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I am where i think: Epistemology and

the colonial differenceWalt er D. Mignolo

a

a Prof essor and Chair of Romance St udies and Prof essor in

Literaure and Cult ural Anthropology , Duke Universit y ,

Published online: 27 Feb 2009.

To cite this article: Walter D. Mignolo (1999) I am where i think: Epistemology and the

colonial dif ference, Journal of Lat in American Cult ural St udies: Travesia, 8:2, 235-245, DOI:

10.1080/ 13569329909361962

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

Debate

I Am Where I Think: Epistemology and the

Colonial 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 being

aware that this was the case—I had my first intellectual exchange with Peter

Hulme. This was owing to the fact that Rolena Adorno and I were seeking to

publish an article of his in a special issue of

Dispositio

(1989) devoted to 'Co lonial

Discourse', a concept Hulme exam ined in his landm ark book Colonial Encounters.

European and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (1986) . I am evokin g this m om en t

for several reasons. First, it was a moment of transformation in Hispanic/Latin

America colonial scholarship, moving away from the double tyranny of the

national values imprinted in Castilian languages and literature written in

Castilian. The transition from 'literature to discourse' was, at the same time, a

transition from the national framing of the colonial period to a new domain of

scholarship that I would today identify as a 'coloniality at large'. Secondly, in

spite of the internal transformation (e.g. the history of Hispanic and Latin

American scholarship), it was not relevant in current debates in which

modernity and coloniality were post-Enlightenment phenomena. Thirdly, I am

evoking this mom ent to remind the reader th at this was the general basis for

The

Darker Side of the Renaissance. The notion of 'colonial semiosis' that I employed

in the book wa s actually introduced in my Afterword to the volum e of

Dispositio.

The last 5 years of the making of

The Darker Side of the Renaissance

were marked

by a dialogue with the transformation of the field of colonial studies and the

presence of colonial legacies through the Chicana/os social movement and

intellectual production. Curiously enough, almost at the same time that Peter

Hulme'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 of

transculturation is given fullest rein in the Preface, presumably the part of the

book 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 to

completion'.

Of course, the spirit in which I am en gaging in this renew ed conversation w ith

Peter Hulme is not that of defending myself of the weaknesses he has detected

in my arguments. Rather, I would like to engage in a scholarly conversation

focusing toward the future, starting from some of the controversial issues Peter

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Debate

Hulme examined in his generous and rigorous review of The D arker Side of the

Renaissance.

A dmittedly, I am also thankful to him for und erlining the contribu-

tion the book makes to the existing and growing literature on coloniality. By

coloniality, I mean the less visible side of modernity. I will come back to the

coloniality/modernity dichotomy at the end of my reply. First, I would like to

start 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 and

scholarship and thoroughness and verve make it superior to most of what it

contests. Ultimately, and in accordance with standards which can, with due

tentativeness, be seen as global, Mignolo's work is better—and it should stand

that gro un d' (Hulme, p. 229). This statement is ma de to counter m y claims

locating my works on the margins. Hulme states: "That interesting work comes

from the margins, however defined, is not to be doubted, but its value does not

depend on its place of origin or on some more broadly defined locus of

enunciation. 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 a

nutshell, Hulme correctly perceives that 'loci of enunciation' involves a politics

and 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 be

valued for what it achieves and not for what it announces. I have no intention

of contesting H ulm e's recognition of the book 's achievement How ever, I wou ld

indulge 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 way

I 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 will

begin with this last issue, since it is the most important for future scholarly and

political discussions.

'A politics of location cannot itself become an epistemology'. Certainly not

'itself I will agree, but I argue tha t epistemology implies and is embedded in a

politics of location. This was one of the epistemic quarrels, related to the

question of 'translation' that Hulme himself addresses in his review, and which

I was addressing in the book. In this regard, I have no problem with the two

statements by Said as quoted by H ulm e. Quite the contrary, I (like many others)

am indebted to Said's groundbreaking book for having brought to my attention

to 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 the

colonial difference visible in the Anglo-speaking world. The Philosophy of

liberation 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 fact

remains that it was Said who produced the impact, backed up by the richness

of French poststructuralism; and this is a fact that has much to do with the

politics of (institutional) location.

Epistemology is embedded in languages and in particular genealogies. To

ma ke a long story short, a 'history of epistemo logy' wou ld m ost likely start with

the Greek words 'episteme', 'doxa' and 'gnosis' and run through modern

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237

vernacular languages and a variety of expressions in order to describe 'episte-

mology' as theory of knowledge, reflection on knowledge, or (a yet more

restricted 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 rhetoric

rather 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 even

less Swahili, Aymara or Nahuatl) languages are the house of modern epistemol-

ogy. I have the impression that, from this perspective, a politics of location can

be in itself an epistemology.

Let me give you another example. There is a splendid moment in Pierre

Bourdieu's 'Thinking about Limits' (1992), in which he places himself in a

disciplinary-theoretical genealogy as well as a national language one. As a

sociologist interested in education, Bourdieu understands the paradox implied

in the process

itself:

'if we are not educated, we cannot think much at all, yet if

we are educated we risk being dominated by ready-made thoughts'. Can we

really not think m uch at all if we are not educated? Is it only education that calls

for thinking? Or is education a manipulation of thinking? Now, think about

education and colonialism, and you will find that what Bourdieu is doing is

mapping loci of enunciation and grounding epistemology in the politics of

location. Let me explain. Let us think about language and education in colonial

expansion and nation-building strategies. Let us concentrate on colonial legacies,

national languages and disciplinary foundations in the education system that

teaches us (those who have access to such an education) how to think. Then tell

me if epistemology does not appear ingrained in the politics of location to the

point where you cannot think the former without the latter. It should appear so

unless one assumes that epistemology is not located; rather, that it is universal

and ungrounded, a neutral guardian of knowledge. I am not saying that Hulme

ho lds these beliefs. I am just pressing the question of the necessary connections

between the politics of knowledge (epistemology) and the politics of location

(interest) in a non-Habermasian direction (Habermas, 1971).

The epistemological traditions in which B ourdieu began to w ork, he confesses,

were for him 'like the air that we breathe': it went unnoticed, which in my view

is close to saying that 'we are where we think'. Bourdieu recognized that his is

a 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 was

not all a national miracle bu t no doub t related to favourable conditions

with in the structure of the education system. This historical tradition of

epistemology 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 principles

of kno wledge a nd scientific tho ughts. (1992, p. 41)

Is it not an epistemic locus of enunciation that is being 'carved' out and

defined 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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238 Debate

educ ation, epistemology a nd colonialism? W hat if you are a Bolivian sociologist

of Aymara descent? Here I am not speaking of blood but education in the

Aymara ayllu. If this is the case, you have to learn Spanish (whose link w ith the

epistemic foundations of social sciences is not strong, or at least, not as strong

as the scenario or loci of enunciation described by Bourdieu). Finally, you reach

Paris or even better, the US, where French and English will allow the Aymara

sociologist to be recognized and legitimized as a serious thinker. I mentioned

Aymara as an extreme, but I could have run the example with Spanish or

Portuguese and an imaginary sociologist from Chile or Brazil. What I am

referring to here was also articulated for the case of history by Dipesh

Chakrabarty (1992a, 1992b), in an argument that I have referred to as

'Chakrabarty's dilemma' (Mignolo, 1999).

Loci of enunciation a re constituted at the intersection of epistemology a nd the

politics of location. Cultures of scholarship are cast in terms of textual national

legacies, for it is in and by text that the educational system is structured and

sciences are articulated, packaged, transmitted and exported. These are the

conditions for loci of enunciation and epistemology, according to the case of

Bourdieu. When loci of enunciation and epistemology are crossed by the colonial

difference, you find yourself in the situation u nde rlined b y

The Darker Side of the

Renaissance.

I had articulated this frame in the debate pub lished in

Latin

American

Research

Review

(1993), pro m pte d by a review article on colonial and

postcolonial discourses by Patricia Seed (1991). Although the topics I deal with

in the book are located in the early colonial period or the initial stage of the

modern/colonial world, I was actually writing the book at the end of the cold

war. I was aware of what political scientist Carl Pletsch (1981) described as 'the

three worlds, or the division of social scientific labor'. The point I would like to

recall here is that the 'three world' order went together with a subalternization

of knowledge and the reproduction of the colonial difference. In this distri-

bution, the production of culture was assigned to the Third World and the

production of social sciences to the First World, in such a way that the

translation of the social sciences to the Third World was a process that should

not h ave been taken for grante d. The introduc tion of social sciences in the Third

World, during the cold war, was part of the ideology sustaining development

and modernization. At the end of my contribution to the debate surrounding

Seed's article, I wrote: "The "native point of view" also includes intellectuals. In

the apportionment of scientific labor since World War II, which has been

described 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 happen ed in the sixteenth century, and the

situation in which Guaman Poma de Ayala and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl

among others found themselves, was not too different from the situation I have

just described. The 'foundation' of the subalternization of knowledge in the

mo dern/co lonial wo rld took place then, und er C hristian epistemic principles in

the European Renaissance. In this sense, the 'extirpation of idolatry' was indeed

an epistemic lobotom y (M ignolo, forthcom ing). The colonial epistemic difference

that justified Area Studies and Orientalism was put in place in the sixteenth

century. Loci of enunciation was, and still is, a concept that allows me to think

together epistemology, the colonial difference, and politics of location.

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239

The second point in Hulme's review addresses the difficulties of my own

metaphors to further the argument that I am trying to advance. According to

Hulme, metaphors such as 'loci of Enunciation' or 'center-periphery' play

against my argument. This suggests that the metaphoric field related to move-

ment (travel, routes, diaspora, displacement, detour) would have been more

conducive. Hulme puts 'translation' in this second set, which he identifies with

the work of James Clifford, although in the index of The D arker Side of the

Renaissance, the entry 'translation' refers to 'pp. 63 and passim'. The entire book,

indeed, is built on the question of translation.

2

'Pluritopic hermeneutics' in the

frame of coloniality, and the coloniality of power, bring translation constantly to

centre stage. Yet in any case, both cen tre/p erip he ry as well as diaspora or travel

invoke loci, and loci of enunciation are not necessarily fixed. They could be

diasporic. Travel and travelling are as much locations as is remaining in one

place. Translation takes place between people who arrive and people who are in

place. This leads to two questions. One question is: what do you prefer, to

underline those who travel and arrive or those who are stationary and receive?

The other is the question of translation and the coloniality of power. Briefly

stated, when you assume a frame such as the one described by Bourdieu, you

realize that modern epistemology was founded on the imperial difference—that

is , the distinction between German, French, and English as languages of science

and modern philosophy and Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish as languages of

hum anist legacies. M odern epistemology 'carved' its locus of enunciation on the

imperial difference, the difference between the 'new' and the 'old' modern/

colonial empires. How ever, mo dern epistemology also found its locus of enunci-

ation on the colonial difference, since the languages and knowledge of colonized

areas (in Asia and Africa) as well as those languages and knowledges 'outside'

its scope (like Mandarin or Arabic or Aymara), were converted into objects of

study but not taken as sustainable knowledge.

(3) I hav e already written too long an d only touched on a couple of issues raised

by Hulme, although these are basic issues that impinge on the rest of the book

as well as on the rest the review. I would like to pursue the argument by

bringing 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 that

this quotation places the work and myself on the academic margins. Hulme

states: 'which initially struck me as strange: just what is "marginal" about an

expensively produced book published by the University of Michigan Press and

containing the thoughts of a Professor in the Department of Romance Studies

and the Program in Literature at Duke U niversity?' Hu lme offers an answ er w ith

which I do not disagree but that I would like to expand on: 'What Mignolo

means, I think, is explained in his Preface: by choosing to write the book in

English, but inscribing Spanish and Amerindian materials and perspectives into

current debate about the Renaissance period and the colonial world, he is

pressing the case for the importance (indeed centrality) of the concerns of the

academic (and political) margins—Latin America, indigenous studies, Spanish

humanism,

colonial

cultural studies—in a wa y perh aps analogou s to, if less

pointed than, the inclusion of Rigoberta Menchû's testimonio on the Stanford

Hu ma nities sy llabus' (H ulme, pp . 220-221).

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By definition, loci of enunciation are not marginal. Yet making them visible

also makes it possible to underline that epistemology is not just a happy

universal spaces which everybody can join. As with any thing else, joining

something that is hegemonic means to accept the rule of the game. If you play

the game, but not exactly according to the rules, chances are that you will be

somewhat on the margins. However, I am not interested in either playing the

role of the 'Hispanic' victim or of the successful marginal who publishes in

English in American university presses and works at Duke. I am interested in

making the (epistemic) colonial difference visible. I did not word it like that in

The

Darker

Side of the

Renaissance. It is, how ever, a key-word in the sequel to

The

Darker Side of the Renaissance, enti t led Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality,

Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (1999). In this book, I try to clarify the

notion of 'colonial difference' by thinking through it. (Hulme is right, by the

way, that I do no t make an effort to define theoretical concepts in The Darker Side

of 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 to

elucidate the theoretical frame of his own thinking, Bourdieu honestly pursues

a comparison with the German philosophical tradition. The comparison is

necessary in order to justify the transferability of scientific thinking from the

sciences of nature to the human sciences, a step which is more difficult to take

in the G erman philosophical legacy because, according to Bourdieu, the distinc-

tion 'erklaren-Verstehen (explanation-understanding)' builds a wall between the

natu ral and the hu m an sciences. French legacies, he concludes, 'propose , then, a

reflection 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 is

conquered, constructed, confirmed. The conquest of the given is a central

concept in Bachelard's thought, and he sums it up in the term epistemological

break. Why is this phase of scientific research important, and why does it

separate, as seems to me to be the case, the tradition I represent from the

dominant Anglo-Saxon tradition? It is because to say that the scientific fact has

to be fought for is radically to defy, in this regard, all of the givens that social

scientific researchers find before th em "' (Bourdieu, 1992, p . 43).

This brief descrip tion of Bourdieu's self-location (e.g. framing his o wn locus of

enunciation in the social sciences and in the European tradition) makes clear the

inseparability 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 I

decide to think from categories, frames and problems that were put in place to

deal with the issues of coloniality and the colonial difference in which I am

interested. If I follow the first route , I hav e tw o choices. Either to become a social

scientist according to the rules of the game that were defined in 'a tradition (to

which) 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 the

colonial difference. In either case, I will be epistemologically marginal, that is,

epistemologically subaltern. This was precisely 'Chakrabarty's dilemma' in the

dom ain of historiography: as long as you are a historian, you cannot be a "Third

World' historian because history is an activity, institution, and way of thinking

that was instrumental in the colonization of memory. The basis of 'Chakrabarty

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Debate

241

dilemma' is that writing subaltern 'histories' means to remain in an epistemi-

cally subaltern p osition in the do main of cultures of scholarship. This is because

one of the invisible places in which the coloniality of power operates is the

domain of epistemology. Consequently, if you 'study' colonialism or the subal-

tern but you maintain the rules of the social sciences and humanities game, you

maintain the coloniality of power that reproduces the epistemic colonial differ-

ence.

Epistemic loci of enunciation are stubborn and, as in the case of Garcia

Canclini (1989), you can describe and 'stu dy ' the h ybridy of society and culture

in a specific place like Tijuana, while maintaining a pure, non-contaminated,

non-hybrid loci of enunciation. This is why I attempted to think from models

and theories provided by C hican o/a thinkers and L atin American philosophers,

such as Enrique Dussel and Rodolfo K usch. Yet, I also used the models provid ed

by 'com plementary dichotom ies' in Amerindian th ough ts (Mignolo, 1995). I

believe that Hulm e intuitively unde rstood this w hen h e says, on pag e 223, T had

the strange impression that Mignolo actually

wanted

to be doing something

rather different and even more ambitious'. 'Pluritopic hermeneutics' was a

necessary step to avoid the 'non-complem entary dichotomy' between the know -

ing subject and the known, the disciplines and the object of study. Their

thoughts and works were and are in a constant struggle with the epistemic

colonial difference, not as an object of study but as loci of enunciation defined

by the coloniality of power—that is, with thinking from a subaltern epistemic

perspective (or Voices from the margins' as Hulme's title states). Dussel's latest

work confronts the issue openly (Dussel, 1994, 1996, 1998; Mignolo, forth-

coming). My not so kind rem arks on G ordon B rotherston's article, thou gh n ot on

his magnificent book (Brotherston, 1992), were prompted by epistemic, not

nationalist, considerations. National histories are local histories, certainly, but

they cannot be confused with them. Thus, Brotherston's discussion of

Amerindian knowledge of a system of writing, taking position on a dispute

between Derrida and Levi-Strauss (that Hulme rightly critiques on page

225),

reminded me of Las Casas and Sepulveda discussing the 'Amerindian

Question'. Amerindians themselves having nothing to say, as they have not been

invited to participate in a debate in which they themselves are objects of

consideration. That is the epistemic colonial difference from whence emerged

Amerindians 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 colonial

epistemic difference.

This explains the connection between 'darker' and 'hybrid' (a concept I truly

do not use very often in the book) that Hu lme notices on page 222 of his review.

Today, this relationship would be recast in terms of the making of colonial

(epistemic) differences. This is w ha t the hu manists and m en of letters did in the

sixteenth century, and this process continues, through 'Orientalism' and 'Area

Studies', to today.

(4) There are several points that I am interested in pursuing, but that I cannot

engage in detail, as this would mean risking a reply that is longer than the

review itself Perhaps in the future there will be an opportunity for elaboration

and further clarification.

(i) On Modernity. I did not stress too m uch in the book tha t 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, as

we know it today, is grounded in the emergence of the Atlantic commercial

circuit durin g the sixteenth century. This wa s a crucial chapter in the history

of capitalism. Thus , it is not so much a q uestion of push ing 'mo dern ity' back

in time, from the eighteenth to the sixteenth century, but of understanding

the historical emergence of modernity/coloniality. Whether conceived in

space (peripheral modernities) or time (would-be modernities), this formu-

lation has the inconvenience of making you believe that first comes

modernity and then coloniality. This is an image forged in the second half

of the eighteenth century, when building the Europe of Nations (between the

Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and the end of the Napoleonic era) was a

concern of nations w ithou t, until tha t point, significant colonial doma ins. The

colonial empires at that time were Spain and Portugal. However, these

countries, unlike England, France and Germany, were not involved in the

Europe of Nations.

(ii) On pluritopic herm eneutics . C ertainly, I start from Pannika r, bu t I also depart

from him. The main dep arture is that Pannikar's 'diatopic hermene utics' (he

also 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 Darker

Side of the Renaissance an d a s I explo re in m or e detail in Local Histories/Global

Designs.

Basically, if you conceive cu ltures as discre te en tities that can be

compared, you remain within the colonial frame that classified the world

and divided it into discrete cultural entities. If you think that modern

epistemology and coloniality of power went together in the classification of

world cultures, then you have to admit that epistemology is located some-

wh ere and, mo st likely, in that locus of enunciation that classified the w orld

into discrete cultural entities. This issue is related to my exploration of

epistemology 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 long

and careful discussion on maps, ethnic and geometric centres, and loci of

enunciation, I wo uld do so starting from my previo us consideration on the topic.

However, I will skip this temptation.

I would like to close this response by recognizing, on the grounds of the

previous discussion, how much I value Hulme's engagement with the book. I

value it first for his intellectual honesty and openness. I also value it for the

critical points he raises and for what he recognizes and praises. Of course I am

not saying this for purely egotistical reasons. Rather, I am concerned with the

closeness of the scholarly mind. The book has been widely reviewed, as Hulme

notices, and the reviews a re generally favourable. In general, it is not unreaso n-

able to expect and have negative critics. That goes with the territory. What is

remarkable, however, is a certain uneasiness that the book has provoked. The

book has been reviewed in a significant number of different fields, which of

course is very good. The uneasiness is detectable in those fields which seem to

take the world for granted and in which there exists the belief that all a book

about the past should do is tell what really happened in a straightforward

manner, hi such attitudes, I see the reproduction of the epistemic colonial

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Debate 243

difference, exercising coloniality of power to maintain hegemonic spaces in

cultures of scholarship.

There is one example I would like to explore. The review in question was

written by Alexandra Walsham and appeared in

The

Historical Journal (1999). It

featured three books, two on modern Europe (Stuart Clark's

Thinking With

Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, 1997; Lyndal Roper ' s

Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe,

1995) and The Darker Side of the Renaissance. Walsham wrote an introductory

paragraph noticing, first, the fundamental questions proposed by 'postmod-

ernism' and the so-called linguistic turn. Walsham remarks that postmodernism

and the linguistic turn have helped generate innovative and provocative 'histori-

cal writing' in recent years. Walsham notices that, taken together, the three

books under review 'highlight both the potential strengths and weakness, the

rewards and dangers of injecting theory into the study of witchcraft, sexuality

and colonization in early modern Europe and the New World'.

I am pleased, in this and similar cases, that the book has been taken as

an important contribution to several fields of knowledge, in this case

'historical writing'. I am not surprised but concerned with Walsham's short

sight when it comes to the colonial difference, the 'interior exteriority' of cul-

tures of scholarship from w hich the book was writte n and that the book attem pts

to make possible—that is, to be able to think and write (and teach) from

the 'interior exteriority' of the colonial difference. Modern cultures of

scholarship and disciplines cannot be denied, but at the same time cannot be

accepted 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, but

at the same time outside, since 'history' was not an activity expected from

the 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 is

where 'voices from the margins' should be located and where a new epistemic

potential is emerging. This is the precisely the fracture that W alsham is trying to

patch.

The scenario dra wn by W alsham echoes the debate between the distinguished

French scholar Marcel Bataillon and the distinguished Mexican scholar Ed-

mundo O'Gorman, apropos of the 'discovery of America' (Bataillon &

O'G orman, 1955). Bataillon charged O 'Gorman with n ot do ing w hat Bataillon, as

a French scholar (by which I mean a scholar working in the French academy,

under academic and national assumption of the French academy) assumed

historians should do. According to Bataillon, a historian should tell the story as

it happened through a careful reading of texts written by those who participated

in or were close to the events themselves. O'Gorman, as a Mexican scholar (by

which I mean working in the Mexican academy, under academic and national

assumption of the Mexican academy, and participating in intellectual debates in

which colonial legacies filtered through the national history of Mexico), how-

ever, wrote his book as part of a larger project criticizing the principles of

positivistic historiography underlying Bataillon's project. O'Gorman's goals

were not to tell the story again, using a new methodology, but to question the

very principles and assumptions under which histories of the discovery of

America have been written. In order to show that Colombus could not have

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244 Debate

discovered America because America was not an existing entity awaiting to be

discovered, but rather an invention of European historiography, O'Gorman

engaged himself in an argument that might have appeared to Bataillon to be a

house 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 the

tensions that prompted Bataillon and O'Gorman's illuminating debate in the

1950s are still alive at the end of the century. This is one of many reasons why

I am interested in looking at loci of enunciation, and in revealing the inextricable

links between epistemology and the politics of location.

For Hulm e, the 'overall thr ust' of the book is 'clearly postcolonial in one of the

important senses of that word: it aims to undo that aspect of the work of

colonization which one critic, in his review, describes as "cognitive imperial-

ism "' (Hulme, p. 223). Walsham, however, read it as a postm odern stud y that

she found 'obfuscating' and 'irrita ting ' (Walsham, 1999, p . 274). As such , Wal-

sham fails to see the difference between two books devoted to 'early modern

Europe' and one book devoted to 'colonization of the New World' because she

sees 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 Walsham

reproduces the epistemic colonial difference by putting the three books at

the same epistemic level (although not at the same level of achievements).

The three books, in this review, have been written within the same postmodern

turn, the obfuscating moment of modern epistemology, because from this

perspective epistemology has only one location, which is a non-location; it

is a non-located 'matrix', like 'whiteness'. Failure to perceive the colonial

difference is at the same time failure to perceive the coloniality of being.

Therefore, it is to think being and space, being a nd the coloniality of pow er from

the 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 the

modern/colonial world, its exterior-interiority where a new form of 'being'

emerged, the 'coloniality of bein g', or if you prefer, 'otherwise than bein g in the

colonial difference'. In this argument, epistemology cannot be detached from the

politics of location.

Notes

1. It feels natural (e.g. within the 'sam e' tradition) that a source of Martin Heidegger's tho ugh t is

Greek language and philosophy, although Heidegger himself is not Greek. It would not feel

natural if a Chinese philosopher built her philosophy on the Greek tradition only. It would

sound conservative if she only paid attention to Mandarin and ancient Chinese tradition, and

not to Western philosophy. H owever, it feels even stranger to think of the possibility of thinking

from Aymara language and categories of thought, in the same way that Heidegger thinks from

Greek language and philosophy. In a way, epistemology and the politics of location always go

together.

2. Hu lme mentions, in passing, that some of my analysis of translation between Spanish and

Nahuatl, and vice versa, has already been corrected. He refers to an observation made by J.F.

Schwaller (1996, p . 947). While Schwaller pro vides a n ew wo rd to po nde r (amoxpoh ua),

unfortunately his 'corrections' of my translations are don e from a perspective on translation that

my entire analysis attempts to displace. A 'new' word does not solve the problem of principles

und er w hich translation is being enacted. It adds, certainly, a new im portant empirical element,

although maintaining the same theoretical matrix.

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245

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i Am Where i Think - Walter Mignolo