How method travels: genealogy in Foucault and Castro-Gómez

ABSTRACT

This paper examines whether, and how, Foucauldian genealogy travels to contexts and problematizations beyond the method's European site of articulation. Our particular focus is on the work of Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez, whose work includes both a systematic defense of the usefulness of Foucauldian inquiry for decolonial study and genealogical inquiry in a Foucauldian spirit but in a context beyond Foucault's own horizon of study. We show that taking up Foucault's work in the context of Latin America leads Castro-Gómez to significantly change Foucauldian concepts, categories, and methods. We further survey the potential synergies of decolonial thought and Foucauldian critique, while also highlighting how their joint mobilization requires a revision and problematization of key commitments of both approaches.

KEYWORDS:

• Genealogy
• method
• coloniality
• Foucault
• Castro-Gómez

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for this journal as well as the participants at the 2019 Critical Genealogies Workshop, and in particular Bonnie Sheehey, Kevin Olson, Don Deere, and George Fourlas, for invaluable feedback and constructive criticism.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a small sample of works see Anwar (2018); Beistegui (2018); Bourbeau (2018); Bradley (2019); Brown (2015, 2019); Dean (1999); Dean and Villadsen (2016); Dilts (2014); Ditrych (2014); Engels (2015); Erlenbusch-Anderson (2018a); Laudani (2011); Lemke (1997); Mbembe (2017, 2019); Meiches (2019); Millard (2015); Mongia (2018); Ojakangas (2013); Olson (2016); Popa (2017); Rambukwella (2018); Repo (2015).

2 We acknowledge that there is significant disagreement among scholars about what genealogy is. While some regard it as an empirical-historical method grounded in archival research, others describe it as a mode of philosophical critique; a philosophical tradition running, roughly, from Nietzsche to Foucault; or as a particular way of doing history. The focus on this paper is on genealogy as a historico-empirical method appropriate for understanding present phenomena. For further discussion see in particular (Bevir 2008; Elden 2003; Davidson 1986; Dutilh Novaes 2015; Geuss 2002; Hacking 2004; Hoy 1994; Koopman 2013; Saar 2007).

3 See Braunstein et al. (2017); Erlenbusch-Anderson (2018b); Geuss (2002); Koopman (2013, 2015); Koopman and Matza (2013); Krupp (2008); Saar (2007).

4 For the purpose of this paper, we understand decoloniality as a set of practices, perspectives, philosophies, and social movements, both inside and outside the academy, which seek a ‘delinking’ (Castro-Gómez 2019) from and ‘undoing of Eurocentrism's totalizing claim and frame, including the Eurocentric legacies incarnated in U.S.-centrism and perpetuated in the Western geopolitics of knowledge’ (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, 2). For more detailed discussion of coloniality and decoloniality in English see, for instance, Bhambra (2014); Grosfoguel (2007); Lugones (2007); Maldonado-Torres (2004); Maldonado-Torres (2007, 2016); Mignolo (2011); Mignolo and Walsh (2018); Ortega (2017); Quijano (2000); Wynter (2003).

5 On this point see for instance Ahluwalia (2010); Lazreg (2017); Legg (2007); Mezzadra (2011); Nichols (2010); Said (1979, 2002); Spivak (2010); Stoler (1995); Young (1995).

6 For some representative examples see Castro-Gómez (2005, 2009); Chatterjee (1995); Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2015); Pérez (1999); Stoler (1995).

7 Nueva Granada, or the Viceroyalty of New Granada, was the name given to the jurisdiction under Spanish colonial rule that comprises the present-day countries Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela. For detailed historical accounts of Spanish colonial rule in the Americas and the creation of New Granada see Eissa-Barroso (2016); Kuethe and Andrien (2014).

8 See Braunstein et al. (2017); Erlenbusch-Anderson (2018b); Koopman (2015); Koopman and Matza (2013).

9 On the notion of epistemological colonialism see for instance Kincheloe (2008); Kincheloe and Steinberg (2008); Smith (1999).

10 For a restatement of this view see also Castro-Gómez (2019).

11 Consider just two instructive examples from Foucault's work. In ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ (2007a), Foucault advises that genealogical critique must reject all global or radical aspirations. Similarly, in ‘Society Must Be Defended’ (2004a, 6) he argues that the successful application of global theories to concrete problematics requires that the ‘theoretical unity of their discourse is, so to speak, suspended, or at least cut up, ripped up, torn to shreds, turned inside out, displaced, caricatured, dramatized, theatricalized, and so on’.

12 On totality in decolonial and critical theory see Zambrana (2016). On the notion of inheritance see Allen (2016).

13 On this point see Bhabha (1994); Said (1994); Spivak (2010).

14 On the notion of racism in Foucault see Erlenbusch (2017); Hong and Ferguson (2011); Kelly (2004); Macey (2009); Mader (2011); McWhorter (2009); Rasmussen (2011); Stoler (1995); Taylor (2011).

15 The forthcoming English translation is Castro-Gómez (2020).

16 For a list of primary sources see Castro-Gómez (2005).

17 On this point see also Mills (1998).

18 For other decolonial and indigenous thinkers who discuss the question of epistemic expropriation of indigenous knowledge see Grosfoguel (2007); Mignolo (2000, 2009); Ortega (2017); Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel (2007); Maldonado-Torres (2016); de Sousa Santos (2014); Kusch (1962); Walsh (2015). For related work on epistemic injustice see (Anderson 2017; Berenstain 2016; Code 2014; Dotson 2011, 2012; Fricker 2007; Kidd, Medina, and Polhaus 2017; Medina 2013; Pohlhaus 2012).