Discovery vs. Invention and Interpretation vs. Perspective

I remember that when I was little I learned on a children’s television show that Australia is the only continent that is just one country. Then relatively recently my sister and I began to discuss that Oceania is actually a more accurate term. Now I am questioning the legitimacy of any categories at all. The two points that I found to be the most mind boggling in the Mignolo reading were that of discovery vs. invention and interpretation vs. perspective. I had never fully considered the naming of places that seem so entrenched in our current world as inventions of coloniality and modernity. “America” was not a landmass just waiting to be found and sired by European powers as the areas already had names and peoples with traditions and epistemic matrices that did not conveniently fit into what Rabasa would call the “Greco-Abrahamic.” Also interesting to note is the current tendency to assume “America” refers only to the United States or North America. This disregard for Latin America, though that too is quite a problematic term, is still indicative of what Manalansan would consider unequal hegemonic power relations partly due to what Mignolo would deem U.S. imperialism.

 I have always been told that history depends on both interpretation and perspective with the terms used almost interchangeably but with, what I would argue, slightly more emphasis on interpretation. Now, however, I see that interpretation is founded on the implicit assumption that there is one linear historical narrative that can merely be articulated multiple ways. Also embedded is the notion that some of those interpretations carry more weight and legitimacy because some would be closer to the supposedly objective universal past than others simply by virtue of language, geography, ancestry, etc. Perspective on the other hand, like Interculturalidad, is based in a framework of many perspectives that do not all neatly collapse into one grand story but require translation and accommodation from all involved in order to come to an understanding. The idea of the double critique is crucial to this as it necessitates one to examine both another’s culture as well as one’s own. This symbolizes the more indigenous horizontal method of exchanging ideas and power as opposed to the vertical usually top-down system imposed by the West.