On Aníbal Quijano’s “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America”

Over two decades have passed since Aníbal Quijano published “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America,” but the essay still resonates. It continues to inspire students and provoke debate, but it also continues to be dans le vrai, which is no small thing given the 20 years we’ve just experienced (especially the last ten). In 2009, I participated in a panel on Quijano’s essay, and my short paper is below. It shows my thinking over a decade ago (hardly where it is now, but there is at least a family resemblance between my former self and me), but it also proposes questions that continue to interest me.

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My comments on this wonderful essay are divided into two parts. In the first part, I’ll try to sum up the main points of Quijano’s argument in “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in atin America.” In the second, I’ll attempt to add something to what Quijano says, focusing primarily on: 1) adding a bit of nuance to his strategically reductive (and certainly overly optimistic) assessment of Europe; and 2) briefly fleshing out his comments about the earliest moments of European colonial expansion into Europe, Asia, and the Americas. I’ll begin with a brief outline of Quijano’s argument.

Quijano sums up his thesis perhaps most succinctly on page 229, when he writes: “The coloniality of power, established upon the production of the idea of ‘race’, has to be admitted as a basic factor in the problem of nation-states or nationality.” What does Quijano mean by “coloniality of power”? In his formulation, it seems to revolve around two key elements: 1) the rise of world capitalism at the start of the sixteenth century (i.e., all forms of labor and production begin to revolve around the axis of capital and a now global market of goods and labor); and 2) the development at more or less the same time of a new mental category to “codify relations between conquering and conquered populations”; and that category, which not only codified these asymmetrical relations but also (more importantly) naturalized them, is race.

In speaking about coloniality and race, Quijano argues that the most decisive move achieved by the production of ‘race’ is the flattening of cultural, linguistic, and ethnic differences. In the colonial American context, Yoruba, Igbo, and Ashanti, for example, are flattened into the category negros; Purépecha, Tzeltal, and Zapotec become simply indios; and Spanish, Portuguese, and French become blancos. There are of course famously complex forms of miscegenation that take place throughout the colonial period (as seen, for example, in Latin American casta paintings); however, these all stem from and refer to the racial economy that Quijano describes. What stems from (and underlies) this flattening of difference into generalized racial categories, according to Quijano, is the formation of racialized forms of labor distribution: put simply (even reductively), blancos receive salaries, indios are relegated to serfdom, and negros are stuck with slavery. As Quijano has it, the racialization of the world economy during the sixteenth century likewise places whites – and Western Europe – at the very center of a network of distribution and exchange that has continually enriched that region for over five centuries.

In historical terms, Quijano argues that it is with the colonization of the Americas, first by the Spanish and Portuguese, and then by the English, French, and Dutch, that the two elements – capitalism and race – become for the first time fully conjugated. And it is precisely this enduring conjugation (which has only intensified over the past five hundred years) – coupled with a strong commitment on the part of local elites to build nation-states along European lines – that conditions and ultimately limits political possibilities in Latin America (whether revolutionary in nature or otherwise). As Quijano puts it: “we have never seen in any Latin American country any separation or time sequence between slavery, feudalism, and capitalism. From the beginning, all of them have been articulated within the same single power structure” (230). According to Quijano, it is precisely this co-articulation, sorted out according to race, that has both given shape to and dramatically limited the democratic, revolutionary, and national possibilities of Latin American countries.

Something that comes to mind here is Dipesh Chakrabarty’s point, in a chapter dealing with Marx’s theories of capital in the context of a newly “provincialized Europe.” Chakrabarty writes that “life [ . . . ] is a ‘standing fight’ against the process of abstraction that is constitutive of the category ‘labor.’ It is as if the process of abstraction and ongoing appropriation of the worker’s body in the capitalist mode of production perpetually threatens to effect a dismemberment of the unity of the ‘living body’” (Provincializing Europe 60-61). Turning back to Quijano’s framework, we might say that two fundamental aspects of the process by which ‘labor’ (whether slave, serf, or salaried in form) has been constituted in Latin America are: 1) the racialization (and thus totalization) of worker’s ‘living’ bodies; and 2) a flattening out of time so that all of these (now racialized and thus naturalized) forms of labor co-exist. Put in another way, late medieval theories of geo-humoral medicine and the deleterious effects of a hot climate on the imaginatio of Africans, for example, begin to be framed as essential (and thus timeless and boundless) characteristics of workers’ bodies and selves – a framework, to use one of Marx’s more famous examples, that binds and defines the piano player as much as the piano maker.

In summing up his argument on page 229, Quijano enters into explicitly mythological terrain, and it is here that I’d like to segue from my brief outline of his article to a few ideas more or less of my own. On page 229 he writes: “The trouble is [ . . . ] that in Latin America the Eurocentricist perspective, adopted as their own by the dominant groups, has led them to impose the European model of nation-building upon the power structures that were organized around colonial relations between ‘races’. Therefore we find ourselves today in a labyrinth where the dangerous Minotaur is almost always in sight, but there is no Ariadne to show us the way out.”

No Ariadne to show us the way out, and likewise no Theseus to kill the minotaur. But then it’s entirely possible that Quijano has mixed up his allegorical components. Since Quijano is in effect arguing that the labyrinth was constructed to keep us (that is, post-colonial Latin Americans) trapped within, it seems to follow that we are not Theseus – temporarily held up on Crete as we work to found Athens and all that follows – but rather the minotaur, an anthropophagous mestizo born out of an orchestrated rape. With this reading, one might notice, I’m consciously blending conceits from both Brazilian and Mexican modernism, and reworking a little Borges’s treatment of the minotaur in his short story “La casa de Asterión” (in a sense, Quijano follows Borges almost to the letter).

For those who don’t know the mythological story of the minotaur, it goes more or less like this. King Minos of Crete rises to his throne by making a deal with Poseidon to sacrifice to the sea god a beautiful, snow-white bull. Minos doesn’t honor the deal with Poseidon, and so as punishment Poseidon contrives for Minos’s wife, Pasiphaë, to fall madly and passionately in love with the white bull. Enter Daedelus (exiled from Athens), who designs a life-like wooden cow that is hollow on the inside. Once this cow is wheeled out to the pasture where the white bull is grazing, Pasiphaë climbs inside and allows the bull to impregnate her. Her child grows to be a monstrous and dangerous man-eater (usually represented as having the body of a man and the head and tail of a bull), and so Minos has him imprisoned in a labyrinth (also designed by Daedelus) very near his palace. In the end, Theseus (the mythological founder of Athens) kills the minotaur with the help of the latter’s half-sister Ariadne.

So who in this story is el hijo de la chingada? Who is the anthropophagous half-breed unable to live in either his mother’s or his father’s world? Who is imprisoned in a labyrinth close by the palace that is his birthright? Who in fact is the tragic hero of this story? And should readers side with Theseus, the founder of the polis upon which the European nation-state is self-consciously based, or should we side with the minotaur: trapped in a prison without doors or locks, his own filth (and the carcasses of his victims) piling up around him, only to be clubbed to death through the machinations of Athenians and his half-sister’s unthinkable (and erotically motivated) act of betrayal?

This story has a particular allegorical richness within the Latin American context. Even Dante Alighieri (of all people) lends a hand. In Inferno 12:11-15, he presents the minotaur (in the seventh circle of Hell, among the violent) as a kind of guardian of violence itself. When Virgil (that poet of Western empire) mentions Theseus and Ariadne to the Minotaur, the latter lunges in fury at the travelers “like a bull that has just received a mortal stab wound that it has not been able to avoid.” The wound of betrayal and violence exacted upon him in the name of “order and progress” or (if you prefer) “liberty and order” would seem to be a deep one. And most decisively, the Minotaur seems not to know what to do about it. Up to his elbows in human blood he sits, and as Dante imagines it, “he gnaws away at himself” in violent fury. So he is not only anthropophagous, but in his Dantean form, he is also autophagous – the enraged and utterly confused – but by no means passive or messianic (pace Borges) – victim of his father’s greed and his mother’s amour fou. My point here, because there isn’t time to unpack the allegory fully, is that whether before his murder or after, the minotaur is a compelling figure not to be avoided, but to be faced as one might look in a mirror. And the notion of the mirror takes us back to Quijano’s text, which ends on this note: “What civil and political rights we have been able to advance and to conquer, in some necessary redistribution of power and decolonization of our society and state, is now being rolled back under the control of the same officers of the coloniality of power. It is now high time to learn how to become free from our distorting mirror” (231). Perhaps the problem is not the mirror, but rather our stubborn desire to see the image of Theseus (with Athens in the backgound) in it.

I’d like now to move away just a bit more from Quijano’s text and leave hanging my own admittedly idiosyncratic reading of the figure of the minotaur (a more forceful figure than the feckless Caliban, in any case). In particular, I’d like to spend the rest of my time looking at an underdeveloped aspect of Quijano’s formulation, namely the somewhat idealistic and historically reductive image that Quijano presents of the European nation-state. He writes that independence (without liberation, to paraphrase Frantz Fanon) in a Latin American context brought only the rearticulation of colonial frameworks of power. I think this is probably incontestable; but Spain and Portugal (the European countries I know best) likewise have struggled for years to shake off the old order. Toni Morrison (1993) has spoken of the “lethal discourses of exclusion blocking access to cognition for both the excluder and the excluded,” and extending this idea, I would say that coloniality serves as a block to cognition as much for the European nations that developed it as for the non-European nations on the other end of the whip. In this sense, coloniality functions much like the medieval conception of sin, defined as a “turning away” from God that is, in the end, its own punishment. The dream of empire (like reason), we might say, produces monsters of all sorts and on all sides.

As I’ve already said, for Quijano the coloniality of power involves the conjugation of the idea of race with global capitalism. Colonial Latin American literature is filled with articulations of this framework, as well as with (albeit more rarely) attempts to renegotiate the terms of domination. In the Iberian Peninsula as well, literature labors to theorize the new colonial order, and with only mixed success; and by “new colonial order” I’m referring to internal structures of colonial rule, such as those that obtained in the former Kingdom of Granada and the Crown of Aragon after the rise of Castilian dominance at the end of the fifteenth century (and to the present), as well as to the overseas empires in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. In the 1509 Auto da Índia by Gil Vicente, a Portuguese wife who has been waiting very unfaithfully (although her name is Costança) for her husband to return from India greets him at the door with an exclamation of horror at his new blackness – the result of his melancholic passage through the “torrid zone.” She cries: “How black you are! I don’t love you! I don’t want you!” In the end, however, she is placated (and their marriage saved) by a walk to the docks, where the ships of Tristão da Cunha are loaded to the gunwhales with Indian spices. Later farces, such as Miguel de Cervantes’s Retablo de las maravillas likewise show the distorted image (and brutal results) that ideas of essentialized identity (within a capitalist framework) can produce. There are also much earlier examples of proto-racial structures taking form in contexts of imperial expansion into Africa and Asia, with Portugal’s official chronicler at the middle of the fifteenth century, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, producing a textual corpus that provides vivid accounts of this process. In historical terms, Portugal became a major player in the African slave trade as early as 1440 CE, and writers such as Zurara were quick to begin elaborating complex mythologies (and taxonomies) of Blackness built upon (yet already quite different from) a pre-existing base of ready-to-hand Muslim Otherness.

On the idea of race (specifically Blackness) and Muslim Otherness, we might also look to Francisco Núñez Muley’s well-known letter to the Royal Audiencia of Granada, written in 1567. Núñez Muley was a well-to-do and elderly Granadan Morisco – or convert to Christianity from Islam – who wrote to the Castilian Crown to complain about new laws designed essentially to eradicate the culture of Granada and impose Castilian cultural and religious mores on the people there. The use of spoken or written Arabic would be forbidden, as would the use of veils and public baths. Traditional Granadan music, the zambra – which was even used in Granada to celebrate Catholic mass – would likewise be discarded. Núñez Muley complains about all of this and more, but most telling for our reading of Quijano is what he has to say on the matter of Granadan Moriscos owning slaves:

With respect to what the decree says about the Blacks that have served some of the native Moriscos of this kingdom, what harm has been done to the Holy Catholic faith by the fact that some of the natives of this kingdom have Black men or women as slaves? Have these slaves become Muslims because of the influence of their owners, and do they, or their masters, have any knowledge of the Muslim faith? Don’t these blacks deserve their wretched state? Must everyone be seen as equals? Let them bring the water pitcher on their backs, or carry burdens, or handle the plow, for the natives do not serve each other for periods longer than a few days at a time, and not on a continual basis within their homes. What sin has provoked the order that the natives of this kingdom should not be allowed to have Black slaves, given the former’s aforementioned needs?

So that this point isn’t missed, Núñez Muley is writing a letter to royal authorities protesting the discriminatory policies of the Crown with regard to the large (and native European) minority group to which he belongs. Within this letter, and in relation to the slaves owned by members of his minority community, he asks the rhetorical question, “Must everyone be seen as equals?” His desired answer, one must assume, is no.

It is perhaps an obvious point that the Europe against which Quijano warns his readers, like the West of Edward Said, is a much simpler, more homogeneous idea than what one finds upon closer inspection. The reality is that European states – at least from my vantage point in the Iberian Peninsula – are on only slightly surer political or existential footing than their former colonies. And it’s entirely possible that Quijano is right in saying that it is the conjugation of race and global capitalism in the sixteenth century that continues to make this problem so seemingly unsolvable. As far as historical reductions go, however, it seems to be a productive one – one that opens rather than closes off conversation. To return to the realm of myth (and my own purposeful misreading of Quijano), it certainly could be in the sixteenth century, and with the establishment of European colonies in a “New World,” that our Theseus-complex, which serves to paper over the bullheaded image we see when we look in the mirror, first took on mature form.

But then it occurs to me that the real labyrinth from which we must escape, we might argue, is history – and historical temporality – itself. And to imagine ourselves continually as so many Theseuses (Theseoi?) is to reproduce continually that labyrinth (and our entrapment within it) and to preclude the elaboration of other possible, non-ontological, modes of being-in-the-world. To alter somewhat Borges’s telling of the mythological story, we are not confronted with a deluded and chiliastic minotaur that is willingly clubbed to death by Theseus (as a heroic and civilizing Other), but perhaps more accurately (as Dante presents it), with a brutal suicide ritual, performed over and over throughout historical time. And, in the end, because of historical time and the imperialism that continues to shape it.