The book grew out of the ongoing debate about ‘globalization’ and ‘postcoloniality.’ Its authors have creatively assimilated the postcolonial theories of Said, Guha, Bhabha, and Spivak, applying them to the revision and renewal of Latin American studies. This new current was consolidated in the LASA Congresses in 1994 and 1997 and in the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group. The authors produce a new synthesis of postcolonial ideas by applying them to Latin American experience and to their own theoretical endeavors. Whereas the idea of postcoloniality unmasks the connections between the imperial system of power and the images of the colonies produced by its ideological agencies, the Latin-Americanist researchers extend their critique deeper into the sphere of culture to reveal the indirect connections between the socio-economic system, power interests, and the manipulative use of mass culture (including the colonization of language and memory). They bring postcoloniality to a new theoretical level and develop its philosophical basis.

The book’s introduction, “The Discursive Translocation of ‘Latin America’ in Times of Globalization,” by Santiago Castro-Gómez and Eduardo Mendieta, gives a panoramic view of the current debate about globalization and postcolonialty in relation to Latin American identity. In contrast to the global rhetoric (or “globe talk”) that has become a conceptual rubric for technocratic triumphalism in the West, the authors present globalization as an ambiguous and multidimensional process that contains both synergetic and centrifugal tendencies. They analyze the paradoxes of glocalization – the globalization of the local and localization of the global – of the new forms of production of wealth, and also, concomitantly, of poverty (14). Indeed, globalization has dissolved the boundaries between the economy, politics, and culture, challenging traditional disciplinary knowledge. All these disciplines must therefore become more self-reflective in regard to their own forms of theorization. Postcoloniality is the critique of cognitive strategies dictated by the colonial and imperial projects of the West; it denounces the integration of a socio-economic system and its cultural-ideological products, including social theories which are used as instruments of manipulation and control. Globalization is observed from its underside and from the perspective of its victims. The authors see postcoloniality as a critical theory for an “age of globalization and exclusion.” They emphasize that this is self-conscious theorizing and thus remains open to the critical analysis of its own categories. Following the series of ‘post-’ nomenclature, I would identify the critique of the technocratic globalization doctrine and the search for an alternative as ‘post-globalism.’

In his contribution to the volume, Walter Mignolo, Argentinian semiologist, brings us the most up-to-date theorizing about postcoloniality. He explores the possibilities of diverse and legitimate theoretical loci of enunciation. From this perspective, he distinguishes three types of reaction to the crisis of modernity: the postmodernism generated in Europe and the US, the postcolonialism which has its locus of enunciation in the British ex-colonies, and the postoccidentalism of Latin America. In contrast to the postcolonial theorists, who overlook the role of Latin America in the process of decolonization, Mignolo shows the preeminence of Latin American thought in developing the philosophical basis for a systematic critique of colonialism and Occidentalization. He proposes a comparative and philological methodology and a pluritopic hermeneutics for the radical rethinking of cultural differences, for rethinking the Other as a subject and, especially, as an understanding subject. Instead of relying on the notion of representation in the human sciences, Mignolo proposes enactment. A pluritopic hermeneutics calls into question the understanding subject itself: we must look at the configuration of power, the interests, and the politics of the intellectual inquiry implied by a scholarly work or political discourse. Mignolo analyzes the “politics of knowledge” implemented in the US which created a certain image of Latin America as an object of the social sciences, understood as ‘area studies’ (for example LASA). He indicates that with the increasing immigration of intellectuals from Latin America to the US, there emerges a new type of work with a “border epistemology” that goes beyond the Occidental pattern and allows the emergence of new thought from the perspective of immigrants, refugees, etc.

Eduardo Mendieta in his essay “Modernity, Postmodernity, and Postcoloniality: A Hopeful Search of Time” confronts globalization as a philosophical problem. He traces the ‘original sin’ of modernity back to the birth of Christianity. The author examines the Christian concept of time and history and reveals the links between Christianity, modernity, and postmodernity. He argues that modernity is a secularization of the Christian chronogram, and that the revealing of God throughout history is reflected in the concept of progress, whether moral or technological. Mendieta echoes Heidegger’s analysis of the modern concept of time underlying the teleological representations of society and history. Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit was a reaction against this ‘temporal fetishism’ and Hegel’s historicism, and his concept of Dasein (“being-there”) etymologically provides a local-spatial view of the human individual. Man is being in time, but he is not manipulated by it: by the very mode of his being, man himself is time and has the ontological privilege of ‘being history.’ Mendieta’s position coincides with that of Dussel, Roig, Zea, and other Latin American philosophers who show that the postmodern concept of the ‘end of history’ is an apology for the status quo. They emphasize that the Latin American nations, which are burdened with stinging socio-economic problems, do not want to ‘close history’ and that liberation remains their purpose.

In this brilliant essay, the author elucidates the important contributions to a critical postcolonial discourse made by liberation philosophy and theology. Mendieta analyzes the major breakthroughs of Latin American and other Third World liberation theologies as an alternative to the theologies historically related to the European Empires. This new theology understands itself as both the liberation of theology and of the poor from a dehumanizing social system. The ideas of a truly ecumenical age and of a planetary ethics, which are expressed in one form or another by the progressive European theologies (Metz, Küng), are enhanced by liberation theologies, which offer a new vision of our planet and of the human community. Mendieta suggests that these theologies were postmodern before the Europeans thought of postmodernism, but that they have now advanced beyond postmodernism to become transmodern. He shows the similarities between liberation theology and liberation philosophy which are both part of postcolonial theorizing. Both consider the world from a life-enhancing perspective (Dussel’s concept of “the life community”), and both look at history from its ‘underside’ to reveal the interdependence of First World wealth and Third World poverty. In contrast to the panoptical chronotope of modernity, the world is not a disjunction of space and time in which difference is relegated to another country and another time, but the conjunction of both (Mendieta calls it “the double spacial-temporal axis” (161)). Liberation theorists conceptualized the growing interdependence of the world. From a global perspective, Mendieta concludes, Europe and America are the “interpretative institutions”; they are distorted mirrors in which representations of the other and of themselves are reflected (163).

The authors also examine Latin American studies in US universities. Alberto Moreiras’s essay “Global Fragments: the Second-Order Latin Americanism” develops a genealogy of the politics of knowledge as it is manifested in Latin American studies, where representations of Latin America have functioned as a theoretical framework supporting the political interests of the United States in this region. The author points out a new social-cultural situation in the US in which the cultures and political energies of the immigrants from Latin America have become an important source of the revision of knowledge about their countries. Moreira criticizes traditional (or first order) Latin Americanism and sketches the main principles of a new (or second order) Latin Americanism, which he characterizes as a highly self-reflexive epistemological critique of (first order) Latin American discourse. The anthology also includes the founding statement of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group and an essay by its coordinator, Ileana Rodriguez, who analyzes the “floating meaning” of subalternation. Fernando Coronil’s essay “Beyond Westernization: Towards Non-Imperialist Geohistorical Categories” shows that the representations of Latin America follow a certain epistemological politics practiced by metropolitan institutions, which portray non-Western countries as the ‘Other’ of the Western ‘I.’ However, as in Borges’s story, where an imperial fullscale map tried to duplicate the represented object, with globalization this kind of historiography and cartography have been disavowed. With massive immigration, the subaltern (the Other) is no longer located outside but is rather inside the developed countries, stimulating new social movements. Coronil hopes that with these changes there will emerge in the universities “the geohistorical categories for a non-imperialist world” (122).

In contrast to this optimism, in her essay “The Boom of the Subaltern,” Mabel Moraña expresses doubts about the possibility of revising the politics of knowledge regarding Latin America inside the theoretical apparatus of US academies. Their hierarchy presupposes the “epistemological privilege” of the hegemonic discourse. Moraña warns that the postcolonial notions of ‘hybridity’ and ‘subalternity,’ as enunciated from the metropolitan theoretical locus, are used to justify the predominance of technocratic intellectuals as the ideological avant-garde of globalization (243). Personally, I do not think that the evolution of postcolonial theorizing in this direction is predetermined. However, such a possibility must not be excluded, given the dehumanizing efficiency of a system based on power and money. Whether the postcolonial movement, which began as Sturm und Drang, will remain faithful and be able to accomplish its renovating mission is an open question.

While the authors just discussed try to deconstruct the colonial images of Latin America which circulate in the academies of the First World, other authors in the book try to do the same with regard to images generated inside Latin America. Hugo Achugar (Uruguay) contrasts the metropolitan theorizing about Latin America with the culturally rooted reflection from Latin America itself. He indicates the necessity to “decolonize postcolonial theorizing” by demonstrating that Latin America has generated its own self-reflexive categories. Nelly Richard (Chile) also distinguishes between speaking about and speaking from Latin America. She criticizes the Latin Americanism produced in academic institutions controlled by the technocrats of knowledge, regardless of their geographical location. According to her, the necessity of reorganizing academic research requires “the critique of the critique” and the further conceptualization of ‘the Other’ in terms of marginality, heterogeneity, difference, hybridity, and subalternation (267). Erna von der Walde (Colombia) analyzes the “macondism” which is functioning in Latin America as a hegemonic and exclusionary concept.

Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez’s essay “Latin Americanism, Modernity, and Globalization. Prolegomena to the Postcolonial Critique of Reason” continues the project of the “critique of Latin American reason” initiated by the liberation philosophers from the Bogota Group. His work is valuable as the self-reflection of this philosophy. The author, in tune with the Habermasian concept of the “colonization of the lifeworld,” focuses on the role of knowledge and of those who produce and conrol it. He considers this colonization a heritage of modernity, which continues to reproduce itself in the links between the discursiveness of the social sciences and the images of Latin America formed by the bureaucratic rationality of academies in both North and South America. Castro-Gómez adopts Moreiras’s distinction between the first order and the second order Latin Americanism and examines the role of postcolonial theorists who are struggling to transform the politics of knowledge as “outsiders within the teaching machine.” He promotes the similar project of a genealogy or archaeology of Latin Americanism from inside the region. He applies the ideas of second order Latin Americanism to the epistemological critique of the traditional representations or myths of Latin America about itself, such as the ‘cosmic race,’ the telluric and autochthonous cultural identity, and the epistemic privilege of the poor. Castro-Gómez traces these myths back to the modern era and shows that, in spite of themselves, they were western representations, used by the populist nation-state aimed at producing a ‘modernization’ of Latin America. He infers that “the project of rationalization has been an Archimedean point on which all the Latin Americanisms of the twentieth century were constructed” (202).

Castro-Gómez points out the structural paradox of Latin Americanism, which uses its homogenizing language of modern knowledge while pretending to represent the heterogeneity and differences in Latin America (what G. Spivak calls “epistemic violence”). Liberation philosophy and theology, in their “journey towards an origin,” towards the unrepresented world of the subaltern, also perpetuate a metaphysical scheme: the search for first beginnings and the essential truth about ‘sameness.’ As a result of his genealogy, he concludes that “underneath the historical representations of Latin America is not a more authentic representation, but rather a will to representation which affirms itself in a ferocious struggle with other wills” (203). The author’s thoughtful criticism must be balanced, as a counterpoint, with the consideration that liberation philosophy has demonstrated its capability for critical self-reflection, enabling it to surmount many illusions of the seventies and to find its way toward renewal. In the last decade it has evolved from confrontation to dialogue and has articulated a new concept of globalization which places the Americas and Europe in a global-historical context as elements of the world-system, and it has also contributed to the development of a planetary ethics of co-responsibility.

This ground-breaking book challenges the reader to consider the current debate about postcoloniality and globalization. It has a polyphonic unity, pointing towards a new direction in the rediscovery of Latin America. The book contains heuristically fruitful theoretical insights from which to gain a better understanding of today’s world.