El campo del pensamiento decolonial latinoamericano / The field of Latin American decolonial thought

El objetivo de este trabajo es abordar el pensamiento crítico latinoamericano desde la perspectiva de la teoría de los campos de Pierre Bourdieu. En ese sentido, el pensamiento crítico es considerado como el objeto de estudio y el campo como la metodología para analizarlo. El pensamiento crítico latinoamericano ha atravesado por varias etapas, sólo la última, identificada como pensamiento decolonial es la que se considera para poner a revisión. Los extractos de la teoría de los campos utilizados para encontrar los objetos del juego del pensamiento decolonial permiten identificar la modernidad-colonialidad y las relaciones saber-poder como elementos constitutivos en la nueva etapa del campo del pensamiento latinoamericano. El ejercicio de observación del enfoque decolonial comprueba que el trabajo intelectual en América Latina para explicar la realidad del conjunto de países de la región, conocido como pensamiento crítico latinoamericano, conforma un campo en el sentido bourdiano. The objective of this work is to approach Latin American critical thinking from the perspective of Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory. In that sense, critical thinking is considered as the object of study and the field as the methodology to analyze it. Latin American critical thinking has gone through several stages, only the last one, identified as decolonial thinking, is what is considered to do the analysis. Excerpts from the theory of the fields used to find the objects of the game of decolonial thinking allow us to identify modernity-coloniality and knowledge-power relations as constitutive in the new stage of the Latin American thought field. The decolonial thought review exercise proves that intellectual work in Latin America to explain the reality of the region’s group of countries, known as Latin American critical thinking, forms a field in the Bourdian sense.

Getting Started

This chapter outlines the state of inter-American relations in the middle of the Cold War. President Richard Nixon came to office in 1969 in the aftermath of the Alliance for Progress, the ambitious ten-year, $20 billion economic aid program announced by President John F. Kennedy in March of 1961. Nixon had strong views about the shortcomings of the Alliance for Progress. Unlike Henry Kissinger, who had limited familiarity with Latin American thought, culture, and society, Nixon judged himself knowledgeable about Latin America. Nixon directed Kissinger to develop a comprehensive review of the U.S. policies toward Latin America. Kissinger then threw himself into the exercise with enthusiasm, perceiving the review of trade, investment, aid, and security issues as a learning experience. Nixon also dispatched his political rival and Kissinger's mentor, Governor Nelson Rockefeller (R-NY), on a fact-finding mission to Latin America.

Hemispheric Comparison in Latin American Anti-Imperial Thought

Comparison has been central to Latin American thought. It has been a consistent thematic preoccupation and key methodological approach. Since the era of independence, Latin American thinkers have worried about the adoption of political ideas and institutions developed elsewhere. Originally these anxieties about comparison were directed at Europe, but they increasingly shifted to the United States as it emerged as the region’s principal imperial threat. This chapter examines the ideas of two prominent Latin American thinkers—the Argentinean statesman Domingo F. Sarmiento and the Cuban nationalist José Martí—to trace the role of comparison in shaping the arguments of the anti-imperial strand of Latin American political thought. It shows that Latin American thinkers selectively read certain aspects of the United States’ racial history to intervene in Latin American political dilemmas. It also shows that for many of these thinkers, comparisons to US race relations functioned to obscure racial hierarchies within their own region. A genealogy of hemispheric comparison within Latin American political thought’s anti-imperial strand thus serves to complicate our understanding of the lineage and aims of comparative political theory.

Exordio: Towards a Hermeneutics of Liberation

Liberatory thought in Latin American philosophy leads to the question of the reinterpretation of historical time consciousness. In the following pages I first introduce the challenge as articulated out of Latin American thought, particularly with reference to Enrique Dussel and Aníbal Quijano, and then I develop a reinterpretation of historical time consciousness in its happening as understood through Hans-Georg Gadamer’s discussion of effected historical consciousness (Wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein) in Truth and Method. As already marked by this trajectory, this essay is not comparative, but, through a dialogue with these thinkers, seeks to rethink the temporalizing-historical movement that is historical consciousness as a possible path to engaging in and understanding liberatory philosophy.

‘An Atmosphere of Genuine Solidarity and Brotherhood’: Hernán Santa-Cruz and a Forgotten Latin American Contribution to Social Rights

Latin America played a crucial role in furthering the cause of human rights at the nascent United Nations (UN) when great powers were mostly interested in limiting the scope to issues of collective security. Following this line of thought, this article aims to understand the Latin American contributions to the promotion of ESCRs in both global and regional debates by tracing the figure of the Chilean diplomat Hernán Santa-Cruz and his efforts as both a drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and founder of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). In Santa-Cruz’s silhouette we can find a vivid example of Latin American thought regarding social rights, marked by the intersections and contradictions of regional discourses such as social Catholicism, socialist constitutionalism, and developmentalist economic theories.

“La tona” e “Hículi Hualula” como dos visiones antitéticas sobre lo indígena en El diosero, de Francisco Rojas González

RESUMEN En este trabajo se analizan dos cuentos del importante pero poco estudiado libro El diosero (1952), de Francisco Rojas González, como dos posturas antitéticas sobre el indígena. “La tona” e “Hículi Hualula” se inscriben en un contexto donde el debate sobre la mexicanidad se encontraba en boga tanto por la institución literaria como por la antropológica. Antropólogo de profesión, Rojas González aparece como una figura que a través de una de sus narraciones problematizará la disciplina a la que pertenece. La postura del autor sobre el conocimiento del indígena será un antecedente para la literatura indigenista mexicana posterior y para el pensamiento latinoamericano que pondrá en duda la superioridad del conocimiento de occidente.Palabras clave: Rojas González, antropología, indigenismo, Tona, Hículi Hualula ABSTRACT In this paper, we analyze two tales from the important but little studied book El diosero (1952), by Francisco Rojas González, as two antithetical positions on the indigenous. "La tona" and "Hícula Hualula" are part of a context where the debate about Mexicanness was in vogue in the literary institution as well as in the anthropological one. Anthropologist by profession, Rojas González appears as a figure who, through one of his narrations, would problematize the discipline to which he belongs. The author's position on indigenous knowledge would set a precedent for later Mexican indigenist literature and for the Latin American thought that would put in doubt the superiority of West's knowledgeKeywords: Rojas González, anthropology, indigenismo, Tona, Hícula Hualula

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Ben Sifuentes-Jáuregui y Marisa Belausteguigoitia, eds. Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought: Historical and Institutional Trajectories. Nueva York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

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