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I am where i think: Epistemology andthe colonial differenceWalter D. Mignolo aa Professor and Chair of Romance Studies and Professor inLiteraure and Cultural Anthropology , Duke University ,Published online: 27 Feb 2009.

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Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 8, No. 2, 1999 235

Debate

I Am Where I Think: Epistemology and theColonial Difference

WALTER D. MIGNOLO

(1) More than 10 years ago, when The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy,Territorialité and Colonization (1995) was in the making—but without me beingaware that this was the case—I had my first intellectual exchange with PeterHulme. This was owing to the fact that Rolena Adorno and I were seeking topublish an article of his in a special issue of Dispositio (1989) devoted to 'ColonialDiscourse', a concept Hulme examined in his landmark book Colonial Encounters.European and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (1986). I am evoking this momentfor several reasons. First, it was a moment of transformation in Hispanic/LatinAmerica colonial scholarship, moving away from the double tyranny of thenational values imprinted in Castilian languages and literature written inCastilian. The transition from 'literature to discourse' was, at the same time, atransition from the national framing of the colonial period to a new domain ofscholarship that I would today identify as a 'coloniality at large'. Secondly, inspite of the internal transformation (e.g. the history of Hispanic and LatinAmerican scholarship), it was not relevant in current debates in whichmodernity and coloniality were post-Enlightenment phenomena. Thirdly, I amevoking this moment to remind the reader that this was the general basis for TheDarker Side of the Renaissance. The notion of 'colonial semiosis' that I employedin the book was actually introduced in my Afterword to the volume of Dispositio.The last 5 years of the making of The Darker Side of the Renaissance were markedby a dialogue with the transformation of the field of colonial studies and thepresence of colonial legacies through the Chicana/os social movement andintellectual production. Curiously enough, almost at the same time that PeterHulme's Colonial Encounter was released in London and New York by Methuen,Aunt-Lute published Gloria Anzaldüa's Borderland/La Frontera in San Francisco(1987). Hulme is certainly perceptive when he observes that 'the language oftransculturation is given fullest rein in the Preface, presumably the part of thebook written last and the one that may best suggest Mignolo's current preoccu-pations rather than those which led to the project which has just come tocompletion'.

Of course, the spirit in which I am engaging in this renewed conversation withPeter Hulme is not that of defending myself of the weaknesses he has detectedin my arguments. Rather, I would like to engage in a scholarly conversationfocusing toward the future, starting from some of the controversial issues Peter

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Hulme examined in his generous and rigorous review of The Darker Side of theRenaissance. Admittedly, I am also thankful to him for underlining the contribu-tion the book makes to the existing and growing literature on coloniality. Bycoloniality, I mean the less visible side of modernity. I will come back to thecoloniality/modernity dichotomy at the end of my reply. First, I would like tostart by commenting on two points Hulme makes at the end of his review.

(2) The first point is that the book deserves recognition 'because its logic andscholarship and thoroughness and verve make it superior to most of what itcontests. Ultimately, and in accordance with standards which can, with duetentativeness, be seen as global, Mignolo's work is better—and it should standthat ground' (Hulme, p. 229). This statement is made to counter my claimslocating my works on the margins. Hulme states: "That interesting work comesfrom the margins, however defined, is not to be doubted, but its value does notdepend on its place of origin or on some more broadly defined locus ofenunciation. A politics of location cannot itself become an epistemology'(Hulme, p. 229).1 Such concern is no doubt behind Hulme's detailed discussion,in pages preceding this quotation, of my use of 'loci of enunciation'. In anutshell, Hulme correctly perceives that 'loci of enunciation' involves a politicsand an epistemology. Yet, he also inserts an aesthetic dimension (e.g. his use of'better' in the previous quotation). Hulme suggests that the book should bevalued for what it achieves and not for what it announces. I have no intentionof contesting Hulme's recognition of the book's achievement! However, I wouldindulge myself in some speculations on epistemology and the politics of loca-tion. I will engage in a double set of considerations: on the one hand, the wayI used and argued from the concept of 'loci of enunciation'; on the other hand,the more general question of epistemology and the politics of location. I willbegin with this last issue, since it is the most important for future scholarly andpolitical discussions.

'A politics of location cannot itself become an epistemology'. Certainly not'itself I will agree, but I argue that epistemology implies and is embedded in apolitics of location. This was one of the epistemic quarrels, related to thequestion of 'translation' that Hulme himself addresses in his review, and whichI was addressing in the book. In this regard, I have no problem with the twostatements by Said as quoted by Hulme. Quite the contrary, I (like many others)am indebted to Said's groundbreaking book for having brought to my attentionto what I have recently been calling the '(epistemic) colonial difference'(Mignolo, 1998, 1999, forthcoming). It is Said, in addition to Frantz Fanon,Rigoberta Menchü, and the Zapatistas, who deserves credit for making thecolonial difference visible in the Anglo-speaking world. The Philosophy ofliberation in Latin America, and its consequences, should not be forgotten either.It was influential in making people aware of the need of 'decolonizing scholar-ship' and 'decolonizing the social sciences' (Fais Borda, 1970). Yet the factremains that it was Said who produced the impact, backed up by the richnessof French poststructuralism; and this is a fact that has much to do with thepolitics of (institutional) location.

Epistemology is embedded in languages and in particular genealogies. Tomake a long story short, a 'history of epistemology' would most likely start withthe Greek words 'episteme', 'doxa' and 'gnosis' and run through modern

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vernacular languages and a variety of expressions in order to describe 'episte-mology' as theory of knowledge, reflection on knowledge, or (a yet morerestricted definition) reflection on scientific knowledge. Most likely, this gen-ealogy would contemplate ancient Greek vocabulary and then move to German,French, and English. Latin would be excluded, since it was reached in rhetoricrather than in epistemology. Latin vernaculars like Italian, Spanish, and Por-tuguese ended up translating the terminology from German, French, and En-glish. In this scenario, German, English, and French (not so much Italian,Spanish, and Portuguese, and of course not Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, or evenless Swahili, Aymara or Nahuatl) languages are the house of modern epistemol-ogy. I have the impression that, from this perspective, a politics of location canbe in itself an epistemology.

Let me give you another example. There is a splendid moment in PierreBourdieu's 'Thinking about Limits' (1992), in which he places himself in adisciplinary-theoretical genealogy as well as a national language one. As asociologist interested in education, Bourdieu understands the paradox impliedin the process itself: 'if we are not educated, we cannot think much at all, yet ifwe are educated we risk being dominated by ready-made thoughts'. Can wereally not think much at all if we are not educated? Is it only education that callsfor thinking? Or is education a manipulation of thinking? Now, think abouteducation and colonialism, and you will find that what Bourdieu is doing ismapping loci of enunciation and grounding epistemology in the politics oflocation. Let me explain. Let us think about language and education in colonialexpansion and nation-building strategies. Let us concentrate on colonial legacies,national languages and disciplinary foundations in the education system thatteaches us (those who have access to such an education) how to think. Then tellme if epistemology does not appear ingrained in the politics of location to thepoint where you cannot think the former without the latter. It should appear sounless one assumes that epistemology is not located; rather, that it is universaland ungrounded, a neutral guardian of knowledge. I am not saying that Hulmeholds these beliefs. I am just pressing the question of the necessary connectionsbetween the politics of knowledge (epistemology) and the politics of location(interest) in a non-Habermasian direction (Habermas, 1971).

The epistemological traditions in which Bourdieu began to work, he confesses,were for him 'like the air that we breathe': it went unnoticed, which in my viewis close to saying that 'we are where we think'. Bourdieu recognized that his isa local tradition tied up with a number of French names: Koyre, Bachelard,Canghuilhem, and if we go back a little, Durkheim. Bourdieu further explains:

One should study the historical reasons for its existence, since it wasnot all a national miracle but no doubt related to favourable conditionswithin the structure of the education system. This historical tradition ofepistemology very strongly linked reflection on sciences with the his-tory of science. Differently from the neo-positivist Anglo-Saxon tra-dition, it was from the history of science that it isolated the principlesof knowledge and scientific thoughts. (1992, p. 41)

Is it not an epistemic locus of enunciation that is being 'carved' out anddefined here at the same time that the conditions of membership are being'naturally' laid out without mentioning the connections between language,

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education, epistemology and colonialism? What if you are a Bolivian sociologistof Aymara descent? Here I am not speaking of blood but education in theAymara ayllu. If this is the case, you have to learn Spanish (whose link with theepistemic foundations of social sciences is not strong, or at least, not as strongas the scenario or loci of enunciation described by Bourdieu). Finally, you reachParis or even better, the US, where French and English will allow the Aymarasociologist to be recognized and legitimized as a serious thinker. I mentionedAymara as an extreme, but I could have run the example with Spanish orPortuguese and an imaginary sociologist from Chile or Brazil. What I amreferring to here was also articulated for the case of history by DipeshChakrabarty (1992a, 1992b), in an argument that I have referred to as'Chakrabarty's dilemma' (Mignolo, 1999).

Loci of enunciation are constituted at the intersection of epistemology and thepolitics of location. Cultures of scholarship are cast in terms of textual nationallegacies, for it is in and by text that the educational system is structured andsciences are articulated, packaged, transmitted and exported. These are theconditions for loci of enunciation and epistemology, according to the case ofBourdieu. When loci of enunciation and epistemology are crossed by the colonialdifference, you find yourself in the situation underlined by The Darker Side of theRenaissance. I had articulated this frame in the debate published in LatinAmerican Research Review (1993), prompted by a review article on colonial andpostcolonial discourses by Patricia Seed (1991). Although the topics I deal within the book are located in the early colonial period or the initial stage of themodern/colonial world, I was actually writing the book at the end of the coldwar. I was aware of what political scientist Carl Pletsch (1981) described as 'thethree worlds, or the division of social scientific labor'. The point I would like torecall here is that the 'three world' order went together with a subalternizationof knowledge and the reproduction of the colonial difference. In this distri-bution, the production of culture was assigned to the Third World and theproduction of social sciences to the First World, in such a way that thetranslation of the social sciences to the Third World was a process that shouldnot have been taken for granted. The introduction of social sciences in the ThirdWorld, during the cold war, was part of the ideology sustaining developmentand modernization. At the end of my contribution to the debate surroundingSeed's article, I wrote: "The "native point of view" also includes intellectuals. Inthe apportionment of scientific labor since World War II, which has beendescribed well by Carl Pletsch (1981), the Third World produces not only"cultures" to be studied by anthropologists and ethnohistorians but also intellec-tuals who generate theories and reflect on their own culture and history'(Mignolo, 1993, p. 131). What happened in the sixteenth century, and thesituation in which Guaman Poma de Ayala and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitlamong others found themselves, was not too different from the situation I havejust described. The 'foundation' of the subalternization of knowledge in themodern/colonial world took place then, under Christian epistemic principles inthe European Renaissance. In this sense, the 'extirpation of idolatry' was indeedan epistemic lobotomy (Mignolo, forthcoming). The colonial epistemic differencethat justified Area Studies and Orientalism was put in place in the sixteenthcentury. Loci of enunciation was, and still is, a concept that allows me to thinktogether epistemology, the colonial difference, and politics of location.

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The second point in Hulme's review addresses the difficulties of my ownmetaphors to further the argument that I am trying to advance. According toHulme, metaphors such as 'loci of Enunciation' or 'center-periphery' playagainst my argument. This suggests that the metaphoric field related to move-ment (travel, routes, diaspora, displacement, detour) would have been moreconducive. Hulme puts 'translation' in this second set, which he identifies withthe work of James Clifford, although in the index of The Darker Side of theRenaissance, the entry 'translation' refers to 'pp. 63 and passim'. The entire book,indeed, is built on the question of translation.2 'Pluritopic hermeneutics' in theframe of coloniality, and the coloniality of power, bring translation constantly tocentre stage. Yet in any case, both centre/periphery as well as diaspora or travelinvoke loci, and loci of enunciation are not necessarily fixed. They could bediasporic. Travel and travelling are as much locations as is remaining in oneplace. Translation takes place between people who arrive and people who are inplace. This leads to two questions. One question is: what do you prefer, tounderline those who travel and arrive or those who are stationary and receive?The other is the question of translation and the coloniality of power. Brieflystated, when you assume a frame such as the one described by Bourdieu, yourealize that modern epistemology was founded on the imperial difference—thatis, the distinction between German, French, and English as languages of scienceand modern philosophy and Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish as languages ofhumanist legacies. Modern epistemology 'carved' its locus of enunciation on theimperial difference, the difference between the 'new' and the 'old' modern/colonial empires. However, modern epistemology also found its locus of enunci-ation on the colonial difference, since the languages and knowledge of colonizedareas (in Asia and Africa) as well as those languages and knowledges 'outside'its scope (like Mandarin or Arabic or Aymara), were converted into objects ofstudy but not taken as sustainable knowledge.

(3) I have already written too long and only touched on a couple of issues raisedby Hulme, although these are basic issues that impinge on the rest of the bookas well as on the rest the review. I would like to pursue the argument bybringing the previous discussion to the very title of Hulme's review article('Voices from the Margin') and the clarification he offers of this title on page 220.There he explains a quotation from page 312 of the book, and underlines thatthis quotation places the work and myself on the academic margins. Hulmestates: 'which initially struck me as strange: just what is "marginal" about anexpensively produced book published by the University of Michigan Press andcontaining the thoughts of a Professor in the Department of Romance Studiesand the Program in Literature at Duke University?' Hulme offers an answer withwhich I do not disagree but that I would like to expand on: 'What Mignolomeans, I think, is explained in his Preface: by choosing to write the book inEnglish, but inscribing Spanish and Amerindian materials and perspectives intocurrent debate about the Renaissance period and the colonial world, he ispressing the case for the importance (indeed centrality) of the concerns of theacademic (and political) margins—Latin America, indigenous studies, Spanishhumanism, colonial cultural studies—in a way perhaps analogous to, if lesspointed than, the inclusion of Rigoberta Menchû's testimonio on the StanfordHumanities syllabus' (Hulme, pp. 220-221).

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By definition, loci of enunciation are not marginal. Yet making them visiblealso makes it possible to underline that epistemology is not just a happyuniversal spaces which everybody can join. As with any thing else, joiningsomething that is hegemonic means to accept the rule of the game. If you playthe game, but not exactly according to the rules, chances are that you will besomewhat on the margins. However, I am not interested in either playing therole of the 'Hispanic' victim or of the successful marginal who publishes inEnglish in American university presses and works at Duke. I am interested inmaking the (epistemic) colonial difference visible. I did not word it like that inThe Darker Side of the Renaissance. It is, however, a key-word in the sequel to TheDarker Side of the Renaissance, entitled Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality,Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (1999). In this book, I try to clarify thenotion of 'colonial difference' by thinking through it. (Hulme is right, by theway, that I do not make an effort to define theoretical concepts in The Darker Sideof the Renaissance; I just use them.)

Let us go back to Bourdieu for a moment and pursue the equation texts-na-tional languages-coloniality of power and cultures of scholarship. In an effort toelucidate the theoretical frame of his own thinking, Bourdieu honestly pursuesa comparison with the German philosophical tradition. The comparison isnecessary in order to justify the transferability of scientific thinking from thesciences of nature to the human sciences, a step which is more difficult to takein the German philosophical legacy because, according to Bourdieu, the distinc-tion 'erklaren-Verstehen (explanation-understanding)' builds a wall between thenatural and the human sciences. French legacies, he concludes, 'propose, then, areflection which is much more general, from which I have drawn an epistemo-logical program that can be summed up in one statement: "The scientific fact isconquered, constructed, confirmed. The conquest of the given is a centralconcept in Bachelard's thought, and he sums it up in the term epistemologicalbreak. Why is this phase of scientific research important, and why does itseparate, as seems to me to be the case, the tradition I represent from thedominant Anglo-Saxon tradition? It is because to say that the scientific fact hasto be fought for is radically to defy, in this regard, all of the givens that socialscientific researchers find before them"' (Bourdieu, 1992, p. 43).

This brief description of Bourdieu's self-location (e.g. framing his own locus ofenunciation in the social sciences and in the European tradition) makes clear theinseparability between epistemology and politics of location. What should I do,identify and assume the tradition Bourdieu represents or the dominant Anglo-Saxon tradition he differentiates from? Obviously neither of them, unless Idecide to think from categories, frames and problems that were put in place todeal with the issues of coloniality and the colonial difference in which I aminterested. If I follow the first route, I have two choices. Either to become a socialscientist according to the rules of the game that were defined in 'a tradition (towhich) I do not belong', and therefore to be marginal, or to 'apply' Bourdieu's(or any other) 'model' to deal with and analyse coloniality of power and thecolonial difference. In either case, I will be epistemologically marginal, that is,epistemologically subaltern. This was precisely 'Chakrabarty's dilemma' in thedomain of historiography: as long as you are a historian, you cannot be a "ThirdWorld' historian because history is an activity, institution, and way of thinkingthat was instrumental in the colonization of memory. The basis of 'Chakrabarty

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dilemma' is that writing subaltern 'histories' means to remain in an epistemi-cally subaltern position in the domain of cultures of scholarship. This is becauseone of the invisible places in which the coloniality of power operates is thedomain of epistemology. Consequently, if you 'study' colonialism or the subal-tern but you maintain the rules of the social sciences and humanities game, youmaintain the coloniality of power that reproduces the epistemic colonial differ-ence. Epistemic loci of enunciation are stubborn and, as in the case of GarciaCanclini (1989), you can describe and 'study' the hybridy of society and culturein a specific place like Tijuana, while maintaining a pure, non-contaminated,non-hybrid loci of enunciation. This is why I attempted to think from modelsand theories provided by Chicano/a thinkers and Latin American philosophers,such as Enrique Dussel and Rodolfo Kusch. Yet, I also used the models providedby 'complementary dichotomies' in Amerindian thoughts (Mignolo, 1995). Ibelieve that Hulme intuitively understood this when he says, on page 223, T hadthe strange impression that Mignolo actually wanted to be doing somethingrather different and even more ambitious'. 'Pluritopic hermeneutics' was anecessary step to avoid the 'non-complementary dichotomy' between the know-ing subject and the known, the disciplines and the object of study. Theirthoughts and works were and are in a constant struggle with the epistemiccolonial difference, not as an object of study but as loci of enunciation definedby the coloniality of power—that is, with thinking from a subaltern epistemicperspective (or Voices from the margins' as Hulme's title states). Dussel's latestwork confronts the issue openly (Dussel, 1994, 1996, 1998; Mignolo, forth-coming). My not so kind remarks on Gordon Brotherston's article, though not onhis magnificent book (Brotherston, 1992), were prompted by epistemic, notnationalist, considerations. National histories are local histories, certainly, butthey cannot be confused with them. Thus, Brotherston's discussion ofAmerindian knowledge of a system of writing, taking position on a disputebetween Derrida and Levi-Strauss (that Hulme rightly critiques on page225), reminded me of Las Casas and Sepulveda discussing the 'AmerindianQuestion'. Amerindians themselves having nothing to say, as they have not beeninvited to participate in a debate in which they themselves are objects ofconsideration. That is the epistemic colonial difference from whence emergedAmerindians in the sixteenth century, Chicano/as in the US today, and white,mestizo, and immigrant créole intellectuals like Kusch, Dussel, and myself.'Voices from the margins' are voices from and dealing with the colonialepistemic difference.

This explains the connection between 'darker' and 'hybrid' (a concept I trulydo not use very often in the book) that Hulme notices on page 222 of his review.Today, this relationship would be recast in terms of the making of colonial(epistemic) differences. This is what the humanists and men of letters did in thesixteenth century, and this process continues, through 'Orientalism' and 'AreaStudies', to today.

(4) There are several points that I am interested in pursuing, but that I cannotengage in detail, as this would mean risking a reply that is longer than thereview itself. Perhaps in the future there will be an opportunity for elaborationand further clarification.

(i) On Modernity. I did not stress too much in the book that the frame for my

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reflections was what Wallerstein conceived as the 'modern-world system',and which I develop in my latest book (Mignolo, 1999) as the 'modern/colonial world system'. The basic idea here is that modernity/coloniality, aswe know it today, is grounded in the emergence of the Atlantic commercialcircuit during the sixteenth century. This was a crucial chapter in the historyof capitalism. Thus, it is not so much a question of pushing 'modernity' backin time, from the eighteenth to the sixteenth century, but of understandingthe historical emergence of modernity/coloniality. Whether conceived inspace (peripheral modernities) or time (would-be modernities), this formu-lation has the inconvenience of making you believe that first comesmodernity and then coloniality. This is an image forged in the second halfof the eighteenth century, when building the Europe of Nations (between thePeace of Westphalia in 1648 and the end of the Napoleonic era) was aconcern of nations without, until that point, significant colonial domains. Thecolonial empires at that time were Spain and Portugal. However, thesecountries, unlike England, France and Germany, were not involved in theEurope of Nations.

(ii) On 'pluritopic hermeneutics'. Certainly, I start from Pannikar, but I also departfrom him. The main departure is that Pannikar's 'diatopic hermeneutics' (healso uses 'pluritopic') remain within a certain conception of cultural rela-tivism that I tried to avoid, as I made explicit in the Afterword of The DarkerSide of the Renaissance and as I explore in more detail in Local Histories/GlobalDesigns. Basically, if you conceive cultures as discrete entities that can becompared, you remain within the colonial frame that classified the worldand divided it into discrete cultural entities. If you think that modernepistemology and coloniality of power went together in the classification ofworld cultures, then you have to admit that epistemology is located some-where and, most likely, in that locus of enunciation that classified the worldinto discrete cultural entities. This issue is related to my exploration ofepistemology and loci of enunciation in sections (2) and (3).

(5) I shall stop here, just mentioning that if I had time to go into Hulme's longand careful discussion on maps, ethnic and geometric centres, and loci ofenunciation, I would do so starting from my previous consideration on the topic.However, I will skip this temptation.

I would like to close this response by recognizing, on the grounds of theprevious discussion, how much I value Hulme's engagement with the book. Ivalue it first for his intellectual honesty and openness. I also value it for thecritical points he raises and for what he recognizes and praises. Of course I amnot saying this for purely egotistical reasons. Rather, I am concerned with thecloseness of the scholarly mind. The book has been widely reviewed, as Hulmenotices, and the reviews are generally favourable. In general, it is not unreason-able to expect and have negative critics. That goes with the territory. What isremarkable, however, is a certain uneasiness that the book has provoked. Thebook has been reviewed in a significant number of different fields, which ofcourse is very good. The uneasiness is detectable in those fields which seem totake the world for granted and in which there exists the belief that all a bookabout the past should do is tell what really happened in a straightforwardmanner, hi such attitudes, I see the reproduction of the epistemic colonial

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difference, exercising coloniality of power to maintain hegemonic spaces incultures of scholarship.

There is one example I would like to explore. The review in question waswritten by Alexandra Walsham and appeared in The Historical Journal (1999). Itfeatured three books, two on modern Europe (Stuart Clark's Thinking WithDemons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, 1997; Lyndal Roper'sOedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe,1995) and The Darker Side of the Renaissance. Walsham wrote an introductoryparagraph noticing, first, the fundamental questions proposed by 'postmod-ernism' and the so-called linguistic turn. Walsham remarks that postmodernismand the linguistic turn have helped generate innovative and provocative 'histori-cal writing' in recent years. Walsham notices that, taken together, the threebooks under review 'highlight both the potential strengths and weakness, therewards and dangers of injecting theory into the study of witchcraft, sexualityand colonization in early modern Europe and the New World'.

I am pleased, in this and similar cases, that the book has been taken asan important contribution to several fields of knowledge, in this case'historical writing'. I am not surprised but concerned with Walsham's shortsight when it comes to the colonial difference, the 'interior exteriority' of cul-tures of scholarship from which the book was written and that the book attemptsto make possible—that is, to be able to think and write (and teach) fromthe 'interior exteriority' of the colonial difference. Modern cultures ofscholarship and disciplines cannot be denied, but at the same time cannot beaccepted as such from the colonial difference. That is 'Chakrabarty's dilemma'.You have to be an historian, although not quite. You have to be inside, butat the same time outside, since 'history' was not an activity expected fromthe barbarian and the colonized—from people who have been labelled'without history'. This is the 'interior exteriority of the colonial difference',historically known as 'the darker side of the Renaissance'. Furthermore, this iswhere 'voices from the margins' should be located and where a new epistemicpotential is emerging. This is the precisely the fracture that Walsham is trying topatch.

The scenario drawn by Walsham echoes the debate between the distinguishedFrench scholar Marcel Bataillon and the distinguished Mexican scholar Ed-mundo O'Gorman, apropos of the 'discovery of America' (Bataillon &O'Gorman, 1955). Bataillon charged O'Gorman with not doing what Bataillon, asa French scholar (by which I mean a scholar working in the French academy,under academic and national assumption of the French academy) assumedhistorians should do. According to Bataillon, a historian should tell the story asit happened through a careful reading of texts written by those who participatedin or were close to the events themselves. O'Gorman, as a Mexican scholar (bywhich I mean working in the Mexican academy, under academic and nationalassumption of the Mexican academy, and participating in intellectual debates inwhich colonial legacies filtered through the national history of Mexico), how-ever, wrote his book as part of a larger project criticizing the principles ofpositivistic historiography underlying Bataillon's project. O'Gorman's goalswere not to tell the story again, using a new methodology, but to question thevery principles and assumptions under which histories of the discovery ofAmerica have been written. In order to show that Colombus could not have

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discovered America because America was not an existing entity awaiting to bediscovered, but rather an invention of European historiography, O'Gormanengaged himself in an argument that might have appeared to Bataillon to be ahouse of mirrors in which the 'historical facts' could never be properly located.I am not surprised, although I am somewhat disconcerted, by the fact that thetensions that prompted Bataillon and O'Gorman's illuminating debate in the1950s are still alive at the end of the century. This is one of many reasons whyI am interested in looking at loci of enunciation, and in revealing the inextricablelinks between epistemology and the politics of location.

For Hulme, the 'overall thrust' of the book is 'clearly postcolonial in one of theimportant senses of that word: it aims to undo that aspect of the work ofcolonization which one critic, in his review, describes as "cognitive imperial-ism"' (Hulme, p. 223). Walsham, however, read it as a postmodern study thatshe found 'obfuscating' and 'irritating' (Walsham, 1999, p. 274). As such, Wal-sham fails to see the difference between two books devoted to 'early modernEurope' and one book devoted to 'colonization of the New World' because shesees the world as a given and cultures of scholarship as describing or represent-ing it, with new postmodern 'theories'. What concerns me here is that Walshamreproduces the epistemic colonial difference by putting the three books atthe same epistemic level (although not at the same level of achievements).The three books, in this review, have been written within the same postmodernturn, the obfuscating moment of modern epistemology, because from thisperspective epistemology has only one location, which is a non-location; itis a non-located 'matrix', like 'whiteness'. Failure to perceive the colonialdifference is at the same time failure to perceive the coloniality of being.Therefore, it is to think being and space, being and the coloniality of power fromthe colonial difference. 'Being' is not a universal entity ingrained only in time-it is ingrained in space as well. The colonial difference is constitutive of themodern/colonial world, its exterior-interiority where a new form of 'being'emerged, the 'coloniality of being', or if you prefer, 'otherwise than being in thecolonial difference'. In this argument, epistemology cannot be detached from thepolitics of location.

Notes

1. It feels natural (e.g. within the 'same' tradition) that a source of Martin Heidegger's thought isGreek language and philosophy, although Heidegger himself is not Greek. It would not feelnatural if a Chinese philosopher built her philosophy on the Greek tradition only. It wouldsound conservative if she only paid attention to Mandarin and ancient Chinese tradition, andnot to Western philosophy. However, it feels even stranger to think of the possibility of thinkingfrom Aymara language and categories of thought, in the same way that Heidegger thinks fromGreek language and philosophy. In a way, epistemology and the politics of location always gotogether.

2. Hulme mentions, in passing, that some of my analysis of translation between Spanish andNahuatl, and vice versa, has already been corrected. He refers to an observation made by J.F.Schwaller (1996, p. 947). While Schwaller provides a new word to ponder (amoxpohua),unfortunately his 'corrections' of my translations are done from a perspective on translation thatmy entire analysis attempts to displace. A 'new' word does not solve the problem of principlesunder which translation is being enacted. It adds, certainly, a new important empirical element,although maintaining the same theoretical matrix.

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