A comparative and epistemic approach to Anglophone and Latin American postcolonial theory and criticism

Abstract

Postcolonial criticism is one of the critical derivations of recent times. Nevertheless, not many works have undertaken studies based upon comparative analyses grounded on its episteme(s). The present study demonstrates that there is more than one episteme in postcolonial criticism. To prove it, the analysis considers key points in the evolution of the ideology and criticism of Anglophone and Latin American postcolonial realms. It first covers the evolution of the Anglophone postcolonial ideology and criticism. After that, it deals with Latin American postcolonial criticism. It concludes by establishing a comparison between both. It leads us to see that the postcolonial Anglophone and Latin American epistemes are asymmetric phenomena that share common features and mutual benefits. Additionally and on equal terms, the present study shows that the post- and de- prefixes linked to the “colonial” term and applied to the Anglophone and Latin American realms, respectively, are indicators that mark an ideological turn in the conception of both terms. Despite the shared plurality and multiplicity of the postcolonial world, the apparent wish for the release and unleashing from the matrix of power, and the paradoxical “sameness convergence” into globalization, these indicators are different, as in fact they show different degrees of epistemic disobedience and social dissidence.

Keywords:

• postcolonial
• decolonial
• Anglophone
• Latin American
• epistemic
• criticism
• colonialism

1. Introduction: the postcolonial vantage and its episteme(s)

One of the issues that can be raised in analysing the problematic nature of postcolonial critique is whether the term “postcolonial” refers to ontological or chronological fact as it would allow for variability in analysis. The consideration of the term itself does not make a tabula rasa with either of the two elements it integrates (“post” and “colonial”) since there is no clearly defined frontier but rather a forced relationship. Neither colonization nor post-colonization creates different persons from the ontological point of view, although new relational fields are created with a whole series of cultural, political, and power relations. Postcolonial studies do demonstrate their validity fundamentally in the analysis of these relations and of the dialogue that is formed from the moment of colonization, since a series of forces of affiliation, resistance, and social transformation appear. This could be the common denominator of the analysis of postcolonial studies, a continuum where these forces of filiation and resistance, and ultimately of transformation, are implicit.

The critical derivations of the postcolonial/decolonial episteme can be seen as a derivation of modernity that raises the question of whether this is a whole or if in reality there are several components, since it is a question of different cultural trunk bases. This leads us to ask if there is more than one related epistemic approach and, in our specific consideration, to propose the existence of two distinct epistemic approaches. These are fundamental in the critical approach to post-coloniality/decoloniality, and they act in different ways. The first, which is of a Western and Anglophone matrix, is marked by academia and a greater normativity and ideological uniformity. The second, which is of a Latin American matrix, is marked by a sense of dissidence and greater diversity in social theory in relation to the hegemonic forms of thought. The latter would be characterized either through creole-liberal forms or through indigenist tendencies and would be shaped by a decolonial thinking with a post-Western emancipatory sense. It would also characterize a good part of current Latin American thought.

2. Anglophone postcolonial ideology and criticism: setting the compass until today

Before dealing with Anglophone postcolonial ideology and criticism, a chronological organization should be established. To this end, three fundamental periods in the colonial/postcolonial process of the Anglophone sphere that are related to the British Empire should be pointed out. The first is the loss of the American Colonies and the declaration of American Independence which took place in the late eighteenth century. The second stage covers the end of the nineteenth century to the first decade of the twentieth century, a period characterized by the establishment of the autonomous communities within the British Empire—the “dominions,” or what today are referred to as “settler” nations. These were nations that recognized and pledged allegiance to Britain—Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa—though in 1931 the Statute of Westminster gave the dominions full governmental control. The third phase of decolonization happened in the decades after the Second World War, and instead of affecting self-governing settler dominions, it involved colonized lands in Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean, places that were not characterized by mass European migration and whose dispossessed populations were controlled by minor British colonial elites.

The emergence of recent postcolonial ideology and criticism is directly associated with the pathos of this third period, a period featuring indigenous anticolonial nationalism leading to the independence and decolonization of many countries and territories. This is the nuclear period of recent postcolonial studies and criticism, but to signal important points in the ideological and literary criticism of postcolonialism, the origins must be delved into. These seem to have started largely in Anglophone universities offering courses on what was known as “Commonwealth,” “new,” or “world” literatures incorporating what would later be called “theories of colonial discourses.” In these courses, the perspectives focused on the European settler communities and on peoples and nations “in the process of gaining independence from British rule, such as those from African, Caribbean and South Asian nations” (McLeod, 2000, 10–11).

“Commonwealth literature” was a term that literary critics used from the 1950s onward that basically described English literature by writers from either European settler communities (dominions) or writers from non-settler communities (African, Caribbean, South Asian), so a number of writers such as Chinua Achebe, R. K. Narayan, George Lamming, and Katherine Mansfield perfectly fit this label. The curious fact is that “Significantly, neither American nor Irish Literature were included in early formulations of the field” (McLeod, 2000, 11). On the other hand, it was clear that the decline of the British Empire was linked to the promotion of the British Commonwealth of Nations and its associates. The idea of sharing a common legacy was stressed and spread bearing in mind that Britain and its cultural productions, as was the case with literature, had the status of primus inter pares. This will be something to which the postcolonial critics will object, as the alleged similar abstract qualities were more important than the real preoccupations and contexts. However, although by today’s standards it can be considered a liberal practice, Commonwealth literature and criticism directed attention to new productions, was partly a political act, and laid the foundations of the postcolonial criticisms to come. The question for the utterly critical is whether this literature represented a common exploitation. The middle-of-the-road answer is that perhaps it represented a call for attention in the study of cultural intersections, something that postcolonial theorists like Homi K. Bhabha (2005) or Timothy Brennan (2013) will develop—along with its added nuances and evolution—into the idea of the frontier as an epistemic notion, but in the meantime this impetus meant that these were major literary fields that deserved significant attention.

Fortunately, the change from a more Westernized liberal humanism into postcolonialism will be possible not because of an evolution within the postcolonial thought but because of a crisis and a widespread “critique within universities … Such a critique occurred quite aggressively with the rise of theory during the 1960s through to the 1980s as alternatives to universalizing critical methodologies, and it led to a more politicized approach to postcolonial literary criticism” (Lane, 2013, 488). This is precisely what was referred to when the fact of recent postcolonial ideology and criticism and its association with the pathos of this third period—a period lasting from the 1960s to the first decades of the twenty-first century—was mentioned. The second stage will be marked by a shift from the analysis of colonial discourses and contexts to the attention of migrant and diasporic communities in the West, something that can be considered a postcolonial interrogation of the new society or a postcolonial critique of postmodernism. It poses another issue: how to cope with indigenous subjectivity, a kind of “foreignness” for the westerners into postmodernism via ideologies of multiculturality and diversity. Is this re-inscription possible? For Bhabha, it is beyond postmodernism, and it is a disruptive place of creativity, a place of “in-betweenness.” This expansion is also linked to the diasporic colonial subjects, to literatures throughout the world, and to the enlargement of the postcolonial canon. Some good examples are the Native Americans, Chicano/as, and Afro-Hispanic and African American peoples. Other critics and writers such as Thomas King (1990) and Jesse Archibald-Barber (2015) have underlined the incompleteness of the postcolonial paradigm by stressing that their analyses of indigenous culture and history have the arrival of colonialism as their epicentres and thus somewhat ignore the cultural premises preceding it. King, for example, tries to vindicate the terms “interfusional” and “associational” to describe “that part of Native literature which is a blending of oral literature and written literature” (2005, 13) without accounting for how first nations are compared and contrasted with this event, sometimes to the grading of it (e.g., indigenous, colonial, postcolonial, etc.), establishing cultural boundaries that were artificially imposed by colonial powers.

A chronological itinerary of recent postcolonial criticism can be criticized for being inaccurate in that its creations and influences have not moved unidirectionally with the arrow of time, but rather have behaved as fluids of communicating vessels without regard to time and influenced by heterogeneous disciplines. In spite of this, one of the most coherent classifications found to date is offered by McLeod (2000, 17–31) when analysing the theories of colonial discourses. He discusses authors such as Edward Said and Frantz Fanon and offers theories of colonial discourses that examine the representations and modes of perception used to keep colonized people controlled under colonial rule. These theories, mostly generated before the 1980s and acting as a true foundation of more recent postcolonial studies, called attention to the role of language to control a particular way of seeing things. They offered a worldview and ordered reality for the benefit of the colonizers. The work was certainly more prescriptive than descriptive and more political than analytical, but it signalled the medium of language as a medium of power and challenged some generally held values. It was widely influential in the millennial discussions and also paradoxical in its approaches; a good example was the importance granted to local concerns in the context of trying to totalize how the literatures of different areas work while following the same agenda. In spite of that, this ground-breaking text solidly put forward the idea that the postcolonial text is always a complex and hybridized formation.

A fourth stage could be articulated or “hinged” in the pre- and post-millennial hopes and fears. It is a moment of joyful expansion where postcolonialism and postcolonial theory is founded as formally fashionable. It is a moment of collections of essays, readers, practice materials, and guides to postcolonial theory, like Leela Gandhi’s Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (1998), Peter Childs and Patrick Williams’s Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory (1997), or Neil Lazarus’s The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies (2004), together with more cultural specifics like Carole Boyce Davies’s Black Women, Writing and Identity (1994), Ato Quayson’s Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing (1997), or Deborah Madsen’s Native Authenticity: Transnational Perspectives on Native American Literary Studies (2010), among others. It is a moment of attention to cultural and historical specifics of literature and a moment in which the postcolonial ideology and criticism recognize the diasporic postcolonial subjects, a time in which the postcolonial canon is expanded because there is a wish to integrate/accommodate the contributions of other colonized peoples—e.g., Chicano/as, Afro-Hispanics, Native Americans, African Americans—or peoples and cultures that were/are interpreted as doubly colonized, e.g., First Nations writing (e.g., Métis, Inuit) in Canada, Aboriginal writing in Australia, or Maori writing in New Zealand. This all speaks about an orientation of richness and ambitious plurality, but it also presents risky fragmentation in the purposes that fails to account for the loss of a more comparative approach and the cost of the study of mutual influences among cultures. The good news is that Anglophone postcolonialism criticism is a progressive movement (Lane, 2013, 491) and continues to find valuable shared experiences and strategies among indigenous and marginalized groups working with the postcolonial tradition across cultural boundaries. Its major problem is probably its encounter with globalization and the question of whether certain groups are going to be diluted as a part of the globalization theory. Not in vain, Timothy Brennan stated, “The tendency of contemporary intellectual trends to supplant predecessors by erasing the history of their own making is not a chance occurrence” (2013, 878). That is why Professor Janet Wilson (2012) expressed the need for “rerouting the postcolonial” and argued that resistance should be global, as there was the promise that the way to go was toward the interface between the postcolonial and the theories of globalization. Few doubt that there were interesting issues ahead—mobility, contingency, the varied positions of the subjects in an increasingly globalized world—but some things have changed in recent years, and it may be that the positive and liberating energies brought about by postcolonial criticism must be redefined towards a true transmodern project with a truly more flexible comparative analysis. Global convergence must not be converted into a new colonialism through deliberate cosmopolitan allegiances. If caution is exercised, then Anglophone postcolonial criticism or its progeny can be rightly rerouted. The right way will be egalitarian pluriversalism, and if it is itinerant, it will work.

3. Latin American ideology and criticism: from the postcolonial to the decolonial

Many critics and scholars of Latin American studies prefer to see postcolonial/decolonial theorizing as predating this critique. Despite this, the cohabitation in many respects of Latin American postcolonial criticism with Anglophone postcolonial criticism has been inevitable since on the one hand it represented an updating of critical assumptions, and on the other it allowed movement towards a more globalist interpretation that could bring benefits by presenting common analyses and a wider dissemination. Critics such as Soto, Damián (2008, 16) and Martha I. Gómez Vélez et al. (2017) have seen how Latin American postcolonial criticism diverges from Anglophone criticism. For example, the authors start from a different place of enunciation, being in Latin America, or they start from postmodern or poststructuralist positions. They are also “focused on the study of the current effects of the colonial heritage from Spain and Portugal, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, while Anglophone post-colonialists focus their work on English and French colonialism” (Gómez Vélez et al., 2017, 46).¹ so much so that these authors consider Latin American and Anglophone modernities to be distinct. Latin American modernity would begin in 1492, and Anglophone modernity with the Enlightenment. Other critics such as Moreiras and Villacañas (2017, 22–23) have preferred to situate themselves directly in post-coloniality and have preferred to speak of “modern post-coloniality” and “global post-coloniality.” The first begins with the wars of independence and continues beyond the end of the Second World War, a period marked by a certain economic rationalization and convergence initiatives such as ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) in convergence with the UN. The second starts with the beginning of the public debt crisis in the 1970s and continues to the present day, a period marked by economic neoliberalism and the public debt crisis.

The uniqueness of Latin America, along with its strength and idiosyncrasies, means that Latin American postcolonial criticism itself is presented as a non-conformist adaptation to the global postcolonial model of the Anglophone matrix. Hence, the situation with Latin American postcolonial studies is different from those orbiting the Anglosphere, first because there is already a critical attitude towards Hispanic colonialism that has existed since the sixteenth century and therefore there are critical studies of this nature with a clear critical mark prior to postcolonial criticism. There is therefore a genealogy of critical thought prior to the global one that emerged in Western academia—both North American and Anglophone and global. Decolonial figures in the Latin American world such as Fray Bartolomé de las Casas (1474–1566), Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1495–1584), and the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539–1616), among others, cannot be ignored. Alongside this, this postcolonial or decolonial Latin American criticism is marked by more recent authors who reconnect with the attitude and critical vision that already existed. Good examples are authors such as Mariátegui (1918) and his dependency theory, Wallerstein and his analysis of the world system (2004), and Juan Carlos Rodríguez’s Althusserian project for Latin American studies (Read, 2017, 2019).

As was said, the singularity of the conceptions and reflections on colonialism and colonial critique in Latin America are not new and have been present since the first colonization by the Spanish. On the other hand, recent postcolonial studies that analyse the situation in Latin America have not converged in ideology or methodology. There are several issues at stake that have both brought them closer to and have separated them from Anglophone postcolonial studies and global criticism. The first characteristic to underline is that there is already a self-reflexive colonial critique that acts as a critique of dissidence in the Spanish empire itself. There are, therefore, critical precedents and a different chronological starting point if this critique is compared with, for example, Anglophone or French colonial criticism because these have different developments and different beginnings. This is why, from the very beginning, critical voices of the Hispanic colonial world are found in the aforementioned Bartolomé de las Casas and Bernal Díaz del Castillo, but also in Hernando de Alvarado Tezozómoc (1520/1530–1610), the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539–1616), Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala (1534–1615), among others.

This Latin American colonial critique is developed and expanded in a second moment, where the turning point is the independence of the Latin American states themselves. Voices of dissent and criticism of the Hispanic colonial world are found before, during, and after independence, echoing to the present day. It is, as Graciela Montaldo recognizes, a long-term project, but one in which the lyrics that “openly intervene in the political struggle” (2017, 401) also participate.² Among these voices, the reflections of such writers as the aforementioned Martí, Mariategui, Martín Jauretche, and Simón Rodríguez (1771–1854) can be highlighted, but there are also more contemporary voices such as those of Arturo Escobar, Walter Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano, Santiago Castro-Gómez, Ramón Grosfogel, and Boaventura de Sousa Santos. These are authors who, in a certain way, take up important traces of the spirit of independence and the Latin American ethic through the analysis of the epistemic search for real independence. This second moment, that of independence, also implies a zero moment of identities and differences, a moment marked by the Creole elites in the struggle for control of power and which will also create new associated subalternities, new metacolonial spaces of domination and tensions, creating binomials such as unity/plurality, Indian/Creole, countryside/city, or barbarian/civilized, which act as a microphysics within postcolonial physics that have not been sufficiently studied. This writing and ideology, largely positioned in the nineteenth century, not only goes hand in hand with politics and thus traces links to modernity, but attempts to redefine the new world in a world that is organizing its borders.

The second characteristic to underline is that there is a convergence, a moment of affinity, where Latin American postcolonial studies seem to integrate or at least dialogue with the common Anglophone trunk. They seem to be willing to join the general global postcolonialism and the Western School, a kind of Western thought and colonial counter-modern history. They are seduced perhaps by its sense of rupture and its apparent decentring of the geo-cultural locus of enunciation. It is this third moment, a moment that could be considered transitional in the evolution towards the decolonial, or as postcolonial prior to the decolonial, from which the accounts of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, structuralism and post-structuralism, Gramscian Marxism, the reflections of Albert Memmi and Frantz Fannon, and of course the contributions of the great postcolonial critics of the Anglosphere Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, among others are fully incorporated. It is a stage in which the social sciences do not make a real epistemological break (Ruggero, 2009, 3), as they are the heirs of a modern/colonial space of power and the ideological knowledge generated by it. However, its evolutionary mark gives it a semantics capable of thematizing a paradigmatic transition (Boaventura, 2003). It was a time when “The price of a homogenisation of the postcolonial model and its application to Latin America, which began in the early 1990s, was to consider the ‘imaginary communities’ or Latin American nations as a continuity of the colony” (Moreiras & Villacañas, 2017, 12).³

There is a fourth moment in Latin American postcolonialism which can be truly called decolonial and where many critics and authors understand that Western and European knowledge must be decolonized to open up a new critical space that is neither monolithic in its methodology nor philosophy and that integrates new cultural and scientific practices. Postcolonialism stems from modernity and is integrated into the global structures of power and the distribution of knowledge, but the new Latin American critical current, the decolonial one, separates itself from this postcolonial and global world system. It is a system that moulds patterns in the wake of concepts such as hybridity, multiplicity, subaltern, otherness, or cultural code and that, in short, codifies reality, making other forms of understanding impossible. A true Latin American decolonial critique today should aspire to analyses that transcend mere cultural meanings and integrate other aspects such as politics or economics.

This is not without its critics, for there is a danger of political bias. In the same way that a creole elite appeared that allowed a certain reconciliation with the Hispanic and an anti-American pan-Americanism, in more recent times populism and authoritarian regimes have been encountered and have occasionally been linked to a misinterpretation of what is truly decolonial. North American hegemonic unilateralism created antagonistic positions of defence from the Latin American point of view. Positions appeared, such as liberation theology or indigenous integration movements that retreated to the zero-degree indigenous in search of an ideal subject in the primordial decolonization. Thus, if the globalist impulse made it possible to break traditional hegemonies on the surface and decentre certain cultural processes, populism, authoritarianism, and ideological-cultural simplification worked against a true new sense of the decolonial and also renounced the tradition of a civilizing universe, something that Moreiras and Villacañas interpret as a “second-order Latin Americanism” (2017, 27). However, if these biases were to be overcome, the viability of this modern Latin American decolonial thought should be characterized by diversity of thought, social heterogeneity, and the desideratum of infinite decolonization.

On the other hand, Latin America’s relationship to the metropolitan is different from that of the English-speaking world. Latin American decolonial thought presents clear traces of a Hispanic imperial background that is part of its own Latin American self, something that the independence movements themselves did not discard and that is part of its decolonial element, because its “decolonial self” is already enmeshed with the Hispanic and facing a new colonialism. This sense of the Latin American as “intermetropolitan,” this total non-abjuration of the Hispanic, is something that Roberto Fernández Retamar himself mentioned in his intention to strengthen the ties with writers of Spanish America in his work Retamar, Roberto (1967) and which he reaffirms in Acerca de España: Contra la Leyenda Negra (1977), since Spain not only transfers its experiences of Al-Andalus to America and the whole relational heritage of the Muslim, Jewish, Moorish, Berber, Roma etc., but does so at a time when the Spanish people were still in the process of developing their own culture (García-Fernández, 2020, 531). A difference that Walter Mignolo also recalls: “If ‘post-colonialism’ fits well in the discourse of decolonization of the ‘Commonwealth,’ ‘post-Westernism’ would be the key word to articulate the discourse of intellectual decolonization from the legacies of thought in Latin America” (1998, 143–4).⁴

This critique, represented by the Latin American decolonial turn, not only receives all the theoretical arsenal of Anglophone globalist postcolonial thought, but it also initiates a reflection on Latin American interiority. It is in a certain way an obvious reconstructive strategy that shows the will to “decenter and multiply the centers of power and knowledge production” (Villacañas, 2017, 319).⁵ This will lead to new interpretations, new knowledge, and new semiotic spaces. It is undoubtedly a step forward in the process of Latin America’s self-invention, while the globalist agenda and much of the Anglophone postcolonial critique is pursuing a unifying strategy. This attitude of independence, of not wanting to be simply a replica of global post-coloniality, is reflected in the work Coloniality at Large, where it is clear that Latin American postcolonial critical thought prefers a certain equidistance from the global Anglophone. On the one hand, it wants to be nourished by it, while on the other it shows its desire for separation, something that Moraña et al. (2008) make clear in “Colonialism and Its Replicants.” Even the step forward of Latin American decoloniality could be justified because it evolves from the paleo-western—to use Fernández Retamar’s terminology—to the post-western, skipping the western and its analogy with developed capitalism. It is something that enters into a perfect analogy with the example of the Russian Revolution, which triumphs easily in its execution because it travels from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century since it does not have to overcome the formalities and developments of the bourgeois class, as the latter was practically non-existent in Russia.

This is why the new Latin American decolonialism is to some extent in tune with Dussel’s (2001) idea of transmodernity, an idea different from that of Habermas (1997), and which, as Delgado, Yasser and Ruiz (2014) and Maldonado-Torres (2011) point out, is no longer based on completing a modernity centred on Europe (Quijano, 2007, 171) and which in turn exports a model to the rest of the world. This would be a subalternist model that maintains a model of a colonized people. The Latin American decolonial model transgresses Western (post)modernity-(post)coloniality and connects with this transmodernity mentioned by Dussel (2001) and Grosfoguel (2006). This transmodernity is nothing but an aspiration for total decoloniality, a diversity as a universal project. A transmodernity in equilibrium that starts from the principle of “diversality” alluded to, with nuances, by Éduard Glissant (1996) and Walter D. Mignolo (2000). It is, in other words, a leap from the universalism of the Western tradition to pluriversalism.

4. Post- and decolonialities in comparison: the Anglophone and Latin American epistemes

Before embarking on any approach toward comparison within postcolonial criticism, the first question to be asked is whether there are different treatments within postcolonial criticism. Another difference that could be pointed out is the asymmetry in the production of Anglo-Saxon and Latin American postcolonial treatments, much more abundant in the case of Anglo-Saxon postcolonial academic criticism in recent times. Is it possible that a colonial empire and a post-coloniality of longer duration, such as the Hispanic one, has given rise to fewer academic works of postcolonial criticism than the Anglo-Saxon one? Another question that could arise in its discursive meaning is whether postcolonialism refers to the literatures and cultural productions produced in the territories occupied during the colonial era and/or whether its effects are projected as a new construct that is really alive in the postcolonial era and even wonder if it is a projection of an earlier time.

Another difference that should lead us to an asepsis in interpretation is that although postcolonial criticism has made giant steps in the recognition of the alterities that compose that composite called reality, it is not an objective representation of history. As Bourdieu (1976, 421–2) pointed out, an identitarian history is demanded that is in tune with the time that interprets history, and is in tune with fashionable themes. This is what Prost (1996) points out when he recognizes history as a scientific discipline, but above all as a social practice. History cannot therefore be defined by its object or by its documents; that is to say, according to this Prost interpretation, there is no such thing as “historical facts.”

Another element to take into account in the comparison between Anglophone and Latin American postcolonial and decolonial epistemes, respectively, has been related to imperialism and colonialism as forms of practice. If Childs and Williams define imperialism as “the extension and expansion of trade and commerce under the protection of political, legal and military controls” (1997, 277), it can be seen how imperialism does not entail the establishment of communities from the imperial state in another place. It can work through the act of settlement, but it is not the only way of acting or aiming at imperialistic goals. In this sense, it could be asked whether the practices and ideologies of imperial legitimization were different in both the British and Spanish empires and whether there were different moments in their execution. One could even speak of different, more critical visions subject even to internal debates, which according to Anthony Pagden in The Fall of Natural Man (Pagden, 1982) and despite the Spanish black legend and even accurate voices such as those of Bartolomé de las Casas, exemplified the Spanish empire. It made the Spaniards the Europeans most concerned about assessing the consequences of the native populations, something that Francisco Támara pointed out in 1556 in the appendix Suma y breve relación de todas las Indias y tierras nuevamente descubiertas por gente de España. This is something that years later the Jesuit Pedro Murillo Velarde endorsed in his work Historia de la Compañía de Jesús en Filipinas (1749) where, despite the fact that the Spaniards were “the owners of the country,” they did not hesitate to sacrifice themselves and spread Christianity to all corners of the earth. Providentialist visions or not, and although the debates and ideologies were different in other imperial powers such as France or England, there is no doubt that the empire-religion connection was less close in the English colonization. This is very important because the languages in which the empires of the nineteenth century were to be framed—and here British colonization will play a preponderant role—were prefigured products of their pre-modern precedents.

In the evolution of Anglophone and Latin American postcolonial ideology, there is a convergence in terms of cultural moment and a difference in terms of chronological moment, since as a cultural phenomenon, it occurs earlier in the Latin American world. In Latin America it fructifies in both foothills of the twentieth century, while the Anglosphere postcolonial winds pollinate well after the processes of independence in the second half of the twentieth century. This, in the case of Latin America, mostly occurs in the phase that Moreiras and Villacañas call the new “stage of modern cultural post-coloniality.” It is a time when literature participates intensely in the national sense, and it will find its antagonist in the United States. It is the golden moment of Pan-Americanist writers and thinkers such as Rodó, Reyes, Darío, Vasconcelos, and Martí, who no longer see Spain as the empire that subdues (with the exception of Martí, perhaps) but direct their anger towards the United States, which they see as the new empire of expansionist desires. Thus the anti-American generates a Pan-American convergence and a reconciliation with the Hispanic legacy. This moment, which in our opinion occurs with a substantial difference in time with respect to the Anglophone postcolonial, anticipates many of the elements that will later be disseminated as part of the Anglophone postcolonial episteme. It could also be that, as Javier García-Fernández points out, these two paradigms, postcolonial and decolonial—these two decolonialities—are at odds or at least start from different assumptions:

The first issue I want to highlight is the character of confrontation between two paradigms of Eurocentric modernity, the first Iberian or Spanish-Portuguese modernity confronted with the second modernity composed and drawn by the Dutch, French, German and British traditions, that is to say by the philosophical legacy of rationalism and enlightenment.⁶ (2020, 524)

But there is still more because the features would define two modernities, the first being the European modernity, which would be Iberian, Catholic, and imperial, and the second being the northwestern (Protestant and state).

This has also led to understanding the dividing line in the intellectual epistemes of both post-colonialities and to find an origin in the tensions of the intellectuals who have supported one or the other. It is clear that the colonial legacies are different, but also in the Hispanic metropolis itself there have been tensions between the Hispanic and Catholic Castilian intelligentsia and the Europeanist, rationalist, and enlightened one, something that has recently been seen when analysing the colonial legacy of Latin America in the work Imperiofobia y Leyenda Negra: Roma, Rusia, Estados Unidos y el Imperio español (2016) by Elvira Roca Barea and what can be considered the response by José Luis Villacañas Berlanga: Imperiofilia y el populismo nacional-católico: Otra historia del Imperio español (2019).

These two epistemes of modernity, transmuted into postcolonial or decolonial forms (especially in the Latin American case), suppose an effective element in the strategic explanation of the multiplicity of contemporary modernities, a consistent explanation in a global world. Their great contribution is to act from modernity as a dissident phenomenon and in the face of hegemonic forces through consensuses of space and time. They have established dialogues and discourses around the concepts of place, language, and history, elements that are fundamental in all postcolonial cultural relations. One of their virtues has been to disseminate alternative modernities and to analyse the encounters between dominating forms of knowledge through political or geostrategic powers and colonized peoples. All of this is part of the dialectic of life itself and of the struggle and confrontation between different ways of seeing, interpreting, and reflecting the world. They suppose, in short, exits to new forms of definition in the face of the narrowness and indefinition of the colonial world, what Lee called “the awakening” from a “spineless existence in colonial space” (1974, 158).

5. Conclusions

It may be that to speak of criticism and postcolonial thought is nothing more than the arrogance of the centrism of Western thought sponsored by the system of economic liberalism, creating an illusory image of economic subversion but bequeathing a form of itinerant cultural vassalage or a way of atoning for the faults of Western intellectuals. The postcolonial critique has given and will give interesting perspectives against subjugation to other ideologies. It will always be a matrix of subversion against established powers, but it also obeys certain interests. That without ignoring that coloniality is different from colonialism: “instead, refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism” (Maldonado-Torres, 2007, 243).

Postcolonialism is an asymmetrical phenomenon, and perhaps the common link between the different cultural manifestations is that they use the same original vehicular language as a matrix element of communication. They are part of a continuum determined by certain cultural characteristics in origin but which have begun to change since their origin. Postcolonialism is by necessity plural because it affects different communities in different ways, where diversity is the determining element. However, let us not forget that colonialism and postcolonialism are phenomena that have existed since ancient times. Ours, the most recent, is simply a swing of the pendulum. Also, it is not only the influence of recent postcolonialism, as before it many cultures and countries had already been visited by other colonialisms and had a clear multiplicity of diverse cultural influences. This can be seen through the example of India where colonialism is neither year 0 nor recent postcolonialism year 1.

On the other hand, postcolonial criticism seems to have situated itself in an interesting subjectivity that is distanced from the historiographic treatment. According to Dosse (2001, 137–8), the historian participates in two subjectivities: a positive one, that of the self of the researcher, and a negative one, that of the pathetic self, that is to say, the part of the human being with the conditions associated with the vicissitudes of fortune (sadness, indignation, fear, compassion, etc.). It is this complementarity of subjectivities which results in objectivity and which provides the activity and the scientific method. In the case of postcolonial literary criticism, complementarity does not exist and accentuates its strength in the pathetic self. Hence, as Hélène Goujat pointed out, “‘Shock’ and ‘indignation’ are very often the reactions of many of those who dedicate themselves to the study of the precolonial and colonial period in Spanish America” (2010).

Latin American decoloniality goes beyond the postcolonial as critique and in its desideratum attempts to transfer a social theory and a project of social transformation. It is not only a political project but an epistemic one, a true epistemic disobedience to the system. It is not so much concerned with globality as with humanity. In its sense of the essence of the human being, of dignity, it goes beyond the postcolonial because, on the one hand, it jumps the barrier of the academy which it sees as a power structure and part of a caste system and, on the other, it opposes the idea of globalization as a curative panacea where the ills of society will be solved together with the cyber-solutions of the moment. It also distances itself from postcolonial thought and the convergence of the “sameness.” Thus, if postcolonial thought stresses sameness in the method and cosmovision, decolonial thought stresses distinctiveness because what the human beings have in common are differences. Hence, it has been seen as a “radical exteriority” (Vallega, 2014) where there is a greater epistemic subversion. It is a sense of the expanded postcolonial, a sense where “the ‘post’ widens, covers cracks at the same time that it dusts them off and reconstitutes” (García & Emiliano, 2012, 29).⁷

It is true that both postcolonial critique and decolonial thought aspire to disassociate themselves from what Anibal Quijano and Walter D. Mignolo call the “matrix of power” (2011), but the question on the existence of a “postcolonial matrix or power” is something that needs time and further analysis. It remains finally to remember that in all power there is a coloniality and that any form of power is based on hierarchical structures; therefore, being decolonial is to be dissident against any form of established power and is the best way toward an epistemic and perhaps socio-political reconstruction. In this sense a very interesting critical proposal was presented by Santos Boaventura de Sousa in the introduction to The End of the Cognitive Empire. The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South (2018) where he introduces the notion of a non geographical south that struggles against capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. In a way, this is not far from the critique that Ramón Grossfogel introduced in “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn” (2007) and that is linked to his idea of the “radical universal decolonial anti-systemic diversality” (2011, 33). Already immersed in the twenty-first century, we should ask ourselves, what is contemporary coloniality, what are the new forms of domination, and how do we free ourselves from inequalities, discrimination, and domination?

Studies on recent postcolonialism have come to demonstrate that cultural hybridization, although not a recent phenomenon, has been accelerated by new types of life. In that sense there has been a confluence with the idea of postmodernity, since its effects have become more palpable thanks to the type of life in today’s society. On the other hand, literature, as a cultural manifestation, and more specifically the division into literatures based on cultural traditions or on particular forms of identity has come to be considered a simple essentialism. The purity, the essential, the single-colour identity has been replaced by paradigms of the plural, and this is where postcolonial studies have been of real help—so much so that what was previously marginal and secondary because it did not present features of essentiality has become central. The postcolonial is now an element of recognition of what was previously marginal, what Louise Bennett (1966) called “colonization in reverse” questioning monocultural Western models. This has had benefits and interesting analyses, but far from being perfect it has sometimes ignored the transtemporal sense of cultural productions, prioritizing recent productions with the idea of creating a global and abstract sense of the phenomenon of hybridization and sometimes leaving aside factors that have not clarified the particular specifications of each literature.

All this should also lead us to think about the relationship between language and power, between master and slave, between ruler and ruled—to think of George Orwell and all those who have affirmed that language is power—but from a positive point of view, because in all these dichotomies the winner is the one who is at the intersection, the one who is in the possibility, in the change, in the remaking, in the moment when the established identity is challenged. It is the identitarian “nation language” alluded to by Chinua Achebe and Louise Bennet, but above all it is language as a space of convergence, because as Fanon states, “(a) man who has a language consequently possesses the world implied by that language” ([1952] 2017, 18). It is a positive appropriation, where fluidity and change are integral parts, and that is why critics such as Katherine Russo have seen it as “a variety of highly fluid and ever-changing practices of proximity” (2010, 8).

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Notes on contributors

José-Carlos Redondo-Olmedilla

José-Carlos Redondo-Olmedilla The study analyzes postcolonial criticism and how in the specific case of Anglophone and Latin American postcolonial realms there are different approaches. To demonstrate this, the author first covers the evolution of Anglophone postcolonial ideology and criticism. After that, it deals with Latin American postcolonial criticism. It concludes by establishing a comparison between both. It leads us to see that the postcolonial Anglophone and Latin American epistemes are asymmetric phenomena that share common features and mutual benefits. The work also shows that the post- and de- prefixes linked to the “colonial” term and applied to the Anglophone and Latin American realms, respectively, are indicators that mark an ideological turn in the conception of both terms. Despite the shared plurality and multiplicity of the postcolonial world and the paradoxical “sameness convergence” into globalization, the study shows different degrees of postcoloniality in the Anglo and Latin American postcolonial criticism. current research analyses contemporary “new” narratives, mainly from Latin America, Australia, India and those within the frame of postcoloniality and decoloniality. His research interests and publications focus on comparative and cultural issues. He is currently working on transnational/cosmopolitan poetics and flows in new postcolonial and decolonial literatures in the English and Spanish languages. He heads the Applied Linguistics and Literary Studies research group at the University of Almería, Spain.

Notes

1. The Spanish into English translations appearing in the main text from direct original sources are mine. In most cases the original in Spanish appears in a note as in this first example: “centradas en el estudio de los efectos actuales de la herencia colonial proveniente de España y Portugal, desde el siglo xvi hasta el xx, mientras que los poscoloniales anglosajones centran su trabajo en el colonialismo inglés y francés.”

2. “que interviene abiertamente en la lucha política.”

3. “El precio de una homogeneización del modelo poscolonial y de su aplicación a América Latina, que empezó a principios de la década de 1990, fue considerar a las ‘comunidades imaginarias’ o naciones latinoamericanas como una continuidad de la colonia.”

4. “Si ‘post-colonialismo’ calza bien en el discurso de descolonización del ‘Commonwealth,’ ‘post-occidentalismo’ sería la palabra clave para articular el discurso de descolonización intelectual desde los legados del pensamiento en Latinoamérica.”

5. “Una obvia estrategia reconstructiva que muestra la voluntad de “descentrar y multiplicar los centros de poder y producción de conocimiento.”

6. “La primera cuestión que quiero poner de relieve es el carácter de confrontación entre dos paradigmas de la modernidad eurocéntrica, la primera modernidad ibérica o hispano-portuguesa confrontada con la segunda modernidad compuesta y dibujada por las tradiciones holandesa, francesa, alemana y británica, es decir por el legado filosófico del racionalismo y la ilustración.”

7. “Lo ‘post’ se ensancha, cubre grietas al mismo tiempo que las desempolva y re‐constituye.”