Indigeneity as Relation

Planetary Longings is the result of putting together, in a more or less revised form, essays that span a large number of years. Chapter 10, for instance, had its first avatar in 1986 and Chapter 9 is a revised and rewritten version of a text published in 1996. Most of the chapters are based on pieces published since 2001, and four chapters (5, 7, 14, and 15) are new. This is not a problem: most of us, given the current regime of academic production, do precisely that. We publish essays, because we have to, and there comes a time when those essays must become part of a book. Of course, there is no telling in advance whether that new book will be entirely organic or just a glorified juxtaposition of independent pieces. Most of the time it is, a bit incongruously, both. That is the case with Planetary Longings. My interest in this review will be to remark on what is organic in the book, its heart or emotional and architectural center; in other words, its underlying theoretical structure, or substructure, on which everything else depends or should depend.

It is certainly a good book, as we could only expect from Mary Louise Pratt, whose previous book, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), was influential for my generation and certainly for the generation after mine. I remember, for instance, several dissertations under my direction that followed Pratt’s footsteps in the productive understanding of travel writing as halfway between imperial desire and ethnography, and as a portender of the Latin American(ist) version of Orientalism or subalternizing exoticization. And it is a good book because it speaks clearly and coherently of, and from, what has become the new, quasi-hegemonic paradigm in Latin Americanist reflection in the humanities. If Imperial Eyes can be read as a book of postcolonial criticism, Planetary Longings both announces and inscribes itself into the mode of critique that has been called “decolonial.” The book should therefore be read, at least partially, from the perspective of finding out, or determining, the effects of the decolonial paradigm on contemporary Latin Americanist reflection.

On the one hand, the “decolonial” (partisans of which generally prefer to speak of “decoloniality” rather than use the older term “decolonization”) has become a term so frequently used that the attempt to explain what it is may be superfluous. It is to be counterposed to the “anticolonial,” more proper of critics and thinkers that were fighting imperial strategies at the time of actual political decolonization, but also to the “postcolonial,” a term which gained currency in the late 1980s and early 1990s primarily through the writing of thinkers born in countries and regions previously dominated by the British, that is, previously part of the British Empire. For Latin Americans, or for Latin Americanism in general, the two terms, that is, “anticolonial” and “postcolonial,” sat on Latin America somewhat uneasily. “Anticolonial” was not meant to be taken as literally as it could have been taken in India, or Congo, or Angola; it was mainly a way of indicating an ongoing struggle, or the will to an ongoing struggle, against neocolonizing strategies of Western powers, most particularly the United States. And “postcolonial” made only a strange, unstable sense, since of course Latin America had previously been colonized, but most Latin American countries had expelled imperial agents and had become ostensibly independent countries early in the 19th century. So “postcoloniality” for Latin America had a slightly different sense than it may have had in Jamaica or Algeria, Indochina or Pakistan.

No wonder, then, that the term “decoloniality,” initially a marker of a difference in imperial history and therefore also an anticolonial difference, evolved within Latin Americanism. Pratt cuts to the chase when she says, “Postcolonialism’s elision of the Americas went hand in hand with an elision of indigeneity, one of the most consequential formations arising from the colonial encounter” (17). And, “As the millenium turned and the search for new knowledges and possibilities for being intensified, postcolonialism waned, and Indigenous knowledge making began to flourish in a new, extroverted way” (17). Decoloniality, then, has everything to do with the expectation and recognition of indigenous knowledge. Pratt is careful, however, to avoid any fundamentalist position regarding indigenous knowledge. She insists, rightly, that the indigenous only becomes so in the presence of an alien invader: “The arrival is what creates the before-and-after moment—you become Indigenous only when somebody else shows up uninvited. Thus, the term indigeneity names a relation, not a condition. It inaugurates what I call the colonial divide . . . and usually sets in motion a narrative of invasion, struggle, displacement, dispossession, otherness, and survivance (or extinction)” (18).

Pratt is surely right that the proliferating discussions of “hybridity, impurity, mimicry, ambiguity, mobility, and ambivalence” (19), trademarks of postcolonial theory, became tiresome and were eventually recognized as dead-ends. But she is also right in pointing out that the “anticolonial” had a tendency to posit the colonized as victims. “Indigeneity,” she says, “by contrast, decolonizes by sustaining and developing ways of being, knowing, and doing that contest the dominant ways of the colonizers and correct their weaknesses and errors” (19). Pratt traces the origin of the term to Aníbal Quijano’s notion of the so-called “coloniality of power,” initially a rather redundant observation, since power, whether exercised by one race against another race, or by a class against another class, or by a gender against another gender, is always necessarily colonial. But the term, now inverted into “decoloniality,” was picked up and used polemically, as a marker of indigenous difference initially, and soon expanded to include descendants of African slaves in Latin America. The polemical intent was addressed not just to the preexisting anticolonial (roughly Marxist) and postcolonial (mainly developed in the context of cultural studies) positions, but also against what the users of the term saw as the Eurocentric positions of a vast array of academics that, whether intentionally or unintentionally, consciously or unconsciously, privileged the European and North American traditions of thought and knowledge, and therefore a generalized “white” ideology, which could only tendentially erase the very presence of alternative worldviews and perspectives. One of the better-known representatives of the decolonial trend went notoriously so far as to say that any Latin American who would refuse to look at the world through indigenous or Afro-Latin American eyes would be complicitous with Western imperialism—which of course put a lot of Latin American criollos in an awkward position.

Pratt, however, unlike the previously mentioned fellow, avoids any essentialisms. Indigeneity is not a substance but a “force,” she says (see 7). And it is a force of what she calls futurity. This is probably Pratt’s specific take on Indigeneity and therefore decoloniality. Indigeneity is a force that may serve not only the indigenous themselves but all of us to find alternatives to “the unprecedented crisis of futurity that human agency has brought about but is less and less able to imagine or control” (7). “A new openness to unpredictability enables a shift out of the systemic” (7), and it is from that exterior position that a force develops that might be able to critique, and decolonize, the “systems and structures” that have brought about “the unspecifiable, unpredictable dynamism of our Anthropocenic ‘nonanalogue’ state” (7). In other words, thought and everyday practices associated with indigenous life, in the Americas and elsewhere, incorporate necessarily (since they have survived sustained historical oppression) practices of “survivance” (18) from which we may all learn, given the fact that our own “systems and structures” are failing or have failed the human race and are now risking to take life, at least human life but also life other than human, into a danger zone of unknown but nevertheless large dimensions.

This is a decolonial take with a twist. It is no longer only an attempt to rescue indigenous knowledges and it is no longer a mandate to critique Eurocentrism as oppressive for non-Europeans, and largely for Europeans and European descendants as well. It is mainly the uncovering of a critical, contestatory position whose very futurity, understood as an alternative to Western knowledge and metaphysics, may save the human race. The real question is then whether the implied critical promise is more than a promise. Is indigenous knowledge, or knowledge-making, truly a possibility of salvation? Or should we give up on the idea of “knowledge,” a dubious word in any case, and insist rather on something like an indigenous relation to existence, in other words, an existential position clearly other, or potentially other, than the dominant Western one? Pratt likes to cite Thornton Highway, a Cree thinker, who makes a point also made by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and others: the indigenous people, and the African descendants affected by the slave trade, already have a great deal of experience surviving the possibility of extinction. So, we should learn from them. Yes, but learn what? It cannot just be the oppositional, contestatory relation to Western traditions of knowledge and to Western thought. There must be more than that.

Chapters 1 to 3 are critical takes on modernity/modernization and globalization respectively, which enable Pratt to present not just a genealogy of decoloniality as a form of academic thought but also the reasons why the former paradigms, dominant in the discussions of the 1980s and 1990s, were insufficient, missed the mark, and must now be left behind. Discussing the work of Sandy Grande, Pratt points out how sub-paradigms of global mobility, for instance, must be understood as part of modernist and imperial figures for “freedom, knowledge, and self-realization” (81) that indigeneity radically interrupts: “Indigeneity today has become a planetary discourse affirming and demanding the freedom to remain in place, to be placed, to be entitled to remain, entitled not to be compelled by some external agent to move” (84).

Chapter 4 produces some masterful analyses of 1990s Latin American novels (by Vallejo, Montero, Bellatín, Piglia, and Eltit) that are presented as novels of “civilizational crisis” (92). Its economic function within the book is the presentation of a certain end of literature—probably standing in for Eurocentric culture as a whole—in civilizational exhaustion. Vallejo, Montero et al. can be described as late criollos even through their self-understanding as “lucid, pessimistic, critical, suicidal” (106). Their novels speak of an end, Pratt says, where “new civilizational possibilities appear but only as lateral configurations that humans can see but not understand” (106). That sense of an ending introduces Chapters 5 and 6, which I believe are the core of the book. Respectively entitled “Planetarized Indigeneity” and “Anthropocene as Concept and Chronotope,” they are two very short chapters in which the claim, made explicit by Pablo Mamani, that “Indigenous peoples have become strategic populations for catalyzing the attack on the neoliberal model” (quoted in 112), is worked out. But only to a certain extent. It remains the case that we frequently access indigenous knowledge through the lenses of Western academic representations of it, including Pratt’s. Thus, for instance, when she says that “philosophical and theoretical works are another central focus of millennial Indigenous activism and creativity, as Indigenous thinkers reach out to the world and non-Indigenous people look for alternatives to the catastrophic course of the present,” she adds a footnote that sends the reader to indigenous philosophical and theoretical works, even if sometimes mediated by academic scholars. But there is never any analysis of what those arcane works may be telling us; I suppose that is left to the interiority of the reader. This is an important problem that, in general, plagues many of the writings of decolonial critics. They speak about the indigenous, but not from within the indigenous perspective. They talk about some radically important work in which we must believe, but that work is only mentioned and not presented. Declamation, not presentation, is in place. And, without the presentation, that is, without the direct critical reading of those indigenous texts, how can the reader possibly adjudicate the immense claim that can be read in the following words? They are the culminating words for Chapters 5 and 6 respectively:

At the millennial turn, Indigenous thinkers are addressing all humankind about how to inhabit the planet. It is by definition futurological; it directly addresses the crisis of futurity. The Indigenous has become a generative space for noncapitalist and anticapitalist civilizational thinking and a source for the more radical visions needed to respond to the unfolding environmental catastrophe. Even as it aims at sustaining Indigenous life, this stream of extroverted thought claims a place in a global intellectual, political, and cultural commons, actively recruiting new audiences, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, with ideas meant to travel, to reach all humankind. (115)

And:

Even if you accept that it’s too late for carbon-based life to survive on Earth, there is still a rich creative challenge in thinking about how to live this ending, how to organize life around it, how to engage the other life-forms that will share the experience, what kinds of aesthetics, ethics, politics, psychic engagement, and intimacy can be created to navigate the experience. The pessimist standpoint has a futurity, too, the possibility of a buen vivir (living well) unfolding toward extinction. (124)

Pessimism notwithstanding, Pratt, in those chapters, tells rather than shows. Given the enormity of the telling, showing would seem essential to its confirmation. I believe this is a flaw in the book, even if shared with a good amount of decolonial criticism, to the extent that the entirety of Pratt’s critical project depends on letting us see that indigenous thought, rather than its academic translation, can sustain the claims that have been made. This is a point in which it would not be too ungenerous to say that Pratt’s critical project becomes a matter of wishful thinking, albeit enthusiastic. And, as wishful thinking, even if it awakens in all of us a sympathy for indigenous knowledge, for indigenous traditions, for indigenous beliefs, and for indigenous existential positions, it runs the risk of becoming nothing but another invitation to ideology in the marketplace of academic ideas, certainly a partisan one, whose credentials are anchored in a choice that might seem rather arbitrary. I want more and expect more from decolonial critics.

Chapters 7 through 11 contain some of the moments in the book where its organicity fails. They are, most of them, interesting chapters, but they have little in common with what I have been describing as the critical core of the book and the project that the book embodies. Chapter 10, for instance, has little to do with Latin America, and Chapters 9 and 11 are indeed chapters that would seem to belong to another book that should have been published some years ago. As I said before, however, this incongruity is often par for the course for contemporary academic books: one does not want to leave certain pieces of writing abandoned in the pages of some journal nobody reads and rescues them as book chapters that will remain at least as milestones of one’s personal itinerary.

Chapter 12 picks up decoloniality again in a very precise and well-developed reading of Iciar Bollaín’s film Bajo la lluvia. Pratt painstakingly shows how the film, through diverse narrative and metanarrative strategies, renders the “parallels between colonial violence in the sixteenth century and the twenty-first” (208). In spite of Pratt’s recognition of the fact that Bajo la lluvia is “a fascinating directorial achievement” (214), the chapter seems to want to move in the direction of a denunciation of the still metropolitan subjectivity of the film director and possibly the entire cast on its European side. This is subtle, as the ostensible intention of the film is precisely to elaborate a radical exposition of colonialism in the past and the present. But one of the fairly frequent reading strategies of the decolonial critic in general is to presume that the (European or American, let us simply call it “white”) other, even in the best and most committed cases, is never decolonial enough, never goes to the end, and always leaves a poisoned and poisonous remainder of Eurocentric misunderstanding. In the last two pages of her essay, Pratt asks devastating questions: “Why the fairy-tale ending? Is the intensely sentimental coloniality of this ending ironic on Bollaín’s part, or is it possible she fell into a familiar racialized fantasy to resolve her film?” (218–19). And, quite ungenerously in my opinion: “If the film is indeed the cinematic equivalent of Imperialism 101, the ending unexpectedly affirms the continuing power of imperial hierarchies to organize action and affect, meaning and possibility, life and death. At the same time, it suggests that knowing this quite possibly makes no difference” (219).

Chapters 13 and 14 are case studies of indigenous figures like Túpac Amaru and his wife Micaela Bastidas, and of past pro-indigenous intellectuality in Latin America such as the one represented by Clorinda Matto de Turner. Chapter 14, however, incorporates a lucid insight that will also be explored in the last two chapters of the book, namely, that there is never a visible future for decolonization. How is this possible?

Decolonization is an exercise in futurology. There is no script, no recipe, for what is supposed to happen once colonial rule ends. There is no theory of decolonization, no picture of what a decolonized society should look like, no telos that recognizes when the new state has been achieved. Decolonization is a future that lies over the horizon. Perhaps we are looking at a paradox. If colonialism can be overthrown only through the imposition of a new hegemonic project, then that imposition will invariably be experienced by some as a recolonization, a new wave of domination and coercion. (248)

What if decolonial theory itself were to be considered in the light of that paragraph? Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui is quoted to that effect: “Rivera Cusicanqui speaks of recolonization coming in ‘waves,’ from the defeat of the 1780–81 rebellion all the way down to late twentieth-century multiculturalism and twenty-first century decolonial thought” (249). This is a tough self-opening to self-indictment for which Pratt’s book should be commended. Rivera Cusicanqui is in fact asking a decisive question: is decoloniality, in spite of its best intentions, yet another form of recolonization, of usurpation of indigenous space? Pratt’s answer to the question is given in the last two chapters, through an insistence on indigeneity as a force open to futurity, through the rejection of all and any essentialisms. Decolonization is an “improvisational” art (252) that can only project itself into “an unknown, unknowable future” (253). One can decolonize, in other words, only intentionally, only tendentially. It is a practice of critique whose destructive side becomes clear, as it is always easy, or relatively easy, to identify the lexemes of colonization that come to invade a territory and produce the indigenous as its included counterpart. The indigenous effort at exclusion, that is, self-exclusion from that poisoned interiority is never so clear. And certainly, the academic effort in favor of decoloniality, which amounts to a reterritorialization of the indigenous decolonial intent, can never claim to be innocent. It is in fact anything but innocent. Particularly in a situation in which, as Pratt makes clear from its very beginning, the decolonial critical paradigm has now become (almost) hegemonic in North American universities and elsewhere. And there is always a problem with hegemony—it builds itself upon exclusions. But Pratt is not herself responsible for that problem—although she does nothing to question it.

Planetary Longings is a good book primarily because it gives us insight into the mind of the critic, who actually presents herself as embodying something like a contemporary Weltanschauung, hence as a representative of a certain state of affairs in academic opinions. But the book does not give us, and does not try to give us, access to indigenous or indigenous-based thinking processes and ideas. The critic is in this case a sophisticated, Western-academic, Latin Americanist critic who has made it her business to be open to subaltern loci of enunciation in Latin America and beyond. Is that enough? Yes, decoloniality may have come a long way from its rough beginnings in the first generation of self-identified decolonial thinkers, back in the 1990s, although they were themselves rooted in a long tradition of criollista identity thinking. But encore un effort is needed, and it has to do with showing rather than telling, hence with an effort to step out of ideology into freer thinking. It does not help that Pratt erases, by not mentioning, other traditions of critical thought, alive and kicking in Latin Americanist reflection, than the one or ones she wants to favor. Can indigenous knowledge, knowledge-making, existential positions regarding the very possibility of knowledge help lead humanity, in the midst of the Anthropocenic predicament, into possibly saving or at least guarding positions? Pratt only says so. Those of us who are seriously expecting better answers can only keep waiting.

Alberto Moreiras is a full professor in the Department of Global Languages and Cultures at Texas A&M University. He is also an executive editor of Política común: A Journal for Thought.