Global Thinking in Latin America

Nino Vallen
SoSe 2021
Global Imaginary from Below
(Felipe Caroca González)

"To make" or "to take" the world either from spatial scopes - where a multiplicity of realities are
interplaying - or through global contrasts between the West with "the rest", relies on the
positionality of several world's imaginaries and the processes of construction of these realities within
academia, political speeches and other mechanisms 1. Regarding Duncan Bell's work 'Making and
Taking Worlds', approaches to a global understanding in academia are far from being ended and
settled2. Since human technology development revolutionized parameters of time and space within
society, new old imaginaries were spreading across public spaces through scholars and politicians
with ideas dressed as utopias about unifying the world 3 while, conversely, others within academia
were addressing those ideas as attempts to reinvoke imperialism in order to rebuild old structures in
which, England for instance, would be directly privileged from it 4. In these lines, the global exists but,
how to make a proper approach to this global phenomena without falling on unproductive contrasts,
as Bell explains, between "the Global and the local" or "the West and the rest"?

Now my question related to the power relationship is, to what extent academia and institutions are
providing a general vision of the world to society? Where are the popular agency and the approaches
to a creation of an imaginary from below? On the one hand, it is needless to say that elite circles
have the mass media under their control (whether with noble or malefic purposes), therefore, Bell's
argument is not wrong when explaining how information has been spreading since the
communication technologies' development in the nineteenth century 5. However, on the other hand,
what Bell misses is the knowledge production from below and how communities that whether do not
have the information's system of other societies or have been isolated of highly developed societies
being far away from mass media production, have been taken into account in this global imaginary.
Although the making of the world from societies that are embedded in this interconnectedness is a
fact, it also shows how other regions or communities that are far to understand or accept this
dynamic have been constantly invisibilized in many fields and for political actors. In short, personally,
I agree with Arturo Escobar's argument that this perspective of making the global reinforce
heteropatriarchal neoliberalism structures6 mostly built from the global north7.

However, considering the idea of "taking" the world, Bell's argument, taking into account the
epistemicide8 by power followed by the imposition of the new epistemologies through violence from
bigger hegemonies, gains validity considering the violent expansions of bigger and advantaged
societies, that nevertheless, were not only from Europe but from Precolumbian societies within the
American continent9. Under that scope, globality has more sense when understanding connections

1
Duncan Bell, “Making and Taking Worlds,” in Global Intellectual History, ed. Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori
(New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2013), 219- 262.
2
Bell, Duncan. (2013), 272.
3
Bell, Duncan. (2013), 263-264.
4
Bell, Duncan. (2013), 264.
5
Bell, Duncan. (2013), 263.
6
Escobar, Arturo. (2019). “The Global Doesn’t Exist”, 1.
7
Grosfoguel, R. (2011). Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy:
Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality. TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural
Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 14.
8
Mignolo, Walter D. (2011). “The Global South and World Dis/Order.” Journal of Anthropological Research 67,
no. 2,183.
Global Thinking in Latin America
Nino Vallen
SoSe 2021
and geopolitical order in a world with actors ravenous for global hegemony leading to dynamic
transregional interactions.

To conclude, the global spectre as an approach to understanding entanglements across the globe,
conversely as Escobar argument, is a fact. However, there is not a clear definition or a philosophical
base beyond "realism" or "irrealism" attempting to find a concrete structure of what is considered as
a global imaginary per se, especially if the popular agency of the masses is not taken into account on
this map.

9
For instance, Incas, Mayas and Aztecas were expansionist societies and henceforth, interconnected in some
degree too.