A Query on Quijano’s Americanization of
the History of Race and Modernity
Chambi Chachage
This is the first time I am reading Anibal Quijano’s
(2000) article on ‘Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America’. What
he is writing on is an area that I have been engaging with. However,
his text – at least so far – is turning upside down my reading of the history
of race and modernity that has been particularly influenced by Emmanuel C. Eze’s
(1997) Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. In this reading the encounter between Euro-America and Africa is
the basis of the origins of the racial ordering of the world. This encounter primarily
led to this ordering as an enlightenment project that preoccupied the
Euro-American theorists in Eze’s reader. It is in this regard I find it
difficult to agree with Quijano when he locates America as the “first
space/time of a new model of power of global vocation” and thus “the first
location of modernity” (p. 533). This centering of America leads him to claim that
it is the “population of America” that was first classified within this new
model and then, “later”, that “of the world” (Ibid.)
In this regard Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors in
Latin America are presented as pioneers of modern racial classification. If
this is so how came major racial classifiers during the dawn of western
modernity – Hegel, Hume, Linnaeus, Kant and Cuvier – were based in Europe? For
sure the “idea of race, in its modern meaning, does not have a known history before
the colonization of America” (p. 534). But this modern construct was primarily
constructed in relation to Africans and Africa. Quijano agrees with the centrality
of the former in that construction but his Americanization thus dislocates the
latter:
As time went by, the colonizers
codified the phenotypic trait of the colonized as color, and they assumed it as
the emblematic characteristic of racial category. That category was probably initially
established in the area of Anglo-America. There so-called blacks were not only the
most important exploited group, since the principal part of the economy rested on
their labor; they were, above all, the most important colonized race, since Indians
[sic] were not part of that colonial society. Why the dominant group calls itself
“white” is a story related to racial classification (Ibid.)
Quijano’s otherwise
compelling critique of the “Eurocentric version” of modernity and global
capitalism thus ends privileging the history of the Atlantic at the expense of
that of the Indian and Mediterranean. Consequently what primarily started in
Africa is presented as having started in America. What Edward W. Said
(1978), notwithstanding his overemphasis of the East, aptly referred to as Orientalism, in reference to the
Eurocentric project of constructing non-western societies as the other, is thus
shifted back to West.
But were the conquistadors not
exploring Africa in search of a route to India in Asia prior to the discovery
of America and, in the process, displacing and/or enslaving Africans who thus came
to be constructed as their ultimate other in the modern construction of race?
