Week Seven: el Norte and the Question of Latin America

These next few weeks continue to be full of knowledge demands—make an attempt to keep your personal list of demands you need to address.  These next three weeks, make a special attempt to bring course concepts and language together.  Make connections.

Make sure you understand the premises that inform Mignolo’s text:  The Idea of Latin America.

1.     page xiii (6 premises are detailed):  Knowledge Demands:  16^th Century, European Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, Modernity, Coloniality, Capitalism, and WWII.

2.     The Invention of America p. 2 “not a continent waiting to be discovered”

3.     Two Differenent Paradigms NOT simply different interpretations!  Change in the terms and logic, not only content.  Knowledge comes from some place (geo-politics of Knowledge).

4.     History (who has it, who doesn’t).  p. 4.  NB:  Rabasa’s idea is different (if you’re interested you can look into this further in the Without History piece we cut).  What is behind European History (“human actors capable of thought and understanding”) and how this relates to Rabasa’s idea of elsewheres.

5.     Creoles:  think about Lowe (hybridity) and our own investigation of mestizaje

6.     Coloniality:  (Anibal Quijano) p. 5 and the logic of on page 7.  Entanglements p. 5 “The darker side of modernity and as the historical perspective of the wretched, the outcasts from history told from the perspective of modernity.”

7.     The Invention of America p. 6 as a key “turning point in world history”  and the demands of modernity, and reliance on coloniality.  “The “reduction of people to ‘Indians’ and ‘Blacks’.” p. 6, from which creoles and mestizos could be born.  How does this relate to racialization?

8.     Modernity/Coloniality:  you cannot be one without the other, and the idea of America (p. 7) and coloniality (also p. 7).  The same logic with only a change in who has power.  Related to revolution (a turning of the same wheel).

9.     The colonial wound and racism p. 8

10.  Shift in geo-politics of knowledge p. 8 NB:  “Even the postmodern endorsement of pluralities of interpretations cannot be celebrated as long as it is restricted to a diversity of interpretations within the one Eurocentric frame of knowledge.”  By theology and egology p. 8

11.  Geopolitics of knowledge p. 9 and “Border Thinking.  The indigenous takes in the European, but the European is not required to take in the indigenous.  Inter-culturalidad p. 9, constitutes the colonial difference p. 10

12.  The map must be redrawn p. 10 This is not simply a difference of name, or referential shape! 

13.  The logic of coloniality p. 11, in place since the conquest and colonization.