Postcolonial Perspectives on the Cultures of Latin America and Lusophone Africa

Robin Fiddian

Locating the Object, Mapping the Field: the Place of the Cultures of Latin America and Lusophone Africa in
Postcolonial Studies

-p. vii: América Latina e África Lusofona aparentemente foram áreas marginalizadas nos debates sobre
estudos pós-coloniais. Aparentemente, por um excesso de anglicanismo, ou pelo gosto dos pesquisadores (Eu
acho que é porque não leem em pt mesmo).

-Said não menciona América Latina.

Locating the Object, Mapping the Field: the Place of the Cultures of Latin America and Lusophone Africa in
Postcolonial Studies

-p.1: citação de Klor => ‘is na error being committed when scholars apply tools and categories of analysis
developed in the twentieth century for understanding British colonialism, especially in India and Africa, to make
sense of the experiences of sixteenth to eighteenth century Latin America?’

-p.2: Essentially, Klor de Alva’s thesis was that the American experience of colonialism differed so radically from
that of colonized peoples in territories such as India, Indonesia, South Africa and Algeria that neither the
category of ‘colonialism’ nor those of ‘decolonization’ and ‘postcolonialism’ could be made to serve a ‘useful’
purpose in the interpretation of ‘the complex political and cultural processes that engendered postcontact
and postindependence American societies’

- […]definition of postcoloniality [por] Ania Loomba, who described a repertoire of interests including
‘opposition to the legacy of colonial domination’

(Autor responde a Klor de Alva defendendo que este modelo também pode ser encontrado nas posições de
intelectuais latino americanos desde Martí, até alguns mais recentes, como Darcy Ribeiro).

-uma análise do termo “América Latina”.

-(Hulme) p.4: é bom lembrar os autores centro-americanos que criticaram o colonialismo como Fannon,
Glissant e CLR James.

-Nessa proposição, os EUA podem ser pensados como pós-coloniais quando lutavam contra a Inglaterra e ao
mesmo tempo, Imperiais quando começam a espalhar a sua influência.

-Quando se pensa em ‘contestation of colonial domination and the legacies of colonialism’, Bolívar e Fannon
podem ser postos lado a lado.

-p.6: (Hulme) => As time passes, and we keep re-reading Fanon, perhaps the similarities between American
countries in their postcolonial phases and African and Asian countries in theirs will come to seem at least as
important as their differences.

- Cita como Mignolo encara estes processos: “wetwenazation” (“invasão” das américas), imperialismo (até
1850) e globalização.

- Two sets of distinctions help to clarify relations between different geographies and time-frames and,
consequentially, between Latin American postcolonial thinkers such as Mariátegui, Dussel and Zea, and the
exponents of late twentieth-century postcolonial theory including Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha. The first set
of distinctions is that made by Anne McClintock and others, between breakaway settler colonies (e.g. the
United States, South Africa and Australia) and colonies where deep settlement occurred (e.g. Algeria, Kenya
and Vietnam); this distinction is maintained by Mignolo, who refers to the breakaway settler colonies as ‘type
a’, and uses the labels ‘type b’ and ‘type c’ to draw a further distinction between ‘colonias de profundo
asentamiento antes de 1945’ and ‘colonias de profundo asentamiento después de 1945’ (Mignolo 1997, 54). A
second set of distinctions is that between postcolonial situations (or conditions) and postcolonial ‘ratio’, which
itself comprises 1) discourses of postcoloniality, and 2) theories of postcoloniality. With the aid of this scheme,
Mignolo is able to acknowledge differences in the historical experience of the three types of colony, especially
in relation to decolonization (which was accompanied by greater violence in type c than in type a) and in
regard to the punctual chronologies of the transition from colonial to postcolonial status (ranging from the
middle of the eighteenth century in the case of the separation of Anglo-America from the British Crown, to a
number of points in time in the quarter-century following the end of the Second World War, in Africa and Asia).

-p.9: Crucially, criteria based on chronology are put further into abeyance in the remainder of Mignolo’s essay,
where he echoes the views of a range of postcolonial theorists and commentators who query ‘a relatively
binaristic, fixed and stable mapping of power relations between “colonizer/colonized” and
“center/periphery”’ and advocate instead a movement towards a more fluid and mobile picture of
postcolonial situations.10 According to this line of thinking, postcolonialism would replace the anti-colonial
critique of Fanon, Cabral and others with a paradigm that favours ambivalence, slippage and transcultural
interaction, all together representing a concerted assault on the binary logic of imperialism.

Lusophone Africa

-p. 10: Estudiosos já incluíram Amílcar Cabral no cânone pós colonial.

-Descreve as diferenças entre as 5 colônias em relação a colonialidade.

-p.11: On the one hand, their history as ‘colonial creatures … in which the establishment of the state preceded
the construction of the nation’ (5) is typical of the continent as a whole, as is the negotiation between
indigenous forms of cultural expression and the European traditions introduced through colonialism; questions
of cultural imperialism (including the influence of the metropolitan literary canon and the role played by a
dominant European language in establishing a ‘mental colonialism’ parallel to operations in the economic and
political spheres) are as relevant to twentieth-century Nigeria as they are to Angola.

-p.12: Beyond the geographical bounds of Africa, the Lusophone territories converged in meaningful ways with
former colonies in other parts of the world, most notably in the Caribbean and Latin America. With regard to
the Caribbean, the historic traffic of African slaves who began to be transported, along with their traditional
cultural practices, to islands such as Hispaniola early in the sixteenth century, was reversed four hundred years
later in the shipping of a symbolic cargo originating in the literary-cum-political movement of Négritude in Haiti
and Martinique, and, from the mid-1960s, of a real cargo comprising ideological dogma, soldiers, and
weapons sent by the Cuban Revolution to assist in the decolonization of Angola.

- He also emphasizes the importance of black literature from the Caribbean (including verse by Nicolás Guillén)
for the evolution of Portuguese-African writing around the mid-point of the twentieth century ( e a influência do
Brazil???)

• The role of the postcolonial intellectual (whether he be Fernando Ortiz, Aimé Césaire, Amílcar Cabral or
Edward Said);

• Nationalism, the struggle for emancipation, and the forging of a cultural identity whose primary radius is local
and national yet may expand to encompass an entire region and beyond (viz the supranational formations
imagined in Pan-Africanism and Pan-Americanism);

• Strategies for achieving ‘mental emancipation’ (or a decolonizing of the mind);

• Social class, political agency and economic power. Manifesting itself differently in different areas of Latin
America (including the Caribbean) and Lusophone Africa, this heading is concerned especially with the roles
played by criollo and, in some cases, mestizo elites, in both colonial and postcolonial societies. Considerations
of gender are also relevant here;

• Concerns of race, colour and ethnicity. In the twin cases of Latin America and Lusophone Africa, this tangled
complex of ideas involves the categories of hybridity and mestizaje, which differ in crucial respects from the
concept of miscegenation as used in connection with the British Empire, and métissage as used in connection
with the French presence in Canada. The concerns of race, colour and ethnicity alluded to under this heading
crystallize in ideologies such as indigenismo (which, as Elizabeth Mudimbe-Boyi has observed, travelled from
Spanish America into the Francophone setting of Haiti in the 1930s), the theory of a ‘raza cósmica’ promoted
by José Vasconcelos in mid-1920s Mexico, Negritude (identified particularly with Aimé Césaire of Martinique
but also espoused by Sédar Senghor of Senegal and transmitted to parts of Lusophone Africa), and ‘the
dialectic of Caliban’, advocated as a strategy of anti-colonial resistance most famously by Césaire but also
explored by Roberto Fernández Retamar in 1973 (after Rodó, Arciniegas and others);

• The clash between different cultural formations and traditions, resulting in new formations which are the
products of ‘syncretism’ or, alternatively, ‘creolization’. ‘Mestizaje cultural’, ‘transculturación’ and
‘supersyncretism’ are complementary terms in a varied and nuanced vocabulary to do with cultural
interaction. Beyond these lexical differences, the essential concern is with processes, not states, of cultural
transformation. Theorists such as Fernando Ortiz, Haroldo de Campos and Roberto Fernández Retamar
highlight the potentially subversive implications of forms of translation, cannibalization, and other adaptations
of Western cultural models in colonial and postcolonial settings;

• Divergent accounts of temporality which call into question dominant paradigms of historical progress and
modernity. Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes and Eduardo Galeano all criticize models of history and modernity
which preserve the ‘backward’ and ‘peripheral’ status of colonized people (including, for example,
Amerindian communities, which are perceived—for the purposes of this argument—as victims of neglect and
continuing internal colonization); and

• The competition between ideologies ranging from Marxism and ‘Third Worldism’ to Liberation Theory and a
revised humanism. Tensions between nationalism, regionalism and universalism.