After the Decolonial. David Lehmann
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state. It denounces the Marxist nebula, which over generations guided even the moderate Latin American left, for its denial of the racial basis of domination, and disqualifies liberalism for its complicity with colonialism and slavery. Paradoxically, then, the world of the decolonial is characterized by quietism in the public sphere of politics and shrill rhetoric within the halls and Twittersphere of academe. In this it can be contrasted with feminist tendencies that also call themselves decolonial, and in addition autonomous, and are more involved in extra-mural politics by virtue of their activist field research and their participation in women’s and LGBT movements.
This distinctively Latin American tendency is a largely self-sufficient subculture, so I will restrict myself to the output of Latin Americans and Latin Americanists – many operating out of the United States – and of particular authors whom they quote. I also take care to refer to particular writings, and readily admit that it is impossible to cover the entire output of a very prolific group of authorities. My plea is for the restoration of the pursuit of universalist social justice to its rightful place in the thought of the region’s left, and I conclude by according the pursuit of gender equality at least parity with the politics of racial and ethnic identity and racial empowerment.
By universalist social justice, I mean a primary focus on the redistribution of income and wealth based on socio-economic criteria and an understanding of social class and gender as drivers of inequality. Universalist justice also means the investigation and punishment of acts of racial discrimination. This is particularly important because whereas indigenous populations can mobilize along identity lines in support of claims to intercultural education, to restitution of usurped lands and to the re-establishment of their own institutions in the form of laws and self-government, Afro-descendant populations rarely are in a position to make such claims, yet they are also victims of racial exclusion and acts of discrimination. To free those populations of these burdens, policies must focus on universal justice and universalist equality, as must policies to change gender inequalities, and they can also include affirmative action. This distinction between identity politics and universalist justice, which are far from mutually exclusive, remains important.
The other reason for foregrounding universalism is largely practical and has little to do with the frequently drawn contrast between universalism and relativism. It is based on the observation that the frontiers of racial and ethnic populations, and thus the basis on which resources will be allocated under affirmative action or multicultural policies, are impossible to draw independently of political judgements about where those frontiers lie, or even personal judgements about whether a particular person is black, brown or white, or indio, cholo, mestizo or blanco. Distribution on the basis of socio-economic status, gender, age or region, in contrast, is in principle less likely to be challenged for its subjective character. Of course, the criteria of class belonging are subject to debate, but at least they can be established on the basis of agreed rational discussion. I have set much store by the merits of gender as a universalist basis on which to pursue equality, even though self-assignation is an ever more prominent element in gender classification, simply because the scale of the phenomenon is still small compared to the exclusive use of self-assignation in racial and ethnic classification. Although the ground is shifting under both regimes of classification, I still would maintain that for some time to come classification by gender will remain less open to politicization. I therefore advocate the restoration of a degree of balance between gender and race in discussions about inequality and rights, even while allowing plenty of room for intersectionality between them.
On this basis, universal rights are rights that belong to all human beings and should be adjudicated according to features that can be assigned to all human beings. This is the case for differentiating features such as age, gender and social class, whereas indigenous laws can apply only to people of particular indigenous groups. Indigenous rights, however – as distinct from indigenous laws – are universal in the sense that anyone claiming indigenous status should be treated in accordance with universal rights, not least the right to non-discrimination. My argument in the chapters that follow is that the systems of indigenous law advocated in decolonial debates are for the most part perfectly compatible with universal rights and should not be considered different in kind from positive law, even if they apply only within a certain population or region.
The institutional and social setting
Since about 1992 race, ethnicity and gender have become the leading topics shaping the scholarly interpretation of two of Latin America’s most distressing problems: inequality and the abuse of human rights by both state and private actors. This is the case among Latin Americanists throughout the western hemisphere and also in Europe: those subjects have set the agenda in publication, in conferences and in university teaching. The broadly left-wing or simply dissident political sensibility which has long dominated the humanities and social science departments of public universities remains, but the content has shifted from Marxism towards identity politics. By identity politics in the university context, I mean recourse to racial, ethno-linguistic, religious and gender ascription or belonging for explanations of advantage and disadvantage in society as a whole, but also in internal matters affecting the university, such as the curriculum, the profile of the student body and the professoriat. The bodies of those involved are also at stake in the less visible and less audible shaping of scholarly and pedagogical discourse and exchange. The academic business of teaching, of the exchange of research and of management, is influenced (not necessarily in a negative sense) by the physical and online presence, or absence, of people who recognize themselves and are recognized by ascription to a population defined by skin colour, by religion, by gender or by ethnic or ethno-linguistic background.
Identity politics occurs when such belonging, in and of itself, confers authority or legitimacy on a speaker or author. It comes in many shapes and forms, sometimes to include and sometimes to exclude, sometimes to break down barriers and sometimes to erect them, sometimes to facilitate exchange and sometimes to interrupt it.
The visibility and audibility of identity politics comes at a time of growth in the number and presence of students from Afro-descendant and indigenous backgrounds in Latin American universities and research institutions, but the presence of professors from those backgrounds lags far behind. Nonetheless, universities have been pioneering spaces where those groups have found a voice ahead of other institutions such as professional bodies or the judiciary.
There has also been a change in the class composition of the professoriat, which is now drawn less from the upper-middle classes than was once the case. University salaries may guarantee security to those with tenure, but they no longer guarantee an upper-middle class existence, and an ever-increasing number of highly qualified people with Masters degrees and doctorates, finding difficulty getting a full-time academic job, are making a living on short-term or hourly contracts. The proliferation of private and public universities and the concomitant growth of student numbers have also expanded the profession, contributing to refined gradations of prestige, status, income and locational differences. This structural change may have added an edge to the traditional dissident posture of academics.
The expression ‘ivory tower’ is anachronistic in a world where there are millions of undergraduates, hundreds of thousands of graduate students and tens of thousands of professors. Academia today constitutes a political arena and a market all of its own where interest groups compete for resources, for departments and centres, for publication outlets, for research funds and for the power of patronage.
A similar scenario exists in the United States where identity politics has been a standard feature of university life for longer than in Latin America and where significant numbers of students and professors teaching and following courses on Latin America are immigrants or people from immigrant families. This US-based contingent can be said to form a single constituency with Latin American humanities and social science: the distinction between a Latin American scholar and an ‘American’ scholar is blurred. They conduct their exchanges equally in English, Spanish and Portuguese, are riven by similar disagreements and are fired by similar enthusiasms. Until 2020, the more prominent figures among them have been fixtures on the same hemisphere-wide lecture, workshop and conference circuits. Decolonial scholarship