Читать книгу After the Decolonial - David Lehmann - Страница 10

In recent decades the most academically influential intelligentsia of the Latin American left have retreated behind the walls of the university, even while they denounce the social order more comprehensively than any previous Latin American ideology. In their diagnosis, Latin American society is characterized by a polarized and polarizing colonial apparatus of racialized domination that has existed unchanged for 500 years and infuses all relations of unequal power and status as well as the mindset of its populations. This diagnosis functions as an indictment of institutions, socio-economic structures and ideologies – like Marxism and liberalism – as well as of the subconscious mechanism where racial prejudice is implanted. There results a cast of mind in which ethnic identities not only have their place, as they must do, but also take precedence over other themes like class, gender, violence, institutional stagnation and collapse, public health, organized crime, corruption … the list is very long.

This reductionism discourages political activity by creating a climate of despair and negativity, and indeed this philosophy of the decolonial, or lo decolonial, as I call the Latin American branch of postcolonialism, constitutes a hemisphere-wide network whose activism is directed at the internal life of academia rather than at politics on the street, in the media, in election campaigns or in institutions of the 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.