Journal of LAtin American Cultural Studies, Vol.

8,

No.2,

1999

235

Debate I Am Where I Think: Epistemology and the Colonial Difference

WALTER D. MIGNOLO

(1) More than 10 years ago, when Tile Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (1995) was in the making-but without me being aware that this was the casc-I had my first intellectual exchange with Peter Hulme. This was owing to the fact that Rolena Adorno and I were seeking to publish an article of his in a special issue of Dispositio (1989) devoted to 'Colonial Discourse', a concept Hulme examined in his landmark book Colonial Encounters. European and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (1986). I am evoking this moment for several reasons. First, it was a moment of transformation in Hispanic/Latin America colonial scholarship, moving away from the double tyranny of the national values imprinted in Castilian languages and literature written in Castilian. The transition from 'literature to discourse' was, at the same time, a transition from the national framing of the colonial period to a new domain of scholarship that I would today identify as a 'coloniality at large'. Secondly, in spite of the internal transformation (e.g. the history of Hispanic and Latin American scholarship), it was not relevant in current debates in which modernity and coloniality were post-Enlightenment phenomena. Thirdly, I am evoking this moment to remind the reader that this was the general basis for The Darker Side of tlte Renaissance. The notion of 'colonial semiosis' that I employed in the book was actually introduced in my Afterword to the volume of Dispositio. The last 5 years of the making of The Darker Side of tlte Renaissance were marked by a dialogue with the transformation of the field of colonial studies and the presence of colonial legacies through the Chicana/os social movement and intellectual production. Curiously enough, almost at the same time that Peter Hulme's Colonial Encollnter was released in London and New York by Methuen, Aunt-Lute published Gloria Anzaldua's BorderlandlLa Frontera in San Francisco (1987). Hulme is certainly perceptive when he observes that 'the language of transculturation is given fullest rein in the Preface, presumably the part of the book written last and the one that may best suggest Mignolo's current preoccu pations rather than those which led to the project which has just come to completion'. Of course, the spirit in which I am engaging in this renewed conversation with Peter Hulme is not that of defending myself of the weaknesses he has detected in my arguments. Rather, I would like to engage in a scholarly conversation focusing toward the future, starting from some of the controversial issues Peter
1356-9325/99/020235-11 1999 Taylor
&

Francis Ltd

236

Debate

Hulme examined in his generous and rigorous review of The Darker Side of the Renaissance. Admittedly, I am also thankful to him for underlining the contribu tion the book makes to the existing and growing literature on coloniality. By coloniality, I mean the less visible side of modernity. I will come back to the coloniality/modernity dichotomy at the end of my reply. First, I would like to start by commenting on two points Hulme makes at the end of his review. (2) The first point is that the book deserves recognition 'because its logic and scholarship and thoroughness and verve make it superior to most of what it contests. Ultimately, and in accordance with standards which can, with due tentativeness, be seen as global, Mignolo's work is better-and it should stand that ground' (Hulme, p. 229). This statement is made to counter my claims locating my works on the margins. Hulme states: 'That interesting work comes from the margins, however defined, is not to be doubted, but its value does not depend on its place of origin or on some more broadly defined locus of enunciation. A politics of location cannot itself become an epistemology' (Hulme, p. 229).1 Such concern is no doubt behind Hulme's detailed discussion, in pages preceding this quotation, of my use of 'loci of enunciation'. In a nutshell, Hulme correctly perceives that 'loci of enunciation' involves a politics and an epistemology. Yet, he also inserts an aesthetic dimension (e.g. his use of 'better' in the previous quotation). Hulme suggests that the book should be valued for what it achieves and not for what it announces. I have no intention of contesting Hulme's recognition of the book's achievement! However, I would indulge myself in some speculations on epistemology and the politics of loca tion. I will engage in a double set of considerations: on the one hand, the way I used and argued from the concept of 'loci of enunciation'; on the other hand, the more general question of epistemology and the politics of location. I will begin with this last issue, since it is the most important for future scholarly and political discussions. 'A politics of location cannot itself become an epistemology'. Certainly not 'itself' I will agree, but I argue that epistemology implies and is embedded in a politics of location. This was one of the epistemic quarrels, related to the question of 'translation' that Hulme himself addresses in his review, and which I was addressing in the book. In this regard, I have no problem with the two statements by Said as quoted by Hulme. Quite the contrary, I (like many others) am indebted to Said's groundbreaking book for having brought to my attention to what I have recently been calling the '(epistemic) colonial difference' (Mignolo, 1998, 1999, forthcoming). It is Said, in addition to Frantz Fanon, Rigoberta Menchu, and the Zapatistas, who deserves credit for making the colonial difference visible in the Anglo-speaking world. The Philosophy of liberation in Latin America, and its consequences, should not be forgotten either. It was influential in making people aware of the need of 'decolonizing scholar ship' and 'decolonizing the social sciences' (Fals Borda, 1970). Yet the fact remains that it was Said who produced the impact, backed up by the richness of French poststructuralism; and this is a fact that has much to do with the politics of (institutional) location. Epistemology is embedded in languages and in particular genealogies. To make a long story short, a 'history of epistemology' would most likely start with the Greek words 'episteme', 'doxa' and 'gnosis' and run through modern

Debate

237

vernacular languages and a variety of expressions in order to describe 'episte mology' as theory of knowledge, reflection on knowledge, or (a yet more restricted definition) reflection on scientific knowledge. Most likely, this gen ealogy would contemplate ancient Greek vocabulary and then move to German, French, and English. Latin would be excluded, since it was reached in rhetoric rather than in epistemology. Latin vernaculars like Italian, Spanish, and Por tuguese ended up translating the terminology from German, French, and En glish. In this scenario, German, English, and French (not so much Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, and of course not Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, or even less Swahili, Aymara or Nahuatl) languages are the house of modern epistemol ogy. I have the impression that, from this perspective, a politics of location can be in itself an epistemology. Let me give you another example. There is a splendid moment in Pierre Bourdieu's 'Thinking about Limits' (1992), in which he places himself in a disciplinary-theoretical genealogy as well as a national language one. As a sociologist interested in education, Bourdieu understands the paradox implied in the process itself: 'if we are not educated, we cannot think much at all, yet if we are educated we risk being dominated by ready-made thoughts'. Can we really not think much at all if we are not educated? Is it only education that calls for thinking? Or is education a manipulation of thinking? Now, think about education and colonialism, and you will find that what Bourdieu is doing is mapping loci of enunciation and grounding epistemology in the politics of location. Let me explain. Let us think about language and education in colonial expansion and nation-building strategies. Let us concentrate on colonial legacies, national languages and disciplinary foundations in the education system that teaches us (those who have access to such an education) how to think. Then tell me if epistemology does not appear ingrained in the politics of location to the point where you cannot think the former without the latter. It should appear so unless one assumes that epistemology is not located; rather, that it is universal and ungrounded, a neutral guardian of knowledge. I am not saying that Hulme holds these beliefs. I am just pressing the question of the necessary connections between the politics of knowledge (epistemology) and the politics of location (interest) in a non-Habermasian direction (Habermas, 1971). The epistemological traditions in which Bourdieu began to work, he confesses, were for him 'like the air that we breathe': it went unnoticed, which in my view is close to saying that 'we are where we think'. Bourdieu recognized that his is a local tradition tied up with a number of French names: Koyre, Bachelard, Canghuilhem, and if we go back a little, Durkheim. Bourdieu further explains: One should study the historical reasons for its existence, since it was not all a national miracle but no doubt related to favourable conditions within the structure of the education system.This historical tradition of epistemology very strongly linked reflection on sciences with the his tory of science. Differently from the neo-positivist Anglo-Saxon tra dition, it was from the history of science that it isolated the principles of knowledge and scientific thoughts. (1992, p. 41) Is it not an epistemic locus of enunciation that is being 'carved' out and defined here at the same time that the conditions of membership are being 'naturally' laid out without mentioning the connections between language,

238

Debate

education, epistemology and colonialism? What if you are a Bolivian sociologist of Aymara descent? Here I am not speaking of blood but education in the Aymara ayllu. If this is the case, you have to learn Spanish (whose link with the epistemic foundations of social sciences is not strong, or at least, not as strong as the scenario or loci of enunciation described by Bourdieu). Finally, you reach Paris or even better, the US, where French and English will allow the Aymara sociologist to be recognized and legitimized as a serious thinker. I mentioned Aymara as an extreme, but I could have run the example with Spanish or Portuguese and an imaginary sociologist from Chile or Brazil. What I am referring to here was also articulated for the case of history by Dipesh Chakrabarty (1992a, 1992b), in an argument that I have referred to as 'Chakrabarty's dilemma' (Mignolo, 1999). Loci of enunciation are constituted at the intersection of epistemology and the politics of location. Cultures of scholarship are cast in terms of textual national legacies, for it is in and by text that the educational system is structured and sciences are articulated, packaged, transmitted and exported. These are the conditions for loci of enunciation and epistemology, according to the case of Bourdieu. When loci of enunciation and epistemology are crossed by the colonial difference, you find yourself in the situation underlined by The Darker Side of the Renaissance. I had articulated this frame in the debate published in Latin American Researc1t Review (1993), prompted by a review article on colonial and postcolonial discourses by Patricia Seed (1991). Although the topics I deal with in the book are located in the early colonial period or the initial stage of the modem/colonial world, I was actually writing the book at the end of the cold war. I was aware of what political scientist Carl PIetsch (1981) described as 'the three worlds, or the division of social scientific labor'. The point I would like to recall here is that the 'three world' order went together with a subalternization of knowledge and the reproduction of the colonial difference. In this distri bution, the production of culture was assigned to the Third World and the production of social sciences to the First World, in such a way that the translation of the social sciences to the Third World was a process that should not have been taken for granted. The introduction of social sciences in the Third World, during the cold war, was part of the ideology sustaining development and modernization. At the end of my contribution to the debate surrounding Seed's article, I wrote: 'The "native point of view" also includes intellectuals. In the apportionment of scientific labor since World War II, which has been described well by Carl PIetsch (1981), the Third World produces not only "cultures" to be studied by anthropologists and ethnohistorians but also intellec tuals who generate theories and reflect on their own culture and history' (Mignolo, 1993, p.131). What happened in the sixteenth century, and the situation in which Guaman Poma de Ayala and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl among others found themselves, was not too different from the situation I have just described. The 'foundation' of the subalternization of knowledge in the modern/colonial world took place then, under Christian epistemic principles in the European Renaissance. In this sense, the 'extirpation of idolatry' was indeed an epistemic lobotomy (Mignolo, forthcoming). The colonial epistemic difference that justified Area Studies and Orientalism was put in place in the sixteenth century. Loci of enunciation was, and still is, a concept that allows me to think together epistemology, the colonial difference, and politics of location.

Debate

239

The second point in Hulme's review addresses the difficulties of my own metaphors to further the argument that I am trying to advance. According to Hulme, metaphors such as 'loci of Enunciation' or 'center-periphery' play against my argument. This suggests that the metaphoric field related to move ment (travel, routes, diaspora, displacement, detour) would have been more conducive. Hulme puts 'translation' in this second set, which he identifies with the work of James Clifford, although in the index of The Darker Side of the Renaissance, the entry 'translation' refers to 'pp. 63 and passim'. The entire book, indeed, is built on the question of translation.2 'Pluritopic hermeneutics' in the frame of coloniality, and the coloniality of power, bring translation constantly to centre stage. Yet in any case, both centre/periphery as well as diaspora or travel invoke loci, and loci of enunciation are not necessarily fixed. They could be diasporic. Travel and travelling are as much locations as is remaining in one place. Translation takes place between people who arrive and people who are in place. This leads to two questions. One question is: what do you prefer, to underline those who travel and arrive or those who are stationary and receive? The other is the question of translation and the coloniality of power. Briefly stated, when you assume a frame such as the one described by Bourdieu, you realize that modem epistemology was founded on the imperial difference-that is, the distinction between German, French, and English as languages of science and modem philosophy and Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish as languages of humanist legacies. Modem epistemology 'carved' its locus of enunciation on the imperial difference, the difference between the 'new' and the 'old' modern/ colonial empires. However, modem epistemology also found its locus of enunci ation on the colonial difference, since the languages and knowledge of colonized areas (in Asia and Africa) as well as those languages and knowledges 'outside' its scope (like Mandarin or Arabic or Aymara), were converted into objects of study but not taken as sustainable knowledge. (3) I have already written too long and only touched on a couple of issues raised by Hulme, although these are basic issues that impinge on the rest of the book as well as on the rest the review. I would like to pursue the argument by bringing the previous discussion to the very title of Hulme's review article ('Voices from the Margin') and the clarification he offers of this title on page 220. There he explains a quotation from page 312 of the book, and underlines that this quotation places the work and myself on the academic margins. Hulme states: 'which initially struck me as strange: just what is "marginal" about an expensively produced book published by the University of Michigan Press and containing the thoughts of a Professor in the Department of Romance Studies and the Program in Literature at Duke University?' Hulme offers an answer with which I do not disagree but that I would like to expand on: 'What Mignolo means, I think, is explained in his Preface: by choosing to write the book in English, but inscribing Spanish and Amerindian materials and perspectives into current debate about the Renaissance period and the colonial world, he is pressing the case for the importance (indeed centrality) of the concerns of the academic (and political) margins-Latin America, indigenous studies, Spanish humanism, colonial cultural studies-in a way perhaps analogous to, if less pointed than, the inclusion of Rigoberta Menchu's testimonio on the Stanford Humanities syllabus' (Hulme, pp. 22O-22l).

240

Debate

By definition, 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 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-na tional 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 distinc tion '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 epistemo logical 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 either case, I will be epistemologically marginal, that is, epistemologically subaltern. This was precisely 'Chakrabarty's dilemma' in the domain of historiography: 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

Debate

241

dilemma' is that writing subaltern 'histories' means to remain in an epistemi cally 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 subal tern but you maintain the rules of the social sciences and humanities game, you maintain the coloniality of power that reproduces the epistemic colonial differ ence. Epistemic loci of enunciation are stubborn and, as in the case of Garda 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, 'I 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' between the know ing subject and the known, the disciplines and the object of study. 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 power-that 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, 1994, 1996, 1998; Mignolo, forth coming). 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 white, mestizo, and immigrant creole intellectuals like Kusch, Dussel, and myself. '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 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. (4) There are several points that I am interested in pursuing, but that I cannot engage in detail, as this would mean risking a reply that is longer than the review itself. Perhaps in the future there will be an opportunity for elaboration and further clarification. (i) all Modernity. I did not stress too much in the book that the frame for my

242

Debate

reflections was what Wallerstein conceived as the 'modem-world system', and which I develop in my latest book (Mignolo, 1999) as the 'modern/ colonial world system'. The basic idea here is that modernity/coloniality, as we know it today, is grounded in the emergence of the Atlantic commercial circuit during the sixteenth century. This was a crucial chapter in the history of capitalism. Thus, it is not so much a question of pushing 'modernity' back in time, from the eighteenth to the sixteenth century, but of understanding the historical emergence of modernity/ coloniality. Whether conceived in space (peripheral modernities) or time (would-be modernities), this formu lation has the inconvenience of making you believe that first comes modernity and then coloniality. This is an image forged in the second half of the eighteenth century, when building the Europe of Nations (between the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and the end of the Napoleonic era) was a concern of nations without, until that point, significant colonial domains. The colonial empires at that time were Spain and Portugal. However, these countries, unlike England, France and Germany, were not involved in the Europe of Nations. (ii) On 'plllritopic hermenelltics'. Certainly, I start from Pannikar, but I also depart from him . The main departure is that Pannikar's 'diatopic hermeneutics' (he also uses 'pluritopic') remain within a certain conception of cultural rela tivism that I tried to avoid, as I made explicit in the Afterword of The Darker Side of the Renaissance and as I explore in more detail in Local Histories/Global Designs. Basically, if you conceive cultures as discrete entities that can be compared, you remain within the colonial frame that classified the world and divided it into discrete cultural entities. If you think that modem epistemology and coloniality of power went together in the classification of world cultures, then you have to admit that epistemology is located some where and, most likely, in that locus of enunciation that classified the world into discrete cultural entities. This issue is related to my exploration of epistemology and loci of enunciation in sections (2) and (3). (5) I shall stop here, just mentioning that if I had time to go into Hulme's long and careful discussion on maps, ethnic and geometric centres, and loci of enunciation, I would do so starting from my previous consideration on the topic. However, I will skip this temptation. I would like to close this response by recognizing, on the grounds of the previous discussion, how much I value Hulme's engagement with the book. I value it first for his intellectual honesty and openness. I also value it for the critical points he raises and for what he recognizes and praises. Of course I am not saying this for purely egotistical reasons . Rather, I am concerned with the closeness of the scholarly mind. The book has been widely reviewed, as Hulme notices, and the reviews are generally favourable. In general, it is not unreason able to expect and have negative critics. That goes with the territory. What is remarkable, however, is a certain uneasiness that the book has provoked. The book has been reviewed in a significant number of different fields, which of course is very good. The uneasiness is detectable in those fields which seem to take the world for granted and in which there exists the belief that all a book about the past should do is tell what really happened in a straightforward manner. In such attitudes, I see the reproduction of the epistemic colonial

Debate

243

difference, exercIsmg coloniality of power to maintain hegemonic spaces in cultures of scholarship. There is one example I would like to explore. The review in question was written by Alexandra Walsham and appeared in The Historical Journal (1999). It featured three books, two on modem Europe (Stuart Clark's Thi1lki1lg Wilh Demons: The Idea of Wilelzeraft in Early Modern Europe, 1997; Lyndal Roper's

Oedipus and the Devil: Witelzcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe, 1995) and Tlze Darker Side of tlze Renaissance. Walsham wrote an introductory
paragraph noticing, first, the fundamental questions proposed by 'postmod ernism' and the so-called linguistic tum. Walsham remarks that postmodernism and the linguistic turn have helped generate innovative and provocative 'histori cal writing' in recent years. Walsham notices that, taken together, the three books under review 'highlight both the potential strengths and weakness, the rewards and dangers of injecting theory into the study of witchcraft, sexuality and colonization in early modern Europe and the New World'. I am pleased, in this and similar cases, that the book has been taken as an important contribution to several fields of knowledge, in this case 'historical writing'. I am not surprised but concerned with Walsham's short sight when it comes to the colonial difference, the 'interior exteriority' of cul tures of scholarship from which the book was written and that the book attempts to make possible-that is, to be able to think and write (and teach) from the 'interior exteriority' of the colonial difference. Modern cultures of scholarship and disciplines cannot be denied, but at the same time cannot be accepted as such from the colonial difference. That is 'Chakrabarty'S dilemma'. You have to be an historian, although not quite. You have to be inside, but at the same time outside, since 'history' was not an activity expected from the barbarian and the colonized-from people who have been labelled 'without history'. This is the 'interior exteriority of the colonial difference', historically known as 'the darker side of the Renaissance'. Furthermore, this is where 'voices from the margins' should be located and where a new epistemic potential is emerging.This is the precisely the fracture that Walsham is trying to patch. The scenario drawn by Walsham echoes the debate between the distinguished French scholar Marcel Bataillon and the distinguished Mexican scholar Ed mundo O'Gorman, apropos of the 'discovery of America' (Bataillon & O'Gorman, 1955). Bataillon charged O'Gorman with not doing what Bataillon, as a French scholar (by which I mean a scholar working in the French academy, under academic and national assumption of the French academy) assumed historians should do. According to Bataillon, a historian should tell the story as it happened through a careful reading of texts written by those who participated in or were close to the events themselves. O'Gorman, as a Mexican scholar (by which I mean working in the Mexican academy, under academic and national assumption of the Mexican academy, and participating in intellectual debates in which colonial legacies filtered through the national history of Mexico), how ever, wrote his book as part of a larger project criticizing the principles of positivistic historiography underlying Bataillon's project. O'Gorman's goals were not to tell the story again, using a new methodology, but to question the very principles and assumptions under which histories of the discovery of America have been written. In order to show that Colombus could not have

244

Debate

discovered America because America was not an existing entity awaiting to be discovered, but rather an invention of European historiography, O'Gorman engaged himself in an argument that might have appeared to Bataillon to be a house of mirrors in which the 'historical facts' could never be properly located. I am not surprised, although I am somewhat disconcerted, by the fact that the tensions that prompted Bataillon and O'Gorman's illuminating debate in the 1950s are still alive at the end of the century. This is one of many reasons why I am interested in looking at loci of enunciation, and in revealing the inextricable links between epistemology and the politics of location. For Hulme, the 'overall thrust' of the book is 'clearly postcolonial in one of the important senses of that word: it aims to undo that aspect of the work of colonization which one critic, in his review, describes as "cognitive imperial ism'" (Hulme, p.223). Walsham, however, read it as a postmodern study that she found 'obfuscating' and 'irritating' (Walsham, 1999, p. 274). As such, Wal sham fails to see the difference between two books devoted to 'early modern Europe' and one book devoted to 'colonization of the New World' because she sees the world as a given and cultures of scholarship as describing or represent ing it, with new postmodern 'theories'. What concerns me here is that Walsham reproduces the epistemic colonial difference by putting the three books at the same epistemic level (although not at the same level of achievements). The three books, in this review, have been written within the same postmodern turn, the obfuscating moment of modern epistemology, because from this perspective epistemology has only one location, which is a non-location; it is a non-located 'matrix', like 'whiteness'. Failure to perceive the colonial difference is at the same time failure to perceive the coloniality of being. Therefore, it is to think being and space, being and the coloniality of power from the colonial difference. 'Being' is not a universal entity ingrained only in time; it is ingrained in space as well. The colonial difference is constitutive of the modern/colonial world, its exterior-interiority where a new form of 'being' emerged, the 'coloniality of being', or if you prefer, 'otherwise than being in the colonial difference'. In this argument, epistemology cannot be detached from the politics of location.

Notes
1. It feels natural (e.g. within the 'same' tradition) that a source of Martin Heidegger's thought is Greek language and philosophy, although Heidegger himself is not Greek. It would not feel natural if a Chinese philosopher built her philosophy on the Greek tradition only. It would sound conservative if she only paid attention to Mandarin and ancient Chinese tradition, and not to Western philosophy.However, it feels even stranger to think of the possibility of thinking from Aymara language and categories of thought, in the same way that Heidegger thinks from Greek language and philosophy. In a way, epistemology and the politics of location always go together. Hulme mentions, in passing, that some of my analysis of translation between Spanish and Nahuatl, and vice versa, has already been corrected. He refers to an observation made by J.F. Schwaller (1996, p. 94 7) While Schwaller provides a new word to ponder (amoxpohua), unfortunately his 'corrections' of my translations are done from a perspective on translation that my entire analysiS attempts to displace. A 'new' word does not solve the problem of principles under which translation is being enacted. It adds, certainly, a new important empirical element, although maintaining the same theoretical matrix.
.

2.

Debate
References

245

R. Adorno & W. Mignolo, Dispositio (Ann Arbor, 1989). G. Anzaldua, Bordaland/lA frontaa. Tile New Mestiza (San Francisco, CA: Aunt-Lute, 1987). M.Bataillon & E. O'Gorman, Dos concepciones de 1a tarea llist6rica con motilJO de la idea del descllbrimiento de America (Mexico City, 1955). P. Bourdieu, 'Thinking about Limits' in ClIltllral Theory and ClIltllral Change, cd. by M. Featherstone (London, 1992), pp.37-49. G. Brotherston, Book of tlze FOllrtlz World. Reading tlze Native Americas Tlzrollglz tTleir Litaatllre ( Cam bridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992). D. Chakrabarty, 'Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for "Indian" Pasts?', Representations, 37 (1992<1), pp.1-26. D. Chakrabarty, 'Provincializing Europe: Postcoloniality and the Critique of History', Cllltllral Stlldies, 6(3) (1992b) pp.337-357. E. Dussd (compiled), Debate en torno a la mca del disCllrso de Apd. Dialogo filos6fico Norte-Sllr desde America LAtina (Mexico City, 1994). E. Dussel, The Underside of Modernity: Apd, Ricoellr, Rorty, Taylor and tlze Philosophy of Liberation, trans. and cd. by Eduardo Mendieta, (New Jersey, 1996). E. Dussel, t.tica de la liberaci6n en la edad de la globa/izaci6n y de la exclllsi6n (Mexico City, 1998). O. Fals-Borda, Ciencia propia y colonialismo intdectllal (Bogota, 1970). N.Garda Canclini, Cllitllras Hfbridas. Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (Mexico City, 1989). J. Habermas, Knowledge and Hllman Interests (1968), trans. by J. Shapiro (New York, 1971). P. Hulme, Colonial Encollnters. Ellrope and tlze Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (London and New York: Methuen, 1986). L. Martin Akoff & E. Mendieta, TTlinking from tlze Ulldaside of History: Ellriqlle Dllssel"s Philosophy Of Liberation (New York, forthcoming). W. D. Mignolo, 'Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse: Cultural Critique or Academic Colonialism?' LAtill Amaicall Researc11 Review, 28(3) (1993), pp. 120-134. W.D. Mignolo, 'Occires fuera de lugar: sujetos dicentes, roles sociales y formas de inscripci6n', Revista de crHica liferaria latilloamericana, 41 (1995), pp.9-32. W. D. Mignolo, 'Diferencia colonial y raz6n postoccidental', Anllario Mariateglliano, X(10), (1998), pp.71-98. W. D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, SlIbaitan Knowledges and Borda Tizinking (New Jersey, 1999) W. D. Mignolo, 'Dussel's Philosophy of Liberation: Ethics and the Gee-Politics of Kowledge' (forthcoming). C. E. PIetsch, 'The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientifc Labor, circa 1950-1975', Comparative Stlldies in Society and History, 23(4) (1981), pp.565-590. J. F. Schwaller, 'Review of The Darker Side of the Renaissance. Literacy, Territoriality and Coloniza tion', Sixteentlz Centllry TOllrnal, XXVII(3) (1996), pp.946-947. P. Seed, 'Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse', LAtin American Research Review, 26(3) (1991), pp.181200. A. Walsham, 'Witchcraft, Sexuality,and Colonization in the Early Modem World ( Review Article)', TTII! Historical TOllrnal, 42(1) (1999), pp. 269-276.