A Fragment on Latin American Dependency Theory and Liberation Philosophy (original) (raw)
Choice Reviews Online, 2003
East. If those views represented all of "Hegelianism," and Hegel's dialectic, there would be little need to discuss Hegel at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The Hegelian scholar H. S. Harris has written emphatically on the sharp division needed in discussing Hegel's writings: There are some strong indications in Hegel's Philosophy of World History that he was willing to countenance a 'speculative faith.' He not only presents world history as the movement of 'Providence' (as if a superhuman agent were really involved), but also employs the myth of a 'March of the Spirit' from the Sunrise towards the Sunset to support a 'substantial' interpretation of the great Asian cultures as logically primitive. Every aspect of this concept of history as the work of a real 'Divine Providence' is superstitious and reactionary. What we now know about the cultural movement of religious ideas (and especially about the spread of Buddhism) shows that the March of the Spirit is an unhistorical fiction; and Hegel's interpretation of non-Christian cultures shows clear signs of the nascent cultural and economic imperialism of Western Europe in his time (and in the ensuing century). Hence, the position adopted here is that we should interpret Hegel's philosophy strictly as a Science and ignore all of the religious' extensions of it made by Hegel or others. In this perspective, the 'Science of experience,' being the speculatively integrated version of Kant's Critical Philosophy, provides the true criterion of what is genuinely scientific in Hegel. The Philosophy of World History shows us the weak side of Hegel's philosophyit is 'speculative' in the bad sense. The Phenomenology is the book that contains Hegel's genuine theory of historical knowledge. Our present object is to discover in it the interpretation of Hegel's system that remains 'eternally' valid. 2 Thus, a view of Latin America with the eyes of the Hegelian dialectic refers to probing Latin America's reality, its masses' passion for freedom, its thinkers' philosophic labors in relation to Hegelian philosophic categories. The categories of Other, of the dialectics of recognition beginning in "Lordship and Bondage," of "Spirit in Self-Estrangement, the Discipline of Culture," and of Absolute Knowledge, Absolute Idea, and Absolute Mind from within Hegel's principle philosophic works remain our subject matter. These particular sections were taken up in and of themselves in chapter 1. We believe they speak to the problematic of Latin American liberation today. The current chapter examines these categories in relation to Latin American philosophic thought. In turn, a view of Hegel with Latin American eyes, refers to a number of Latin American thinkers who have written under the impact of, or in response to Hegel, and whom we will examine. Within the themes of identity, culture, philosophies of history, and liberation in Latin America, we will again limit ourselves to only a few of the many thinkers who have written in relation to these themes. We will take up the essayist and poet Octavio Paz, the philosopher of Latin American history Leopoldo Zea, the philosophers Augusto Salazar Bondy and Arturo Andrés Roig, the Peruvian historian and sociologist Anibal Quijano, as well as a proponent of what has been termed a "Philosophy of Liberation" for Latin America, Enrique Dussel. Our commentary on these thinkers will also be selective, given the vast range of their works. Prologue Frantz Fanon: The Dialectics of Recognition as a Dialectics of Liberation On the opening page of Fanon's first book, Black Skin, White Masks, (first published in French in 1952), he begins his explanation of why he is writing with the words, "Towards a new humanism." 3 It is, in fact, this expression that captures Fanon's revolutionary vision, birthed in 1952 and developed and enriched in a multiplicity of ways over the next nine years, reaching its culmination in The Wretched of the Earth, (first published in French in 1961, the year of Fanon's death at thirtysix). We propose to explore this "new humanism" as developed in Fanon's thought from a dialectics of recognition toward a dialectics of liberation. The transcendence had its fullest expression in The Wretched of the Earth. However, here we will be
The Duality of being both Oppressor and Oppressed in Different Places
INNOVA Research Journal, 2017
El propósito principal de este artículo es ofrecer una perspectiva diferente de un opresor y una persona oprimida y comprender mi propia realidad a través de mi propia experiencia. Esta dualidad me hace una persona con características únicas. Características que en ocasiones me hacen privilegiada como mestizo y una persona que comúnmente oprime, explota y gobierna a otros con fuerza económica y social. Por otra parte, otras situaciones me convierten en una persona colonizada que se caracteriza por ser dependiente y oprimida cuando estoy en la posición de mujer latina en los Estados Unidos. Me gustaría pensar en mí como una mujer que está dispuesta a "desarrollar [mi] poder para percibir críticamente la forma en que [yo] existo en el mundo con el cual y en el cual [yo] me encuentro" (Freire, 2000, p. 12). Me gustaría ver este mundo como una realidad en un proceso de transformación.
U jeets'el le ki'ki’ kuxtal: A Hemispheric Meditation on Abolition and Autonomy
South Atlantic Quarterly, 2023
This article imagines abolitionist politics in the Yucatán peninsula as one group, known as U jeets'el le ki'ki’ kuxtal, pushes against one portion of Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador's development plan known as the “Tren Maya.” I contend that U je'etsel's calls for autonomy speak to forms of radical abolitionist politics present in the United States, where we might observe the centrality of land in both abolition and decolonization. To this end, I first provide a definition of a trans feminist abolition radically focused on the otherwise, or the eradication of all forms of social oppression. This definition is followed by close readings of U je'etsel's communiqués regarding AMLO's 2021 visit to the Yucatán peninsula and the continued role the so-called “Caste War” plays in attempts to expand nationalized colonization into the region. My final goal is to proffer that “Caste War” constitutes a historicized form of radical autonomy as well as project of abolition subject to forces that seek to vacate it of its liberatory power. I demonstrate that part of U je'etsel's discursive project is to reclaim the “Caste War” narrative as part of an emancipatory project involving a radical reclaiming of autonomy's regional history.