of knowledge and the body-politics of knowledge. Historically, this has allowed
Western man (the gendered term is intentionally used here) to represent his knowledge as the only one capable
of achieving a universal consciousness, and to dismiss non-Western knowledge as particularistic and, thus, unable to achieve universality.
perspective of Eurocentric philosophies (Castro-Gomez 2003).

This epistemic strategy has been crucial for Western global designs. By hiding the
location of the subject of enunciation, European/Euro-American colonial expansion and
domination was able to construct a hierarchy of superior and inferior knowledge and,
thus, of superior and inferior people around the world. We went from the sixteenth century characterization of people

without writing to the eighteenth and nineteenth century characterization of people without history, to the twentieth century characterization of people without development
and more recently, to the early twenty-first century of people without democracy. We went from the sixteenth century rights of people (Sepulveda versus de las Casas debate in
the school of Salamanca in the mid-sixteenth century), to the eighteenth century rights of man (Enlightment philosophers), and to the late twentieth century human rights. All
of these are part of global designs articulated to the simultaneous production and reproduction of an international division of labor of core/periphery that overlaps with the
global racial/ethnic hierarchy of Europeans/non-Europeans. However, as Enrique Dussel (1994) has reminded us, the Cartesian ego cogito (I think, therefore I am) was

The social,
economic, political and historical conditions of possibility for a subject to assume the
arrogance of becoming God-like and put himself as the foundation of all Truthful
knowledge was the Imperial Being, that is, the subjectivity of those who are at the center
of the world because they have already conquered it. What are the decolonial implications of this epistemological critique to
preceded by 150 years (since the beginnings of the European colonial expansion in 1492) of the European ego conquistus (I conquer, therefore I am).

our knowledge production and to our concept of world-system?

Despite their attempt to deconstruct current imperialist practices, the aff

simply replaces the military with the academy their knowledge
production about the Latin American subaltern gives privilege to Western
forms of thinking
Grosfoguel, Professor Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, 7 (Ramon, The Epistemic Decolonial Turn
Cultural Studies, Vol 21 Issue 2-3, p 211-223, T&F Online)//JAG
In October 1998, there was a conference/dialogue at Duke University between the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group and the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group. The
dialogue initiated in this conference eventually resulted in the publication of several issues of the journal NEPANTLA. However, this conference was the last time the Latin

The
Latin American Subaltern Studies Group composed primarily by Latinamericanist
scholars in the USA. Despite their attempt at producing a radical and alternative
knowledge, they reproduced the epistemic schema of Area Studies in the
United States. With a few exceptions, they produced studies about the subaltern rather than
studies with and from a subaltern perspective. Like the imperial epistemology of Area
Studies, theory was still located in the North while the subjects to be studied
are located in the South. This colonial epistemology was crucial to my dissatisfaction
with the project. As a Puerto Rican in the United States, I was dissatisfied with the
epistemic consequences of the knowledge produced by this Latinamericanist group.
They underestimated in their work ethnic/racial perspectives coming from the region,
while giving privilege to Western thinkers. This is related to my second point: they gave epistemic
privilege to what they called the four horses of the apocalypse,2 that is, Foucault, Derrida, Gramsci and Guha. Among the four
main thinkers they privilege, three are Eurocentric thinkers while two of them (Derrida and Foucault) form part of the poststructuralist/postmodern Western canon. By
privileging Western thinkers as their central theoretical apparatus, they
betrayed their goal to produce subaltern studies. This is not an essentialist, fundamentalist, anti-European
critique. It a perspective that is critical of both Eurocentric and Third World fundamentalisms, colonialism and nationalism. What all
fundamentalisms share (including the Eurocentric one) is the premise that there is only
one sole epistemic tradition from which to achieve Truth and Universality . However, my main points
here are three: (1) that a decolonial epistemic perspective requires a broader canon of thought than
simply the Western canon (including the Left Western canon); (2) that a truly universal decolonial perspective
cannot be based on an abstract universal (one particular that raises itself as universal global design), but would have
to be the result of the critical dialogue between diverse critical
epistemic/ethical/political projects towards a pluriversal as oppose to a universal world ;
(3) that decolonization of knowledge would require to take seriously the epistemic
perspective/cosmologies/insights of critical thinkers from the Global South thinking
from and with subalternized racial/ethnic/sexual spaces and bodies. Postmodernism
American Subaltern Studies Group met before their split. Among the many reasons and debates that produced this split, there are two that I would like to stress.

and postructuralism as epistemological projects are caught within the

Western canon reproducing within its domains of thought and practice a
coloniality of power/knowledge.
Area studies is inseparable from the militaristic knowledge that views Latin
America in terms of its usefulness to the US their knowledge-gathering
only shows us a target to be destroyed by US bombs, making nuclear
genocide inevitable
Chow, Professor Comparative Lit at Brown, 6 (Rey, The Age of the World Target p 40-42)//JAG
Often under the modest and apparently innocuous agendas of fact gathering and
documentation, the "scientific" and "objective" production of knowledge during
peacetime about the various special "areas" became the institutional practice that
substantiated and elaborated the militaristic conception of the world as target .52 In other words,
despite the claims about the apolitical and disinterested nature of the pursuits "I higher
learning, activities undertaken under the rubric of area studies, such as language training, historiography,
anthropology, economics, political science, and so forth, are fully inscribed in the
politics and ideology of war. To that extent, the disciplining, research, and development of so-called
academic information are part and parcel of a strategic logic . And yet, if the production of
knowledge (with its vocabulary of aims and goals, research, data analysis, experimentation, and verification) in fact shares the same scientific and
military premises as warif, for instance, the ability to translate a difficult language can be regarded as equivalent to the ability to break military codes53is it a
surprise that it is doomed to fail in its avowed attempts to "know" the other cultures ? Can
"knowledge" that is derived from the same kinds of bases as war put an end to the
violence of warfare, or is such knowledge not simply warfare's accomplice, destined to
destroy rather than preserve the forms of lives at which it aims its focus? As long as
knowledge is produced in this self-referential manner, as a circuit of targeting or getting
the other that ultimately consolidates the omnipotence and omnipresence of the
sovereign "self"/"eye" the "I"that is the United States, the other will have no choice
but remain just that a target whose existence justifies only one thing, its destruction by the
bomber. As long as the focus of our study of Asia remains the United States, and as long as this focus is not accompanied by knowledge of what is happening elsewhere at other times as well as at the
present, such study will ultimately confirm once again the self-referential function of virtual
worlding that was unleashed by the dropping of the atomic bombs, with the United
States always occupying the position of the bomber, and other cultures always viewed as
the military and information target fields. In this manner, events whose historicity does not fall into the epistemically closed orbit of the atomic bomber
such as the Chinese reactions to the war from a primarily anti-Japanese point of view that I alluded to at the beginning of this chapterwill never receive the attention that is due to them.

"Knowledge," however conscientiously gathered and however large in volume, will lead
only to further silence and to the silencing of diverse experiences.54 This is one reason
why, as Harootunian remarks, area studies has been, since its inception, haunted by "the absence of a
definable object"and by "the problem of the vanishing object. "55 As Harootunian goes on to argue, for all its investment
in the study of other languages and other cultures, area studies missed the opportunity, so aptly provided by Said's criticism of Oriental ism, to become the site where a genuinely alternative form of knowledge
production might have been possible. Although, as Harootunian writes, "Said's book represented an important intellectual challenge to the mission of area studies which, if accepted would have reshaped area
studies and freed it from its own reliance on the Cold War and the necessities of the national security state,"56 the challenge was too fundamentally disruptive to the administrative and instrumentalist agendas so
firmly routinized in area studies to be accepted by its practitioners. As a result, Said's attempt to link an incipient neocolonial discourse to the history of area studies was almost immediately belittled, dismissed,
and ignored, and his critique, for all its relevance to area studies' future orientation, simply "migrated to English studies to transform the study of literature into a full-scale preoccupation with identity and its
construction."57

Reject the affs Eurocentric epistemology embracing a decolonial

epistemology is the best way to rupture current conceptions of Area Studies
that guarantee intellectual exploitation
Grosfoguel, Professor Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, 7 (Ramon, The Epistemic Decolonial Turn
Cultural Studies, Vol 21 Issue 2-3, p 211-223, T&F Online)//JAG

Globalization studies, political-economy paradigms and world-system analysis , with only a few
exceptions, have not derived the epistemological and theoretical implications of the epistemic

critique coming from subaltern locations in the colonial divide and expressed in academia through ethnic studies
and woman studies. They still continue to produce knowledge from the Western man point zero
god-eye view. This has led to important problems in the way we conceptualize global
capitalism and the world-system. These concepts are in need of decolonization and this
can only be achieved with a decolonial epistemology that overtly assumes
the decolonial geopolitics and body-politics of knowledge as points of
departure to a radical critique. The following examples can illustrate this point. If we analyze the European colonial expansion from a
Eurocentric point of view, what we get is a picture in which the origins of the so-called capitalist world-system is primarily produced by the inter-imperial competition among
European Empires. The primary motive for this expansion was to find shorter routes to the East, which let accidentally to the so-called discovery and, eventual, Spanish
colonization of the Americas. From this point of view, the capitalist world-system would be primarily an economic system that determine the behavior of the major social actors
by the economic logic of making profits as manifested in the extraction of surplus value and the ceaseless accumulation of capital at a world-scale. Moreover, the concept of
capitalism implied in this perspective privileges economic relations over other social relations. Accordingly, the transformation in the relations of production produces a new
class structure typical of capitalism as oppose to other social systems and other forms of domination. Class analysis and economic structural transformations are privileged over
other power relations. Without denying the importance of the endless accumulation of capital at a world scale and the existence of a particular class structure in global

How would the world-system looks like if we move the locus

of enunciation from the European man to an Indigenous women in the Americas, to , say
Rigoberta Menchu in Guatemala or to Domitila in Bolivia? I do not pretend to speak for or represent the perspective of
these indigenous women. What I attempt to do is to shift the location from which these paradigms are thinking.
The first implication of shifting our geopolitics of knowledge is that what arrived in the
Americas in the late fifteenth century was not only an economic system of capital and
labor for the production of commodities to be sold for a profit in the world market . This was a
crucial part of, but was not the sole element in, the entangled package. What arrived in the Americas was a broader and
wider entangled power structure that an economic reductionist perspective of the worldsystem is unable to account for. From the structural location of an indigenous woman in
the Americas what arrived was a more complex world-system than what politicaleconomy paradigms and world-system analysis portrait. A
European/capitalist/military/christian/patriarchal/white/heterosexual/male arrived in
the Americas and established simultaneously in time and space several entangled global
hierarchies that for purposes of clarity in this exposition I will list below as if they were separate from each other: a particular global class formation where a diversity
capitalism, I raise the following epistemic question:

of forms of labor (slavery, semi-serfdom, wage labor, petty-commodity production, etc.) are going to co-exist and be organized by capital as a source of production of surplus
value through the selling of commodities for a profit in the world market; an international division of labor of core and periphery where capital organized labor in the periphery
around coerced and authoritarian forms (Wallerstein 1974); an inter-state system of politico-military organizations controlled by European males and institutionalized in
colonial administrations (Wallerstein 1979); a global racial/ethnic hierarchy that privileges European people over non-European people (Quijano 1993, 2000); a global gender
hierarchy that privileges males over females and European patriarchy over other forms of gender relations (Spivak 1988, Enloe 1990); a sexual hierarchy that privileges
heterosexuals over homosexuals and lesbians (it is important to remember that most indigenous peoples in the Americas did not consider sexuality among males a pathological
behavior and has no homophobic ideology); a spiritual hierarchy that privileges Christians over non-Christian/non-Western spiritualities institutionalized in the globalization of
the Christian (Catholic and later Protestant) church; an epistemic hierarchy that privileges Western knowledge and cosmology over non-Western knowledge and cosmologies,
and institutionalized in the global university system (Mignolo 1995, 2000, Quijano 1991). a linguistic hierarchy between European languages and non-European languages that
privileges communication and knowledge/theoretical production in the former and subalternize the latter as sole producers of folklore or culture but not of knowledge/theory

conceptualization of the world-system, from decolonial

perspectives of the South will question its traditional conceptualizations produced by
thinkers from the North. Following Peruvian Sociologist, Anbal Quijano (1991), (1998), (2000), we could conceptualize the
present world-system as a historical-structural heterogeneous totality with a specific power matrix
that he calls a colonial power matrix (patrn de poder colonial). This matrix affects all dimensions of social existence such as sexuality, authority,
(Mignolo 2000). It is not an accident that the

subjectivity and labor (Quijano 2000). The sixteenth century initiates a new global colonial power matrix that by the late nineteenth century came to cover the whole planet.
Taking a step further from Quijano, I conceptualize the coloniality of power as an entanglement or, to use US Third World Feminist concept, intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989,
Fregoso 2003) of multiple and heterogeneous global hierarchies (heterarchies) of sexual, political, epistemic, economic, spiritual, linguistic and racial forms of domination and

What is new
in the coloniality of power perspective is how the idea of race and racism becomes the
organizing principle that structures all of the multiple hierarchies of the world-system
exploitation where the racial/ethnic hierarchy of the European/non-European divide transversally reconfigures all of the other global power structures.

(Quijano 1993). For example, the different forms of labor that are articulated to capitalist accumulation at a world-scale are assigned according to this racial hierarchy; coercive
(or cheap) labor is done by non-European people in the periphery and free wage labor in the core. The global gender hierarchy is also affected by race: contrary to pre-European
patriarchies where all women were inferior to all men, in the new colonial power matrix some women (of European origin) have a higher status and access to resources than
some men (of non-European origin). The idea of race organizes the world's population into a hierarchical order of superior and inferior people that becomes an organizing

Contrary to the Eurocentric perspective, race,

gender, sexuality, spirituality, and epistemology are not additive elements to the
economic and political structures of the capitalist world-system, but an integral,
entangled and constitutive part of the broad entangled package called the European modern/colonial
capitalist/patriarchal world-system (Grosfoguel 2002). European patriarchy and European notions of sexuality,
principle of the international division of labor and of the global patriarchal system.

epistemology and spirituality were exported to the rest of the world through colonial
expansion as the hegemonic criteria to racialize, classify and pathologize the rest of the
world's population in a hierarchy of superior and inferior races . This conceptualization
has enormous implications that I can only briefly mention here: The old Eurocentric idea that
societies develop at the level of the nation-state in terms of a linear evolution of modes
of production from pre-capitalist to capitalist is overcome . We are all encompassed within a capitalist worldsystem that articulates different forms of labor according to the racial classification of the world's population (Quijano 2000, Grosfoguel 2002). The old Marxist
paradigm of infrastructure and superstructure is replaced by a historical-heterogeneous
structure (Quijano 2000), or a heterarchy (Kontopoulos 1993), that is, an entangled articulation of multiple
hierarchies, in which subjectivity and the social imaginary is not derivative but
constitutive of the structures of the world-system (Grosfoguel 2002). In this conceptualization, race and racism are not
superstructural or instrumental to an overarching logic of capitalist accumulation; they are constitutive of capitalist accumulation at a world-scale. The colonial power matrix is
an organizing principle involving exploitation and domination exercised in multiple dimensions of social life, from economic, sexual, or gender relations, to political

The old division between culture and

political-economy as expressed in post-colonial studies and political-economy
approaches is overcome (Grosfoguel 2002). Post-colonial studies conceptualize the capitalist world-system as being constituted primarily by culture,
while political-economy place the primary determination on economic relations. In the coloniality of power approach, what
comes first, culture or the economy, is a false dilemma, a chicken-egg dilemma that obscure the complexity of the
organizations, structures of knowledge, state institutions, and households (Quijano 2000).

capitalist world-system (Grosfoguel 2002). Coloniality is not equivalent to colonialism. It is not derivative from, or antecedent to, modernity. Coloniality and modernity
constitute two sides of a single coin. The same way as the European industrial revolution was achieved on the shoulders of the coerced forms of labor in the periphery, the new
identities, rights, laws, and institutions of modernity such as nation-states, citizenship and democracy were formed in a process of colonial interaction with, and
domination/exploitation of, non-Western people. To call capitalist the present world-system is, to say the least, misleading. Given the hegemonic Eurocentric common sense,
the moment we use the word capitalism people immediately think that we are talking about the economy. However, capitalism is only one of the multiple entangled
constellations of colonial power matrix of the European modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system. It is an important one, but not the sole one. Given its

To
transform this world-system it is crucial to destroy the historical-structural
heterogenous totality called the colonial power matrix of the world-system . Anti-capitalist
decolonization and liberation cannot be reduced to only one dimension of social life. It requires a broader
transformation of the sexual, gender, spiritual, epistemic, economic, political, linguistic
and racial hierarchies of the modern/colonial world-system. The coloniality of power
perspective challenges us to think about social change and social transformation in a
non-reductionist way.
entanglement with other power relations, destroying the capitalist aspects of the world-system would not be enough to destroy the present world-system.

2NC

Framework
Our Epistemology of Latin America is flawed
Castro-Gomez 98
a philosopher known for his work on colonial legacies herd in Colombia, He studied philosophy at St. Thomas
University in Bogota, where he was a pupil of faculty members of the Group of Bogot (Philosophy) , main
distributors in Colombia for the Latin American Philosophy . He then traveled to Germany where he graduated in
philosophy at the University of Tbingen and later a doctorate in the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in
Frankfurt. On his return to Colombia was a professor at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota and Thinking
Institute investigator. (Santiago, Latin American postcolonial theories, Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice,
10:1, 27-33, http:l/dx.doi.org/10.1080/10402659808426118)

During the late 1970s a new field of investigation called "postcolonial studies" began to
consolidate itself in Western universities, especially those in Britain and the United States.
The discourses emerged from influential university chairs held by refugees or sons and daughters of
foreigners and immigrants. These individuals were socialized in two worlds differing in language, religion,
traditions, and socio-political organization. They were acquainted with both the world of colonized
nations, which they or their parents abandoned for some reason or another, and the world of
industrialized countries in which they live and work today as intellectuals or academics. At a time when
postmodern, structuralist, and feminist theory enjoyed a privileged position in the intellectual AngloSaxon world, these people considered themselves to be "Third World intellectuals of the First World,"
thus defining the form in which they began to reflect on problems relating to colonialism. Departing

from institutionally accepted studies such as anthropology, literary criticism, ethnology,

and historiography, postcolonial theorists articulated a critique of colonialism which
substantially differs from anticolonial narratives of the 1960s and 1970s. During that
period academic circles popularized a type of discourse which emphasized the
revolutionary rupture from the capitalist system of colonial domination. Working within
the geopolitical spaces opened by the Cold War, as well as the environments created by Asian and
American independence movements, this discourse focused on the fortification of national identities of
colonized countries and the construction of a society free from class antago nism. The critique of

colonialism was understood as a rupture from the structures of oppression which had
impeded the "Third World" from realizing the European project of modernity . However,
anticolonialist narratives never pondered the epistemological status of their own discourse. Such criticism arose from methodologies
pertaining to the social sciences, the humanities, and philosophy-fields of study that had been developed by European modernism
since the 19th century. Economic dependence, the destruction of cultural identity, the growing poverty of the majority of the
population, and the discrimination of minorities were all phenomena considered to be "deviations" from modernity. All of these

These popular
sectors, not the bourgeoisie, would be the true "subjects of history," those who would
carry out the project of "humanizing humanity," which in turn would be realized within
colonized nations themselves. What postcolonial theorists began to realize is that the very language of
maladies, it was thought, could be rectified through revolution and the popular sector's seizure of power.

1040-2659/98/010027-07 1998 Carfax Publishing Ltd modernity, with which anticolonialists expressed
themselves, is essentially located within the totalizing practices of European colonialism. Third World critiques of
colonialism, narratives theoretically based on sociology, economics, and the political sciences, could not leave behind
the space in which these disciplines reiterated the hegemonic language of modernity in colonized countries. Follow
ing the thesis of Jacques Derrida, the Indian philosopher Gayatri Spivak affirms that no socially diagnostic discourse
can transcend the homogenizing structures of modem rationality .

Scholars study revolutions ineffectively-leads to bad policymaking in Latin

America
Brass, Tom (Social and Poltical Sciences Faculty at the University of Cambridge, On which side of the
barricade? Subaltern Resistance in Latin America and Elsewhere, The Journal of Peasant Studies)
9/8/10, http:/ldx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150412331311109

This theory about 'passive revolution' - the view linking the rise of fascism to the lack
of a bourgeois revolution, and consequently a 'weak' national bourgeoisie and bourgeois
democracy, and the absence of a peasant 'voice' in national politics - is wrong on a
number of counts. First, as has been argued in the preceding section, not only were peasants not excluded from
nationalism but they were projected by those on the political right as the very
embodiment of the nation itself. Second, it is a theory which decouples capitalism
from fascism, and thus exonerates the former from any blame for the latter: if fascism
was a feudal reaction against capitalism, then capitalism is recast as an innately
progressive systemic form.115 This idea, as Trotsky, showed throughout the 1930s, is nonsense: fascism was a specifically capitalist reaction
against the working class, and thus unconnected with feudalism. The latter critique notwithstanding , it was ideas about 'passive
revolution' (fascism = feudal reaction) which lay behind the disastrous policy of
the Popular Front, or agency which represents the epitome of 'subaltern resistance'.
Discourse is key to reshape the representations and challenge the
Affirmatives instruments of power
Crow 10 - Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at the University of Bristol (Joanna,
Introduction: Intellectuals, Indigenous Ethnicity and the State in Latin America, 8/28/10, Latin American and
Caribbean Ethnic Studies Volume 5 Issue 2,
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17442221003787068#.UfwgaW15Oks)//BZ

Finally, one of the principal themes connecting all of the articles and indeed all of the discussion
points above, either explicitly or implicitly, is power. As Andermann and Rowe proposed in their recent
book on state iconography in the Southern Cone, there is a challenge to think about images not
solely as representations of cultural history, but as depositories and instruments of
power (2005, p. 3). Images matter: they are inherently political and they tell us a great deal
about social relations. As stated at the beginning of this introduction, assumptions about
indigenous ethnicitywhich contribute towards the creation of images, or are based on the
images one is confronted withaffect the way that indigenous people are treated . Andermann
and Rowe concentrate on the images created and propagated by the state, but intellectuals too have a
critical role to play. Intellectuals As Wade has remarked, the concepts of race and ethnicity are part of an
enterprise of knowledge (1997, p. 6), and knowledge is intimately related to power. As producers of
knowledge and, in our case, enunciators of indigenous ethnicity, intellectuals are important
arbiters of power. Their discourses and images of indigeneity may function as part of, in
negotiation with, or in opposition to, the dominant representation regime, or indeed entirely
outside the sphere of state authorities, although the latter is rare. All the intellectuals considered in this
volume have sought to lead processes of discursive transformation (like Florencia Mallon's [1995] local
intellectuals in Peasant and Nation) and to influence the organization of the society in which they live.
Beyond thisand the fact that most of the contributors use intellectual in the broader Gramscian sense of
the termit becomes rather difficult to summarize them. Indeed, what stands out most clearly is the great
diversity of intellectuality being discussed.

Link West is Evil

Critiques of Western imperialism are self-defeating they reify Western
norms and domination over marginalized cultures by simply trying to
situate non-Western knowledge into an Western epistemic framework**
Jenko, Professor PolSci National University of Singapore, 11 (Leigh, Fall, Recentering Political
Theory: The Promise of Mobile Locality Cultural Critique, Vol 79, ProjectMuse)//JAG

In claiming to offer a distinct approach to cross-cultural engagement that

takes historically marginalized (often coded as non-Western) traditions seriously as sources of theory production,
my call to recenter theory implicitly criticizes existing alternatives for stopping short of this more
radical goal. In much scholarly literature on cross-cultural theorizing, solutions to the problem of Eurocentrism
aim primarily to draw attention to the limits and contingency of those master
signifiers inscribed within and by dominant (often coded as Western or Europeanized) social scientific and
humanistic discourse (e.g., Euben 2006). This effort, pioneered and articulated by postcolonial studies, defines Eurocentrism
as the projection of the West and its disciplinary categories as a universal measure of knowledge against which all other lifeworlds or cultures must be compared (Prakash, 1475 n.1; Chakrabarty, 29, 43). Confronting Eurocentrism so understood
thus entails recognizing the closures, contingencies, and silences enacted within
Europeanized discourse as its local categories become inscribed as universal ones. This kind
Destabilizing the Local

of critical work seeks its basis not without but within the fissures of dominant structures (Prakash, 148687). It thus aims more to mitigate what Fred
Dallmayr calls the bland universalism accompanying colonialism and first-world capital flows (1996, 99), than to engage foreign discourses as

because this confrontation

with Eurocentrism aims at its fissures rather than its alternatives, the critical stance
that undermines the certainty of Europeanized categoriesand so enables the entry of more cosmopolitan
renderings of human life-worldsalso returns the theorist to the very audience and discourse whose
terms originally prompted the critique. Although addressing Eurocentrism on one level,
it reconstitutes it on another: the analysis chastens Europeanized categories only
insofar as it continues to inhabit them (Jenco). Those theorists who explicitly urge the
inclusion of non-Western voices [End Page 30] in our debates about political life, including political
philosophers such as Charles Taylor as well as comparative theorists such as Roxanne Euben, ground this move in an
understanding of knowledge as local and rooted . In contrast to an older cosmopolitanism that promoted
indiscriminate tolerance or rootless eclecticism, this new cosmopolitanism is characterized by its
resistance to imperializing universalism, on the one hand, and its unwillingness to sacrifice the rootedness of individual
potential outside replacements for the problematic categories of Europeanized knowledge. Precisely

persons within their particular cultural backgrounds, on the other (Malcomson, 23335). In this way they can resist both functionalist equivalences and
universalizing ambitionsArchimedian vantage points that transform localized insight into general, universal knowledgeand instead seek a new
space for communication across cultural differences (Benhabib; Euben 1999). Many culturally sensitive political thinkers analogize this cosmopolitan
negotiation of rooted selves to a conversation that takes place between differently situated interlocutors to encourage mutual transformationwhether
in the form of convergence, as for Bikhu Parekh and Charles Taylor (1999), or of accommodation without strict consensus, for James Tully and Fred

rather than imposing our

terms on them we formulate both their way of life and ours as alternative possibilities
in relation to human constraints at work in both (1985, 125). Hans-Georg Gadamer and those comparative political
theorists influenced by him such as Fred Dallmayr invoke a similar process that encourages a fusion of horizons. These dialogic,
supposedly mutually transformative encounters are conducted as often between texts as
between people, and mean to facilitate mutual sympathy, grounded in the credibility of
differently situated ways of life, as a means of combating universalist hegemony and
hierarchical power relations (Dallmayr 2004; Euben 1999, 13). The dialogic approach further develops the postcolonial articulation
Dallmayr (1996). Charles Taylor calls what emerges a language of perspicuous contrast, in which

of Eurocentrism by showing how critique can flow from both cultural locales without asserting the singular dominance that characterizes more

There are problems with this position, however, despite its important role
in correcting imperializing narratives fueled by unreflective, often Western-centric
universalism. Pratap Mehta, speaking of the cosmopolitan viewpoint that underlies these and other approaches to [End Page 31] cultural
homogenizing approaches.

its hermeneutic potential is greater than its

transgressive possibilities (633). That is, the encounter with otherness has enhanced the
interpretive richness of our self-reflections by making us ever more aware of the silences
and contingency of our own sources of knowledge. But it has ignored possibilities for
fundamental transformations in knowledge production prompted not only by the
inclusion of cases and voices that our own theories marginalize, but also from shifts in
the very audience, language, and resources assumed in the production of intellectual
work. Roxanne Eubens analysis of Muslim and Western travelers in search of knowledge, for example, gathers Muslim perspectives not to set
difference in political theory, has insightfully pointed out that

political theory on a new track addressed to Muslim audiences disciplined by their terms of debate, but to make a tripartite argument notably
independent of any particular Muslim viewpoint: that the association of travel and the pursuit of knowledge is not confined to any particular cultural
constellation or epoch; that knowledge about what is familiar and unfamiliar is produced comparatively, and finally that the course and

Godrejs plea for including nonWestern perspectives within a cosmopolitan political theory, similarly, does not expect to
advance political theory along non-Western lines so much as enhance the disciplines
capacity for self-reflection. She recommends an immersive interpretive understanding of texts situated in non-Western cultural
consequences of exposures to the unfamiliar are unpredictable (2006, 1516). Farah

frames to thereby disturb or dislocate our familiar understandings of politics, working from the assumption that the very movement of [a] Western
reader within the Western tradition of political theory . . . may allow her to find familiarity in these [Western] texts that eludes her in the encounter

the attempt to unmask

Western universalistic ambitions through localizing or rooting knowledge in culturally
specific contexts ends up effacing the ability of historically excluded traditions or
debates to discipline our own inquiry. Despite the fact that these theorists all recognize such
others as theory-producing, self-reflective beingshence their inclusion within political theory and philosophythey
paradoxically prohibit the often long-standing strains of [End Page 32] thought that lay behind
their claims from displacing the very debates or categories in Western thought
recognized to be problematic. Rather, frameworks of comparison confine theoretical claims
to their communities of origin, resulting in the paradoxical insistence by cross-cultural
theorists that any project of inclusion cannot transcend its own origins in European
Enlightenment thought. This is not only for the reason that European thought dominates global knowledge productiona key
with a non-Western text (138, 139). Godrej and Euben are representative, but certainly not exhaustive, of how

motivation for postcolonial theorists, whose project turns in large part on exposing the aporia of Western modernity in global settingsbut because

the individual Western researcher is assumed to be rooted in her local, Europeanized

categories to such an extent that his or her understanding of non-Western ideas is
permanently constrained. Indeed, this embeddedness is seen by many, including Charles Taylor, as the
constitutive problem of learning across cultures (1985, 13031; Godrej, 158, 159), on the assumption
that the only other alternative would be a view from nowhere that reinforces existing
power relations by according the status quo a claim to neutrality (Euben 2006, 27). The starting
assumption of these analyses is revealed to be precisely that we cannot transcend our own
situated particularity radically enough to do more than , in Eubens words, negotiate these
other particulars, as we disclose commonalities in the cross-cultural production of knowledge (45). As Anglophone political theorists,
we are situated always-already within the putative tradition that constitutes political
theory, and always-already outside of any other possibilities.

Link Postmodernism
Postmodernist lens skews our view of Latin America
Sanchez and Pita 99, Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature at UC San Diego,
Lecturer at UC San Diego, respectively (Rosaura, Beatrice, Mapping Cultural/Political Debates in Latin
American Studies, Cultural Studies, Volume 13:2, Pgs. 290-318, Taylor and Francis Online) EC

What is purportedly a characteristic postmodernist feature, as previously indicated, is

the tendency to see everything as fragmented, heterogeneous, ephemeral and
contingent (Harvey, 1989: 285). Given the rejection of foundationalism and
essentialism, there is a tendency to see everything as at and to reject not only deep
structures but the very notion of the subject. Little if any room is left for a notion of history, only nostalgia, pastiches of the past, expressed through
representations of representations or, what is perhaps more the case, there is now an inability to distinguish simulacra from the real. This is so since it is assumed
that there are no longer any originals, only copies, endless replication in an imageproducing society in which cultural production becomes central precisely because of its
quality of self-consuming artefacts and its creation of a market eager to consume more
and more products. The rei cation of the sign, the multiplicity or cannibalization of styles, the loss of boundaries between the elite and popular, the notion of multiple identities or
positionalities, the abstraction of space, all are described as postmodernist traits (Harvey, 1989: 284307; Jameson, 1988a: 18), along with political notions of pluralism and radical democracy, that entail a
longing for collectivity and groupuscules. These are all cast together ahistorically by privileged fractions, who fancy, for example, that inclusion of minority or Third World literature within their literary canon

Of all of these features, only a select

few could be said to characterize Latin American cultural production, for there
undeniably remains today in Latin America a modernist structure of feeling. This stage of modernity
is a great equalizer, and that insertion of Third World cultural products within their markets makes them postmodernist.

produced by incomplete modernization,with all its incongruities and ruptures, accounts for Latin Americas still modernist (and not modernista) literature with an emphasis on the divided self, an anguished

all qualities present

in modernism that have all too often also been linked to postmodernism (Harvey, 1989: 273; Jameson, 1991:
subject, a fragmented structure marked by ambiguity and complexity, simultaneous time spaces, an elitist concept of art (despite allegations to the contrary),

666; Perloff, 1992: 158). Postmodernism cannot, as a result, be seen to be anything other than a fuzzy concept; at best it is an ideological eld marked by overlapping and slippages of meaning. Perhaps for
this reason and citing the heterogeneous local forms produced within and sometimes against its logic, Cols, for example, takes issue with postmodernism and nds it an unsatisfactorily homogenizing term

The
utilization of the label postmodernism is furthermore increasingly unsettling as one
sees minority literature in the US and Third World literature in general grasped and inserted within the network of cultural
commodity circulation and classi ed as postmodernist examples of difference. In a timespace dimension where it is the thing to be ethnic and different, First World critics
sometimes forget to examine the Third World cultural work within a peripheral
context, eviscerating the text in the process. Menchs testimonial again serves as a good example in this regard, although equally as good, although
less in vogue, perhaps because her class interests are less palatable (to proponents of new social movements, for example) is that of Domitila Barrios de Chungara (Let Me Speak!) (1978). Yet if we
further examine the Mench text,we are struck not only by its mediated format, its arrangement according to the anthropologists
questions and scheme, but also by its historicity, its call upon collective memory, its discourses of
resistance and social transformation, its concern with the survival of Quich culture, its
denunciation of the exploitation of both indigenous and Ladino farm workers and the
dispossession of the Indians. Clearly there is no crisis of historicity here and no absence
of revolutionary discourses. The way Mench and her people feel about themselves and
their world has little to do with identity politics in the First World or with the
consciousness of middleclass consumers in the United States or elsewhere within
this period of postmodernity. Much as critics may attempt to force the work into new
representational models and into a framework of pluralism and difference, it clearly
results in an uncomfortable t.The dimension of class and political/economic disparity is still paramount in Menchs testimonial, and the alliances that Mench sees
(Cols, 1992: 267). It is, as we have previously indicated, and as even a cursory glance at the literature will demonstrate, a lax term, used at times to describe anything and everything.

developing with labour unions, students, peasants and a variety of Indian groups are not modelled after the alliance politics theorized in advanced countries but are instead a continuation of alliances forged
within and as a result of both colonial and capitalist development.

Postmodernism does not accurately depict the state of Latin America

Sanchez and Pita 99, Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature at UC San Diego,
Lecturer at UC San Diego, respectively (Rosaura, Beatrice, Mapping Cultural/Political Debates in Latin
American Studies, Cultural Studies, Volume 13:2, Pgs. 290-318, Taylor and Francis Online) EC

That the goal of hegemony is the absorption and recon guration of dissent does not
imply that this is a fait accompli in Latin America today nor, we would hold, does it imply that all
Latin American cultural production or lived experience can be reductively classi ed
as postmodernist. Alongside an informal sector of labour practices, there are coexisting modes of cultural
production, subordinated practices and counter-practices that need to be mapped out. It is in this regard that most theoretical
writing on newly developing countries is in effect caught in a transcultural double-bind, constantly having to straddle the general and the particular, the global and the local. The concept of postmodernism is
in fact a pre-eminent example of this engagement with categories that con gure both consent and dissent and shape identity and difference in Latin American theoretical writing, even as theorists endeavour
to create a sense of themselves as separate and distinct from the centre, albeit tied to a global economic system.Tracing the emergence and proliferation of the terms of these debates during the decade of the

At the core of the problematic

deployment of the term postmodernism, and its attendant corollaries, one nds, for
the most part, a collapsing of differences between the postmodern period of capitalism,
postmodernity, and postmodernism and, secondarily, we would venture to say, in some
cases at least, an eagerness to t cultural practices of Latin America within schemata
born in and authorized by the First World. The problem of inclusion and exclusion, as
well as frame of reference, is clearly central to any engagement with these theoretical
categories.
1980s and early 1990s are a plethora of publications, including several dealing speci cally with Latin America.6

Postmodern scholars study Latin America through a structuralist

perspective
Brass, Tom (Social and Poltical Sciences Faculty at the University of Cambridge, On which side of the
barricade? Subaltern Resistance in Latin America and Elsewhere, The Journal of Peasant Studies)
9/8/10, http:/ldx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150412331311109

the fact that the postmodern epistemology of the Subaltern Studies

project is rooted in structuralism, which in tum informed the reactionary linguistic/cultural tum of the 'New philosophers' in France,
More important than this, however, is

who emerged in the mid-1970s and in tum refigured the political right."' The rightwards political trajectory of the few Philosophers', for the most part ex-Maoists who
participated in the ay events of 1968, is linked invariably and simply to a disillusion which sulted from the chronicling by Solzhenitsyn of prison life in the Soviet gulag, a

permitted them tu affix the institution of the concentration camp - associated hitherto solely
with fascism - firmly ithin a Marxist lineage, and thus to condemn socialism as
irretrievably inted (Marxism = the State = the Gulag).'" However, it is equally clear on the views expressed at that conjuncture by Jean-Marie Benoist, one of e
discovery which

'New Philosophers', that their political roots go much deeper, and are to e found in an espousal of structuralism/{postmodernism), and thus also in e theoretical objections of

structuralist argument is symptomatic, and anticipates all the classic

oppositions of postmodem theory: on the one hand, a facile dismissiveness of
eurocentrism' coupled with an antagonism towards Marxism, historical materialism,
science, development and history, and on the other an endorsement of Heidegger,
Neitzsche, an innate concept of difference!'otherness', aporia and the
lingnistic/cultural tum.""
such theory to Marxism. His

Link Postcolonialism
Postcolonial epistemology relies on assumptions about Latin American
culture- blurs the line between fact and fiction, ruins our ability to
understand the struggle of the impoverished in Latin America and creates
an imbalance of power
Brass, Tom (Social and Poltical Sciences Faculty at the University of Cambridge, On which side of the
barricade? Subaltern Resistance in Latin America and Elsewhere, The Journal of Peasant Studies)
9/8/10, http:/ldx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150412331311109
Beverley attempts to get round this problem by invoking two forms of Postmodern aporia (narrative hybridity, subaltern
unknowability). Accordingly, much of his analysis

is devoted to the conceptual habilitation of

testimonio, or 'narrative ... told in the first person by a narrator who is also a real
protagonist or witness of the events he or she counts', as he applied it originally to Rigoberta MenchU, an
icon of Latin merican subaltern 'otherness'." On discovering that hers was not stimonio in the sense he had defined it, however,
Beverley reverses its eaning: testimonio, he announces, no

longer has to consist of a first-hand witness

account but can now involve 'a kind of narrative hybridity'." In there words, it is composed of a mixture of truth
and non-truth. There is no merit to this kind of inflation: how long before one is told that
testimonio imposed entirely of falsehoods is still acceptable as testimonio? Perhaps such a
moment will also mark the annexation by literary studies of social cience and history, a
process whereby all fact finally becomes its 'other', fiction, and the litersry critic is
accordingly installed as the only true subject of struggle, which he himself constitutes in
the realm of literature, the fictional but nevertheless only 'real' world'." A second fom1 of
postmodern aporia involves the claim that, as the subaltern is unknowable, he/she cannot be represented, in effect not only
abolishing the intellectual accessibility of peasants and labourers but converting them
into the mysterious 'other' of conservative discourse. hose such as Spivak and Kristeva link the
'unrepresentability' of subaltern ulture to the 'unknowability' of the subaltern him/herself: a subject thus efined cannot be
represented by someone 'other' (= intellectuals) than im/herself, a view that verges on the solipsistic." A

consequence of
ristine subaltern 'otherness' being both unknowable and intellectually accessible,
moreover, is that it is unalterable. Just such an epistemology is voked by conservatives who clainl that, as
the subaltern likes the way he/she is, and feels empowered by his/her culture (of which the economic is erely a part), consequently

leaves power
and control in the hands of the bourgeoisie, since according to this ind of argument it is impermissible for an
no one- and especially not intellectuals on the ft - should presume to advise bim/her otherwise. This of course

intellectoal even to put to a ubaltern a non-subaltern idea: because the subaltern is unknowable, the atore of the subaltern and
therefore of its 'other' cannot even be posed. ven if it could, intellectuals are disbarred from this, because to do so is to privilege a
non-subaltern discourse.

Postcolonial research of Latin American culture is done through a capitalist

scope- leads to exclusion of important viewpoints and cultures
Brass, Tom (Social and Poltical Sciences Faculty at the University of Cambridge, On which side of the
barricade? Subaltern Resistance in Latin America and Elsewhere, The Journal of Peasant Studies)
9/8/10, http:/ldx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150412331311109

point
underlined by the depoliticization \repoliticization of much current popular culture. The case
of Disney comics demonstrates both the longevity of and the extent to which 'popular cultore' is formed not 'from below' but
rather 'from above', and also how the reproduction of the agrarian myth is a central
aspect of this process, resulting in the formation of what amounts to false
consciousness." Control exercised 'from above' over what precisely constitutes the 'from below' agenda of 'popular culture', together
with its reproduction, has always been a political objective pursued globally both by imperial states
and by multinational corporations. There is accordingly a remarkable overlap between what are usually represented as being politically
Many examples from Latin America, North America and elsewhere confirm that mass culture is as much a 'from above' as a 'from below' product, a

divergent processes: on the one hand, the 'natural' identity which both postmodern theory and the subaltern studies project currently insist is culturally empowering for those at
the rural grassroots; and on the other, the similarly 'innate'/'authentic'/non-ratioual yet palpably disempowering - form of consciousness which capital has attempted

even commentators sympathetic to postcolonial studies themselves admit, the burgeoning 'alterity' industry in the academy is
based on complicity: namely, between local oppositional discourses and capitalism
itself, an arrangement whereby the latter commodities the 'marginality' of the former as
'cultural difference'. In the course of being processed as an ideological commodity, therefore, 'non-Western' identity is
rendered 'exotic' (= 'other'), and literary representations of this exoticism are
consumed within Western capitalism as one more product. Nor should the role within metropolitan capitalist
historically to create/reproduce 'from above' for its own economic and political ends. As

contexts of travel writing - a widely read genre and hugely influential form of 'popular culture' - in reproducing the agrarian myth about rural populations in the so-called Third
World be underestimated." To claim, as Beverley does, that all one has to do in such cases is to 'resubalterni2e' the issue is to avoid this question, not to answer it. Not the least

'resuhalternization' will amount in the majority of instances merely to the

discursive reinstatement of nationalism, and with it the enduring historical opposition
between a stereotypically pristine national identity on the one hand and an all
embracing imperialism on the other. In other words, agency licensing struggle not between classes but between nations, and within the
of the difficulties is that

latter between ethnicities.

Link Area Studies

United States based research reinforces our flawed epistemology
Castro-Gomez 98
a philosopher known for his work on colonial legacies herd in Colombia, He studied philosophy at St. Thomas
University in Bogota, where he was a pupil of faculty members of the Group of Bogot (Philosophy) , main
distributors in Colombia for the Latin American Philosophy . He then traveled to Germany where he graduated in
philosophy at the University of Tbingen and later a doctorate in the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in
Frankfurt. On his return to Colombia was a professor at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota and Thinking
Institute investigator. (Santiago, Latin American postcolonial theories, Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice,
10:1, 27-33, http:l/dx.doi.org/10.1080/10402659808426118)

In the early 1990s, thinkers in the United States like Walter Mignolo, John Beverley, Alberto
Moreiras, Ileana Rodriguez, and Norma Alarcon began to reflect upon the political function of
Latin American studies in the North American university and society. They adopted
Indian criticism and established a postcolonial restoration aptly named "Latin American
Studies." According to the aforementioned authors, "Area Studies," and "Latin American
Studies" in particular, have traditionally functioned as 30 Santiago Castro-Come;:;
discourses inscribed in a bureaucratic-academic rationality that homogenizes the social,
economic, political, and sexual differences of Latin American societies. Latin
Americanism, that is, the consolidation of theoretical representations of Latin America
produced from the human and social sciences, is identified as a disciplinary mechanism
in accord with the imperialist interests of North America's foreign policy. The
emergence of the United States as the triumphant power during the Second World War,
the financial aid programs for the modernization of the "Third World," the postmodern
globalization of the American way of life during the phase called "late capitalism," the
political struggle against the expansion of communism in the southern part of South
America-all of these factors must have acted as empirico-transcendental conditions of
possibility for Latin Americanist discourse in North American universities. Similarly to
the misrepresentation of India, the United States' "official historiography" of Latin America,
presented as a series of literary, philosophical, and sociological representations,
structurally conceals difference. In fact, humanist epistemologies, with their emphasis
on the centrality of intellectuals and erudition, find themselves symbiotically
incorporated in literature programs present in almost all universities. They seek to
formulate a critique of modernity's epistemological strategies of subalternization in
hopes of moving toward the locus enuntiationis (the site of enunciation) from which
subaltern subjects may articulate their own representations. In the following pages I would
like to examine closely the specific premises of two members of the group: John Beverley and Walter
Mignolo. Beverley's criticisms are mainly directed toward the type of literary and humanistic discourse
which predominates in Latin American literature depart ments in the U.S. Following Foucault's thesis,
Beverley argues that structures of the university apparatus offer professors and students

material that is already reified, "packaged," into rigid canonical schemata that have
defined Latin American literature. Beverley reveals that the institutional organization of such

literature programs follows the hegemonic ideology of imperialism. Thus, Spanish, English, and French
literature departments exist because Spain, Eng land, and France had important empires. Polish and
Romanian literatures, on the other hand, are not given whole departments. In many universities

Latin American literature exists as a subdivision of the "Romance languages," while at

the same time literatures from Romania and Poland are studied within the context of
"Slavic Languages."

The way we try to know the Other has concrete political implications the
production of knowledge aids colonialism and ensures a relationship with
alterity founded in violence
Dutta, Professor English at Gauhati University, 4 (Nandana, November, The Face of the Other: Terror
and the Return of Binarism Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Vol 6 No 3,
p 442-443, T&F Online)//JAG

The implicit ethical pressure would seem to point towards reciprocity, communication,
and knowledge as necessary elements of a response to the other. But knowledge is the
means through which discipline has been practiced (as Foucault shows in his famous critiques of the discourses of medicine,
penology, etc.). The problem of knowledge is most acutely brought before us in the discourse of
colonialism. Stephen Greenblatts thesis that wonder is the central figure in the initial European response to the New World, the decisive emotional and intellectual
experience in the presence of radical difference (1991: 14) is particularly worthy of notice here. Wonder, which could have sustained otherness, actually becomes a means not to

Because the discoverer uses only a fragment and then imagines the rest in the act of
appropriation . . . the bit that has actually been seen becomes by metonymy a
representation of the whole (ibid.: 122). And the recognition that a supplement is active in such
other constructions is hardly adequate preparation for redress, though its acceptance in
our perceptual exercises draws attention to the limits of what we see . For example when Husserl speaks of
see.

the sphere, he indicates the use of the idea of the sphere that offers a short cut to its visualization: Like a flash there appears with the word the representation of a ball, in which
the shape alone is specifically attended to. This accompanying representation, whose property crudely approximates to the intended concept and thereby symbolizes it, may then
disappear once again, leaving only the word remaining. (Husserl 1994: 32) Such symbolic representation / the sign, the word sphere / works through that practical equivalence

The natural next step is the

possibility of forming symbolic representations which are not founded through prior
authentic representations (Husserl 1991: 35). In our discursive exercises the other has become
just such a sign, calling up preconceived ideas about what constitutes it, intentionality
and imaginative fulfillment working overtime, in the process camouflaging and
preventing the other from being seen as what one does not know; and resulting in the
glib use of the term in newspaper reports and articles, in student essays, and in everyday
conversation. So the problem perhaps needs to be refigured: can the self know the
other? What kind of knowledge would this be? Can knowledge be separated from
violation? Can/ should alterity be reduced to the familiarity of knowledge?
Communication could also degenerate into power over the other, through a panoptic,
unidirectional thrust, as was evident in colonial educational and administrative practice,
but, closer to us, demonstrated in the media, in the use of satellite television, when the
other can be transformed by the sheer barrage of forceful images emitted (the media coverage of the
between authentic representations and their symbols which makes possible the use of the latter in place of the former.

WTC explosions and their aftermath, the percolation of the same rhetoric into journalistic reports of events following September 11, like the attacks on the Jammu and Kashmir

), in the
universalization of knowledge practice through quicker and more effective circulation.
The question here: should we shift from seeing to listening? Reciprocity, which may
mean exchange with the other, in such a situation could turn out to be extremely
superficial. The idea of intersubjectivity (for example, in Lacan 1988), merely suggests an interchangeability of subject/object positions, just as critiques of Althussers
assembly or the December 13 attack on the Indian Parliament, the Godhra-Gujarat carnage, the particular polarization of narratives, images of good and evil

(1971) conception of unidirectional subject construction through hailing and interpellation retains the polarity of subject and object. This is rather unfortunately brought home
to us in the application of literary theory to a literary text: in most instances the theory simply finds itself in the literary text; the difference is only in the degrees of
sophistication of the methods of application, not in the reciprocal relationship of theory and literary text. Implicit in these issues is the persistence of binarism, in disguise and

If binarism characterized structuralism and was shaken off by poststructuralism,

our worlds, our contexts, and the accompanying rhetoric nudge it back into our thought
horizons. Modern brands of terror contribute to this polarization in particularly
emphatic ways, disabling us to live with otherness, evoking in us the desire to either
convert or kill the other. If, however, the material conditions of our world force the return of
binarism, it becomes imperative to search for a redeeming version that will grow out of
it.
without.

Link Latin America Studies

The historical knowledge we have of Latin American culture is seen
through a European perspective-blurs the truth and hurts plebian struggle
Brass, Tom (Social and Poltical Sciences Faculty at the University of Cambridge, On which side of the
barricade? Subaltern Resistance in Latin America and Elsewhere, The Journal of Peasant Studies)
9/8/10, http:/ldx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150412331311109
It is the acceptability to landlords and rich peasants alike of the pro-peasan discourse
informing the agrarian myth, together with the close link between the latter and the
politics of nationality and tradition, that poses difficulties for Latin American
subalternists. Because the views of those on the ultra nationalist political right in 1930s
Latin America were from the 1920s onwards influenced strongly by the writings and
ideas of their European counterparts (Jose Ortega y Gasset, Jose Calvo Sotelo and Jose Antonio Primo de
Rivera among them), many commentators equate reactionary discourse in Latin America simply with a
harkening back to European culture and tradition (Hispanidad)." Whilst true in part, this argun1ent

overlooks the extent to which a specifically populist form of right-win reactionary discourse about rural society locates its

nationalism in idealized forms of popular culture and indigenous tradition within

Latin America itself." Not the least of the many difficulties faced by those who attempt to apply a
subaltern framework to Latin America, therefore, is the crucial role played by the
peasantry in the discourse of the political right, where it takes the form of a
specifically plebeian national identity deployed by conservatives and reactionaries
as a weapon in their struggle with the left. In describing the subaltern studies project as a new approach
Beverle ignores the long history of such ideas in Latin America generally and in the Andean region in particular." Grouped under
the rubric indigenismo, the lineage in question extends from adllerents such as Jose Carlos Mariategui Hildebrando Castro Pozo and
Hugo Blanco, whose formal position on the Peruvian left masked their populism, to explicitly populist organizations

Exporting radical democracy treats the third world as an object from which
to extract information resources their knowledge production is
indistinguishable from colonialism in form
Kapoor, Professor Enviro Studies at York University, 8 (Ilan, The Postcolonial Politics of
Development p 46-47)//JAG

Universities have tended to pride themselves as institutions where knowledge can be pursued
for its own sake, and where education is delivered in a neutral and objective manner. But of late,
these claims have fallen into disrepute. Far from being pure and unmotivated, knowledge and learning are shown to be subject
to myriad institutional demands (Brub & Nelson 1995; Kuhn 1970; Miyoshi 2000): pressures to publish or
perish (for faculty tenure and/or promotion); the imperative for prestige and originality; competition
(among students and faculty) for research funding and grants; jockeying between students for high grades; or turf wars among researchers.
These institutional demands are shaped, in turn, by external factors, such as government
funding or cutbacks to education, corporatization of the university , the relative availability of research funds
for humanities/social sciences versus natural sciences, or state policies on immigra- tion or multiculturalism (that may affect pedagogical content and style, for exam- ple).
Spivak encapsulates this intersection of academic learning and will to power, this knowledge framing according to institutional demands and pressures, under the rubric of
teaching machine (1993; cf. 1990a: 5). But she casts a particularly critical eye on how this knowledge framing intersects, in turn, with Third World. She is concerned primarily

in which Western university researchers, armed with personal/ institutional interests, go to the South to do
fieldwork and collect data. She calls this a process of information retrieval (1990a: 59), wherein the Third World
becomes a repository of an ethnographic cultural difference (1999: 388).10 It is, for her, another
form of imperialism, the Third World once again providing resources for the First
World; but unlike classical imperialism, it is extraction of surplus-value without extra-economic coercion (Spivak 1988a: 290; cf. Best 1999: 486, 492). Seen in this light,
Western intellectual production mirrors, and is many ways complicit with, Western
imperialism. Cultural imperialism supple- ments classical (socioeconomic) imperialism, with the Third World producing both the wealth and the possibility of the
with the politics of knowledge production, specifi- cally the way

cultural imperialism. The first

is what she refers to as the benevolent first-world appropriation and reinscription of the Third World as an Other (1988a: 289). She means by it the retrieval of
information from the South, not to encounter the Third World on its own terms, but for
other, usually First World, purposes. To illustrate, she takes Julia Kristeva, the noted French feminist scholar, to task over her book, About
cultural self-representation of the First World (1990a: 96; cf. 1988a: 271). Spivak picks up two specific dimensions of this

Chinese Women (1977). Ostensibly a feminist book about ancient Chinese matriarchal institutions, Spivak reproaches it for being ahistorical (for too easily extrapolating the
category of woman to ancient Chinese social institutions), romantic (for implying that contemporary China has declined relative to the former idyllic age), and colonialist (for
benevolently using the Chinese example, but to argue for the ultimate Western feminist political agenda a non-patriarchic feminist utopia). For Spivak, Kristeva is not
interested in Chinese women per se, but in appropri- ating them for her own purposes. This amounts to exoticizing and orientalizing the women, treating the margin as tourist
(1988b: 134-53).

Link Development
Notions about development stress the need for a change in view and
discourse
Sanchez and Pita 99, Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature at UC San Diego,
Lecturer at UC San Diego, respectively (Rosaura, Beatrice, Mapping Cultural/Political Debates in Latin
American Studies, Cultural Studies, Volume 13:2, Pgs. 290-318, Taylor and Francis Online) EC

What is particularly contested, in part or entirely, is the use of Eurocentric paradigms to refer to
economic, political and cultural spheres in the peripheral world (Nelson Osorio, cited in Ydice, 1989:
106). For other critics not only is the notion itself of centre/periphery or even the category of
Third World taken to task, wholly or in part, but so too the very notion of development (Escobar,
1992) or what Chakrabarty calls the transition narrative, used to explain the periphery in terms of an incomplete transition, a lack or an absence
(Chakrabarty, 1992a: 45).3 Although discrediting of the development model is not unique to the periphery (see Touraines critique in the 1981

Third World theorists in particular reject discourses of modernity that have led
to the representation of their continents as underdeveloped, stressing the need for
translation),

new discourses and new forms of representation (Escobar, 1992: 48). Whether the posited alternative
discourses challenge the foundations of capitalism or merely construct new local discourses that sustain the power of capital is, however, a key

. The move away from totalizing paradigms and towards multiple

responses/propositions (Ydice, 1992: 4), however fashionable today, suggests analyses framed in terms
of the particular and the local, a microsocial approach that, while potentially in opposition
to globalism, not only tends towards formulations in terms of the very fragmentation which a mobile capitalism and exible accumulation
can feed upon (Harvey, 1989: 303) but also ignores the fact that particular master narratives are
strategically important for guiding particular social struggles (Fraser and Nicholson, 1990: 26),
acknowledged or not.4 Postmodern social theories posited to displace prior analytical categories
must, in any case, take the nondiscursive into account; that is, the impact of globalization on a multitiered cultural sphere. Harvey, for example, suggests that the restructuring taking place in this period of late capitalism, with its
question

multinational corporations, high-tech informatization, international working class, transition to exible accumulation in the midst of a weakening to
some extent of the autonomy and power of nation-states, has compressed time and space to the point where volatility and a growing homogenization
are the rule and not the exception, within the centre as much as on the periphery (Harvey, 1989: 191). Thus envisioned,

the culture of postmodernism.

we are all within

The idea of modernizing undermines ties to previous ways of life

Sanchez and Pita 99, Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature at UC San Diego,
Lecturer at UC San Diego, respectively (Rosaura, Beatrice, Mapping Cultural/Political Debates in Latin
American Studies, Cultural Studies, Volume 13:2, Pgs. 290-318, Taylor and Francis Online) EC

In developing countries,modernization is still a project to be realized rather than

something taken for granted. The past, meaning not a pre-colonial past but the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is not yet an
object of nostalgia in the Third World but rather still very much a part of todays
reality; the resulting incongruities are of course jarring. For example, the adobe Indian huts of the Ecuadorian sierra,
although now disappearing, are still visible to anyone driving on the now paved Pan American highway, from which, moreover, one can also glimpse
an occasional satellite dish. To account for these juxtapositions, one must realize, as Chakrabarty explains, that history exists in Third World societies
precisely because it has not yet been devoured by consumerist social practices (Chakrabarty, 1992a:
57). Something similar could perhaps likewise be said about the First World itself,where internal Third World and/or ethnic spaces lend credence to the idea that the death of history
has been, to say the least, greatly exaggerated.

Link Stability
Euro-Americans views on Latin America based on upheavals
Timothy Smith, 06- Assistant Professor of Anthropology (Views from the South: Intellectual
Hegemony and Postmodernism in Latin America, Taylor and Francis Online,
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00938150500535554#tabModule)//NG

research of many anthropologists working in Latin America has been

framed by the social, political, and economic upheavals that have marked a number of
countries devastated by armed conflicts, counterinsurgency wars, economic crises,
corrupt governments, and foreign intervention. In moves towards peace and reconciliation, however, emerging governments and
their foreign aid donors have strategically used the international rhetoric of democratic
transition and democratic openingsmany times based on a Euroamerican model as
well as focusing on decentralization and the attempt to reconcile multiculturalism with the
national project. Included in this process is a celebration of human rights, increased
tolerance of ethnic claims, and the challenge of guaranteeing minority rights within a
neoliberal framework. Moreover, an emerging acknowledgment of ethnic and cultural diversity
is forcing accommodating states to reformulate their definition of citizenship in order to maintain
Throughout the last two decades, the

the appearance of their willingness to cooperate in the stable institution of democratic forms of government (Kymlicka 2001). For nearly forty years, scholars of (and from)

provide an understanding of a
region that has been marked by utopian revolutions, foreign intervention, troubled
economies, military repression, and a failed modernist paradigm of development. In No
Latin America have pointed to the importance and necessity of intellectuals to cover these issues, and to

Apocalypse, No Integration, Martn Hopenhayn (2001) attempts to lay out what he considers the defining failures of Latin American social planning and the roles of those

utopian movements and the vanguards of

development failed to meet the challenges of countries whose populations escaped the
violence of war, genocide, and state repression. Instead, they were met with development policy, orthodox Marxism, and
intellectuals involved with or against the ill-formed models of development narratives. Both

dependency theory. However, from the ashes of these paradigms, visions of the Left, and the dismantled state project come new alternatives for social transformation and the
creation of new and viable channels for change. Hopenhayn punctuates the argument by claiming that, while the energies and beliefs in participatory responsibility continue to
exist in new social movements, albeit fragmented and dispersed at the present, they must be given new meaning in order to survive. Participation in alternative pathways must

intellectuals can make themselves

relevant by framing new objects of study in their projects, by making use of Latin
America's historical contingencies, and by abandoning the search for any one new
paradigm; social scientists must advocate an epistemological pluralism if they are to
understand the complexities of postrevolutionary Latin America.
be relevant and have importance in daily life. The role of the intellectual is not to be abandoned. Rather,

Intellectuals bad- see the fight against oppression as a sign of inferiority

rather than the road to rights
Sanchez and Pita 99, Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature at UC San Diego,
Lecturer at UC San Diego, respectively (Rosaura, Beatrice, Mapping Cultural/Political Debates in Latin
American Studies, Cultural Studies, Volume 13:2, Pgs. 290-318, Taylor and Francis Online) EC

At the level of political debate, it becomes increasingly clear that there is at times an
intolerance and even impatience today among some Latin American intellectuals
with the very notion of revolution and with those who would continue to assert the
centrality of class location and who seek macrosocial transformations. This is evident in Monsivis recent
article, translated and published in the L.A. Times, giving his reaction to the Chiapas Zapatista (EZLN) guerrillas, who rejected the governments rst proposed peace plan. His comments
reveal disappointment verging on exasperation with their unrealistic reasoning (Monsivis,
1994). Monsivis does not support the Zapatistas armed struggle nor does he see the need
to continue it, despite admiring their sense of community and sharing many of their
grievances: the high-level corruption, the imperial presidency, the state party, the
terrible abandonment of indigenous communities and the rejection of democracy. As is clear,

Monsivis sees the problems of the indigenous populations in Chiapas in political terms and views the struggle in cultural terms.

The political battle which he

credits them with winning is the media war. We would have to agree that sub-comandante Marcos has made it a point to voice his demands in terms
of more palatable discourses, such as subalternity (giving a voice to the voiceless, a face to the faceless, etc.); yet, what in effect the Indians claim is land, health bene ts, education, work and political reform.

. Their
call for democracy however leads Monsivis to question their posing as national
representatives and their appropriation of the expression civil society, which he
himself elsewhere used to describe non-state-linked urban movements (Monsivis, 1992: 13), as if claims to
civil society were reserved to a select civilian sector and not to others. It is perhaps an ironic and telling sign of the self-delusion
of cultural and political critics that while some see armed struggle as pass, as a stage
superseded by new social movements, U.S. policy makers envision more rather than
less armed confrontation with Third World enemies (Marxist-Leninists , terrorists, drug-traf ckers, religious fundamentalists, etc.)
(Jonas, 1990: 21). Reactions to social conditions themselves, which the United Nations Economic
Commission for Latin America estimates leave 44 per cent of the regions population
(183 million) living in poverty and 44 per cent of the workforce unemployed or
underemployed, are a key issue. Latin American countries, following the neo-Liberal economic policies imposed by the IMF and the World Bank have in recent
years imposed brutal austerity programmes reducing government expenditures, in effect instituting a process of pauperization for many (Petras and Vieux, 1992: 1014). Thus fundamental
questions of economic disparity and widespread conditions of human misery resulting
from this drastic scal retrenchment could be said to contribute to continued popular
mobilization and struggle, this (not surprisingly, perhaps) despite the defection of a number of leftist intellectuals to neo- Liberal policies. As Petras and Vieux indicate (1992:
The coinciding of the Chiapas revolt with the signing of NAFTA makes the point that the leaders explicitly meant to tie their grievances with the larger concerns of Mexican workers and citizens

19):

The affs liberal approach to conflict resolution reduces peace to an end

their discourse reinscribes a rigid universalism
Richmond, Professor IR Intercollege in Cyprus, 6 (Oliver, Patterns of Peace Global Society, Vol 20
No 4, p 367-394, InformaWorld)//JAG

These critical arguments carry important policy implications for the

construction of peace, contrary to received wisdom that such approaches cannot
engage with the policy world. For example, if, as the liberal peace argument dictates, peace is generalisable, universalisable, and can actually be
constructed, then the critical project of a universal emancipation indicates that the current development of the liberal peace project may lead to further emancipatory
refinements, perhaps relating to human security issues. The more radical criticism associated with post-structuralism would argue that this is not a viable project, but this offers

what these approaches

indicate is the need to uncover these unintended consequences, and to respond to
them in order to enhance the sustainability of peace. Even better, this peace should not just be
externally sustainable but also self-sustainable . Yet reframing peace as communicative action based upon Habermasian dialogic
little for policy makers other than a greater sensitivity to the unintended consequences of their own actions. Either way,

relations underlines the negotiation and mediation that is played out in any discussion of peace between actors, interests, norms, and valuespast, present, and futureas well
as the role of individuals in claiming agency in their emancipation.73 This type of processof learning and of feedbackdoes not seem apparent in most theorisations and
practices that contribute to peacebuilding and the peacebuilding consensus. Indeed, this development of a fourth generation in peace and conflict theory seems to be a

the sort of universalism inherent even

in an emancipatory discourse such as in critical theory, which privileges liberal
positions, may tend towards the notion that one actor in a relationship has better
knowledge or more expertise in a particular area and therefore must act to
emancipate the other. In one sense, this is exactly the conundrum faced by the liberal
peace and its associated peacebuilding consensus. From this perspective, peace is
simply a differend, which, whatever its creators best intentions, simply
reproduces injustice and conflict for some of its constituents.75 What these emancipatory approaches to
counter-discourse to the mainstream dogma of peace.74 However, it is also problematic because

understanding peace underline is that some of the conceptualisations of peace tend to fall into mainstream, orthodox and conservative discourses, whereas others76 are
effectively counter-discourses, which in critical fashion indicate that the notion of peace simply cannot be deployed without an adjective specifying what type of peace is being

liberal peace is a classic example of this, and indicates that built into its implicit
such orthodox conceptualisations of peace as an ideal
form, obtainable or unobtainable, represent a discursive game in which the use of
the term often disguises or legitimates baser objectives. The liberal peace and the
emancipatory notion of peace are often equated, although there are significant
referred to, who defines it, and for what reasons. The

theorisation is an acknowledgement of its limitations. In effect

differences. Yet it is a characteristic of most discussions of, claims about, and

conceptualisations of peace that its emancipatory qualities are claimed and
emphasised, mainly because it is such a powerful normative concept.
Perception of Latin America as failing lead to neoliberalism- increases
social division
Sanchez and Pita 99, Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature at UC San Diego,
Lecturer at UC San Diego, respectively (Rosaura, Beatrice, Mapping Cultural/Political Debates in Latin
American Studies, Cultural Studies, Volume 13:2, Pgs. 290-318, Taylor and Francis Online) EC
Neo-Liberal projects are also no doubt a response to the perceived failures of several

revolutionary struggles, and the incapacity of Third World nations to survive as socialist
states, given the crushing blockades, embargoes and destabilizing counter-insurgency,
backed overtly or covertly by the United States. The odds have been overwhelmingly
against any small Third World nation seeking to delink itself from transnational
corporate and US military domination, especially in the absence of regional alliances to
provide support; the unviability of these efforts has led to a rethinking of social change and revolution among the Left. For this reason many have traded in
socialism for neo-Liberal calls for redemocratization and have grounded hopes for
political action in the new social movements, forgetting that liberal democracy is the
handmaiden of modernization; that is, the consolidation of bourgeois democracy, which tends, if anything, to preclude social transformation, much as has
been historically the case in the United States, with its increasingly polarized class and
racially divided society.

Impact Imperialism
We control impact uniqueness the dichotomized knowledge of the aff
ensures endless warfare because otherness can only be encountered as a
target for US bombs their epistemology rigs the game in favor of
imperialist conclusions**
Chow, Professor Comparative Lit at Brown, 6 (The Age of the World Target p 36-39)//JAG

In the decades since 1945, whether in dealing with the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, North Korea, Vietnam, and countries in Central America, or during the Gulf Wars, the United States has been

War and knowledge enable and foster

each other primarily through the collective fantasizing of some foreign or alien body that
poses danger to the "self" and the "eye" that is the nation. Once the monstrosity of this
foreign body is firmly established in the national consciousness, the decision makers of
the U.S. government often talk and behave as though they had no choice but war.38
War, then, is acted out as a moral obligation to expel an imagined dangerous alienness from
the United States' self-concept as the global custodian of freedom and democracy. Put in
a different way, the "moral element," insofar as it produces knowledge about the "self"
and "other"and hence the "eye" and its "target"as such, justifies war by its very
dichotomizing logic. Conversely, the violence of war, once begun, fixes the oilier in its
attributed monstrosity and affirms the idealized image of the self. In this regard, the pernicious
stereotyping of the Japanese during the Second World Warnot only by US military
personnel but also by social and behavioral scientistswas simply a flagrant example of
an ongoing ideological mechanism that had accompanied Western treatments of nonWestern "others" for centuries. In the hands of academics such as Geoffrey Gorer, writes Dower, the notion that was collectively and "objectively" formed about the
conducting war on the basis of a certain kind of knowledge production, and producing knowledge on the basis of war.

Japanese was that they were "a clinically compulsive and probably collectively neurotic people, whose lives were governed by ritual and 'situational ethics,' wracked with insecurity, and swollen with deep, dark
currents of repressed resentment and aggression."39 As Dower points out, such stereotyping was by no means accidental or unprecedented: The Japanese, so "unique" in the rhetoric of World War Two, were
actually saddled with racial stereotypes that Europeans and Americans had applied to nonwhites for centuries: during the conquest of the New World, the slave trade, the Indian wars in the United States, the
agitation against Chinese immigrants in America, the colonization of Asia and Africa, the U.S. conquest of the Philippines at the turn of the century. These were stereotypes, moreover, which had been strongly
reinforced by nineteenth-century Western science. In the final analysis, in fact, these favored idioms denoting superiority and inferiority transcended race and represented formulaic expressions of Self and Other
in general.40 The moralistic divide between "self" and "other" constitutes the production of knowledge during the U.S. Occupation of Japan after the Second World War as well. As Monica Braw writes, in the years
immediately after 1945, the risk that the United States would be regarded as barbaric and inhumane was carefully monitored, in the main by cutting off Japan from the rest of the world through the ban on travel,
control of private mail, and censorship of research, mass media information, and other kinds of communication. The entire Occupation policy was permeated by the view that"the United States was not to be
accused; guilt was only for Japan":41 As the Occupation of Japan started, the atmosphere was military. Japan was a defeated enemy that must be subdued. The Japanese should be taught their place in the world:
as a defeated nation, Japan had no status and was entitled to no respect. People should be made to realize that any catastrophe that had befallen them was of their own making. Until they had repented, they were
suspect. If they wanted to release information about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it could only be for the wrong reasons, such as accusing the United States of inhumanity. Thus this

the elitist and aggressive panoramic "vision" in which the

other is beheld means that the sufferings of the other matter much less than the
transcendent aspirations of the self. And, despite being the products of a particular
culture's technological fanaticism, such transcendent aspirations are typically expressed
in the form of selfless universalisms. As Sherry puts it, "The reality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
seemed less important than the bomb's effect on 'mankind's destiny,' on 'humanity's
choice,' on 'what is happening to men's minds,' and on hopes (now often extravagantly
revived) to achieve world government."43 On Japan's side, as Yoneyama writes, such a
"global narrative of the universal history of humanity" has helped sustain "a national
victimology and phantasm of innocence throughout most of the postwar years ." Going one step further,
she remarks: "The idea that Hiroshima's disaster ought to be remembered from the transcendent
and anonymous position of humanity . . .might best be described as 'nuclear
universalism.' "44 Once the relations among war, racism, and knowledge production are underlined in these terms, it is no longer possible to assume, as some still do, that the recognizable
information was suppressed.42 As in the scenario of aerial bombing,

features of modern warits impersonality, coerciveness, and deliberate crueltyare "divergences" from the "antipathy" to violence and to conflict that characterize the modern world.45 Instead, it would be

the pursuit of warwith its use of violenceand the pursuit of peace

with its cultivation of knowledgeare the obverse and reverse of the same coin, the coin
that I have been calling "the age of the world target." Rather than being irreconcilable
opposites, war and peace are coexisting, collaborative functions in the continuum of a
virtualized world. More crucially still, only the privileged nations of the world can afford to wage war
and preach peace at one and the same time. As Sherry writes, "The United States had
incumbent on us to realize that

different resources with which to be fanatical: resources allowing it to take the lives of
others more than its own, ones whose accompanying rhetoric of technique disguised the
will to destroy."46 From this it follows that, if indeed political and military acts of cruelty are not unique to the United Statesa point which is easy enough to substantiatewhat is nonetheless
remarkable is the manner in which such acts are, in the United States, usually cloaked in the form of enlightenment and altruism, in the form of an aspiration simultaneously toward technological perfection and

. In a country in which political leaders are held accountable for their decisions
by an electorate, violence simply cannotas it can in totalitarian countriesexist in the raw. Even the most violent acts must be
adorned with a benign, rational story. It is in the light of such interlocking relations among war, racism, and knowledge production that I would make the
the pursuit of peace

following comments about area studies, the academic establishment that crystallizes the connection between the epistemic targeting of the world and the "humane" practices of peacetime learning.

This logic of visibility transforms the globe into a picture whose existence is
defined in terms of its very representability. It is precisely this logic which
necessitates atomic annihilation as the end point of this process of
presencing otherness.
Chow, Professor Comparative Lit at Brown, 6 (Rey, The Age of the World Target p 29-31)//JAG
I should make clear that what I am suggesting is not simply that hard science was replaced by a visual gimmick, that the "real thing" was replaced by a mere representation. Instead, it is that the
dropping of the bombs marked the pivot of the progress of science, a pivot which was to
continue its impact on all aspects of human life long after the Second World War was
over. Science has, in modernity, reached the paradoxical point whereby it is simultaneously
advanced and reduced. Having progressed far beyond the comprehension of
nonspecialists and with complexities that challenge even the imagination of specialists,
science is meanwhile experienced daily as the practically useful, in the form of
miniscule, convenient, matter-of-fact operations that the lay person can manipulate at
his or her fingertips. This is the situation to which Martin Heidegger refers in a passage such as this one from his well-known essay "The Age of the World Picture": Everywhere and in
the most varied forms and disguises the gigantic is making its appearance. In so doing, it evidences itself simultaneously in the tendency toward the increasingly small. We have only to think of numbers in atomic

The gigantic presses forward in a form that actually seems to make it disappearin
the annihilation of great distances by the airplane in the setting before us of foreign and remote worlds in their everydayness, which is produced at random through
physics.

radio by a flick of hand. Our daily uses of the light switch, the television, the computer, the cell phone and other types of devices are all examples of this paradoxical situation of scientific advancement, in which the
portentous what Heidegger calls "the gigantic"disappears into the mundane, the effortless, and the intangible. We perform these daily operations with ease, in forgetfulness of the theories and experiments that

Seldom do we need to think of the affinity between these daily operations and a
disaster such as the atomic holocaust. To confront that affinity is to confront the terror
that is the basis of our everyday life. For Heidegger, hence, the explosion of the atomic bomb is "the
mere final emission of what has long since taken place, has already happened"15a
process of annihilation that began with the very arrival of modern science itself. From a
military perspective, the mushroom cloud of smoke and dust signals the summation of a
history of military invention that has gone hand in hand with the development of
representational technologies, in particu lar the technologies of seeing. As Paul Virilio asserts, "For men at war, the function of the weapon is the function of the eye."16
made them possible.

Virilio argues time and again in his work that close affinities exist between war and vision. Because military fields were increasingly reconfigured as fields of visual perception, preparations for war were
increasingly indistinguishable from preparations for making a film: "The Americans prepared future operations in the Pacific," Virilio writes, "by sending in film-makers who were supposed to look as though they

in the age of modern technology,

the world has become a "world picture." By this, he means that the process of (visual)
objectification has become so indispensable in the age of modern scientific research that
understanding"conceiving" and "grasping" the worldis now an act inseparable from
the act of seeing from a certain form of "picturing." However, he adds, "picture" in this case does not mean an imitation. As he
explains: World picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world
but the world conceived and grasped as a picture. What is, in its entirety, is now taken in
such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by
man, who represents and sets forth. Wherever we have the world picture, an essential
decision takes place regarding what is, in its entirety. The Being of whatever is, is
sought and found in the representedness of the latter." For Heidegger, the world becoming a picture
is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age, and he emphasizes the point "that
the world becomes picture is one and the same event with the event of man's (sic)
were on a location-finding mission, taking aerial views for future film production."17 In the essay cited above, Heidegger argues that

becoming subiectum in the midst of that which is."19 By the word subiectum, he is referring to "that-which-lies-before, which, as ground,
gathers everything onto itself."20 As such "ground," men (sic) struggle to conquer the world as their own
particular pictures, bringing into play an "unlimited power for the calculating, planning,
and molding of all things." As is clearly demonstrated by the case of the United States,
science and research have become "an absolutely necessary form of this establishing of
self in the world."21
Imperialism Bad- leads to indebtedness, unemployment, increased
imports, insufficient pay, greater social gap, poverty, and illiteracy
Sanchez and Pita 99, Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature at UC San Diego,
Lecturer at UC San Diego, respectively (Rosaura, Beatrice, Mapping Cultural/Political Debates in Latin
American Studies, Cultural Studies, Volume 13:2, Pgs. 290-318, Taylor and Francis Online) EC

Latin American testimonials, for example, are, at one level, indisputably commodities
produced within this postmodern period; that is,within the transnational phase of
capitalism, for a world market. This global restructuring of capitalist production (cultural and
Contemporary

otherwise) is said to signal the triumph of modernization and the end of the modernist developmental or historical paradigm (Jameson, 1991: 324).

is an ongoing project having a tremendous impact on the

restructuring of Latin American economies, although not in the sense of emancipation
from want and full integration into a mass economic and political democracy, but rather of its penetration by
massive foreign investment, multinationals, informational technology and hardware
and its insertion within a global circuit of consumption, especially of cultural commodities. It goes without
saying that whatever processes are at work at the cultural level, the postmodern period of capitalism has in fact
meant increased capitalist penetration, indebtedness, balance-of-payment dif -
culties, in ation, rising unemployment and underemployment, the growth of an
informal sector of the economy, the restructuring of local cultures, and of course,
increased consumption, especially by local middle and upper classes, with access to videorecorders, radios, televisions and other
But in fact, within the Third World, modernization

cultural artefacts. Attendant to this widening consumer society, to which we will return below, is an intensi cation of uneven development itself, for

US, motivated by local

market penetration and the availability of cheap labour, has in good measure intensi
ed marginality, poverty and, in some instances, illiteracy.
the installation of growing numbers of assembly plants and manufacturing subsidiaries, especially from the

Impact Oppression
Isolation of regions in area studies creates North/South binaries and
marginalizes Latinos in the United states
Alverez, Arias, and Hal 11 respectively - Director, Center for Latin American, Caribbean and
Latino Studies; Professor of Latin American Literature University of Texas at Austin; Professor of
Anthropology and of African and African Diaspora Studies University of Texas at Austin (Sonia E., Arturo,
and Charles R., Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, Re-visioning Latin American Studies in
the United States, Vol. 17, No. 2, December 2011, 131-145
Questions of how theory travels, of translations and multiple positionalities within contemporary LAS are further complicated by
the burgeoning numbers of diasporic Latin American-origin intellectuals who today work in academic institutions of the North, as
compared to our/their scarce numbers during the heyday of Cold War Area Studies. In that respect, Southeast Asian/ist scholar

the presence of what he calls the immigrant imaginary has increasingly

complicated the practice of Area Studies in the United States, calling into question the
integrationist logic inherent in liberal conceptions of area studies. The growing participation of
Vincent Raphael argues that

diasporic intellectuals in Area Studies, he further contends, makes it harder to determine where exactly the home of such

The connection between the Latin

American immigrant imaginary and that of multi-generation US Latinas/os within
institutionalized Latin American and Latina/o Studies formations is further highlighted, and at the
same time confounded, by the fact that lclontemporary diasporic humanities faculty teach, in relative terms,
literature, politics, anthropology, ethnography, and areas to those from there who are now
permanently here and who constantly have to think themselves in relation to those
Others who came here earlier, under considerably different conditions.2 It is this inexorable
confounding of here and there in the Latina/o Amricas that has spurred some of the most
exciting cross-border, interdisciplinary work in recent decades, a third vital force in the de~centering and
revitalization of LAS. Transmigration and accelerated ows of people, ideas, and capital across the America s has forced a
re-imagining of both Latin America and US Latinas/os. Further incorporating the
voices and perspectives of Latina/os in the United States and of other historically
marginalized groups in the Latinalo Amricas, therefore, is vital to the enterprise of de- centering Latin American
Studies. Indeed, in (historically belated) recognition that Latin America and the Caribbean stretch well into the
North of the Amricas, that there is no inside/outside, that borders within and without
countries in our hemispheres are increasingly uid, Latina/o Studies/Diaspora Studies
constitute a set of miradas/epis- temologies which should be a requisite to a genuinely
revitalized LAS.
scholarship lies and who its privileged practitioners or audiences might be.'

Representations create state policies that oppress and coerce indigenous

people
Crow 10 - Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at the University of Bristol (Joanna,
Introduction: Intellectuals, Indigenous Ethnicity and the State in Latin America, 8/28/10, Latin American and
Caribbean Ethnic Studies Volume 5 Issue 2,
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17442221003787068#.UfwgaW15Oks)//BZ

The state is a crucially important classifier and manager. It enacts policies that affect
indigenous people, determines who is given what rights, and creates and promotes images of
indigenous peoples (through museums, schools, official national symbols, etc.). It also has an
impact on intellectuals representations of indigenous peoples: it can endorse certain people's
work, thereby securing the dissemination of that work and often providing a salary (e.g. Diego Rivera in
Mexico); it can allow people a space to operate without sanctioning their work (e.g. Jos Carlos
Maritegui during Augusto Legua's oncenio in Peru); it can repress those individuals who go too
far in their defense of indigenous rights (in Colombia a number of intellectualactivists have been
eliminated by forces linked to the government). Possibly Foote's article here provides the most compelling

example of the state's role in the dissemination of images (or histories) of indigenous peoples. In some
cases, the link is not so direct but nonetheless important. For example, Wood notes how critical
technological developments have been for the production of indigenous cinema ; these
are not controlled by the state, but they can be encouraged, disseminated andmore
importantlyfinanced by the state. However, it is also important to underline the impact that
intellectuals can have on the state, for it is not a one-way relationship. Baud recently made a pertinent
point in this regard: The coercive and authoritarian elements of Latin American state
formation have obscured not only the developmentalist and sometimes even benevolent policies
of the state, but also the different ways in which subaltern politics penetrated and influenced
these same state policies. (2009, p. 37) Intellectuals, of course, are not necessarily concerned with
subaltern politics, but this is usually the case if they are dealing with indigenous issues or, indeed, are
indigenous themselves. The Maya community organizers that are the focus of Arias perspectives piece are
part of the most marginalized sector of Guatemalan society. As he puts it, indigenous communities
remain outside the purview of the state, yetand this is the crucial pointthey are also the dynamic new
forces transforming it. In a similar vein, Garca tells us that doctors from the Guatemalan Ministry of
Culture changed their views about the scientific (or what they thought was non-scientific) nature of Maya
medicine and healing practice after lengthy discussions with his research team, and even discussed
creating a new style of training to incorporate Maya knowledge.

Scholars evaluate social movements incorrectly-leads to oppression

Brass, Tom (Social and Poltical Sciences Faculty at the University of Cambridge, On which side of the
barricade? Subaltern Resistance in Latin America and Elsewhere, The Journal of Peasant Studies)
9/8/10, http:/ldx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150412331311109

The political implications of this inability to conceptualize false consciousness and the
consequent problems with rural grassroots mobilization based on this are profound. To
begin with, the labelling by postmodern theory of all grassroots cultore as 'authentic' and
'innate', and mobilization on the basis of this as empowering, is a direct effect of a view
that regards subaltern identity/agency as perpetually 'there', and thus 'naturally'
desired by its subject." Not only is such a view epistemologically misplaced - ideologically, nothing is or can be 'natural' -but it misinterprets as 'from
below' or 'authentic' grassroots phenomena forms of
identity/behaviour/culture/consciousness that are actually 'from above' creations." In
doing this, postmodernism exhibits a gullibility exploited in a systematic fashion from
the late 1920s onwards by a nascent public relations industry, which demonstrated
clearly how public opinion in the United States could successfully be constructed/channelled." The object was sinlple:
consciously to stimulate anti-rational desire, which could then be harnessed by
capitalism for two particular ends. First, to generate additional demand for its
commodities; and second, to disguise the 'from above' origin of this initiative, by
presenting it as a 'natural' or 'from below' cultoral emanation that empowers its
subject.
Euroameican scholars ignorant of Latin Americas complexities
Timothy Smith, 06- Assistant Professor of Anthropology (Views from the South: Intellectual
Hegemony and Postmodernism in Latin America, Taylor and Francis Online,
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00938150500535554#tabModule)//NG

Euroamerican scholars mark Latin America as a site of utopian revolutions, foreign

intervention, troubled economies, military repression, and a failed modernist paradigm
of development. Four recent books critically assess this construction by addressing its source in the
international imaginary. They advocate a subaltern perspective on colonial difference and
argue that postmodernity as promulgated by Euroamerican scholars may become yet
another intellectual trend ignorant of Latin America's particularities and complexities.

Latin American scholars have embraced postmodernity far longer than their Euroamerican
counterparts, whose relatively recent applications remain problematic.

Impact Turns Case

Impact- This lead to misrepresentation of people from Latin America
Castro-Gomez 98
a philosopher known for his work on colonial legacies herd in Colombia, He studied philosophy at St. Thomas
University in Bogota, where he was a pupil of faculty members of the Group of Bogot (Philosophy) , main
distributors in Colombia for the Latin American Philosophy . He then traveled to Germany where he graduated in
philosophy at the University of Tbingen and later a doctorate in the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in
Frankfurt. On his return to Colombia was a professor at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota and Thinking
Institute investigator. (Santiago, Latin American postcolonial theories, Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice,
10:1, 27-33, http:l/dx.doi.org/10.1080/10402659808426118)

This means that no sociological theory can "represent" objects found outside the totality
of signs that configure the institutionality of knowledge in modem societies. It is always
anticipated that scientific knowledge is codified within the interior of a fabric of signs
that regulate the production of "meaning," such as in the creation of objects and subjects
of knowledge. It is from a certain "politics of interpretation," then, (actualized in
universities, publishing houses, centers of investigation, etc.) that a theory's "effects of
truth" are produced. Furthermore, the politics of interpretation define the frontiers that
separate one scientific discipline from another and assign determined parcels of
knowledge. . Anticolonialist narratives discursively generated a "marginalized,"
"exteriorized" space which agreed with the reconfiguration of intellectual strongholds
experienced by institutions responsible for creating new knowledge. In many metropolitan
universities "marginality," "alterity," and "Third World ism" were even converted into new fields of
academic investigation capable of mobilizing a considerable amount of financial assistance. The
institutional implementation of these new objects of knowledge/investigation demanded the importation
of "practical examples" from the "Third World," such as magical realism, liberation theology, and any
other subjects that could be classified within the space of "otherness." From this point of view, the

emphasis of anticolonial narratives on opposition, such as the divisions between the

oppressors and the oppressed, the powerful and the meek, center and periphery,
civilization and barbarism, succeeded in strengthening the binary system of
classification inherent to metropolitan apparatuses that produce knowledge

Impact K Affs
Their criticism can never do anything to challenge the violence of
imperialism as it exists only to supplement and strengthen the very modes
of understanding it seeks to criticizetheir theoretical interventions are
grounded in the very logic of referentiality which must purge all otherness
which does not present itself as knowablethe 1AC is merely the
completion of the colonial gaze
Chow, Professor Comparative Lit at Brown, 6 (Rey, The Age of the World Target p 11-15)
The developments of poststructuralist theory in the Anglo-American academy in the
past few decades have led to a situation of considerable irony, in which theoretically
sophisticated studies of the wretched of the earth tend to be undertaken by those in the
most wealthy and prestigious institutions of learning .17 As some of the pages to follow (specifically, in the chapter "The
Interruption of Referentiality") will argue, this aporia between the mode of address (well-informed and often self-conscious academic
language) and the harsh, downtrodden worlds it purports to be concerned about is , to be sure, by no
means attributable purely to poststructuralist theory , but the latter's focus on the self-referential
capacity of language and signification, as well as its radical suspension and deferral of
referentiality as such, does make certain questions ineluctable . For instance, are we to consider such an aporia a
kind of revelation that has been made all the more acute by the theoretical understanding of the temporally belated or displaced nature of linguistic signification, or are we to
think of it as characteristic of the social divide between the economically comfortable and the disenfranchised? Or both? Are not the two seemingly disparate phenomenaone

the
more glaring the economic divide is, the more it tends to become a motor for the kind of
truth that language unveils by being profoundly, painfully aware of itself, of its own
rules of intelligibility? Conversely, if the ineluctability of linguistic self-referentiality has
stemmed from a historical awareness of language-as-fundamental-dislocation as Foucault and
other poststructuralist theorists have argued can such self-referentiality, however patient and vigilant, in any
way help ameliorate the problems of social inequity and injustice, or does it simply
becomeand continue to derive its legitimacy assuch inequity and injustice's
symptom? Where does the incessant bracketing of referentiality leave those cultures and
identities that remain peripheralized? Can poststructuralist theory deal with exclusion
having to do with the technical nuance of academic language, the other having to do with "vulgar" economicsmutually inscribed in each other, in the sense that

and how? What happens when poststructuralist theory confronts the demands of critical multiculturalism? This is the point at which self-referentiality, as a problematic
emerging from a particular epistemic rupture, needs to be understood in terms that go beyond the drama of avant-garde language and theory in modernity. As I will argue in the
chapter "The Age of the World Target," some of Martin Heidegger's work, insofar as it challenges the dominance of the modern technological attitudenamely, an exploitative,
ordering attitude that sees human beings as the center of the universe for whose use everything else existsserves as a good point of departure for a broader critique.
Heidegger's analysis in the essay "The Age of the World Picture" offers valuable insights into the philosophical underpinnings of the United States' hegemony as a military
superpower and its will to world domination in the twentieth century. In 1945, toward the end of the Second World War, the United States dropped its entire inventory of two
atomic bombs on Japan. What politics of visionof viewing the worldaccompanied the strategic decision to drop the bombs? The technologies of atomic warfare, inseparable
from those of seeing, have far-reaching ramifications. Following Heidegger's suggestion that in modernity the world has come to be grasped and conceived as "a picture," we may

If the rise of
modern self-referential writing has functioned as a "mad" and "poetic" resistance to the
steady instrumentalization of the world, one that is dominated by the manifestation or
unveiling of techne in the form of destructive technological forces, what does this
madness, this poetry, have to say about catastrophes such as that caused by the
dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? In the context of Anglo America, this question embeds
say that in the wake of the atomic bombs the world has come to be grasped and conceived as a target to be destroyed as soon as it can be made visible.18

another, one that concerns the place of America in contemporary cross-cultural transactions: how, in the wake of the institutionalization of poststructuralist theory, which
arrived from Europe (and is derived from the undoing of European though from within itself), have we dealt with historical events on the Pacific side of the United States? Does
the literary-theoretical consciousness/writing that rebels against the demotion of language ever see these events other than casting them as signs of the decline and sunset of the
West? From Nietzsche and Heidegger to Derrida and Foucault, Western philosophy and theory's pronouncements of the West's demise and loss of meaning have continued with

Poststructuralist theory exercised

and strengthened the muscles of Western thought, rendering that thought even more
able to reproduce itself through discursive self-criticism"; at the same time it "has not
attempted to seriously confront the non-West" except through negligence and silence .19 As
relative indifference to and ignorance of the histories and languages elsewhere. As Shu-mei Shih writes: "

a scholar from Asia working closely with European theory in America, I find myself habitually returning to the implications of this disjuncture: between the self-reflexive and
(fashionably) mournful/melancholy postures of contemporary theory, on the one hand, and the strange complacency of its provincial contents (its habit to tell the story only

about certain languages, cultures, and histories), on the other, is there not... a persistent epistemic scandal? One may perhaps counter: life is short; you can't expect specialists of
ancient Greek tragedy, the Italian Renaissance, German semiotics of the eighteenth century, the English novel, or the French nouveau roman to know about happenings in the

that alibiof not having enough time or not being available to know
everythingis precisely the heart of the matter here because it is, shall we say, a oneway privilege. Such an alibi is simply not acceptable or thinkable for those specializing
in non-Western cultures. They, by contrast, must know quite a bit more than their own
specialtiesin the form of languages, histories, and textsin order to pass as credible academic professionals. Few scholars of Asian languages and literatures, for
Pacific region. But

instance, have not read or studied something by Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Austen, Dickens, Freud, and Woolf; fewer still
have not heard of Sartre, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Benjamin, Adorno, and Habermas in recent decades. On these scholars, the pressure is that of an imperative to acquire global
breadthto be cosmopolitan in their knowledgeeven if they choose to specialize in esoteric languages and subject matters. (Time and again, the contrast between those who
specialize in the West and those who specialize in the Rest comes to the fore at international conferences held in Asia, Australia, Latin America, and elsewhere. In my own
experience with such conferences, local participants often have read the latest theory published in North America or Europe, whereas those specializing in North America or
Europe, unless they happen to be ethnically or culturally related to the Rest, often can only speak of their own specialties with little knowledge of the local languages or cultural
traditions. If language is used as a metaphor, the locals in this instance tend by and large to be multilingualin the sense that they [are obligated to] know more than their own
specialty/language, whereas specialists of the West tend by and large to be monolingualin the sense that they often speak only from within their own specialty/language.)

Read against issues raised in the present discussion, the atomic bombs that were
dropped in August 1945 on two Japanese cities suggest much more than the malice that
is an inevitable product of warfare. Above all, the unleashing of the bombs was perhaps
the crowning event of the ascendance of the United States to the position of supreme
world power. Designed with the help of European scientists as part of the war for control
of Europe, the bombs were, nonetheless, deployed to annihilate population centers in
Asia. If the self-referential turn of modern literature and theory is inherent to the
tortuous but necessary process in which the supremacy of the Western logos (and, by
extension, Western imperialism and colonialism) is deconstructed, then the
consequences of the United States' ascendancy as superpower by the mid-twentieth
century, certainly, would need to be part of such deconstruction , whether or not it is consciously intended by the
individual writer. In other words, would not the concerted efforts at disconnecting the signifier and
signifiedat interrupting, bracketing, and dismantling so-called referentialityneed to
be rethought from this supplemental perspective, one that understands America not as just the land of Disney and McDonald's
but also as the successor to and advancer of Europe and European imperialist intentions and tendencies over the course of modern history? In terms of
knowledge production, the shift of the center of geopolitical power to America and an
increasingly English-language-dominant world means that the unleashing of the bombs
must be historicized in conjunction with the post-Second World War development of
area studies, the peacetime information-retrieval machinery that complements the
United States' self-aggrandizing foreign policy. Area studies capitalize on the intertwined
logics of the world-as-picture and the world-as-target, always returning the results of
knowing other cultures to the point of origin, the eye/I that is the American state
and society. As H. D. Harootunian and Masao Miyoshi write: "More than fifty years after the war's end, American
scholars are still organizing knowledge as if confronted by an implacable enemy... Area
studies as it was implanted in colleges and universities and their adherents still
ceaselessly seek to maintain the received structure of operations with new infusions of
cash in a world more global and culturally borderless than the one that existed at the
inception of the Cold War."20 In this instance, in which a binary of self and other is reinforced as
government policy, the epistemic ground that poststructuralist theory methodically
takes apartreveals to be unstableis reestablished both with brute force (military conquests,
followed by the stationing of U.S. troops in various bases throughout the Pacific) and with flourishing civil apparatuses (funding agencies,
educational programs, culture and information bureaus, religious missions, publishing houses, and so forth). Knowledge of the otheroften coded as
native or indigenous knowledgeis now part of the enforcement of self-referentiality in a direct sense.
Rather than being a problematic emerging from the ashes of the demise of language, to
be self-referential is, from the perspective of U.S. foreign policy, a straightforward
practice of aggression and attack.21 As was the case with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in

the more recent wars on Afghanistan and Iraq this self-referentiality means bombing
and eradicatingthose others who are not like "us."

Alternative De-Colonial Epistemology

The alternative is to reject the 1AC to de-center Latin American studies
the alternative is key to open up the academic realm
Alverez, Arias, and Hal 11 respectively - Director, Center for Latin American, Caribbean and
Latino Studies; Professor of Latin American Literature University of Texas at Austin; Professor of
Anthropology and of African and African Diaspora Studies University of Texas at Austin (Sonia E., Arturo,
and Charles R., Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, Re-visioning Latin American Studies in
the United States, Vol. 17, No. 2, December 2011, 131-145

Latin American Studies must be de-centered if it is to continue to thrive in

this transformed environment. Demographic shifts, diasporas, labor migrations, the movements of global
capital and media, and processes of cultural circulation and hybridization have brought into question the nature
of areas identities and composition. Globalization, space/time compression, and greater intemational mobility
We maintain that

have created an intensication of overlaps and brought together intellectual travelers that were formerly kept largely separate.

What has come into question in the wake of contemporary approaches about
population and cultural movements across regions and nations is the notion that the
world can be divided into knowable, self-contained areas of study . Indeed. Latin America is today
a global reality. As Walter Mignolo said at a 2001 retreat to formulate the LASA Strategic Plan , Latin America is now
the perspective, not the area of study. By this Mignolo meant that Latin America is no longer a
geographical entity to be studied; rather. it now signies a reorientation of knowledge,
an epistemology that looks at global concems from a Latin American perspective,
independently of who is doing the looking, from where, and what is being looked at . At
the same time. there is greater complexity in the boundaries that dene the area of study. Traditionally Latin American Studies
have embodied and respected disciplinary boundaries, and in most cases Latin Americanists have been primarily organized by

discipline. But disciplinary divisions no longer work as well as in the past. Increasingly Latin
Americanists nd themselves both anchored in a disciplinary formation, and, at the same time, crossing disciplinary boundaries
into cognate areasin effect becoming trans- disciplinary. While there are still relatively few academic interdisciplinarians and
teaching or training programs that purposely prepare interdisciplinary specialists, many Latin Americanists today deliberately

One can
readily observe today an intensication of the expectation that intellectual activity be
addressed in an interdisciplinary fashion, whether by individuals or by teams of
individuals with different skills working together. This may be so especially in the sciences, but major
funding agencies are requiring interdisciplinary approaches above single-disciplinary ones in many areas of study. Latin
Americanists now have the opportunity to synthesize this new intellectual reality. and
to create new and meaningful disciplinary intersections and congurations that will
help in knowledge production, and in making this knowledge more readily accessible
and applicable to communities and constituencies so as to confront real world
problems and situations.
adopt either trans-disciplinary or interdisciplinary approaches in addressing the intellectual issues they face .

New discourse on Latin America is key to understanding their struggle

Sanchez and Pita 99, Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature at UC San Diego,
Lecturer at UC San Diego, respectively (Rosaura, Beatrice, Mapping Cultural/Political Debates in Latin
American Studies, Cultural Studies, Volume 13:2, Pgs. 290-318, Taylor and Francis Online) EC

Proliferating notions of endism, like post-histor y, post-industrial , postcolonial, postMarxism, post-development and postmodernism are very much a part of the latest
economic/political and cultural phraseology. Aside from blatant grandstanding from the most reactionary quarters, these
categories and this reconguring of explicatory frameworks are a response to an
epistemological crisis closely linked to poststructuralism, to a rejection of
metanarratives, in particular of the Marxist paradigm, and to new formulations of

political struggle within late capitalism (in what Touraine calls post-industrial societies (Touraine, 1981: 6)) carried out by heterogeneous groupings or
social actors. The proliferation of works theorizing these new social movements during the 1980s in Latin America, as well as throughout the world, is a primary example of cultural production within

Key to most if not all these writings is a retreat from class as the fundamental
division in society (Meiksins Wood, 1986). At bottom lies an assumption about the end of old
polarities (i.e. class antagonisms) and a new world order and a call for new strategies
substituting the political for the economic, replacing the question of capitalism with
that of state power (Jameson, 1993a: 174) and privileging cultural discourses and manifestations as the object of study. Modernization (i.e.consumer society), democratization and
popular culture thus become the new foundations of pluralism.What is lacking, ironically, in these presumably antifoundationalist writings is a radical critique of liberalism, that is, of bourgeois
democracy (Chakrabarty, 1992: 20). Central to the body of literature on new social movements is the work of Laclau and Mouffe (1987), whose discursive model, like the sociology of action of
Touraine (1981: 27, 139), focuses on constructs of identity, collectivity, democracy, historicity, as well as on social actors and alliance politics. Latin American theorists,
like Escobar, interested in adapting these models for alternative social projects, posit
the struggle at the level of discourse. For Escobar, in Latin America, social movements
are economic, political and cultural struggles, that is, struggles over meanings, from the
nature of national development to everyday practices (Escobar, 1992: 41). For that reason, Escobar argues, the task
for Latin American intellectuals is both to resist Eurocentric epistemologies and to
construct collective imaginaries capable of orienting social and political action (Escobar, 1992: 41);
that is, new political discourses that allow for a rede nition of Latin America and which
enable the mobilization of emerging new social actors. For this task Escobar signals
three major discourses with the potential to articulate . . . forms of struggle: the
discourse of democracy, the discourse of difference, and anti-development discourses
(Escobar, 1992: 48), all, ironically, one would have to note, Eurocentric constructs as
well.
postmodernity.

Alternative Reject Area Studies

We must reject the borders of area studies to bridge all forms of
disciplinary fields
Alverez, Arias, and Hal 11 respectively - Director, Center for Latin American, Caribbean and
Latino Studies; Professor of Latin American Literature University of Texas at Austin; Professor of
Anthropology and of African and African Diaspora Studies University of Texas at Austin (Sonia E., Arturo,
and Charles R., Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, Re-visioning Latin American Studies in
the United States, Vol. 17, No. 2, December 2011, 131-145

we must acknowledge the distinctive

intellectual genealogies. political trajectories, and bureaucratic moorings of LAS and
Chicana/Puerto Rican/Latina-0 Studies at US universities in striving to bridge rather
than merge the two.2' Many contributors to the Forum urge scholars, activists and practitioners alike to move
beyond the binary opposition between Latina/o and Latin American Studies and
analyze the manifold trans- border ows and points of intersection, as well as points of
tension, between these elds. Given that the US is already the fourth largest Spanish-speaking nation in the world
But as Jonathan Fox, Pedro Cabran and Frances Aparicio rightly insist,

and in light of large and growing populations of Portuguese and Haitian Creole speakers and indigenous and Afro-descendent

a de-centered Latina/o American Studies would be uniquely

poised to promote innovative, policy-relevant knowledge about transmigrations and
diasporas. Producing knowledge relevant to meeting the challenges facing the Latina/o Americas in the 21*
century also requires furthering genuinely interdisciplinaryrather than simply
multidisciplinaryperspectives and cross-disciplinary collaboration, the fourth vital dimension
migrants from Latin America,

of de-centering LAS. Yet. interdisciplinarity itself is in dire need of being re-visioned and updated. Latin American Studies, like
other Area Studies, historically has been largely a multi- rather than an inter- (much less trans-) disciplinary enterprise. insofar
as traditionally it has aggregated disciplines but has not always actively fostered the creative convergence of discipline-based

Area Studies Centers and programs too often have resembled sandboxes, as Latin
wherein colleagues in different disciplines, like small
children in a sandbox, engage in parallel play but do not actually engage with one another . Part
knowledges.

American historian Florencia Mallon aptly puts it,

of our common agenda as ofcers in LASA was to contribute to changing the prevailing culture of multi-disciplinarity,
encouraging faculty and students to think in terms of playing across disciplinary boundaries in our ongoing pedagogical and
research projects. ln fact, LAS

entails not just inter-disciplinary dialogue but also promoting

conversations and collaboration with other inter/trans-disciplinary elds, such as
feminist studies. critical race studies. LGBTII studies, cultural studies. social
movement studies. and postcolonial studies. Finally, unsettling historically hegemonic forms and
practices of LAS requires that we promote productive dialogues between universitybased and non-university-based or alternative knowledge producers . We must be more
attentive and responsive to the fact that knowledge about the Latin/o-a Amricas is produced in an
ever wider range of places and spaces within and without the academy from professionalized
non-governmental organizations and autonomous feminist collectives to barrio organizations in Chicago linked to the altemative
globalization movement. to Juntas de Buen Gobierno (Good Government) in Chiapas. As LASA ofcers, we made special effons to
open spaces for what we termed altemative knowledge producers and collaborative research methods. through new categories of
paper submissions, and LASA supported initiatives such as Otros Saberes.23 The

contention here is that to

foment dialogue across the borders that conventionally have separated academic and
non-academic sites of theory production can only prove mutually enriching.

Alternative Peasant Consciousness

Postmodern aporia and flawed knowledge about culture marginalizes Latin
Americans-evaluating a new peasant conciousness is key to solve
Brass, Tom (Social and Poltical Sciences Faculty at the University of Cambridge, On which side of the
barricade? Subaltern Resistance in Latin America and Elsewhere, The Journal of Peasant Studies)
9/8/10, http:/ldx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150412331311109
A second form of postmodern aporia involves the claim that, as the subaltern is

unknowable, he/she cannot be represented, in effect not only abolishing the

intellectual accessibility of peasants and labourers but converting them into the
mysterious 'other' of conservative discourse. those such as Spivak and Kristeva link the
'unrepresentability' of subaltern culture to the 'unknowability' of the subaltern
him/herself: a subject thus defined cannot be represented by someone 'other' (=

intellectuals) than im/herself, a view that verges on the solipsistic." A consequence of pristine subaltern
'otherness' being both unknowable and intellectually inaccessible, moreover, is that it is unalterable.
Just such an epistemology is invoked by conservatives who claim that, as the subaltern

likes the wayhe/she is, and feels empowered by his/her culture (of which the economic
merely a part), consequently no one- and especially not intellectuals on t left - should
presume to advise him/her otherwise. This of course leaves power and control in the
hands of the bourgeoisie, since according to t kind of argument it is impermissible for
an intellectual even to put t subaltern a non-subaltern idea: because the subaltern is
unknowable, the nature of the subaltern and therefore of its 'other' cannot even be
posssible Even if it could, intellectuals are disbarred from this, because to do so is privilege a nonsubaltern discourse. Theorized in this manner, both the subaltern and his/her culture become
essentialized and a-temporal forms of existence. Each remains socio economically
hermetic and ahistorical, immune to external change a challenge: neither can be
analyzed, only reported." This innate a unmediated subaltern consciousness of course
forbids its characterization false, which in tom prevents not ouly the transcendence
but also a political critique by those who are not themselves subalterns of existing culture identity
and agency based on this. Denying the efficacy of 'false consciousness' on the grounds that 'Western
Marxism [refuses] class consciousness to the pre-capitalist Subaltern', therefore, Beverley ag follows
Spivak and maintains that it is necessary to recognize the existention of a specifically subaltern form of
peasant consciousness." Not the le problematic aspect of such an epistemology is that it depoliticizes the
li between consciousness and action. Like postmodernism generally, it al licenses the reification of every
form of belief, which can then be subsum within an all-embracing rubric of 'subaltern consciousness'.

Trapped wit this epistemology, Latin American subaltemists are forced to conclude the
since there is no such thing as false consciousness, all from-bel consciousness which
exists must therefore be an 'authentic' grassro manifestation. Within this nonjudgemental framework, subaltern agent based on any and every conceivable kind of
political consciousness conservative and reactionary as well as socialist and
progressive -become empowering for its subject, and consequently is regarded not just
legitimate but also as unchallengeable.

A2: Perm
Perm fails have to supplant current forms of knowledge production about
marginalized cultures to reconfigure Eurocentrism
Jenko, Professor PolSci National University of Singapore, 11 (Leigh, Fall, Recentering Political
Theory: The Promise of Mobile Locality Cultural Critique, Vol 79, ProjectMuse)//JAG
Recentered Political Theory: Two Examples Two examples from recent scholarly work on Asian thought begin to illustrate (but by no means exhaust) what this recentered
political theory may look like. I have chosen to analyze the work of scholars who are Western in terms of nationality and academic location because their position belies the
necessity of their own Eurocentrism, and inverts the much more common direction of intellectual influence from the West to the East. The first is Stephen C. Angles recent
book Sagehood: The Contemporary Significance of Neo-Confucian Philosophy. Although Angle ultimately grounds his argument in analytic philosophical discourse without
directly problematizing philosophy as a field of knowledge organization, his analysis is exemplary of recentering in other important ways. Angles primary goal is to flesh out
and push forward a contemporary Confucianism based on Neo-Confucian orientations to their defining but contested goal of sage-hood (sheng), understood as a character ideal
that cultivates moral spontaneity in accord with the ethical-political principles of the Way (dao) (26). He argues that a viable extension of neo-Confucian sage-hood in the
modern world is centered on reverence for harmony (he), interpreted as respect for the interdependence of self and world indicated by the neo-Confucian value of li(coherence).
In elaborating his argument, Angle does not ignore counterarguments or insights from contemporary Anglo-American analytic philosophy, but he identifies their relevance in
terms of the neo-Confucian ideals at issue, rather than as independently valuable or definitive paradigms of what philosophy or moral character should look like or be
compared to (2225). Writing in English but drawing more extensively on Sinophone sources than Anglophone ones, Angle problematizes the issue of audience by explaining
that his argument addresses, in addition to his colleagues in the West, fellow scholars of Confucianism, and perhaps a broader Chinese audience as well. He notes his
indebtedness to the Chinese scholars he engaged (in Chinese) while doing research at Beijing University and presenting his work at universities across China, Hong Kong, and
Taiwan (8, viiviii). It is precisely by working within the internal threads of neo-Confucian tradition and engaging its contemporary advocates that Angle defends its unique
contributions to the ideals of the contemporary world. He holds that it can be [End Page 47] taken seriously by everyone, whether or not their ancestors could have been
Confucians, but without suborning it to the terms or concerns of analytic political philosophy (179). Although Angle does not address the possibility of how or if his project
implies disciplinary displacement, other projects have come to interrogate the modes and foci of knowledge production within political science and philosophy. The elaboration
of alternative disciplines to structure knowledge in different but productive ways offers another illustration of recentering. Ingrid Jordt, a Buddhist yogi haun(i.e., established
meditator) and anthropologist, shows how the phenomenon of Buddhist mass lay meditation in Burma reconfigures political legitimacy along Buddhist lines by authorizing the
laity to verify the activities of both sangha[Buddhist monastic community] and state (2007, 212). In the process, participants in this movement develop new ways to verify the
interior knowledge gained from meditation (such as if and to what degree political leaders, monks, and lay people have progressed toward nyanzin, or stages of insight) that in
Jordts view cultivates a distinct disciplinary enterprise. Likening this discipline to Western psychology or cognitive science, Jordt suggests that it poses compelling and
heretofore unexplored connections between how ethical training such as meditation can cultivate particular beliefs and verifiable mental transformations in its practitioners
(2006, 195). Although conventional political science has typically ignored interior mental states, Jordt argues that they are essential components for the moral empirical theory
of knowing, praxis, and being in Burmese Buddhism and thus are at least partly constitutive of the political actions that contest and affirm the legitimacy of political rulers

recentering, although ultimately a collective and ongoing project, can begin to take shape
when individual scholars address diverse communities of scholarship and participate in
the production of knowledge in accord with their disciplinary conventions . As Angle and Peng argue,
these very local environments and resources that make such communities possible and
relevant do not preclude their applicability (through some form of explicit or implicit translation) to the more
general questions that circulate within the circumferences of other local communities ,
whether they be disciplinary, cultural, or intellectual. It is on the basis of precisely such [End Page 48] resources, in fact,
that local circumferences are often reconfiguredbut without suborning them to dominant
Eurocentric practice. Jordts experience as an advanced Buddhist meditator and her careful attention to Burmese theorizations of meditation is another
(2007, 61). These two examples show how

example: reconceptualizing in Buddhist terms what constitutes political authority includes not only identifying its particular components (including nyanzin discernment by the
laity, as well as their recognition of leaders pon, the accumulation of merit from past lives) but also reframing the very idea of political authority to work across and reflect the
influence of multiple past and future lifetimes (2007, 183, 197). Jordt thus belies social science attempts to read the military junta in Burma in conventional terms, as a regime of
purely coercive compliance beyond the reach of effective popular critique that takes the exclusive form of democratic voting and protection of human rights. Just as importantly,
she also gestures toward an ambitious new frame for political life that ruptures both temporal and spatial boundaries that usually contain it, requiring explanation by way of the

Her project, like Angles, affirms the viability

of alternative non-Anglophone knowledge communities to pose questions about and
solve contemporary political problems, even as both deny through example the
inevitability of the hold of any particular kind of local thought (including and especially that of Europe and
America) on the academic production of scholars in American and European universities and
elsewhere. The potential of such radically mobile locality is all the more possible if, over
time, the training for political theorists no longer emphasizes conversance with a set of
Euro-American texts, themes, and (almost purely) Anglophone conversations, but
instead centers its students within other, equally rich thought traditions that , while demonstrating
provisional relevance to political life, are guided by distinct concerns (such as sagehood or nyanzin), disciplined by
particular canons (Zhu Xis compilation of the Fourteen Books and its subsequent commentarial amendments, Buddhist sutras of the Theravada tradition),
native epistemology of vipassana meditation that constructs political meanings in Burma (60, 191).

and addressed to other, possibly non-Anglophone or multilingual audiences (Sinophone academia, the global Buddhist intellectual community). Acknowledging that other

the very notion of what it is

we are doing when we do political theory will come under scrutiny from new, diverse
audiencesperhaps culminating in the radical supplanting (rather than merely
intellectual traditions throughout time and space have organized and analyzed knowledge [End Page 49] very differently,

supplementing ) of dominant streams of political-theoretic discourse by currently

existing alternatives. Angles and Jordts projects address multidisciplinary and multilingual audiences, but each is centered in distinct communities of
knowledge production that make their resulting insights possible even as they expose existing disciplines to risk.

Incorporation of subaltern voices into current hegemonies of social studies

ensures marginalization
Mignolo, Professor Romance Studies and Cultural Anthropology at Duke, 99 (Walter, I Am Where I
Think: Epistemology and the Colonial Difference Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol 8 No 2,
p 235-245)//JAG9

loci of enunciation are not marginal. Yet making them visible also makes it
possible to underline that epistemology is not just a happy universal spaces which
everybody can join. As with any thing else, joining something that is hegemonic means to
accept the rule of the game. If you play the game, but not exactly according to the
rules, chances are that you will be somewhat on the margins . However, I am not interested in either playing the role
By definition,

of the 'Hispanic' victim or of the successful marginal who publishes in English in American university presses and works at Duke. I am interested in making the (epistemic)
colonial difference visible. I did not word it like that in The Darker Side of the Renaissance. It is, however, a key-word in the sequel to The Darker Side of the Renaissance,
entitled Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (1999). In this book, I try to clarify the notion of 'colonial difference' by
thinking through it. (Hulme is right, by the way, that I do not make an effort to define theoretical concepts in The Darker Side of the Renaissance; I just use them.) Let us go back
to Bourdieu for a moment and pursue the equation texts-national languages-coloniality of power and cultures of scholarship. In an effort to elucidate the theoretical frame of his
own thinking, Bourdieu honestly pursues a comparison with the German philosophical tradition. The comparison is necessary in order to justify the transferability of scientific
thinking from the sciences of nature to the human sciences, a step which is more difficult to take in the German philosophical legacy because, according to Bourdieu, the
distinction 'erklaren-Verstehen (explanation-understanding)' builds a wall between the natural and the human sciences. French legacies, he concludes, 'propose, then, a
reflection which is much more general, from which I have drawn an epistemological program that can be summed up in one statement: "The scientific fact is conquered,
constructed, confirmed. The conquest of the given is a central concept in Bachelard's thought, and he sums it up in the term epistemological break. Why is this phase of scientific
research important, and why does it separate, as seems to me to be the case, the tradition I represent from the dominant Anglo-Saxon tradition? It is because to say that the
scientific fact has to be fought for is radically to defy, in this regard, all of the givens that social scientific researchers find before them"' (Bourdieu, 1992, p. 43) This brief
description of Bourdieu's self-location (e.g. framing his own locus of enunciation in the social sciences and in the European tradition) makes clear the inseparability between
epistemology and politics of location. What should I do, identify and assume the tradition Bourdieu represents or the dominant Anglo- Saxon tradition he differentiates from?
Obviously neither of them, unless I decide to think from categories, frames and problems that were put in place to deal with the issues of coloniality and the colonial difference in
which I am interested. If I follow the first route, I have two choices. Either to become a social scientist according to the rules of the game that were defined in 'a tradition (to
which) I do not belong', and therefore to be marginal, or to 'apply' Bourdieu's (or any other) 'model' to deal with and analyse coloniality of power and the colonial difference. In

as long
as you are a historian, you cannot be a "Third World' historian because history is an
activity, institution, and way of thinking that was instrumental in the colonization of
memory. The basis of 'Chakrabarty dilemma' is that writing subaltern 'histories' means to remain in an
epistemically subaltern position in the domain of cultures of scholarship . This is because one of
the invisible places in which the coloniality of power operates is the domain
of epistemology. Consequently, if you 'study' colonialism or the subaltern but you
maintain the rules of the social sciences and humanities game, you
maintain the coloniality of power that reproduces the epistemic colonial
either case, I will be epistemologically marginal, that is, epistemologically subaltern. This was precisely 'Chakrabarty's dilemma' in the domain of historiography:

difference . Epistemic loci of enunciation are stubborn and, as in the case of Garcia Canclini (1989), you can describe and 'study'
the hybridy of society and culture in a specific place like Tijuana, while maintaining a
pure, non-contaminated, non-hybrid loci of enunciation . This is why I attempted to think from models and theories
provided by Chicano/a thinkers and Latin American philosophers, such as Enrique Dussel and Rodolfo Kusch. Yet, I also used the models provided by 'complementary
dichotomies' in Amerindian thoughts (Mignolo, 1995). I believe that Hulme intuitively understood this when he says, on page 223, T had the strange impression that Mignolo
actually wanted to be doing something rather different and even more ambitious'. 'Pluritopic hermeneutics' was a necessary step to avoid the 'non-complementary dichotomy'

Their thoughts and works were and are in a

constant struggle with the epistemic colonial difference, not as an object of study but as
loci of enunciation defined by the coloniality of powerthat is, with thinking from a
subaltern epistemic perspective (or Voices from the margins' as Hulme's title states). Dussel's latest work confronts the issue openly (Dussel,
between the knowing subject and the known, the disciplines and the object of study.

1994, 1996, 1998; Mignolo, forthcoming). My not so kind remarks on Gordon Brotherston's article, though not on his magnificent book (Brotherston, 1992), were prompted by
epistemic, not nationalist, considerations. National histories are local histories, certainly, but they cannot be confused with them. Thus, Brotherston's discussion of Amerindian
knowledge of a system of writing, taking position on a dispute between Derrida and Levi-Strauss (that Hulme rightly critiques on page 225), reminded me of Las Casas and
Sepulveda discussing the 'Amerindian Question'. Amerindians themselves having nothing to say, as they have not been invited to participate in a debate in which they
themselves are objects of consideration. That is the epistemic colonial difference from whence emerged Amerindians in the sixteenth century, Chicano/as in the US today, and

'Voices from the margins' are voices from and

dealing with the colonial epistemic difference. This explains the connection between 'darker' and 'hybrid' (a concept I truly do not
white, mestizo, and immigrant crole intellectuals like Kusch, Dussel, and myself.

use very often in the book) that Hulme notices on page 222 of his review. Today, this relationship would be recast in terms of the making of colonial (epistemic) differences.

This is what the humanists and men of letters did in the sixteenth century, and this
process continues, through 'Orientalism' and 'Area Studies', to today.

A2: Perm (K Affs)

Solution: redefine postmodernism
Sanchez and Pita 99, Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature at UC San Diego,
Lecturer at UC San Diego, respectively (Rosaura, Beatrice, Mapping Cultural/Political Debates in Latin
American Studies, Cultural Studies, Volume 13:2, Pgs. 290-318, Taylor and Francis Online) EC

, it would be useful to attempt to disarticulate the term

postmodernism, and stress that it variously, and according to its users,means to
encompass three different areas: (l) the world system of late capitalism, that is, a
postmodern global economy; (2) postmodernity as the general overall condition and
To grapple with this complex and slippery set of notions

(following Jamesons comments on modernity (1991: 310)), as what Raymond Williams calls a structure of feeling, that is, a particular lived

(3) a
cultural aesthetic, an artistic and intellectual dimension composed of different strands
of postmodernism (sans quotation marks). Underpinning all three related categories, implicitly or
explicitly, is of course the term modernization, the key notion implicitly being rejected but
which, however imprecise and contradictory, best describes the globalization
phenomenon presently underway in accelerated fashion in an ever more highly
urbanized Latin America. Thus whether one disagrees on matters of degree or substance and despite its many and serious
shortcomings, this construct postmodernism has to be dealt with. At worst it is a catch-all
marketable, facile and fashionable term; at best it is symptomatic of the period and
grapples with perceived shifts (however slight) in economic, political and cultural structures and practices. Once we are disposed
to look at these three overlapping areas, we can examine contradictory assignments of the term
postmodernist to particular cultural products, like testimonials , using the genre as a test case around
which to critically view the handling of the postmodernist designation. Even critics questioning the adoption of the
postmodernist paradigm, such as Larsen, insist on calling recent testimonials postmodernist
experience or logic of space and time (see Harvey, 1989: 39) that is political as much as cultural/ideological (West, 1988: 272), and

(Larsen, 1990: 88). The testimonial can in fact serve as a useful way of considering different spheres encompassed by postmodernism and of
examining its position within literary spaces while at the same time noting its relation to the market and links to various social movements.

A2: Area Studies Inevitable

Situation in Western knowledge forums is not inevitable alternative
allows for tying knowledge to localized knowledge communities
Jenko, Professor PolSci National University of Singapore, 11 (Leigh, Fall, Recentering Political
Theory: The Promise of Mobile Locality Cultural Critique, Vol 79, ProjectMuse)//JAG

the real dilemma for

political theory as it confronts non-Western thought may not be how to avoid the
imposition of Western universalism or how to respect local difference, but how to take
differently localized claims seriously as the constituents, and not simply the targets, of
potentially generalizable reflections on political (and other slices of) life . Many comparative political
Recentering Political Theory Both indigenization movements and the practices of Sinology suggest that

theorists would presume that this more radical regrounding of political theory is impossible, despite the evidence adduced above. They often cite the
Gadamerian [End Page 42] insight that existing understandings are negotiable but ultimately non-transcendable components of all knowledge and
learning. Even those scholars such as Andrew March, who urge us to take foreign traditions seriously by engaging them on their own grounds, insist
that direct argumentation from within an alien ethical tradition is ill advised and unlikely to meet with success (238). Similar views about the limits of
understanding are also articulated within the Chinese academic community. He Peizhong, drawing on his own research into how foreigners study
China, has repeatedly insisted that foreigners can offer an important outsider perspective on Chinese issues but cannot themselves provide insider
insights. Only by studying what outsiders say about us can we learn more about ourselves, He insists, partly because they have put our culture to
such obvious use in advancing their own civilization and scholarship (2008). It may be true that Western forms of learning shape the prejudices of
these outsider investigators and theorists as individuals, many of whom were thoroughly trained in Europeanized academic disciplines before turning
their gaze toward the others that those disciplines, including political theory, have historically excluded. Yet it remains a largely unanswered question
especially in light of attempts around the world to overcome what are seen to be unduly pervasive foreign influences on native scholarly productionto
what extent those intellectual prejudices have anything to do with national or ethnic cultures rather than with training, institutional incentives,
expectations, or intellectual resources. Although these latter conditions often channel intellectual effort into recognizable localized patterns (sometimes
conflated with, but not reducible to, nationally defined cultures), the mistake is to think that the contingently local clustering of particular concerns,
methods, and agendas confines a theorist of a particular ethnic or cultural background to those traditions of reflection her society happens to have
produced. In an influential article, Peng Guoxiang suggests the hubrisand contradictionsof a purely insider/outsider dichotomy like the one He
Peizhong (and advocates of the new cosmopolitan position) presume when he asks, Dont we, who are in the very middle of all this, sometimes not
completely understand Chinese philosophy ourselves? . . . We do not want to excessively claim that researching our own history and culture is a special
[End Page 43] advantage, but ought to use truly original research as the means of manifesting ourselves (Peng). Peng acknowledges the capacity of
original research by Chinese to speak for itself within an international community of scholars, just as He grounds the value of foreign China studies in
the absorption by Westerners of Chinese civilization, but both fail to consider the broader implications at stake here: if work by Chinese scholars is
intelligible and compelling to outsiders, so too can Chinese scholarship itself constitute a basis for, rather than be a target of, philosophical and
theoretical work done by non-Chineseindeed, Chinese research on Chinese studies in Korea and Japan recognizes this very possibility by highlighting
their contributions to Chinese thought. Of course, most thinkers do come to see those traditions circulating in their place of residence as more relevant
to their lives and concerns than other global alternatives, given that the former are often more tightly linked to the actual dilemmas of the society in
which they live. These localized places may and often do evidence historically close relationships with the theoretical creativity of their (alwayschanging) residents, and these relationships are important for connecting people to ideas and arguments they care about. It remains unclear, however,
how, if at all, the fact of localized knowledge production can predict the presence of any given perspective in particular human minds, on the one hand,
or decisively preclude the adoption and development of what are perceived to be culturally alien modes of thought, on the other. This is not to ignore
the very important power dynamics at work in structuring the access of scholars to one agenda or opportunity over another; rather, it draws attention

knowledge production is tied more closely to

contingent structures of power, inclination, and commitment than to inevitably
overpowering cultural background conditions. The need to gain traction on such
structures, in fact, specifies the project of recentering as a multigenerational,
interdisciplinary, and collective effort to target not simply the research subjects of
individual scholars, but also the modes and sites of training, constitutive practices, and
target audiences of the entire disciplinary enterprise. Taking cues from Sinology, we can think of
ways to reorganize political theory around [End Page 44] localized communities of knowledge,
to them as objects of reform, precisely by suggesting that

supplying to individual researchers the linguistic, historical, and cultural proficiency in particular thought traditions that constitute many of the

These research initiatives need not be dictated

necessarily by the nation-state territorialization that now organizes area studies, but by
the concentrations of primarily scholarly audiences and concerns withinand across
particular regions of the globe. This shift in focus does not mean to provide perfect insight into some indelible cultural essence;
individual prejudices that shape theorizing in the first place.

rather, it simply suggests that we facilitate access, by way of linguistic and other forms of training, to diverse fields of interconnected knowledge and
schools of thought abiding in particular locales. Of course, postcolonial and democratic theorists have pointed out repeatedly how institutionalized
regional divisions, such as those promoted by area studies, impose on a hybrid and fluid world a particular strategic geopolitical ecology subservient
to the interests of dominant (read: American) powers (Palat, 69). Edward Said, in particular, argues that the area studies of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century European and American researchers had the effect of constructing the Orient into a category that is not so much a way of receiving
new information as it is a method of controlling what seems to be a threat to some established view of things (59). We need not supply a full defense of

a focus on localized scholarly

communities rather than texts or people offers important benefits to the field of political
area studies particular disciplinary history, however, in order to make the less stringent claim that

theory. This is especially true if, unlike contemporary critics of area studies, we
recognize that and how scholars in those areas themselves draw and redraw political,
intellectual, and geographic boundariesincluding those imposed on them by others.
Localized debate does not entail a sacrifice of self-critique; it simply recenters it by
turning it to internal purposes. The study of foreign Sinology (guoji Hanxue) in Chinese academic communities, for instance,
interrogates boundaries by retaining Chinese civilization at the center of inquiry and evaluating the success of foreign and domestic boundary-drawing

5Regionalized discourses by non-Westerners (such as variously deployed Japanese constructions of

East Asia in the twentieth century) also demonstrate [End Page 45] how boundaries can empower as much as
dominate indigenous intellectual production.6 At the very least, such burgeoning scholarship on
how regionalization discourses inform and enable knowledge from within those very
same regions belies claims that a localized approach necessarily implies a unilateral
reification of arbitrary boundaries, particularly those of nationalism, or that imposed or
internal regionalized notions preclude critical engagement. As Taiwanese scholar Chen Kuan-hsing argues,
these regional imaginaries can serve as critical anchoring points (212) for multiplying
frames of reference to facilitate comparisons that bypass Euro-America as a necessary
source of universal theory (226). Reinscribing local particulars as sites of general
knowledge-production, in turn, recognizes that local communities of inquiry and audience
offer already-existing epistemological frameworks that themselves ground self-critique,
rather than stand as passive objects of analysis.
in those terms.

A2: Area Studies Accurate

Scholars have flawed views of Latin America state interference proves.
Crow 2010 (Joanna Crow, Lecturer of Latin American Studies at Bristol University, PhD from
University College London, Introduction: Intellectuals, Indigenous Ethnicity and the State in Latin
America, 7/28/2010, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17442221003787068)//JL
As Wade has remarked,

the concepts of race and ethnicity are part of an enterprise of

knowledge (1997, p. 6), and knowledge is intimately related to power. As producers of knowledge and,
in our case, enunciators of indigenous ethnicity , intellectuals are important arbiters of
power. Their discourses and images of indigeneity may function as part of, in negotiation with, or
in opposition to, the dominant representation regime, or indeed entirely outside the sphere of state
authorities, although the latter is rare . All the intellectuals considered in this volume have
sought to lead processes of discursive transformation (like Florencia Mallons [1995] local intellectuals in
Peasant and Nation) and to influence the organization of the society in which they live. Beyond this and the
fact that most of the contributors use intellectual in the broader Gramscian sense of term
it becomes rather difficult to summarize them. Indeed, what stands out most clearly is the great diversity
of intellectuality being discussed.
States corrupt scholars through salary indigenous cinema proves.
Crow 2010 (Joanna Crow, Lecturer of Latin American Studies at Bristol University, PhD from
University College London, Introduction: Intellectuals, Indigenous Ethnicity and the State in Latin
America, 7/28/2010, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17442221003787068)//JL

The state is a crucially important classifier and manager. It enacts policies that affect
indigenous people, determines who is given what rights, and creates and promotes images of
indigenous peoples (through museums, schools, official national symbols, etc.). It also has an impact on
intellectuals representation of indigenous peoples: it can endorse certain peoples work ,
thereby securing the dissemination of that work and often providing a salary (e.g. Diego Rivera in
Mexico); it can allow people a space to operate without sanctioning their work (e.g. Jos Carlos
Maritegui during Augosto Lenguas oncenio in Peru); it can repress those individuals who go too far in
their defense of indigenous rights (in Colombia a number of intellectual-activists have been eliminated by forces
linked to the government). Possibly Footes article here provides the most compelling example of the states role in the dissemination
of images (or histories) of indigenous peoples. In some cases, the

link is not so direct out nonetheless

important. For example, Wood notes how critical technological developments have been for
the production of indigenous cinema; these are not controlled by the state, but they can
be encouraged, disseminated and more importantly financed by the state.

Aff

Framework
Politicians will ignore the K seen as not dealing with reality*
Beverley, Professor Hispanic Language and Literature at UPitt, and Sanders, Grad Student at
UPitt, 97 (John and James, Negotiating with the Disciplines. A Conversation on Latin American
Subaltern Studies Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol 6 No 2, T&F Online)//JAG

historians like Mallon criticize us for being 'textcentric', I think I know what they're worried about. They're
worried about a kind of theoretical prattle they find confusing and obscurantist . Spivak gets a lot of
Now, when

the blame for this, since her writing is so difficult to understandit's like consulting the Delphic oracle. I know professional historians would much prefer to go to the archives and pick through dusty legajos than
read Spivak. Most of them probably would rather be tortured than have to read Spivak. On the other hand, I think that historians, and in general people in the social sciences, have been closed to the implications
for their own work of a book like Rama's La ciudad letrada. Now, it so happens that La ciudad letrada is about the state. It's true that it looks at the state from the perspective of the role of literature in constructing
Elites. But this is precisely where the question of what Raymond Williams called 'cultural materialism' comes in. What Williams and Althusser were interested in, in different though I think complementary ways,
was how ideology was not just 'ideas' but material practices located in the school, the family, the workplace, institutions ... In Althusser's famous definition, ideology is what interpellates individuals as subjects.

What cultural studies does is essentially make culture homologous with ideology. So
that if you can show a genealogy of the Latin American state that traces the role in it of the letrado and a certain literary ideal,
maybe you can explain a lot about Latin American states, about Latin American politics,
about the particular ideological form that the Latin American bourgeoisie assumes , that it isn't

simply a pure mercantile or capitalist bourgeoisie, it's a bourgeoisie that likes to think, or used to anyway, that it's cultured, reads both Rod6 and Marti, identifies itself with a Romantic literary image. Then you
have a more Gramscian understanding of hegemony and Latin American elites and Latin American politics, in which culture is a key element. At the same time though, you have got away from the 'culturalist'
conception of culturethe conception that basically identifies culture with the Sunday supplement of the newspaper. It was to get that idea of a cultural determination of class and power relations that Guha
insisted on taking the concept of the subaltern from Gramsci. Gramsci was posing a challenge to historians. The challenge is that if you're doing a book like Murdo MacLeod's Spanish Central America (1973),
which is full of all kinds of information about social and economic institutions/you also need to talk about how the people who are acting in those institutions as historical subjects were formed as subjects. And
since some of them were formed as subjects in part through literature and the humanities in Spanish or colonial schools, you have to talk about that. But MacLeod doesn't say much in that 500 or 600 page book
about who was reading in colonial Central America, what they were reading, what they were being taught, how the cultivation of letrasthat is, of literature and historymarked a distinction between subaltern
and dominant subject positions. He takes it for granted that his actors always already existed as subjects, had pre-established interests and pursued rational choice strategies for maximizing those interests. But to
me, that is a liberal and psychologistic way, of looking at subjects, subaltern or otherwise: subjects are already there, all the historian has to do is figure out from the archives what they did. Whereas the problem
we wanted to try to get at was how people are produced as the subjects who act in relations of production, in gender and ethnic relations, in given historical and social conjunctures. How is it that they're

But isn't there a political risk here? Disciplines like economics and
political science or the professional schools are probably never going to pick this up. Right now in
economics you don't even have very many Marxists left, much less subaltern studies
approaches ... It's getting very conservative ... JB: More technocratic ... JS: More technocratic. Developmentalism is still king,
albeit now in a neoliberal mode, and feeds into NGOs and transnational entities like the World Bank. Political science may be a battle ground for theory, but political
scientists are going to find it much easier than historians or anthropologists to dismiss
what you are doing as not dealing with 'reality', as they understand it. The
danger one might imagine then is that in pursuing subaltern studies we'll abandon the
study of what subjects actually doas opposed to their creationto the economists and
policy-administration people. And we won't like the consequences!
constructed as subjects in the first place? JS:

Right-wing backlash to abstract approach to Latin America**

Mallon, Professor History at University of Wisconsin-Madison, 94 (Florencia, December, The
Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History The American
Historical Review, Vol 99 No 4, p 1491-1515, JSTOR)//JAG

Joseph struck a nerve, especially in Richard Slatta, who edited the volume on Latin American bandits extensively discussed in the original review
essay. Slatta had a particularly sharp barb ready for anything that smacked of "Foucaultism
or other strains of poststructuralism. Serious philosophical differences divide the practitioners," he wrote. "The cacophony
of conflicting discourses and competing projects often is too abstract, rarified, and
sectarian to help working historians ... Philosophers are still working on what Foucault means by dispositif and other concepts.
How, then, can practicing historians employ his ideas with any confidence?" In the footnote to this statement, he also summarily disposed of Gramsci: "Similar problems face

Joseph's effort to link

questions of textual analysis, subaltern agency, and recent advances in agrarian history to the
history of banditry received a slap on the wrist from a "working historian " who
found all the theories associated with Foucault and Gramsci to be too confusing and
half-baked. In order to dismiss methodological criticisms associated with an overreliance on typology, an underemphasis on social analysis, and an uncritical use
historians taking up Gramscian hegemony. The term suffers confusing 'slippage' at the hands of the master and his disciples."'8 So

of official records, Slatta invoked the twin ghosts of poststructuralist and Gramscian slippage. Although the celebration of the linguistic turn was never Joseph's purpose in the

his attempt to use the dual purposes of Subaltern Studies to

overcome a dead end in Latin American bandit studies was answered by an attempt to
first place, it is interesting to note that

collapse both purposes into a morass of postmodern confusion .'9 Not long after the debate on banditry, the
Subaltern Studies Group was once again invoked in the pages of the Latin American Research Review. In a review essay on colonial and postcolonial discourse, Patricia Seed
stated that, in the historical field, "members of the subaltern studies movement have been the leaders of the postcolonial discourse movement." Although Joseph's original
article on banditry had appeared in the same journal a year before, Seed did not demonstrate an awareness of it, or of other recent discussions on politics, ethnicity, and the state
that had begun to appear in various subfields of Latin American history. In works that spanned the geographical and temporal spectrum from the early colonial period to the

all subaltern communities were internally differentiated and

conflictual and that subalterns forged political unity or consensus in painfully contingent
ways. Some scholars had also uncovered the multiple ways in which oppressed peoples had engaged and used state institutions and the law, demonstrating that the same
twentieth century, historians had begun to show that

strategy increased people's room to move and made impossible a frontal assault on the existing balance of power. Authors actively questioned more linear or top-down
renditions of major transitions, such as the conquest, the abolition of slavery, or the Nicaraguan Revolution, engaging in dynamic debate with other historians over the

historians have
been relatively reluctant to consider any form of reflexivity or reflexive
selfcritique of their practices."20 Seed shared with Richard Slatta an impatience for what can be loosely
termed resistance studies. [A]nthropologists and historians' versions of what happened were usually tales of either heroic resistance in which natives
importance of subaltern political struggles in these transitions. It was only by ignoring this literature that Seed was able to conclude that "

dramatically defended their homelands or accounts of manipulative accommodation in which colonial goals were maneuvered to serve the interests of the native community or
some combination of the two story lines. In the late 1980s, these tales of resistance and accommodation were being perceived increasingly as mechanical, homogenizing, and
inadequate versions of the encounters between the colonizers and the colonized. In contrast to Slatta, however, who warned against postmodern slippage, Seed saw
poststructuralism as the answer. "As narratives of resistance and accommodation were losing credibility," she wrote, "a major new intellectual movement was emerging in
association with thinkers loosely grouped as poststructuralists." But she also agreed with Slatta when she linked poststructuralism, the linguistic turn, and postcolonial discourse
studies directly to Subaltern Studies, once again collapsing the linguistic and textual analysis methods of the school into their more political goals and purposes, neatly covering
over their Gramscian genealogy.2' In a sense, it could not have been otherwise for her. Openly to discuss the Gramscian project of Subaltern Studies would have led back into a
part of the resistance studies literature Seed had summarily dismissed. It would have necessitated a more careful reading and analysis of the last generation of historical studies
on subaltern practices, culture, politics, and resistance in Latin America.22 It would have made the panacea of the linguistic turn seem less complete and therefore less

we encounter, to my mind, the

gravest problem with the kind of conceptual and methodological borrowing that the
application of Subaltern Studies to other parts of the world entails. In the process of
the dialogue itself, either or both sides can be flattened out, simplified,
misrepresented. If this occurs, the nuances, internal tensions, and contradictions-in short,
the very stuff of which meaningful academic discussion is made-are pushed aside in
favor of defining the correct way. Once this has been done, it is no longer necessary to
understand what has gone before, since it has become entirely irrelevant . Latin
Americanists who rediscovered Marxism and its many varieties in the 1960s and 1970s also tended to fall into this
methodological trap. Dismissing earlier traditions and works as irrelevant and passe, we often missed important clues concerning the explanatory
attractive. And it would have led back into the deep creative tension centrally present in the Subaltern Studies Group itself. Here

power of ethnicity, race, family, ecology, and demography because our newly discovered theoretical correctness told us that it all came down to class and mode of production.23
Besides, what better way to circumvent entire literatures, often prohibitive in size and overwhelming in detail. and complexity, than by lumping them into categories that were

in today's academic world, with its notorious overproduction, such

techniques of dismissal are especially attractive. They make it possible for scholars such as
Patricia Seed to pretend that a single approach to an issue such as resistance and accommodation-in the African, Asian, and Latin
American fields, for the colonial and postcolonial periods-dooms the entire project and makes it irrelevant. "Such
no longer theoretically current? Especially

tales of 'adaptation and response,"' Seed concluded in her response to a query by Rolena Adorno, relying on notions of oppositional identity as untouched, authentic, and
unproblematically created, coincided well with the narratives that were being produced by the leaders of emergent postcolonial states as well as by those opposing the largely
economic domination and occasional direct political domination of the United States in Central and South America. Often producing a political redemptive narrative based on
liberation from an evil oppressor, such tales found congenial readerships not simply in Latin America but throughout current and former colonial worlds.

A2: Epistemology
They set the bar too high perfect scholarship of Latin America
unnecessary
Paton et al, Professor Caribbean History at Newcastle, 4 (Diana Paton, John Beck- Professor Cultural
Studies at Newcastle, Gemma Robinson- Professor English at Newcastle, Spring, Teaching The
Americas Radical History Review, Issue 89, p 218-229, ProjectMuse)//JAG

One of the difficulties in designing a program on something as vast as the Americas was our constant
awareness of our own ignorance, of the impossibility of providing coverage of even a fraction of
the important questions and problems that arise in studying the Americas. Could our program be
legitimate given that we had no specialist on Canada or Venezuela, for example? In the end, we answered
yes to this question, even while recognizing that our graduates would not be able to claim a
complete knowledge of the histories, societies, and cultures we were teaching them about.
Complete coverage is an illusory goal anyway, we concluded, even were we to limit ourselves
to an examination of, say, the Caribbean, Brazil, or the United States. Recognition of the blank spaces in
our own program forced us and our students to see that what we taught and they
learned was neither representative (in the sense of providing a key to all aspects of American societies and cultures) nor
canonical (in the sense of introducing students to the best or most significant aspects of these histories and cultures). Indeed, we began to stress that our
purpose was precisely the opposite of a canonical oneeven while the necessity of providing syllabi and reading lists forced us to include some
things and exclude others.

A2: Imperialism Impact

Using US knowledge production as a starting point doesnt guarantee
imperialism just provides a basis for comparison
Paton et al, Professor Caribbean History at Newcastle, 4 (Diana Paton, John Beck- Professor Cultural
Studies at Newcastle, Gemma Robinson- Professor English at Newcastle, Spring, Teaching The
Americas Radical History Review, Issue 89, p 218-229, ProjectMuse)//JAG
Thus we resolved our anxieties about coverage and representativeness by adopting a thematic approach. And yet these anxieties would have been less easily assuaged had the

For all our recognition of the

constructedness of regional knowledges, an Americas program without Americanists
would have simply been another Latin American/Caribbean studies degree. The United
States, then, turns out not to be simply one nation among many in the Americas, but the
crux of the comparison. This results in part from the prior configuration of Latin American and Caribbean studies (which were already
blank spaces in our map been where the United States, rather than Venezuela and Canada (among others), should be.

comparative) on the one hand, and American studies (which was not, although in the United Kingdom the existence of U.S. and Canadian studies programs is in itself

is also a manifestation of a U.S. cultural dominance that we could try to

understand but could not ignore. The absence of U.S. specialists was not a practical problem for us, nor would it be at any British university,
suggestive) on the other, but it

given the extent of resources in Britain devoted to the study of the United States in comparison with any other part of the Americas. To give a crude example, few British history

in trying to see the Americas whole,

we did confront an important intellectual and political issue: the geopolitical, economic,
and cultural dominance of one part of what we are trying to compare over all the others .
Obviously, we should not be teleological about this . One of the optional courses in our program, The Renaissance in the Atlantic World
examines Anglo- American and Latin American texts from a period when future U.S. dominance over Latin America was neither envisioned nor inevitable. And yet the
fact of global U.S. power sets the parameters of what we do in many ways .
Our students (who so far have been mainly British, although students from Spain and Cyprus have also studied with us), while lacking the insider knowledge that
comes from growing up in any of the cultures they are studying, have far greater everyday cultural knowledge of the
United States than of Latin America or the Caribbean. Like us, they watch American films and TV, listen to American
departments lack a U.S. historian, but few include a historian of any other part of the Americas. But

music, and buy the products of American consumer-capitalist culture (even if these are more likely to be made in Mexico or Taiwan than in the United States itself). The actions

although they may listen to some styles of

Cuban and Jamaican music, could see Mexican or Argentine films if they went to an art house cinema, and (with our encouragement) will follow
Brazilian politics, their knowledge of Latin America and the Caribbean comes far more
exclusively via an academic route. Even in terms of academic knowledge, most of our
students have taken many more undergraduate courses about the United States than
they have about the Caribbean or Latin America.
of U.S. politicians might transform their lives by throwing the world into war. In contrast,

Alt Fails
Subaltern studies destroys policymaking by focusing only on textual
deconstruction
Mallon, Professor History at University of Wisconsin-Madison, 94 (Florencia, December, The
Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History The American
Historical Review, Vol 99 No 4, p 1491-1515, JSTOR)//JAG
It was in the light of such a deductive analysis of politics that the need for a Subaltern Studies approach made the most sense. A hegemonic alternative for the future needed to

Activists and intellectuals concerned with building an alternative

needed to know, through investigation, what traditions they had to work with . They could not
be built with what already existed.

deduce them simply through the application of Marxist categories. "Every trace of independent initiative on the part of subaltern groups should therefore be of incalculable value
for the integral historian," Gramsci wrote. "Consequently, this kind of history can only be dealt with monographically, and each monograph requires an immense quantity of
material which is often hard to collect."'13

Herein lies the deepest, most irresolvable , and also the most

fertile tension in the Subaltern Studies project. The recovery of subaltern practices,
beliefs, and actions necessitated the use of new documents but especially of new
methods for reading old documents. This laborious and methodologically complex task
led many members of the group increasingly into semiotics, literary criticism, and many forms of
textual analysis. Yet, by encouraging the deconstruction of texts along lines of power
and hierarchy and by decentering all subjects that emerged in the documents, these
techniques have ultimately questioned two assumptions central to the group's political
purpose: that subaltern practices had some autonomy from elite culture and that
subaltern politics had a unity and solidarity of its own.14 By January 1986, when the second Subaltern Studies conference
was held in Calcutta, this tension came out into the open. As summarized by David Hardiman, himself a contributor to the project from its inception, the school was "standing at
something of a crossroads . . . One road leads towards greater concentration on textual analysis and a stress on the relativity of all knowledge; another towards the study of

The
proponents of textual analysis emphasized the value of the group's deconstruction of
existing theories and pointed out the inevitable relativism of such an endeavor ; Guha himself
subaltern consciousness and action so as to forward the struggle for a socialist society." As reported by Hardiman, both positions received well-argued support.

stressed that the school was "born under a sign of negation-'negation' is inscribed on the subaltern banner." The proponents of a more openly political purpose, however,
emphasized the constructive rather than deconstructive aspects of the school's original purpose, the need to focus on politics and on the interactions of elites and subalterns over
time. If, indeed, the Subaltern School sought to "make the subaltern classes the subjects of their own history," some scholars argued, deconstruction was of necessity a tool

Guha also supported the need for an ultimately political purpose , and he suggested that this
division might be a strength rather than a weakness. Hardiman, however, concluded his report by suggesting that
this division could very well prove difficult to overcome in the long run , especially since "the
debate during the conference served more to reveal these differences rather than to
work towards their resolution."'15 Can these differences be resolved? Is resolution in one direction or the other
rather than a goal.

even the most desirable goal? I think not. In an essay published in 1985, Gayatri Spivak reflected on the productive aspects of these contradictions. By insisting that subalterns
possessed positive human agency and could be thinking and autonomous historical subjects, she argued, the Subaltern Studies school was placing itself in a subaltern position
within historiography. Yet the very act of doing so, Spivak insisted, could be "reinscribed as a strategy for our times." Subaltern identities and consciousness will always remain
slightly out of reach, resisting attempts to fit them into a linear narrative. But historians must persist in their efforts at recovering subaltern subjectivity, even though they know
it is an ultimately impossible task. "It is a hard lesson to learn," Spivak concluded. "[B]ut not to learn it is merely to nominate elegant solutions to be correct theoretical practice."
By continuing to explore the politically positive, liberating potential of subaltern histories, then, by marshaling semiotics and postmodern techniques for emancipatory purposes
that they can never entirely meet, by persisting in these apparently impossible attempts at combination, the Subaltern Studies Group can continue to make its greatest and
broadest contribution.16

Carnivalism
Subaltern authors use carnivalesque thinking
Brass, Tom (Social and Poltical Sciences Faculty at the University of Cambridge, On which side of the
barricade? Subaltern Resistance in Latin America and Elsewhere, The Journal of Peasant Studies)
9/8/10, http:/ldx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150412331311109
Celebrated not just by Latin Americanist subalternism but also in postmodern frameworks
(resistance theory associated with the work of J.C. Scott) and non-postmodern theory (the 'moral
economy' approach of E.P. Thompson) alike as power-exercised-from-below, the 'primordial'

rituals of 'crowning/decrowning' associated with Bakhtinian concepts of carnival and

carnivalesque discourse/performance are currently presented as the 'natural' voice of
the people at the rural grassroots in many so-called Third World contexts, a politically
unmediated (~ 'authentic') form of 'from below' resistance to any/all types of
injustice/oppression/exploitation exercised 'from above' .17 Broadly speaking, carnival and the

carnivalesque entail the inversion - and thus the negation - of existing hierarchy and
its structures of control/domination, a situation which licenses in turo a ritual
challenge to those who exercise power and its symbolic overturning." In specifically
Thompsonian terms, this involves the application of 'moral economy' in a carnivalesque form known
as 'rough musicking' (= 'a ritualised expression of hostility')." Such a view, however,
overlooks the extent to which carnival not merely does not challenge but actually
reinforces and justifies the existing social structure, and is therefore -pace Canclini - more
accurately categorized as a form of social control (or power-exercised-from-above)."

And, this Carnivalesque thinking inhibits our ability to truly understand the
subject
Brass, Tom (Social and Poltical Sciences Faculty at the University of Cambridge, On which side of the
barricade? Subaltern Resistance in Latin America and Elsewhere, The Journal of Peasant Studies)
9/8/10, http:/ldx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150412331311109
For this reason, it is important to remember a number of things about the role of carnival in
general, and its particular manifestation as the fiesta in rural Latin America, in the
reproduction of the wider socio-economic system." To begin with, the fact that in Latin America
(as elsewhere) the main impact of carnivalesque discourse/performance is ideological and

not material, and as such involves nothing more than a ritual and symbolic overturning,
and one moreover that is ouly of short duration." Furthermore, insofar as carnival is the site of laughter,
this serves not to reinforce but to defuse the anger that prefigures class struggle. "In other
words, the function of carnival is much rather that of a 'safety valve' mechanism: any

grassroots opposition that exists is doubly displaced, from potentially threatening

arenas (the labour process) and organizational forms (strikes, trade unions), thus
rendering it safe." Opposition is permitted, therefore, but channelled in what is an essentially
harmless form (antagonism = symbolic) into an equally harmless site (carnival, the fiesta) in which its
manifestation is and remains systemically non-threatening. Equally significant in this regard
is the fact that, where disputes over title or access to property have been concerned, often it
was poor peasant farmers or labourers who were targets of carnivalesque discourse
initiated by authorities or landowners in the vicinity." Far from being a break with the existing
socio-economic order, the carnival (and carnivalesque discourse) in some instances ensures its
continuation, and allows the dominant class in the context concerned to reproduce the
social relations of production and thus to perpetuate its rule.