Introduction: From Cross-Genealogies and Subaltern Knowledges to Nepantla

Walter D. Mignolo

In February of 1994, at the end of the

second meeting of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group at Ohio University, Duke University was scheduled to be responsible for the fth meeting (the rst meeting was held at George Mason University in 1992). In the meantime the third was held in Puerto Rico in 1996; the fourth at the College of William and Mary in April of 1997. In between, there was a special meeting with Ranajit Guha at Rice University in March of 1995. The fth meeting took place at Duke in October of 1998, under the form of an interdisciplinary and international workshop called Cross-Genealogies and Subaltern Knowledges. A parallel story developed at Duke between February 1994 and October 1998. This story ended up in the idea of and the need for a journal as a space of intersection for Latin American, Latino, American, subaltern, postcolonial, and cultural studies which began to grow at Duke with the support and encouragement of Duke University Press. The journal responded to the need that emerged as a consequence of the intensive interdisciplinary dialogue between what has been taking place between the humanities and the social sciences in approximately the past six years. When the time to organize the fth meeting at Duke came, the idea of connecting the meeting with the initiation of the new journalNepantla: Views from Southarose. The intersection between the journal and the meeting of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group was a happy coincidence. Since the aspirations we have for Nepantla only partially coincide and largely exceed the goals the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group has settled
N e p a n t l a : V i e w s f r o m S o u t h 1:1 Copyright 2000 by Duke University Press
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for itself, the meeting was transformed into an international and interdisciplinary workshop that responded to the platform of the journal. In any event, the need to promote dialogue between people engaged in diverse intellectual projects, but with common interests in social transformations (which include, of course, the transformation of the university), dictated and shaped the workshop in consonance with Nepantlas design. By doing so, we thought to satisfy the two basic principles implied in the title and subtitle of the journal. Nepantla is a Nahuatl word describing the in-between situation in which the Aztecs saw themselves in the sixteenth century, as they were placed in between ancient Aztec wisdom and the ongoing Spanish colonization. Views from South, on the other hand, suggests the connection between Nepantla as used by Nahuatl-speaking people in Mexico and the appropriation by Chicanos/as in the Southwest of the United States today (Anzalda 1987; Mora 1993). The Nepantla notion, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, inscribed and continues to inscribe in the history of the modern colonial world the changing borders of colonial expansion, the double side of modernity/coloniality. But if Nepantla comes from the history of Spanish colonization, its metaphorical meaning can be extended to nineteenth-century British and French expansion to Asia and Africa, or to the borders reproduced by current global coloniality and the growing hegemony of the North Atlantic. Nepantla, nally, and as the story of its emergence indicates, links the geohistorical with the epistemic with the subjective, knowledge with ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and nationality in power relations. The in-between inscribed in Nepantla is not a happy place in the middle, but refers to a general question of knowledge and power. The kind of power relations inscribed in Nepantla are the power relations sealing together modernity and what is inherent to it, namely, coloniality. Furthermore, and stretching the connotations of the word South a bit, it also brings to the foreground the South as a metaphor for global suffering under global capitalism, as Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos will have it (de Sousa Santos 1995, 1998); it also refers to the South of the Americas, and the South of the United States, as a metaphor for Latinos/as, Hispanics, Latin Americans, and Amerindians in the United States. Last but not least, it creates a space of dialogue with both the socioeconomic conditions and sociological and philosophical reections in and from the South of Europe, as de Sousa Santos (1995; 1998) and Franco Cassano (1996), among others, are currently arguing, and which Roberto Dainotto will explore in Nepantla 1.2. Finally, the agrammaticality of the

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subtitle Views from South can be looked at in correspondence with Nepantla. If the in-betweenness invoked by the word Nepantla breaks away with the unity of a given language when it enters in colonial conict with another (Spanish and Nahuatl for the case in hand), agrammaticality is what may be expected: a creative act, indeed, that transgresses the law of the grammar and the grammar of the law and invokes, at the same time, the postcolonial and the postnational. The reader not familiar with the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group should know that in 1993 a special issue of boundary 2 (volume 20, number 3) was titled and devoted to, The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America (Beverley, Oviedo, and Aronna 1993). This issue included the Latin American Studies Groups Founding Statement. In retrospect this issue signicantly contributed and encouraged the dialogue between Latin American intellectuals and Latin Americanists in the United States. The issue, reprinted as a book by Duke University Press in 1995, included a signicant number of scholars and intellectuals living and writing in Latin America with some living and writing in the United States. The issue deed the canonical model of area studies that, coincidentally, was in crisis at the time of the publication of The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America. Thus, among the authors included were Xavier Albo, a Bolivian anthropologist and Spanish immigrant who has been deeply involved with indigenous and political movements in the Andes since the 1970s; Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano, who participated closely in the 1970s debates on dependency theory; and Argentinian philosopher Enrique Dussel, one of the founders of liberation philosophy in Latin America. For political reasons he left Argentina during the years of the military dictatorship and established his residence in Mexico. While the projects associated with these three names are closer to the postcolonial than to the postmodern, the collection of articles edited by Beverley, Oviedo, and Aronna also included names that may be associated with postmodern, rather than with postcolonial, concerns, among them Nestor Garca-Canclini, an Argentinian anthropologist and cultural theorist, who like Dussel emigrated to Mexico in the 1970s. The Chilean sociologists Jos Joaqun Brunner and Norbert Lechner, the Chilean philosopher Martin Hopenhayn, the Chilean cultural critic and French immigrant Nelly Richard, the Chilean cultural critic and feminist theoretician Raquel Olea, an Argentinian leading intellectual, Beatriz Sarlo, and Brazilian literary critics Silviano Santiago and Roberto Schwarz all contributed. Among the Latin Americanists living and working in the

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United States were the three editors and literary critics Neil Larsen and Hernan Vidal. I indulged myself in this enumeration to give you an idea of the reach and variety of intellectual production in Latin America relevant to contemporary intellectual debates, but largely unknown in the Englishspeaking world because it is published in Spanish and Portuguese. The workshop at Duke was organized with this dialogic background in mind, although with the purpose of expanding it with the inclusion of Chicano/a and Latino/a cultural critics, signicantly absent in The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America. But that was not all, since those of us who organized the workshop and are the editors of Nepantla intended also to include discourse from other geohistorical locations and other intellectual projects akin to subaltern studies. The main goal, as I mentioned earlier, was to put in conversation different intellectual projects with common interests. The commonality was to be found in crossing their genealogies, on the one hand, and in their subaltern position in the domain of knowledge production on the other. Which, cast in different words, means that subaltern studies, whether South Asian, Latin American, or North American, is not just a question of studying the subalterns but of subalternity of knowledge production itself, as Dipesh Chakrabarty, a historian and member of the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group, has clearly pointed out (Chakrabarty 1992). The same concern has been raised since the 1970s in Africa and in Latin America around the question of whether or not it is possible to talk about African or Latin American philosophy. In the social sciences, Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda loudly proposed, in the 1970s, to decolonize the social sciences under the belief, similar to Chakrabartys, that history was redened during the Renaissance, that social sciences were invented after the Enlightenment, and that both contributed to European colonial expansion. Three days of intensive and exciting dialogues showed, at least to me, that the search for new abstract universals from the Left is no longer an obvious project. Toward the end of the workshop it was clear that two complementary, although somewhat conicting, discourses were taking place. One discourse evolved around the concept of hegemony and posthegemony, the necessary thinking of a possible extension of the political eld beyond hegemonic articulations; the other developed around the concepts of coloniality, peripheral modernities, and decolonization. It was obvious that not every participant in the conference adhered to one or the other of those discourses. Some participants may have been attracted

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by both without engaging in either of them. Other participants may have rejected both. Silence, as we know, does not mean lack of engagement. This situation suggested to me that regarding new abstract universals as the torch that will show the real way for all of us may not be the way to go. It should be possible, perhaps, to turn the search for abstract universals into a thinking of diversity as universal project (or diversality, as Martinican writer and philosopher Edouard Glissant [1990, 1998] has it). Diversality as universal project may be one way of countering the hegemonic force of current global capitalism, of course, but it may also be the dream of an ideal society whose coming into being will be the result of some hegemonic master plan. Perhaps the future will be conceived in terms of socialisms rather than socialism,1 a terrain in which diversity as a universal project would have not only an intellectual ring but also a material conguration. This discussion, which came at the end of the workshop, impinges on academic knowledge and on alternatives we can envision for social transformation and the transformation of the university whichlet me repeatis part of the social. Geopolitically, the transformations would have to take into account local histories in the frame of colonization since the sixteenth century, in the south (see the nal section, Documents, in this issue) as well as in the north (Readings 1996)or at the intersection of a geographical South and a geopolitical North (Smith 1996). Within a larger picture of knowledge production in search of social transformations, re-placing, rather than opening the humanities and the social sciences (Wallerstein et al. 1995), could be a more provocative and useful way of planning the university of the twenty-rst century and South-North relations. Re-placing the social sciences and the humanities may be a logical conclusion if we begin with the assumption that subaltern knowledges are one of the consequences of the hegemony of cultures of scholarship and academic disciplinarity. Thus, while in the 1970s Orlando Fals Borda claimed the need to decolonize the social sciences, and Chakrabarty voiced in the 1990s the need to provincialize Europe because of the epistemic hegemony of history as a discipline, Wallerstein in the 1990s proposed to open the social sciences. These projects are not contradictory. Indeed, I see them as complementary. However, it would not be surprising if in the end they are linked by an irreducible difference, similar to the difference between the intellectual projects that emerged during the workshop under the names of posthegemony and decolonization. Such differences in compatibility are the precise site of possibilities for diversity as a universal project instead

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of new abstract universals (or empty signiers) that, like the state in a multicultural society, will ensure everybody recognition and control everybodys participation. If there was a debate at the end of the workshop it is because the debate goes beyond the workshop itself, and the role of Nepantla is to offer the space for continuing the conversation. Being aware, of course, that beyond the irreducible differences among projects in compatibility there is the domain of the irreducible difference with projects in incompatibility, like those driven by the market, by consumerism, by accumulation as nal destination of human happiness and democratic societies. Although not all of those who had been invited were able to attend, the publication of the workshop proceedings is still a complicated issue. Those who agreed to participate in the workshop came, and came on time! But, as we all know, it is difcult to have the nal version of a paper ready for publication. Consequently, while the general principles of the workshop will be reected in the rst two issues of Nepantla, we will not reproduce in the journal all the materials presented at the workshop. Furthermore, we chose to include material and contributors that did not participate in the workshop but that t very well within the journals philosophy. Nepantla opens up with a set of position papers addressing core issues of the workshop (Dipesh Chakrabarty on South Asian subaltern studies, John Beverley and Ileana Rodriguez on Latin American subaltern studies, and Larry Grossberg on cultural studies). The Essays section begins with miriam cookes view of Islamic feminism as multiple critiques from a subaltern position; John Kraniauskas looks for points of intersection in Garca-Canclinis and Homi Bhabhas conceptualization and uses of hybridity; Gareth Williams grounds his reection on insurrection in El Salvador, to reect on the North/South interfaces; and Mary Pat Brady takes up the question of borders and modernity from a Chicana perspective. The section Interview brings Amrico Paredes, a founding and leading gure of Chicano imaginary, into the conversation. The interview, introduced by Jos David Saldvar, is Saldvars contribution to discussion generated in and by the workshop. The rst issue of Nepantla closes with Documents, featuring a discussion about the future of the university in Chile, which was not part of the workshop but which indirectly encroaches upon its agenda. First, because it offers a view from South about the university as institution, its national history and future uncertainties; second, because of its Cross-Genealogies and Subaltern Knowledges relevance for imagining a future university and the university of the future.

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Nepantla 1.2 will feature papers by Gyan Prakash on the impossibilities of writing subaltern histories and Ramn Grosfoguel on the pertinence of dependency theory, today, for a critic of subalternity. The section Essays will open with Roberto Dainotto on the making of Europes South. Sara Castro-Klarn explores the Brazilian maniesto antropfago and offers a new perspective on hybridity and mestizaje. Finally, Javier Sanjins explores the question of mestizaje in the Bolivian context and compares visual arts with Angel Ramas concept of the lettered city.

Notes
Although I am responsible for this introduction, Gabriela Nouzeilles and Alberto Moreiras made valuable suggestions that have been incorporated in the nal version, for which, of course, I am very thankful. 1. I am using socialisms in plural, having in mind the Zapatistas use and transformations of the word democracy, which they rendered as to rule and to obey at the same timethat is, the incorporation of a historical, semantic, and political density that goes beyond master plans and the textbooks. Or, if you wish, I am thinking of the appropriation and transformations of the words by those who have been excluded from democracy and socialism, and by those who react against the excess committed in the name of both. I thank Ramn Grosfogel for a conversation about this issue that resulted in this clarication.

References
Anzalda, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute. Beverley, John, Jos Oviedo, and Michael Aronna, eds. 1993. The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America (special issue). boundary 2 20, No. 3. . 1995. The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cassano, Franco. 1996. Il pensiero meridiano. Bari, Haly: Sagittary Laterza. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 1992. Postcoloniality and the Artice of History: Who Speaks for the Indian Past? Representations 37: 126. Fals Borda, Orlando. [1970] 1987. Ciencia propia y colonialismo intelectual. Bogot, Colombia: Carlos Valencia Editores. Glissant, Edouard. 1990. Potique de la relation. Paris: Gallimard.

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. 1998. The Unforeseeable Diversity of the World. Keynote address at the conference Beyond Dichotomies, Stanford University, 8 May 1998. Mora, Pat. 1993. Nepantla: Essays from the Land in the Middle. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Readings, Bill. 1996. The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Smith, Terry, ed. 1996. Ideas of the University. Sydney: Research Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Sousa Santos, Boaventura de. 1995. Pela mo de Alice: O social e o politico na ps modernidade. Lisbon: Cortez Editora. . 1998. On Oppositional Postmodernism. In Critical Development Theory: Contributions to a New Paradigm, edited by Ronaldo Munck and Denis OHearn. New York: Zed Books. Wallerstein, Immanuel, Calestous Juma, Evelyn Fox Keller, Jrgen Kocka, Dominique Lecourt, V. Y. Mudimbe, Kinhide Mushakoji, Ilya Prigogine, Peter J. Taylor, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, eds. 1995. Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.