Literatures of the Americas

Series Editor Norma E.   Cantú

KANSAS CITY ,  Missouri USA

This series seeks to bring forth contemporary critical interventions within a hemispheric perspective, with an emphasis on perspectives from Latin America. Books in the series highlight work that explores concerns in literature indifferent cultural contexts across historical and geographical boundaries and also include work on the specifi c Latina/o realities in the United States. Designed to explore key questions confronting contempo-rary issues of literary and cultural import, Literatures of the Americas is rooted in traditional approaches to literary criticism but seeks to include cutting-edge scholarship using theories from postcolonial, critical race, and ecofeminist approaches.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14819

Juan G. Ramos • Tara Daly Editors

Decolonial Approaches to Latin American Literatures

and Cultures

Literatures of the Americas ISBN 978-1-137-60312-8 ISBN 978-1-349-93358-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-93358-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016907576

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

Cover illustration: travelstock.ca / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Nature America Inc. New York

Editors Juan G. Ramos College of the Holy Cross Worcester , Massachusetts , USA

Tara Daly Marquette University Milwaukee , Wisconsin , USA

v

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A work of this nature would not have been possible without the support of many people from various latitudes and at different stages of its production. The current form of this volume is the product of the endless conversations and e-mail exchanges with my co-editor Tara Daly. Thank you for sharing and reimagining this volume at every turn. None of this would have been pos-sible without the instant and unconditional support from Sara Castro-Klarén, Horacio Legrás, Zairong Xiang, Antonia Carcelén- Estrada, Arturo Arias, Javier Sanjinés, Gustavo Verdesio, Elizabeth Monasterios, Laura Beard, and Mabel Moraña. There are no words to express my gratitude for your intel-lectual and collegial generosity, and for believing in this project from its incep-tion. At different points, Beatriz González-Stephan, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Carmen Luz Cosme, Claudia de Lima Costa, and Jorge F. Coronado have been also supportive of this project. At the College of the Holy Cross, I want to thank my Dean Margaret Freije, my chairs Estrella Cibreiro and Daniel Frost, and my colleagues in the Department of Spanish for their sup-port, advice, and words of encouragement. Without the editorial support and patience of Brigitte Shull, Paloma Yannakakis, Norma Cantú, and the rest of the editorial and production staff at Palgrave, this project wouldn’t be any-where near its current form. I extend my thanks to the anonymous external reviewers for their generosity and keen insights. Without the ongoing support from family and loved ones, I would have been like a sailor lost at sea without a compass or stars to guide me. In the Southern Hemisphere, Tito, tía Azu, Ruth, and ñaños have been my crux and centaurus . No tengo palabras para agradecerles por tanto amor, paciencia y por enseñarme tanto cada día. In the Northern Hemisphere, Panza, Adora, and Emily have been incredibly good

vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

at reminding me when to stop and look beyond books or the screen. Gildo, Leda, Adelina, Liza, Enrico, e Mitti: av ringrazi per e voster bo cor. Sara, my polaris , for guiding me with patience, words of encouragement, affection, and unconditional love to fi nd transatlantic routes.

— Juan G. Ramos

I thank my co-editor Juan Ramos for his initiative and ongoing col-legiality in bringing this book to fruition. I cannot imagine a better writ-ing partner. I am grateful to the team of professors I studied with at the University of California, Berkeley: Estelle Tarica, José Rabasa, Richard Rosa, and particularly in relationship to this project, Nelson Maldonado- Torres. Thanks to my colleagues in the Five Colleges for their friendship and sage advice over the past few years: Heidi Scott, Justin Crumbaugh, Rogelio Miñana, María Elena Cepeda, Sonia Alvarez, Claudia de Lima Costa, Sara Brenneis, and Micaela Díaz-Sánchez, amongst others. I also appreciate the very new support of my colleagues in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Marquette University, especially Jeffrey Coleman, Dinorah Cortés-Vélez, Eugenia Afi noguénova, and Anne Pasero, who have welcomed me into their community. I extend my gratitude to Brigitte Shull, Paloma Yannakakis, Norma Cantú, and the Palgrave team, as well as the generous external reviewers of this man-uscript. It has also been a distinct pleasure to work with the group of outstanding scholars who contributed to this volume and I thank all of them for their interest, trust, good humor, and scholarship. And to Julieta Paredes, who often sweeps in and out of my life at the right moment, thank you for sharing your generous wisdom.

Behind the scenes, thanks go to Edgewood Road and its tirelessly opti-mistic and insightful leaders, Mike and Sharon, as well as to my grand-mother, for her friendship. To Colin, Kate, and Julia: you are the best teammates a sister could have. And to Laura, for climbing real and meta-phoric ladders with equal ease to meet me, thank you.

— Tara Daly

vii

Introduction: Decolonial Strategies for Reading and Looking with and against the Grain xiii Juan G. Ramos and Tara Daly

Part I Undisciplining “Spanish” and “Literature” 1

1 Notes from the Field: Decolonizing the Curriculum/The “Spanish” Major 3 Sara Castro-Klarén

2 The Rule of Impurity: Decolonial Theory and the Question of Literature 19 Horacio Legrás

Part II Decolonizing Translation and Representations of the Indigenous 37

3 The (De)coloniality of Conceptual Inequivalence: Reinterpreting Ometeotl through Nahua Tlacuiloliztli 39 Zairong Xiang

CONTENTS

viii CONTENTS

4 What Does the Sumak Kawsay Mean for Women in the Andes Today? Unsettling Patriarchal Sedimentations in Two Inca Writers 57 Antonia Carcelén-Estrada

5 New Indigenous Literatures in the Making: A Contribution to Decoloniality 77 Arturo Arias

Part III Material Culture and Literature as Decolonial Critiques 97

6 Decolonizing Aesthetic Representation: The Presence of the European Savage in Bolivian Modernity 99 Javier Sanjinés C.

7 The Air as a Decolonial Critique of Being in César Calvo’s Las tres mitades de Ino Moxo y otros brujos de la Amazonía 121 Tara Daly

8 Disruptive Capital in Andean/World Literature: A Decolonial Reading of Enrique Gil Gilbert’s Nuestro pan 141 Juan G. Ramos

Part IV Decolonial Options, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Transregional Alliances 161

9 Ethnic Reemergence in Uruguay: The Return of the Charrúa in the Light of Settler Colonialism Studies 163 Gustavo Verdesio

CONTENTS ix

10 When Nationality Becomes a “Negative Condition” for Politics: Gamaliel Churata’s Contribution to Bolivian Political Theory 181 Elizabeth Monasterios P.

11 Decolonization and Indigenous Sovereignty: Coming to Terms with Theories in the Americas 199 Laura J. Beard

Postscriptum: Decolonial Scenarios and Alternative Thinking: Critical and Theoretical ExplorationsMabel Moraña 215

Contributors’ Biographies 225

Index 231

xi

Fig. 6.1 Face of a medal, photograph by Javier Sanjinés C., 2015 100 Fig. 6.2 Obverse of medal, photograph by Javier Sanjinés C., 2015 108 Fig. 6.3 Cristo aymara (1939) by Cecilio Guzmán de Rojas.

Private collection. 113 Fig. 6.4 Photograph of Chola 116

LIST OF FIGURES

xiii© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016J.G. Ramos, T. Daly (eds.), Decolonial Approaches to Latin American Literatures and Cultures, DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-93358-7

INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIAL STRATEGIES FOR READING AND LOOKING WITH AND AGAINST THE

GRAIN

Juan G. Ramos and Tara Daly

Decolonial Approaches to Latin American Literatures and Cultures engages literary and cultural production in Latin America and beyond through the lens of decolonial thought produced both within and outside of academia, in North America, South America, and Europe. Each of the 11 chapters pro-vides a unique geographic and temporal entry point into the possibilities and limits that literature and material culture produced from precolonial to con-temporary times offer to the open and evolving corpus of decolonial schol-arship, as well as the inverse: what decolonial thinking, broadly construed, can lend to the shifting fi elds of Latin American literary and cultural studies.

Implicit in this volume’s title and the varying positions the contribu-tors take is a collective questioning of the very idea of “Latin America,” what “Latin American” contains or leaves out, and the various practices and locations constituting Latinamericanism. From the outset, we want to clarify a few points that have been raised either in previous scholar-ship or in the interventions presented in this book. The historical and geopolitical ramifi cations of the naming of Latin America as a seemingly

J.G. Ramos () College of the Holy Cross Worcester , MA , USA

T. Daly Marquette University, Milwaukee , WI , USA

heterogeneous category that divides and distinguishes the Americas between Latin (Hispanophone, Francophone, and Lusophone) and Anglo, and other legacies of European languages, Empires, and colonialisms has been well documented from a decolonial perspective by Walter Mignolo in his The Idea of Latin America (2005) and others. Decolonial Approaches takes up the challenge presented in Mignolo’s book, and moves beyond it, to question the exclusion of indigenous, mestizo, and other groups from discussions around the politics of language, geography, and racialization, as well as literary and cultural production. If the very idea of Latin America operates under the historical mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion of indigenous, afrodescendant, and mestizo groups, an invocation of Latin American as an all-encompassing term is by necessity a problematic adjec-tive and category because it continues to assume a framework of inclusion and exclusion of specifi c subjectivities, genealogies of languages, thought, and modes of being in what we call the Americas.

While we acknowledge the kaleidoscopic idea that is “Latin America,” for the sake of communicating with our readership, the contributors have maintained Latin America and Latin American as geopolitical markers, though not unproblematically. In fact, every contributor complicates the picture of what constitutes Latin America and inquires as to whether to separate the Americas means to continue to use imperial framings. From Sara Castro-Klarén’s contribution in which the centrality of Spanish is questioned as the organizational axis in academic departments that teach Latin American literature, to Laura J.  Beard’s invitation to engage in transregional and inter-American dialogues, the chapters in Decolonial Approaches explicitly and suggestively interrogate Latin America and Latin American as geo-cultural categories. In this sense, this volume’s orga-nization also follows the invitation put forth by José David Saldívar in Trans- Americanity (2012) to consider a framework of analysis that stems from “an unfi nished encounter with Quijano’s and Wallerstein’s collab-orative global North–south work,” and the way in which this might lead to “trans- Americanity studies” (xv). Reframing a discussion around the Americas is particularly productive, whether it is done under the guise of trans- Americanity or through calling Latinamericanism into question. If the latter is understood as a particular set of evolving sensibilities toward and from Latin America (Tinsman 11–12) or “as a project of ‘sympa-thy’…with Latin America (if the project is undertaken from outside Latin America itself), or of nationalist affi rmation (if undertaken within Latin America)” (Beverley 3), the contributors have been careful not “to impose

xiv INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIAL STRATEGIES FOR READING AND LOOKING …

agendas from the U.S. academy and civil society onto Latin American con-texts where they do not fi t well” (Beverley 19). Instead, the contributions to this volume are invitations to think about contemporary practices within the US academy, particularly in the humanities, toward Latin America. Ideally, some of the broader questions and concerns raised throughout the 11 chapters will be taken up and resonate beyond the US context.

Throughout the volume, the contributors engage with what can be sum-marized as two overlapping but distinct approaches to decolonial think-ing and doing. First, a number of the chapters initiate dialogue between thinkers and writers situated in academia. These interlocutors include, but are not limited to, Santiago Castro-Gómez, Arturo Escobar, Enrique Dussel, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Walter Mignolo, María Lugones, Aníbal Quijano, Ramón Grosfoguel, and Sylvia Marcos, a heterogeneous and transnational group that some might call “the usual suspects” or what used to be the modernity/coloniality working group. However, none of the concepts developed by this group are taken at face value and applied in the 11 chapters, but interrogated and questioned within the context of the cultural texts, objects, or indigenous groups discussed. This is to say that a number of the authors in this volume consider the ways that some of the key ideas proposed by some of the aforementioned scholars might com-plement, trouble, and inform Latin American literary and cultural studies, as well as how literary and cultural texts and indigenous peoples might unsettle and challenge the applicability of some of these scholars’ key con-cepts. As the contributions underscore, to think decolonially is not simply a matter of imposing theoretical concepts or frameworks onto objects of study but rather amplifying the forms of decolonial thinking that emerge from subjective experiences and textualities, which disrupt, respond to, and, consciously or not, redress the underpinning of such theories. As such, the approaches that these chapters take to engage with literary and cultural texts horizontalize, rather than verticalize, the intricate and some-times seemingly incongruous relationships between theory and literary or cultural materials. Resulting from this decolonial move, Latin American literatures and cultures are foregrounded with varying degrees of proxim-ity and distance to theory, and thus recognize the marked elisions between subject and object of study, as well as the very methodological foundations for such practices.

While they have not been explicitly named or considered “decolonial” as such, the second inroads into discussions of decoloniality that this vol-ume offers is the consideration of a plurality of nonacademically situated

INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIAL STRATEGIES FOR READING AND LOOKING … xv

interventions that are at the heart of this volume. These interlocutors include indigenous peoples from Central, South, and North America, as well as established and lesser-known mestizo and mestiza authors whose works speak to and reveal aspects of the coloniality of power, knowledge, being, gender, sexuality, race, and translation, and their webbed intersec-tional patterns which transcend specifi c locales and open up possibilities reframing disciplinary and methodological questions, as well as enabling intra and transregional collaborations. These latter voices include those of Ometeotl , Julieta Paredes and Mujeres Creando Comunidad , Enrique Gil Gilbert, César Calvo, Gamaliel Churata, and contemporary indigenous groups like the Charrúas, the Mayas, and various fi rst nations from what is today Canada.

In the context of this second approach to decoloniality, this book expands the sources as well as the types of texts or interventions that con-tribute directly or indirectly to the broader work of decoloniality in its local and transregional contexts in the Americas, helping to draw attention to the nuances within debates around subjectivity, knowledge systems, and not solely on identity politics but also on the politics of identity. The latter implies an interrogation of not just the loci of enunciation of the writers of the texts or the doers of the actions analyzed but also a self-referentiality to the blind spots and the situatedness of the contributors themselves, which some of them explicitly address in their chapters. An additional component to this second strand of thinking is that it signals the continued importance of considering social movements in Latin America within the discussion of decoloniality. A number of the chapters, particularly those by Arturo Arias, Laura J. Beard, Antonia Carcelén-Estrada, and Zairong Xiang draw con-nections to embodied indigenous practices and languages that are not cap-tured by their translation into codes such as writing or Spanish language. It is precisely from what remains outside of codifi cation and translatabil-ity that decolonial modes of resistance and resignifi cation can emerge in response to the historical silencing, misappropriation, and objectifi cation of others at the hands of those who have instituted and reconfi gured what Aníbal Quijano termed “the coloniality of power.” By employing this term, Quijano intended to name a complex, multilayered process of domi-nation by which Europe instituted categories of race, gender, modalities of labor, and modes of knowledge, which converge as different expressions of power. Coloniality names the pervasiveness of such modes of power beyond formal colonialism and their renewed contemporary expressions. 1

xvi INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIAL STRATEGIES FOR READING AND LOOKING …

Quijano’s critique of the various stages of colonialism’s effects, and its still felt aftermath, can only be understood by way of the longue durée of Latin America’s colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial legacies.

Part of the challenge that gave way to this book was to rethink the very possibilities of engaging with Latin American literatures and cultures in renewed ways, rather than simply rejecting them because these concepts or categories are in origin, or in practice, Eurocentric. In a recent attempt to bring a decolonial perspective in dialogue with the fi eld of compara-tive literature, Mignolo seeks to decolonize comparative studies with the intention of producing decolonial options by which he means other ways of knowing and thinking from cultures and literatures “existentially nour-ished by the colonial (not the imperial) side of borders” (101). 2 Building on his concepts of border thinking, border dwelling, and languaging, Mignolo opts for the replacement of the “Western concept of ‘literature’” and favors languaging given its emphasis on action, doing, but most importantly on “the enunciation and not the enunciated” (109–110). 3 In this same essay, Mignolo concludes by beckoning decolonial scholars and intellectuals “to look at sites of entanglements…articulated by the ‘/’ of modernity/coloniality.” Such forms of looking require border think-ing and border dwelling, which privileges “indigenous (and other non-modern) relational ontologies rather than substantial Western ontologies” (117). Only by doing so can a true delinking “from the already-made entities such as the ideas of ‘literature’ and of geohistorical entities like ‘Europe,’ ‘Eurasia,’ or ‘America’ take place” (117). In fact, albeit with different degrees of engagement, all of the contributors return to the ideas of literature and culture to investigate and reveal the constitutive politics emerging from indigenous and some mestizo groups as means to ques-tion the processes of continued domination and exclusion understood as coloniality.

If Europe violently imposed languages (oral and written), the very con-ception of literature (as knowledge), and particular articulations of culture onto the Americas, fully rejecting historically, politically, racially, culturally informed and nuanced analyses of languages, literatures, and cultures sim-ply because they are Eurocentric in origin all too readily plays into the logic of exclusion enacted through the diverse modalities of coloniality that Europe envisioned and instituted. Leaving these categories unquestioned in an examination of the longue durée of Latin America’s colonial, post-colonial, and neocolonial literary and cultural production assumes a facile and untroubled acceptance of a fi xed and linear framing of literatures and

INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIAL STRATEGIES FOR READING AND LOOKING … xvii

cultures in the Americas. Rather than simply rejecting engagements with literature, cultures, or languages, and without claiming to be comprehen-sive, the 11 contributors proposed reexaminations of some key and illustra-tive moments and sites of disruption and questioning that have historically attempted to call into question and destabilize coloniality. As such, the interventions presented in this volume proceed to enter into dialogue with the concept and articulations of coloniality, while revealing multiple modes of undoing its structures and work, which is what we mean by decolonial.

Questioning the limits and options inherent in both canonical and non- canonical literature and culture vis-à-vis the theoretical concepts deriving from coloniality/decoloniality can indeed lead to nuanced and complex attention to the longue durée of Latin American cultural and literary pro-duction with all of its contradictions, multilayeredness, and imbricated histories of coloniality and resistance. As Moraña, Dussel, and Jáuregui have noted, “the study of coloniality implies… the challenge of think-ing across (frontiers, disciplines, territories, classes, ethnicities, epistemes, temporalities) in order to visualize the overarching structure of power that has impacted all aspects of social and political experience in Latin America since the beginning of the colonial era” (17). Invocations of decolo-nial perspectives emerge in response to such inter and transdisciplinary approaches to the study of coloniality in relation to literature and culture, which is why a “pure” literary approach is not employed in any of the con-tributions. As Horacio Legrás argues in Chapter 2 , literature’s “impure” nature, which is to say its transcultural aspects that attempt to translate local experience into the universal language of modernity, is perhaps part of why some decolonialists and its detractors avoid engaging with literary genres. However, it is from this “avoidance” itself that the space for more subtle work emerges: if literary scholars steer clear of decolonial think-ing and if decolonial scholars do not adequately engage in critical literary readings (a claim that Legrás will make of Mignolo), then it could be said that all of the contributors of this volume aim to interrogate and transform the “why” behind the mutual aversions of decolonial thought and litera-tures/cultures with the goal of opening up critical and practical space.

In other words, the transcritical approaches that guide the book—that is, literary and cultural “texts” as critique of decolonial theories and vice versa—work to diversify and enliven the possibilities and point toward the limits across these convergences. Regardless of the sites of decoloniality from which the contributors situate themselves, collectively they problematize the divisions

xviii INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIAL STRATEGIES FOR READING AND LOOKING …

between “literature” and “culture,” or “artistic object,” and “activist move-ment,” and challenge uniform theoretical approaches to cultural analysis. Like any “theory,” but particularly because for some scholars it is a relatively new set of concepts, nascent, and problematic line of thinking, decolonial-ity in this volume acts as one modality amongst other (non)complementary modes of analysis through which to approach the literatures and cultures at hand. Many of the chapters, in fact, produce complex debates that triangulate diverse approaches to the topics of literary, political, economic, and embodied resistance to the coloniality of power. The chapters draw on decolonial theo-ries, alongside translation studies, queer theories, critical race theories, post-humanism, among other theories and contemporary debates. The net goal is to mobilize decolonial theory in ways that sift through what may or may not be useful from a set of ideas, and purposely draws upon the productive fric-tions and schisms between thinkers as well as schools of thought.

Within its discussion of Latin American literatures and cultures them-selves, this volume draws close attention to the coloniality of language. Spanish is framed as an impure language both within the literary texts taken up and within its context and role in (re)producing knowledge and in Spanish departments, a claim that Sara Castro-Klarén’s chapter poignantly makes. In this sense, the presence in the chapters of indigenous languages and concepts from the Nahua (Xiang), Quechua, Kichwa, and Aymara (Carcelén), Maya (Arias), Amawaka (Daly), Charrúa (Verdesio), and Cree groups (Beard), amongst others, serves as a very partial representative of the linguistic and cultural diversity of the Americas within discussions of literature and cultural studies. These languages all symbolize inroads into what is the growing fi eld of decolonial cultural production, whether oral, visual, or written, as part of a social movement, as written languages, or in Constitutional reformations. As Zairong Xiang, Antonia Carcelén, and Arturo Arias effectively underscore, no translation gives us the full picture, because something always remains untranslatable, unheard, or omitted. However, partial access to other knowledge systems is arguably more ideal than none, provided that such knowledge is not misappropriated. And as Antonia Carcelén-Estrada argues, even the performance of translated “concepts,” often still resonates with colonial “sedimentations.”

The book’s “decolonial approaches” imply various challenges to the concept of Latin America, as discussed above, to the concept of “litera-tures,” and the concept of “cultures.” In the fi rst case, our book aims to destabilize Latin America as a contained territory and to envision it

INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIAL STRATEGIES FOR READING AND LOOKING … xix

as a dynamic part of a global system. This means recognizing that Latin America, for some, is Abya Yala and that it is not a concept that proposes to “poner a andar el reloj de la historia al revés y restaurar algún mundo anterior a la colonización” (Browitt 29), a critique levied at some deco-lonialists’ utopic vision of a “pure,” preconquest indigeneity. Instead, the term is a modern concept that has been refashioned within its contempo-rary context, particularly in relation to indigenous movements and decolo-nial theories (Walsh, “Introducción”; Garcés, 162–64). As the 11 diverse voices of the book demonstrate, decolonial approaches do not exclusively stem from national traditions, but from delinking nations from the foun-dational binary of modernity/coloniality, and thus reveal the plurality of spatial relationships that shape regional, transregional, or transcontinen-tal patterns and alliances. For instance, Elizabeth Monasterios challenges “national” traditions in her reading of Gamaliel Churata’s work in Bolivia, as Bolivia is not his country of origin, but Perú. Yet, as she argues, he contributed immensely to Bolivian political theory, even if libraries there wanted to exclude his works. Laura J. Beard’s approach to questions of indigeneity urge us to see connections between autobiographic prac-tices within a North/South paradigm. And Gustavo Verdesio’s raising of questions of sovereignty with respect to the Charrúa group in Uruguay highlights the settler colonial legacies of nineteenth-century and earlier articulations of territorialization and belonging that failed to see indig-enous residents as part of their project. Likewise, Daly’s chapter on the Amazon points to the regional alliances between overlapping “nations” within and beyond “Peru” such as the Quechua and the Amawaka indig-enous groups as well as the mountainous Andes and the rain-forested Amazon.

Within the broader fi eld of decolonial studies and theories that has developed as such over the past fi fteen years or so, a great majority of the scholarly production has tended to be, whether initially conceived as such or not, either of a theoretical/philosophic bent (Dussel, Lugones, Mignolo, Maldonado-Torres, Walsh) or of a sociopolitical world-systems- type anal-ysis (Grosfoguel, Quijano, Wallerstein, Lao-Montes). Even though Walter Mignolo’s expansion of Aníbal Quijano’s theories of the coloniality of power within the context specifi cally of The Darker Side of the Renaissance (1995) originated with a critique of writing and Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s work on coloniality of being originates, and often returns to liter-ary sources, there is a tendency by those trained in “close” literary analysis to remain averse to the methodological, political, and theoretical implications

xx INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIAL STRATEGIES FOR READING AND LOOKING …

of considering the broader colonial/modern system within which literary production may be situated. Such a move would imply recasting atten-tion on the construction of Latin America as a literary system, based on area studies models, questions of canonicity, and the prevalence of some national literatures within this system. Another implication of engaging with the colonial/modern system is to rethink and reconfi gure the sites, units, and modes of inquiry with intention of questioning their limitations, but also the repercussions in our pedagogies, curriculum, and profession.

For various reasons, which lie beyond the scope of this introduction or volume, decolonial theory has become somewhat ossifi ed into a “settled camp” that some literary scholars resist because of what they deem its pre-scriptiveness or antagonistic relationship on the surface to the hermeneutics of close reading and the agency of the political subject. 4 Because decoloni-ality critiques Europe, and because Europe has been seen as the geopoliti-cal site from which writing, thinking, disciplines, and language have been imposed onto its former colonies, literature scholars seem to be, at times, particularly resistant to decolonial theory, which calls into question the very foundations of our training, practices, and intellectual work. Such resistance is particularly evident when one looks at departmental course offerings, a topic which is partially covered by Castro-Klarén’s chapter. Most self-iden-tifi ed decolonial thinkers rest at the margins of literature, whether in Latin American studies programs, Ethnic Studies departments, or the occasional institutional outliers like Rutgers and Duke, where there is less resistance. In this context, this volume is aimed at “de-ossifi ying” what has turned into a series of theories that are actually not as black and white as someone like Jeff Browitt makes them look in his critique, “La teoría decolonial: buscando la identidad en el mercado académico.”

However, another important point is that decolonial theory itself has done important and dynamic work to incorporate a range of different traditions and scholars into their dialogues. For instance, what might be considered “literary” texts like Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (1950), as Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Black Skin/White Masks (1952) and Guaman Poma de Ayala’s El primer nueva corónica (~1615) are cited and have served as building blocks for deco-lonial thinking (Maldonado-Torres, “Césaire’s Gift” 120–21), amongst many other texts, literary and otherwise. While perhaps deep textual anal-ysis of some of those texts is not undertaken from the context of Latin America, we might ask what other authors can and do contribute to

INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIAL STRATEGIES FOR READING AND LOOKING … xxi

discourses of decoloniality, even if doing so in the imperial or colonizer’s language. In this sense, this volume aims to put literary and cultural studies on, in, and with Latin America in direct dialogue with decolonial concepts that might help “literature,” and specifi cally Latin American literature, open itself up more to comparative work that moves beyond national or even regional traditions.

This is not to say that there is no risk in sublimating the importance of the locus of enunciation to the broader “global design” that affects it, but when one does move beyond the level of the most recognized names in decolonial theory, there are often deeply rooted citational politics within that corpus that draw a multiplicity of thinkers into the discussion, like Fausto Reinaga, Armando Muyulema (Walsh, “Interculturalidad y (de)colonialidad” 32), as well as Chela Sandoval, Paulin J. Hountondji, Kwasi Wiredu (Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience” 166), Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Sylvia Wynter, Lewis Gordon, and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, the last who takes a highly critical stance before the term “decolonial,” and particularly the way the label is loosely applied as an empty term, more in the South than in the North (“Potosí Principle,” n.p.). The point is that while cri-tiques of decolonial theory may be aimed at one or two central fi gures, the critiques themselves may be missing nuances, even as they claim that the decolonial theorists do not engage rigorously enough in nuanced debate.

Recognizing this predicament, in its own new contributions to the dis-cussion, the book demystifi es the notion that decoloniality refers to only a somewhat strict set of names, but broadens it to include a plurality of practices, thoughts, languages, and disciplines, as well as critical and politi-cal positions that are not uniform but increasingly complex and diverse. In sum, the bringing together of precolonial through contemporary sub-jects, objects, voices, as well as visual, literary, and cultural texts in con-versation with academic voices who have also situated their arguments and scholarship in literary or cultural analysis, is what we believe defi nes our “decolonial approaches” to Latin American Literatures and Cultures. The approaches are not universal; they are nuanced, imbricated, as well as complementary and, at times, contestatory of each other.

Due to the range of ideas and voices represented in this book, this volume also attempts to point out some of the ambiguities that underlie both decolonial or postcolonial approaches to literature. This is to say, rather than draw lines in the sand between thinkers who may diverge on one aspect of very complex theories—for instance, the failure to see

xxii INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIAL STRATEGIES FOR READING AND LOOKING …

the proliferation of capitalist systems in multiple sites as ongoing on the part of postcolonial theorists or the reduction of modernity as something defi ned “only by conquest”—this book attempts to create a more impar-tial politics of alliance based on moving in and out of complementary and deviating concepts. Recently, along the lines in the sand mentioned above, Jeff Browitt has taken decolonial theorists to task for what he claims are the reductionist “blancos de su crítica: Europa, eurocentrismo, Occidente, Modernidad” (27). He names the same people with whom some of the contributors in this volume dialogue as “Los decolonialistas” (27). However, to cite some examples, in Ramón Grosfoguel’s and Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s written work and lectures, both constantly make ref-erence to Western traditions not as the enemy but simply as one model of knowledge among other possibilities. They also do not fi re arrows at Europe blindly, as Mignolo is indebted to the work of Benveniste and others (Epistemic Disobedience” 165) and Maldonado-Torres to both Levinas and Heidegger, among many others, and openly say as much ( Against War , Chapters 1 and 2 ). Additionally, as another more nuanced take on the coloniality of gender, Julieta Paredes is very clear in her book Hilando fi no: Tejiendo la rebeldía (2008) that gender hierarchies, for instance, exist and have existed in indigenous communities, but the only way to go beyond the stasis of gender hierarchies is to confront the indige-nous, precolonial, and colonial forms of patriarchy. The point in Paredes’s work is to build alliances across genders to work toward a true and pos-sible decolonization of patriarchy. This is a point that appears in the work of anthropologist Rita Laura Segato as well in her critique of soft forms of precolonial patriarchies within the framework of coloniality of gender (30–35). We point to these examples to signal the possibility of produc-tive scholarly dialogues. If we identify as “literary and cultural scholars and educators,” regardless of particular theoretical or political inclinations, perhaps it is our common task to truly engage with and expand the very works that we critique for not being rigorous enough. Likewise, the posi-tions in this book appear as interventions aimed at igniting fruitful con-versations about the blatantly obvious disconnect between what we teach, how we teach it, and what we publish. Simply put, an impetus behind the inception of this book was to bring literature and culture to the center of our profession in its full spectrum and complexities.

The collections Coloniality at Large (2008) and A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture (2008) served as touchstones for this project in certain ways, but we wanted to move beyond the discussion

INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIAL STRATEGIES FOR READING AND LOOKING … xxiii

of postcoloniality and highly theoretical analysis (with some exceptions in the volume) and toward practices of decolonial reading and looking that weave in and out of close reading analyses of either texts or mate-rial culture. While the contributors to both collections have indeed done groundbreaking work in pointing to both theoretical and practical direc-tions toward decolonial literary scholarship, Decolonial Approaches to Latin American Literatures and Cultures brings together emerging and more established scholars at various ranks, and scholars who are situated within literature departments to update and move critical conversations in different directions. While in Coloniality at Large the contributors give a comprehensive overview of the banes and boons of postcolonial theory in the context of the Americas from a broad set of disciplinary and interdis-ciplinary perspective, and A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture presents key positions and studies that engage with coloniality and the decolonial (among other comprehensive and massive positions), the current volume approaches the project from a different angle, thinking about the range of possibilities decolonial theory offers to literature and culture within a more focused frame. Such an approach has its advantages, disadvantages, and shortcomings, most notably an absence in this volume of interventions focusing on the Caribbean or Brazil, even if they were part of our original vision. For a variety of reasons, these interventions do not appear in the current version of this book, but we openly acknowledge their absence to indicate what are undoubtedly necessary and future direc-tions where decolonial work can be taken. 5

Through its disparate chapters, this book invokes the need for further inquiry into what might be called a set of alliance-building practices for engaging in decolonial work within Latin American literary and cultural studies across academic and nonacademic sites. Such “practices” might include at the institutional level, as Castro-Klarén suggests, an examina-tion into the discipline of “Spanish” literature and its methodologies at the undergraduate and the graduate levels. In an age in which languages are ever more mixed, global, and unstable and given that the USA will have the largest number of Spanish speakers of any country by the year 2050, how will we revise curricular objectives and offerings in Spanish or Latin American studies programs to refl ect demographic shifts and to avoid duplicating imperial patterns? Moreover, how will we meet other disciplines and area “studies” in ways that facilitate exchange as well as effectively prepare students for the future? 6

xxiv INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIAL STRATEGIES FOR READING AND LOOKING …

In bringing together scholars whose work stems from various geo-graphic regions and traditions, in written, visual, and oral modalities, new interlocutors are brought into dialogue in this volume, but this is only a fi rst step in continuing to think about Latin American literatures, cultures, and decoloniality. The new problems raised here speak to the continued need to collectively think about how to “quebrar la misma reproducción de la dinámica hegemonía-subalternidad” (Schiwy 311) that has fueled the notion that technology “originates” in the West and is “received” in other geopolitical sites. Rather, the volume proposes taking seriously the learning that emerges from sites of knowledge in Latin America without dismissing it as irrelevant scholarship produced elsewhere. For instance, Verdesio raises the issue of how decolonial scholars and activists might think about their own practices and politics around publishing as part of decolonial self-critical processes. We, as editors, also observe, however, that the critique of publishing practices in general also goes well beyond taking up the “practices” of decolonial scholars, but of looking at the infrastructure of the European-model-based university which continues to privilege and prioritize single-authored works over coauthored pieces, and theoretically “disciplined” work over “creative” scholarship. Ideally, in thinking about the decoloniality of publishing, we hope the volume might spark conversations about alternative platforms for collaboration that might eradicate the focus on single authorship. Arias, for instance, points to the benefi cial relationships that Maya poets have formed with non-Mayan allies in the name of publishing their poetry.

The book also proposes that the practices of reading and writing can be “decolonial” not only in the selections of texts and materials we choose to read, teach, or look at but also the ways in which we read them. Such strategies need not be prescriptive but rather entail looking for the ways in which texts resist the very markets that enable them to be produced. Ramos’s chapter draws attention to the linkages between intra/interna-tional geographic space and racial determinism, and seeks to mobilize dis-cussions beyond antagonistic positioning of indigenous, montubios, and mestizos. As Ramos develops in his reading of Gil Gilbert’s Nuestro pan (1942), literature can make visible the ways in which peasants and nature alike disrupt capital; beyond the novel, Ramos’s work implies that capital continues to be “disruptible” today, particularly in relation to questions of alternative and community-organized land and agrarian practices.

The practice of looking, too, can be decolonial. Decoloniality does not have to do with the question alone of what we see, but performs a

INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIAL STRATEGIES FOR READING AND LOOKING … xxv

questioning of why we see things the way we do. At this juncture, we want underscore that there have been an array of artistic interventions that have brought decoloniality directly into conversations particularly with  the visual arts, and that have served as catalysts for thinking decoloniality and aesthetics. The journal Calle 14, published out of Colombia and whose fi rst issue was released in 2007, has been steadfast in issuing pieces on the popular arts in dialogue with decoloniality and aesthetics. Two issues, one in 2010 and one in 2011, ran on “Arte y Decolonialidad,” and incorpo-rated a diverse spectrum of authors from the Americas and Europe. There have also been a number of “decolonial artist” gatherings and installa-tions in Central America (for instance, “Arte Nuevo InteractivA,” which took place in Merida, Mexico, and at Duke University in 2013), in South America and in Europe (Transnational Decolonial Institute), and mul-tiple conversations and dialogues across the globe in Asia, Europe (in all its dimensions and not just Western Europe), and other global sites. In this sense, thinking about the wider implications of decolonial aesthet-ics points to blind spots in our senses, how we perceive and sense visual, aural, and tactile arts. In the case of literature and culture, blind spots to reading and looking are often just that: spots. They require an inten-tioned slowing down, another and other ways of looking, in order that the interrogation not just of the object but also of the conditions of its coming into view might be recognized in approaches to texts, material cultures, and historically excluded groups, including indigenous peoples and afrodescendants. Sanjinés performs this type of looking in his close analysis of material objects and texts when he reads the transference of the myth of the “barbaric European savage” onto the Americas, particularly in Bolivia, and how it served to obfuscate the representational practices within Bolivia’s early-twentieth-century educational reforms and literary representations. Looking decolonially means peeling back masking layers that have served as reductionist lenses to the dense strata of social inequali-ties and hierarchies.

The co-editing process itself has been an exercise in thinking not as one or two, but as greater than the sum of both of us. This book’s collaborative process brings together a set of scholars that create this polycentric com-pendium, full of contradictions, convergences, and lines of debate. Such lines of inquiry are echoed in our choice of the book cover and the Nazca lines as both reference and metaphor for this type of collaborative work. It is our hope that this volume is a series of starting points, not an end. Decolonial Approaches to Latin American Literatures and Cultures is

xxvi INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIAL STRATEGIES FOR READING AND LOOKING …

organized into four different sections that we think most accurately and effectively capture the range of approaches that our authors have taken up around the broader questions laid out above. These sections are guide-posts for readers but we emphasize that there are myriad ways of grouping the chapters, and consequently, there are echoes and overlaps throughout the book.

The fi rst section, “Undisciplining ‘Spanish’ and ‘Literature,’” captures the ways in which the fi rst two chapters call for a complex examination of the coloniality of language and the purity of genre by foregrounding “oth-erness” and differences as inherent to the very defi nition of both language and literature. The vexing of these categories serves as an entry point into the sections and chapters that follow.

In the fi rst chapter entitled “Notes from the Field: Decolonizing the ‘Spanish’ Major,” Sara Castro-Klarén initiates an inquiry into what deco-lonial thinking lends to a potential rethinking of the “Spanish Major” from the perspective of the curriculum as both an “epistemic and a politi-cal structure.” Based on her diverse experiences in a number of differ-ent Spanish departments over the course of her career, as well as initial research undertaken into a sampling of some of the more well-known Spanish department course offerings today at top-ranking  institutions, Castro-Klarén proposes alternatives to teaching “Spanish” and moving beyond the “language-stall” model. In doing so, Castro-Klarén argues for concrete pedagogical and curricular practices that challenge philological approaches that assume the “unity of the language” at their base or peri-odization models that impose a Eurocentric calendrical conception that distorts the heterogeneity of Latin America, comprehensively troubling the coloniality of power as it manifests itself at curricular, departmental, and institutional levels.

Horacio Legrás takes up the task of looking critically and rigorously at decolonial theory in the context of literary studies in Chapter 2 , “The Rule of Impurity: Decolonial Theory and the Question of Literature,” with a view toward naming and addressing the pivotal issue of the subject in decolonial theory, a topic he does not see decolonial authors as having adequately taken up in their writings. Legrás’s interrogation of literary subjects who write “as other,” and therefore challenge the decolonial basis of identity as starting point, provides a site for thinking about what lit-erature, and specifi cally indigenous literatures, might offer decoloniality’s oversights of subjective agency. Legrás’s chapter introduces broader ques-tions that are followed up upon by many of the contributors who work

INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIAL STRATEGIES FOR READING AND LOOKING … xxvii

along blurred lines between the simultaneous situatedness and the mobil-ity of their subjects. In its totality, a number of the authors indirectly echo Legrás’s questioning of the possible reasons why literature does not play a more central role in theorizations of coloniality/decoloniality.

After some of the broader questions have been laid out regarding the implications of the work at hand in the volume, we move to a sec-ond section on “Decolonizing Translation and Representations of the Indigenous.” The authors in this section share an interest in the limits and the potentials of translation, across a number of different registers, includ-ing linguistic, cultural, visual, and conceptual translation.

In Chapter 3 , “The (De)coloniality of Conceptual Inequivalence: Reinterpreting Ometeotl through Nahua Tlacuiloliztli ,” Zairong Xiang coins the term “conceptual inequivalence” to analyze the coloniality of translation between indigenous and European languages and cosmolo-gies through a meticulous analysis of the colonial/modern reception and translation of the Nahua duality deity, and principle, Ometeotl . Xiang makes the important case that the universalization of Western cosmology also results in the universalization of Western problems. Because Ometeotl has been mistranslated as a heteronormative form of dualism, Ometeotl has not been able to be seen in its own, non-dualistic terms. Xiang inter-prets the Coatlicue Mayor via the pictorial writing system, tlacuiloliztli , to ultimately show that the statue challenges binary readings of gender, and of duality in general, presenting a secret world of knowledge inaccessible to everyday viewers. Tlacuiloliztli  moves beyond pictorial writing, and is instead “a radically different form of knowledge that retains a space for the irreducible conceptual inequivalence that resists colonial imposition and universalization of its cosmology” (Xiang 15–16).

In Chapter  4 , “What Does the Sumak Kawsay Mean for Women in the Andes Today? Unsettling Patriarchal Sedimentations in Two Inca Writers,” Antonia Carcelén-Estrada explores the problematic nature of translation and its multiple contemporary meanings in Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and Guamán de la Poma and contemporary activists in Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, and Brazil. Providing a translational analysis of what she calls the “patriarchal sedimentations,” Carcelén-Estrada posits the (un)translatability of indigenous languages and knowledges against the limi-tations of imperial language, which prohibit colonial and contemporary agents from accessing their Sumak Kawsay , an Andean constitutional right to “live well in community.” Drawing on Julieta Paredes’s and Mujeres Creando Comunidad ’s recent work on translating the Sumak Kawsay into

xxviii INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIAL STRATEGIES FOR READING AND LOOKING …

action via their communitarian- based feminism, Carcelén-Estrada demon-strates the way that contemporary women in Argentina and Ecuador have attempted to “perform” their Sumak Kawsay via political activism—Reyna Maraz and Manuela Picq, specifi cally—but have ultimately remained alien-ated from it.

Arturo Arias continues with the topic of indigenous cultures and translation in Chapter  5 ,“New Indigenous Literatures in the Making: A Contribution to Decoloniality.” Arias explores the cultural, political, and ontological reasons behind the emergence of contemporary indig-enous bilingual narratives (indigenous languages and Spanish) in Abya Yala that give non-native readers access to such transgressive representa-tions. Arias posits that these still little-known textualities constitute an epistemic change in the Latin American “lettered city” and disrupt the myth of homogeneous nation-states because they operate in unprivileged peripheral spaces. Arias hypothesizes that alternative knowledge producers challenge Western parameters of knowledge production by provincializ-ing cosmopolitan critics and academic institutions. By producing literature from nontraditional and unconventional sites, indigenous writers offer a countermodernity and alternative ethos to the West, in some cases, point-ing toward a postanthropocene world in which the sustainability of the environment as a whole is the point of ethical departure. Arias situates his intervention within the context of literary history, positing that “the most important expression of decoloniality as a response to the exhaustion of testimonio…has been offered by Maya literature” (11) and by calling for new methodologies toward the study of indigenous literatures in the Americas.

The three chapters in the third section, “Material Culture and Literature as Decolonial Critiques,” turn their attention to specifi c material culture and literary texts to tease out elements of decolonial positions and cri-tiques. That is to say, the authors of three chapters look and read lesser studied/non-canonical materials and textualities to bring forth conversa-tions between artists and theorists as possible decolonial interlocutors.

In Chapter 6 , “Decolonizing Aesthetic Representation: The Presence of the European Savage in Bolivian Modernity,” Javier Sanjinés analyzes a commemorative coin that seemingly collapses representations of colonial and imperial representations of Europeans (as savages and wildmen) with mestizo Bolivians to showcase the hierarchical relationship of educational models instituted in the early decades of the twentieth century in which

INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIAL STRATEGIES FOR READING AND LOOKING … xxix

Europe was still positioned as the source of knowledge and education and Bolivia as its recipient. In a nuanced reading of this coin, Sanjinés traces the embedded genealogical connections between this coin’s images with literature ranging from Juan Ruiz’s Libro de buen amor (1330–1343) to Carlos de Medinacelli’s La chaskañawi (1947) to demonstrate how Bolivian liberal and cultural elites enacted modalities of oppression of indigenous peoples and cholos. In doing so, Sanjinés argues for a move toward decolonizing aesthetic representation to reveal mechanisms that intricately weave educational policy, politics, literature, and aesthetics as tensional sites of laden coloniality.

In Chapter 7 , “The Air as Decolonial Critique of Being in César Calvo’s Las tres mitades de Ino Moxo y otros brujos de la Amazonía ,” Tara Daly focuses on the trope of air as an unstable and changing category that runs counter to the fi xity of land as a site from which being can be refor-mulated. In her analysis of Calvo’s novel, Daly traces points of connection with Luce Irigaray’s philosophical work on air to look at alternative sites, outside the lettered city or the fi xity of land, from which decolonial prac-tices can emerge. Through a close attention to the complex networks of beings (e.g. material, immaterial, human, nonhuman, ancestral, and con-temporary) that coexist in the Peruvian Amazon, and in constant dialogue with and questioning of decolonial scholarship, Daly presents a critique of the coloniality/decoloniality of being, species, shamanistic and ances-tral practices, and alternate knowledges and temporalities that challenge Western modernity and its Eurocentric rationality.

In contrast to the centrality of air, in Chapter 8 , “Disruptive Capital in Andean/World Literature: A Decolonial Reading of Enrique Gil Gilbert’s Nuestro Pan ,” Juan G. Ramos proposes a reexamination of an Ecuadorian novel to focus on land, agrarian politics, capital, and the centrality of fi eld- workers as entry points from which to critique the lack of sustained engage-ment between decolonial scholarship and social realist fi ction through their shared ambivalence and questioning of Marxism. In his analysis of the novel, and through a close dialogue with Quijano, Dussel, and con-temporary Latin American literary scholarship, Ramos argues for ways in which a critique of capital can be enlivened in connection to decolonial theories, particularly if we look for moments in which workers and nature disrupt capitalism’s force. Such a position leads Ramos to argue for a pos-sible expansion of the Andean as a conceptual metaphor to call into ques-tion the uneasy relationship between Latin American literary studies, area studies, and comparative literature practices, particularly world literature.

xxx INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIAL STRATEGIES FOR READING AND LOOKING …

In the fourth and last section entitled “Decolonial Options, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Transregional Alliances,” the three chapters share a focus on questioning a variety of political and theoretical positions articulating the centrality of indigenous sovereignty from Uruguay, through the Andes, and a trans-American perspective that bridges North–South alli-ances. All three chapters engage with social and cultural agents who pres-ent alternative options to decolonial questions.

In Chapter 9 , “Ethnic Reemergence in Uruguay: The Return of the Charrúa in Light of Settler Colonialism Studies,” Gustavo Verdesio argues that settler colonialism is constitutive of contemporary Uruguay and its continuation must be understood in terms of colonial legacies, rather than coloniality of power. By calling into question the usefulness and limita-tions of coloniality of power, particularly when confronted with historical and economic particularities of other contexts such as Uruguay, Verdesio draws our attention to particular instances in which the negative recep-tion of the ethnic reemergence of the Charrúa in modern-day Uruguay is unseparable from settler colonialism, a phenomenon that initiated the colonial legacies symptomatic today of those reclaiming their Charrúa roots. In this chapter, Verdesio also draws larger connections with a wide set of academic studies and contemporary events in Uruguay that elicit a questioning of the categories and terms of engagement with colonial, coloniality, and the decolonial.

In Chapter 10 , “When Nationality Becomes a ‘Negative Condition’ for Politics: Gamaliel Churata’s Contribution to Bolivian Political Theory,” Elizabeth Monasterios carefully traces the interconnectedness and devel-opment of Churata’s literary and political ideas, particularly around the centrality of indigenous peoples in a reconstitution and rearticulation of politics in the Andes at large. By placing Churata as an author of intellec-tual importance in both Perú and especially Bolivia, Monasterios reveals possible sites from which to think anew long-standing questions of nation-alism, revolution, nationality, agrarian reforms, and political belonging in light of a revalorization of Churata’s work and thought. Monasterios also situates Churata as a pivotal fi gure in the development of literature and political thought in Bolivia by situating his relationship and engagement with his Bolivian counterparts within the sociohistorical milieu.

In the closing chapter to this volume, “Decolonization and Indigenous Sovereignty: Coming to Terms with Theories in the Americas,” Laura J. Beard explores the political, rhetorical, and literary dimensions, claims to, and recognitions of indigenous sovereignty by contextualizing her

INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIAL STRATEGIES FOR READING AND LOOKING … xxxi

arguments in a critical dialogue between key critical works in indige-nous studies and decolonial thought. Instead of privileging colonial or Eurocentric conceptions of power, Beard invites us to reimagine new ways in which Latin American literary studies could shift its focus by engag-ing with lessons emerging from North American literary separatists who position indigenous knowledge systems, intellectual histories, experiences, languages, and literary texts at the center of profound decolonial practices emerging from indigenous sites and frameworks. Beard also situates “the need to tell stories,” as part of an ongoing project of Native American and indigenous peoples’ resistance and considers the possibilities for thinking trans-American alliances via the genre of indigenous life narratives.

Mabel Moraña’s refl ections carefully draw connections, underscore new and emerging lines of inquiry, and illuminate points of contestation that these chapters produce. Moraña also introduces questions of her own that could serve for future work around this body of critical scholarship, as well as methodological questions, and their connection to the profession.

The contributions in this volume allow for some general and conclud-ing refl ections. Despite contemporary trends in transatlantic studies and Latino/a studies, both of which have infl uenced Spanish departments in the past decade, approaches to the study of “Latin American litera-ture and cultures” still tend to continue including nation-based models or genre-based approaches to literatures that can limit critical thinking if not carefully coupled with regional or transregional approaches that place Latin American literatures and cultures into broader comparative stud-ies in coloniality, decoloniality, and world literatures. For instance, new work might be fathomed between African and South American writers in a comparative context, or Pacifi c-based indigenous groups and North American groups based on a common set of concerns around sovereignty. If “national” traditions are falling away or if we are moving “globally toward a polycentric world” (Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience” 169), then understanding the paradigm of modernity/coloniality as a point of entry to patterns of oppression without claiming that it negates the need for subsequently nuanced work based on the specifi cs of a given case might afford us a more diverse toolbox for bringing Latin American literatures and cultures into dialogue with diverse traditions in comparative frames. 7

With this said, the editors of this book recognize the limits of its inten-tions, but we believe that the interventions presented here open up lines of inquiry into a complex set of concepts and ideas that have only really

xxxii INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIAL STRATEGIES FOR READING AND LOOKING …

started to coalesce as “decolonial theory” in the last ten or so years. The book is not a comprehensive look at decolonial theory, but merely a sam-ple of the ways that decolonial theory, material culture, and “literature” might inform each other and particularly within the context of the North American academy. This volume, thus, acknowledges its own oversights or shortcomings. It is a foray into a dialogue that we want to continue with the diverse scholars, activists, writers, thinkers, doers, and practitio-ners, who have contributed to Latin American literatures and cultures, and particularly the new generation of graduate students working on these topics. Many of the concepts that have been undertaken in this volume could be turned into books of their own. The topic of the coloniality of gender and sexuality warrants much more emphasis in the volume, as do geographic areas like the Caribbean and Brazil, and countless other indig-enous and afrodescendant groups. The plurality of perspectives presented here is a step toward further pluralization of “Spanish,” of “Literature,” of “Latinamericanisms,” of “Transamericanisms,” and of decolonial strate-gies for reading, looking, thinking, and doing with and against the grain.

NOTES 1. For a detailed discussion of coloniality of power, see Quijano (2000). 2. For a detailed discussion of decolonial comparative literature methodolo-

gies, see Mignolo’s “On Comparison” (2013). 3. For a detailed discussion of border thinking, border dwelling, and languag-

ing, see Mignolo’s Local Histories/Global Designs (2000/2012). 4. For some examples of such positions, see Moreiras, “The Fatality of (My)

Subalternism” (2012), particularly the position paper’s third section titled “A Democratic Critique of Imperial Reason.” Other examples might include Alberto Moreiras, “Infrapolitical Literature: Hispanism and the Border” (2010), Bruno Bosteels, “Politics, Infrapolitics, and the Impolitical” (2010), and Jaime Rodríguez Matos, “Introduction: After the Ruin of Thinking” (2015).

5. In fact, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel’s Coloniality of Diasporas (2014) is a key example of how the concept of coloniality can be productively acti-vated to bring forth a nuanced, rich, and a groundbreaking discussion of the historical networks of migration and exchange in the Caribbean.

6. The US Census Offi ce estimates that the USA will have 138 million Spanish speakers by 2050, making it the biggest Spanish-speaking nation on Earth, with Spanish as the mother tongue of almost a third of its

INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIAL STRATEGIES FOR READING AND LOOKING … xxxiii

citizens ( http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/29/us-second-biggest-spanish-speaking-country ).

7. A recent work in comparative literature engages precisely with the possible connections between decoloniality, decolonial scholarship, literary prac-tice, and the discipline of comparative literature. For such a discussion, see Chapter 3 , “Comparative Literature and Decoloniality,” which appears in Introducing Comparative Literature (2005), cowritten by César Domínguez, Haun Saussy, and Darío Villanueva. Interestingly, this chapter traces possible clues in decoloniality from Mignolo’s earlier work on liter-ary criticism, as well as more recent theoretically inclined articulations.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Beverley, John. Latinamericanism after 9/11 . Durham: Duke University Press,

2011. Print. Bosteels, Bruno. “Politics, Infrapolitics, and the Impolitical: Notes on the Thought

of Roberto Esposito and Alberto Moreiras.” CR: The New Centennial Review 10.2 (2010): 205–238. Web. 15 October 2015.

Browitt, Jeff. “La teoría decolonial: buscando la identidad en el mercado aca-démico.” Cuadernos de literatura XVIII. 36 (2014): 25–45. Web. 15 October 2015.

Castro-Klarén, Sara, ed. A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture . Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008. Print.

Domínguez, César, Haun Saussy and Darío Villanueva. Introducing Comparative Literature: New Trends and Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2015. Print.

Césaire, Aime and Robin D.  G. Kelley. Discourse on Colonialism . New  York: Monthly Review Press, 2000. Print.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin/White Masks. New York: Grove Press, Inc. 1967. Print. Fanon, Frantz, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Constance Farrington. The Wretched of the

Earth . New York: Grove Press, Inc, 1965. Print. Garces V., Fernando. “Las políticas del conocimiento y la colonialidad lingüística

y epistémica.” Pensamiento crítico y matriz (de)colonial: refl exiones latinaomeri-canas . Ed. Catherine Walsh. Quito, Ecuador: Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar; Ediciones Abya-Yala, 2005. 137–167. Print.

Guamán, Poma A. F, and G Y. F. Pease. Nueva Corónica Y Buen Gobierno . Caracas, Venezuela: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1980. Print.

Lugones, María. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.” Hypatia 22.1 (2007): 186–209. Web. 15 October 2015.

Maldonado-Torres. Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008. Print.

xxxiv INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIAL STRATEGIES FOR READING AND LOOKING …

Martínez-San Miguel, Yolanda. Coloniality of Diasporas: Rethinking Intra-Colonial Migrations in a Pan-Caribbean Content. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Print.

——. “Césaire’s Gift and the Decolonial Turn.” Radical Philosophy Review Vol. 9.2 (2006): 111–138. Web. 15 October 2015.

Mignolo, Walter. “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom.” Theory, Culture and Society Theory, Culture and Society Vol. 26, 7–8 (2009): 159–181. Web. 15 October 2015.

——. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking . 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Print.

——. “On Comparison: Who is Comparing What and Why?” Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses . Eds. Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. 99–119. Print.

——. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options . Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Print.

——. The Darker Side of the Renaissance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Print.

——. The Idea of Latin America . Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. Print. Moraña, Mabel, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A.  Jáuregui. “Colonialism and its

Replicants.” Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate . Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. 1–20. Print.

Moreiras, Alberto. “Infrapolitical Literature: Hispanism and the Border.” CR: The New Centennial Review 10.2 (2010): 183–203. Web. 15 October 2015.

——. “The Fatality of (My) Subalternism: A Response to John Beverley.” CR: The New Centennial Review 12.2 (2012): 217–246. Web. 15 October 2015.

Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views From South 1.3 (2000): 533–580. Web. 15 October 2015.

Rodríguez Matos, Jaime. “Introduction: After the Ruin of Thinking: From Locationalism to Infrapolitics.” TRANSMODERNITY : Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 5.1 (2015): 1–8. Web. 15 October 2015.

Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. “The Potosí Principle: Another View of Totality” e-mis-férica Hemispheric Institute NYU. Issue 11.1 (2014): N.p. 28 October 2015.

Saldívar, José David. Trans-Americanity : Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico . Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.

Schiwy, Freya. “Descolonizar las tecnologías del conocimiento: Video y episte-mología indígena.” Estudios culturales: Retos desde y sobre la región andina. Ed. Catherine Walsh. Quito, Ecuador: Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, 2003. 302–313. Print.

Segato, Rita Laura. “Género y colonialidad: en busca de claves de lectura y de unvocabulario estratégico descolonial.” Feminismos y poscolonialidad: descoloni-

INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIAL STRATEGIES FOR READING AND LOOKING … xxxv

zando el feminismo desde y en Amérca Latina . Eds. Karina Bidaseca y Vanesa Vazquez Laba. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Godot, 2011. 17–47. Print.

Tinsman, Heidi. “Introduction: Histories of Latin Americanisms.” Radical History Review 89 (2004): 11–12. Print.

Walsh, Catherine. “Introducción: (Re)pensamiento crítico y (de)colonialidad.” Pensamiento crítico y matriz (de)colonial: refl exiones latinaomericanas . Ed. Catherine Walsh. Quito, Ecuador: Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar; Ediciones Abya-Yala, 2005. 13–35.

——. “Interculturalidad y (de)colonialidad: diferencia y nación de otro modo.” Desarrollo e interculturalidad, imaginario y diferencia: la nación en el mundo Andino: 14a Conferencia internacional, 21–23 Sept de 2006. Ed. Hamilton Neto M. Rio de Janeiro: Educam, 2006. 27–43. Print.

xxxvi INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIAL STRATEGIES FOR READING AND LOOKING …