Por mais poderosos, articulados e sofisticados que sejam os aparatos filosóficos, epistemológicos, institucionais e teórico-ideológicos em favor  do capitalismo e do imperialismo, os sujeitos sociais e coletividades oprimidas têm sido capazes de responder com alternativas. Ainda que a modernidade ocidental hegemônica, forjada em grande medida pelo eurocentrismo e pelo etnocentrismo, tenha longo alcance através de suas “mãos” (vísiveis e invisíveis), é possível realçar, de forma paralela, variados exemplos concretos, forjados nos mais distintos contextos, que revelam o protagonismo, a rebeldia e a inventividade de subalternos que, compartilhando de outras matrizes de pensamento, conhecimento e experiência de vida, não se submeteram a (e até subverteram) o que lhes foi imposto.

Este artigo busca destacar alguns aspectos do complexo processo de “formação”[1] de um movimento que constitui um desses exemplos. O movimento katarista da Bolívia desafiou as regras pré-estabelecidas e ganhou terreno, especialmente a partir do final dos anos 1960, duas décadas antes da formalização por Krenshaw (1989) do conceito de “interseccionalidade”[2] – que descreve a opção pela relevância prática e teórica da complementaridade entre as normalmente distintas categorias de “raça” e “classe”. No bojo do enfrentamento ao sistema corrente de relações de poder marcado pela opressão aos povos originários, camponeses-indígenas[3] Aymara da região do Altiplano andino formaram uma inovadora articulação e estiveram à frente de mobilizações com fortes demandas étnico-culturais em um dos países com maior grau de exclusão social da América Latina.

O Katarismo emergiu, grosso modo, como resultado da confluência de dois processos (Hurtado, 1986): um de longo prazo, marcado pelos sucessivos atos oficiais de deslegitimação e expropriação de amplas terras coletivas e respectiva conversão das mesmas em propriedades rurais individuais privadas – que tiveram início no longo período marcado pelo colonialismo espanhol, mas continuaram durante o período republicano (a partir de 1825); e outro mais de médio e curto prazo, caracterizado pelo ambiente de alta tensão resultante do tenebroso massacre de soldados camponeses-indígenas na Guerra do Chaco (1932 a 1935), seguido das políticas públicas de incorporação e cooptação adotadas pelo bloco em torno do Movimento Nacionalista Revolucionário (MNR) que, com a ajuda dos próprios camponeses-indígenas empenhados na extinção do pongueaje econômico[4], deslocou a elite extrativista e mais conservadora que dava corpo à chamada rosca[5] e assumiu o comando do Estado Boliviano após a Revolução de 1952.

Uma das medidas estruturais que fizeram parte da agenda inicial do governo revolucionário[6] foi justamente a reforma agrária (no sentido de garantir legalmente as posses de terras a comunidades “tradicionais”, especialmente em áreas andinas), associada à aplicação, a partir dos gabinetes da República, de um modelo de organização das comunidades rurais com base nos sindicatos agrários. À medida que cumpria, ao menos parcialmente, a promessa de evitar a continuidade da desterritorialização dos povos e nações indígenas, a coalizão à frente do governo que se seguiu à Revolução de 1952 colocava em prática também, com a compulsória exigência da sindicalização rural, uma tentativa de enquadramento dos beneficiários aos padrões sociopolíticos da modernidade. A intenção era forçar o deslocamento de todo esse contingente, que mantinha um peso populacional enorme, para a condição de camponeses, dentro de um regime de organização classista, enfraquecendo, ainda que de forma gradual, as demandas de ordem étnico-culturais.

Em compasso com a implementação de um modelo educacional “integracionista” – ou seja, que assumia o aprendizado formal concentrado na língua espanhola, sem espaço para a diversidade social[7]-, a sindicalização rural compulsória foi pensada e implementada como mais um recurso de engenharia social dentro do paradigma moderno de dominação e incorporação de povos e culturas “inferiores” ao modelo institucional “universal” construído a partir de modelos de países do Norte.

O que os idealizadores da “inclusão por decretos” dos indígenas ao quadro institucional moderno não esperavam é que os próprios “objetos” das nomeadas políticas pudessem vir a atuar como “sujeitos” dotados de saberes, demandas e estratégias próprias. Em resposta à tentativa positivista de invisibilização e extinção de seus padrões distintos de modos de vida, camponeses-indígenas aymara do Altiplano Andino trilharam um “caminho próprio” – sem seguir necessariamente o receituário da modernização assumindo-se como camponeses nem se refugiar no essencialismo indígena de cunho “purista” que, pelo lado oposto, também acaba se acoplando perfeitamente à divisão simplista entre aqueles ocidentais e não-ocidentais.

Essa escolha “imprevista” que toma como base o diálogo – e não o divórcio – entre estruturas de cariz “moderno” (sindicato agrário) e práticas aparentemente “tradicionais” (mantendo a organização em ayllus[8] e o papel de jilaqata[9], por exemplo) permite identificar no movimento katarista insinuantes características pós-coloniais, no sentido sublinhado por Young (2003), em seu compêndio de síntese sobre o tema. Para este autor, o pós-colonialismo oferece a possibilidade de “ver as coisas diferentemente”, de acordo com uma linguagem e uma política em que os interesses dos subalternos “estão em primeiro plano, e não em último”.

Imagem 1 – Monumento em homenagem a TupacKatari na cidade de Achacachi (Bolívia) – Fonte: Maurício Hashizume (2009)

2. Antecedentes e contextualização

A análise da formação do Katarismo não pode prescindir da revisão do perfis e dos caminhos percorridos por alguns personagens que vieram a se firmar como precursores e primeiros líderes do movimento. Para este fim, destacaremos as biografias de dois artífices que lhe foram centrais: Raimundo Tambo e Jenaro Flores.

Há um consenso – presente em variadas obras que de alguma forma abordam o movimento, entre as quais as de Hurtado (1986), Albó (1987), García Linera (2008) e Tapia (2007) – de que os primórdios do Katarismo estão ligados ao surgimento de “uma corrente de opinião entre jovens aymaras residentes em La Paz que empreenderam a revalorização de sua cultura” (Hurtado, 1986: 11). Esses jovens – quase todos vindos de áreas rurais do interior da Bolívia – encontraram nas reivindicações étnico-culturais, ainda durante a década de 1950, não só uma forma de nutrir a auto-estima para enfrentar o intenso racismo nas áreas urbanas (ou seja, como um mecanismo de defesa em território hostil), mas também de dar visibilidade às suas intenções de atuar e interferir como sujeitos políticos na definição dos rumos do país. (ou seja, como mecanismo de ataque, ainda no bojo da “abertura”, especialmente com a reforma agrária nas terras altas e nos vales, proporcionada pela Revolução de 1952).

Entre os jovens indígenas que despontaram no interior desta articulação na área urbana, despontaram nomes como Raimundo Tambo e Constantino Lima. De acordo com este último, o grupo realizava reuniões clandestinas em lojas de comerciantes simpatizantes e decidiu fundar a primeira entidade política de inspiração na cultura indígena (Hashizume, 2010). Em 5 de novembro de 1960, 21 índios se reuniram na capital boliviana para formar o Partido Autóctone Nacional (PAN), que pode ser considerada como a primeira agremiação política a abraçar a ideologia indianista. O PAN defendia, grosso modo, a autonomia dos povos indígenas por meio do resgate integral da civilização pré-colombiana e a extinção da organização social com base no Estado-nação, copiada do modelo europeu. Tambo e Lima faziam parte do rol dos 21 que estiveram presentes no que pode ser considerado um marco do Indianismo[10]. Em 1962, os militantes do PAN recebem o reforço decisivo do intelectual Fausto Reinaga, que veio a consolidar obras que se tornaram referência indianistas.

Com Reinaga, o PAN se converte primeiro em Partido dos Índios do Qollasuyo  (PIQ) e, logo depois, em Partido dos Índios Aymara Quechua (PIAQ). Fundado em 15 de novembro de 1962, no mesmo dia e mês da morte do mártir indígena Tupac Katari[11] no final do século XVIII (1781), em Peñas (Departamento de La Paz), local no qual fora esquartejado em praça pública. O período que se seguiu à criação do PIAQ foi marcado pela crise de governança enfrentada pelo comando político do MNR. Essa situação de instabilidade culminou, em 1964, com o golpe militar do astuto general René Barrientos, um dos articuladores do que veio a se chamar de Pacto Militar-Camponês, que teve grande relevância no relaxamento temporário de tensões entre os setores descontentes do campesinato-indígena e o governo central.

Dois anos após o golpe, em 1966, o PIAQ se converteu no Partido Índio de Bolívia (PIB). Mesmo sob os auspícios das perseguições da ditadura militar, Reinaga é nomeado para presidir o PIB, junto com uma nova direção, na qual Raimundo Tambo aparecia como secretário geral e vice-presidente.

Como já foi dito, mesmo antes do regime militar, jovens estudantes aymaras vinham se reunindo em núcleos de discussão em La Paz. E Tambo, como um desses estudantes, permaneceu na operação dessa forma de agitação ao longo da década de 1960, paralelamente à sua participação como militante indianista. O colégio militar Gualberto Villaroel, situado numa área de grande concentração aymara em La Paz, era um dos principais focos de movimentações. Juntamente com outros que também vieram do campo, Tambo fundou, em meados dos anos 1960, o Movimento 15 de Novembro, grupo secreto formado em homenagem a Tupac Katari (data de sua morte[12]) que se dedicou ao estudo e discussão dos valores e da história indígena.

Nesse exercício de reinterpretação do passado a partir da perspectiva indígena, redescobrem as figuras lendárias de Tupac Katari, Bartolina Sisa e Zarate Willka, além de promoverem ampla reflexão sobre a discriminação étnico, racial e social cotidiana sofrida no “exílio” que enfrentavam na urbe. Todas as questões discutidas no âmbito mais intelectualizado do círculo indianista sendo compartilhadas por meio de Tambo (e não só por ele) com a “base” dos estudantes indígenas.

Ele terminou o ensino secundário e tentou, sem sucesso, galgar posições nos colégios militares. Matriculou-se então na Faculdade de Direito da Universidade Mayor de San Andrés (UMSA) e, junto com outros ex-participantes do Movimento 15 de Novembro[13] fundou o incômodo Movimento Universitário Julian Apaza (Muja). Ao mesmo tempo em que combatiam o preconceito e a discriminação no meio acadêmico e urbano, os jovens do Muja também procuravam denunciar o conjunto de problemas enfrentados pelas comunidades camponesas-indígenas da área rural.

Curiosamente, Tambo também estreitou laços com segmentos da esquerda sindical, ligada às ideologias originadas na Europa e alojada na COB, entidade que concentrava grande parte dos trabalhadores “formalizados” da Bolívia. Já no final da década de 1960, com apoio da COB, Tambo se engaja em uma manobra ousada – forma o Bloco Independente Camponês (BIC), que almejava se firmar como uma espécie de núcleo político rival  ao sindicalismo agrário marcadamente dependente do governo central – instituído oficialmente pelo MNR no contexto de 1952 e depois largamente “aproveitado” no contexto do Pacto Militar-Camponês.

A montagem do BIC se deu em paralelo aos esforços da COB, de partidos de esquerda (com destaque para o POR trotskista, com Guillermo Lora à frente) e de organizações independentes em fazer prosperar a Assembleia Popular – mobilização com ambições de gestar e aplicar uma agenda paralela popular, surgida no hiato democrático após a queda de Barrientos (1969) que se estendeu pelas administrações dos generais Ovando e Torres, até 1971. Uma das principais fragilidades da Assembleia foi, por sinal, a sua limitadíssima participação camponesa.

Enquanto o BIC, de Tambo (bastante influenciado tanto pelo Indianismo como pelo Marxismo sindical e partidário), não conseguia alcançar os seus objetivos, outra liderança katarista dava os seus primeiros passos por dentro da complexa estrutura do sindicalismo agrário, institucionalizado e fomentado pelo Estado (seja pelo MNR, no bojo de 1952, ou pelos militares que assumiram o poder) com inegável intuito de controle dos camponeses-indígenas.

Jenaro Flores, então jovem indígena que havia também frequentado o colégio Villaroel e retornado à comunidade  onde nasceu, assumia, em 1969, o comando do Sindicato Camponês de Antipampa (Subcentral de Lahuachaca, Província de Aroma).

Antes de iniciar a sua carreira dentro do sindicalismo agrário, contudo, Jenaro Flores passou por uma experiência marcante, mas pouco conhecida, até entre pesquisadores do tema. No final da década de 1960, quando voltou para Antipampa , foi escolhido para trabalhar como assistente de investigação de um estudo sobre os reflexos da reforma agrária de 1953 que estava sendo levado a cabo pela Universidade de  Wisconsin, nos Estados Unidos. Coordenada por Ronald Clark, a investigação era financiada pelo Comitê Interamericano para o Desenvolvimento Agrícola (Cida) e apoiada pelo Serviço Nacional de Reforma Agrária do governo boliviano. Essa experiência, segundo Albó (1987), permitiu que Jenaro aprofundasse os conhecimentos técnicos sobre as questões rurais. Ao mesmo tempo, o jovem testemunhou de perto a discriminação sofrida pelos pongos aymaras, que tinham o trabalho explorado em relações de servidão e ainda tratados, inclusive pelos próprios funcionários oficiais (que também participavam da pesquisa), com extremo desprezo.

“Mais do que qualquer coisa”, define Albó (1987), “esses estudantes de mão cheia criaram uma identidade baseada nas suas próprias experiências como camponeses e aymaras em face aos desafios da cidade”. Na comparação direta entre os indianistas (articulados em torno dos partidos e movimentos dos quais Raimundo Tambo e Constantino Lima fizeram) e os kataristas, que passaram a focar esforços na organização por meio dos sindicatos agrários, Yashar (2005) ressalta que os kataristas foram “mais bem-sucedidos na formação de redes transcomunitárias” (Yashar, 2005: 169). Os ativistas do katarismo viam a sua luta de forma “diferente em termos ideológicos e estratégicos”, como também realça Hurtado (1986: 262). Ideologicamente, eles concordavam que o colonialismo era um instrumento de opressão que vigorava há séculos contra camponeses-indígenas. O final do período de domínio oficial do colonialismo político em 1825 (independência da Bolívia como Estado-nação) acabou se desdobrando em um novo período de colonialismo interno (González Casanova, 1969) que manteve a condição de subordinação e de exclusão dos indígenas, mesmo depois da Revolução de 1952. “Mas eles se recusaram a reduzir a sua luta à questão racial ou à questão de classe” (Yashar, 2005: 169).

Nesse sentido, como deixa poucas dúvidas o Manifesto de Tiwanaku, documento de 1973 que é apontado como referência inicial do Katarismo, é bastante abragente. “Nós nos sentimos economicamente explorados e cultural e politicamente oprimidos”, destacam os signatários[14], reforçando o potencial de ações efetivas de  “tradução intercultural” (Santos, 2006) e de “ecologia dos saberes” (Santos, 2007), com espaço para as “epistemologias do Sul”[15] (Santos e Meneses, 2007).

Imagem 2 – Sede da CSUTCB, que tem sua origem ligada ao Katarismo, em La Paz (Bolívia) – Fonte: Maurício Hashizume (2008)

3. Diálogo entre lideranças e “tradução intercultural”

Como se nota pelas trajetórias de Raimundo Tambo e Jenaro Flores, os kataristas optaram pela escolha mais complexa de cruzar permanentemente as fronteiras estabelecidas pelo “cardápio cognitivo” então existente. Cruzaram sistematicamente não apenas a “linha abissal” (Santos, 2007) entre o que o mundo moderno (escolas, universidades, instituições do Estado e sindicatos) e o que pensamento hegemônico classifica como “pré-moderno”, obsoleto, rudimentar e descartável (cosmovisão, herança cultural, práticas e rituais aymaras), mas também a linha das grandes ideologias identificadas pelas correntes de esquerda e de direita, reciclando os conhecimentos adquiridos no contato com esses diversos campos de conhecimentos.

Uma das linhas divisórias do conhecimento mais subvertidas pelos kataristas foi a que tende a separar o rural e o urbano. Por exemplo, ainda em 27 de maio de 1969, aymaras que residiam em La Paz – entre os quais Mario Gabriel, cunhado de Jenaro Flores -, criaram o Centro de Coordenação e Promoção do Campesinato – Mink’a[16], um espaço cultural na principal aglomeração urbana para tratar das tradições, histórias e da cultura camponesa-indígena, como um todo, que inclusive é uma das signatárias formais do Manifesto de Tiwanaku. Manteve-se um fluxo de trânsito de pessoas entre campo e cidade. Todos os familiares de uma comunidade retornavam (e ainda continuam retornando até hoje, em algumas regiões andinas), por exemplo, para ajudar a recolher a produção agrícola no período de colheita. Ao mesmo tempo, estudantes camponeses-indígenas eram frequentemente enviados para a cidade, assim como ocorreu no caso do núcleo que veio a formar o Katarismo. Incontáveis deslocamentos para o perímetro urbano também eram feitos por conta da venda de muitos dos produtos agropecuários produzidos no interior.

Um episódio envolvendo os dois principais líderes do movimento katarista ajuda também a mostrar esse insinuante caráter híbrido do movimento. Em março de 1970, realiza-se um congresso na localidade de Ayo Ayo para a escolha da direção sindical agrária da Central da Província Aroma. Mais de mil delegados compareceram e assumiram uma posição antioficialista, afastando conhecidos “dirigentes amarelos”  como Pascual Lara, Francisco Lima e Angel Morales, enfraquecidos por terem apoiado o Imposto Único Agropecuário instituído pelo general Barrientos. No entanto, a disputa pela secretaria geral da Província colocou frente a frente Jenaro Flores, da Subcentral de Lahuachaca, e Raimundo Tambo, da subcentral de Ayo Ayo. Este último tinha muito mais experiência sindical e política: era quase um advogado formado e havia sido condutor tanto do Movimento 15 de Novembro como do Muja, no período em que viveu na capital La Paz. Cinco anos mais jovem, Flores não apresentava grande experiência no sindicalismo, mas atraía atenções com seu carisma pessoal. Em menos de um ano e meio, Flores tinha saltado do sindicato de sua comunidade para a subcentral, e já concorria à central, numa carreira veloz (Hurtado, 1986: 36).

A eleição foi muito disputada, mas as bases acabaram elegendo Flores, jovem que era casado e, detalhe que veio a se mostrar importante, atuava concomitantemente como jilaqata (autoridade rotativa “tradicional”) de sua comunidade; o preterido Tambo era solteiro, e não ocupara nenhuma posição dentro do sistema indígena de organização social. Ou seja, numa acirrada disputa pela chefia de uma instituição tipicamente “moderna” – e por que não dizer, colonial? -, teria pesado o fato de que um dos candidatos tinha uma conexão mais efetiva com a identidade e os valores de extração “étnico-cultural”. Esse caso mostra como a hibridação pode se dar na prática, com base no diálogo intercultural entre os distintos conhecimentos.

Conta-se que, após a divulgação do resultado da disputa, o público exigiu um abraço de unidade entre os dois concorrentes (Rocha Monroy, 2006: 12). O perdedor Raimundo Tambo teria, então, partido para um abraço em Jenaro Flores. A partir dali, começaram a trabalhar juntos. Tambo passou a ocupar posição estratégica no Conselho de Amautas (ligado ao modelo indígena de organização social), que assessorava a Central Agrária de Aroma, e consolidou-se como quadro político e formulador do Katarismo. Enquanto isso, Flores se firmava cada vez mais como dirigente camponês de massas.

Formado na encruzilhada da cidade e o campo, Jenaro Flores utilizou habilmente os ensinamentos e os contatos mantidos entre essas duas esferas. Organizou, por exemplo, campeonatos de futebol para atrair camponeses e fazer ressoar as idéias kataristas. Estimulou e manteve canais relevantes com La Paz, com destaque especial, além dos já citados Movimento 15 de Novembro e do Muja, para duas emissoras (Rádio Méndez e Rádio San Gabriel[17]) que passaram a transmitir programas com conteúdo e história indígena, e o Centro Mink´a .

Em 1970, dois fatos relevantes fortaleceram a imagem de sindicalismo “cultural” dos kataristas (Hashizume, 2010: 22). Pela primeira vez, a simbólica bandeira wiphala[18] apareceu hasteada, em 6 de junho, por ocasião de um encontro de camponeses no dia do professor, em Corocoro (Província Pacajes, vizinha à Aroma). E no dia 15 de novembro, a wiphala voltou a tremular em Ayo Ayo diante de cerca de 30 mil camponeses-indígenas que compareceram para homenagear Tupac Katari.

Por meio da aproximação com políticos como José María Centellas e Juan Chambilla (ambos da ala mais à esquerda do MNR), Flores promoveu o evento de 189º aniversário da morte de Tupac Katari, no qual foi inaugurado um monumento em homenagem ao mártir, e conseguiu atrair a presença não só do presidente naquela ocasião, Juan José Torres, mas também de outras autoridades bolivianas (Hurtado, 1986: 38). Esse primeiro impulso de ascensão dos kataristas[19] foi sucedido pelo golpe de Banzer, em 21 de agosto de 1971, que colocou todo o movimento na clandestinidade. Mesmo nessa condição, o Katarismo continuou a conquistar espaço. Primeiro, surgiu o já citado Manifesto de Tiwanaku (1973). Ladeado por assassinatos, desaparições, prisões e perseguições, o massacre de Epizana, Tolata e Melga, em 1974, que ceifou a vida de camponeses-indígenas que protestavam contra o governo, tornou o clima ainda mais tenso (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2003: 147). Após aprovar mais uma declaração de apoio ao programa katarista em 1977, o setor consegue realizar um importante encontro em 1978 que, por sua vez, permitiu estruturar duas conquistas centrais em 1979: a fundação da Confederação Sindical Única dos Trabalhadores Camponeses da Bolívia (CSUTCB) e as mobilizações populares contra o governo que resultaram numa paralisação nacional contra o pacote de medidas de ajuste econômico receitadas pelo Fundo Monetário Internacional (FMI) da presidenta interina Lidia Gueiler, em dezembro do mesmo ano.

Como desdobramento desse processo de lutas, a CSUTCB reiterou a adoção da análise dos problemas e da busca de soluções com base na “teoria dos dois olhos”: como camponeses, juntamente com toda a classe social trabalhadora explorada, e como povos indígenas (aymaras, quechuas, ayoreos, moxeños etc.).

Em junho de 1983, com sua tese política, a CSUTCB de certa forma conclui o seu programa político, que pode ser sintetizado no seguinte trecho:

Nosso pensamento não admite uma redução unilateral de toda nossa história a uma luta puramente classista nem puramente etnicista. Na prática, dessas duas dimensões reconhecemos não apenas nossa unidade com os operários, mas também nossa personalidade própria e diferenciada.

Imagem 3 – Reprodução de cartaz exposto em prédio municipal de Sica Sica (Bolívia) – Fonte: Maurício Hashizume (2009)

4. Formas de luta e “ecologia de saberes”

Na prática, portanto, o movimento katarista utilizou a estrutura formal e institucional formada em torno do sindicalismo moderno/colonial para cultivar e disseminar outros conhecimentos, ou melhor, a hibridação de conhecimentos, sempre de acordo com os contextos nos quais os problemas eram apresentados. As jilaqatura e sindicato agrário foram (e continuam a ser) utilizados como duas faces, uma mais institucional (com registro formal junto às autoridades estatais) e outra mais simbólica (com forte influência na vida comunitária), de uma proposta comum. Há depoimentos que garantem que a luta sindical ganhou com os ensinamentos culturais, e vice-versa. Em vez de recusar em absoluto possíveis ensinamentos “vindos de fora”, o katarismo escolheu absorver e reorganizar as ideias de acordo com as suas necessidades.

Evidentemente que essa sobreposição não se dava de maneira natural, tranquila e sem sobressaltos. Em inúmeras vezes, a convivência entre essas duas lógicas gerava “faíscas”: impasses, entreveros e contradições. O caso do Katarismo demonstra claramente, porém, que o pressuposto paradoxo social formatado pela matriz colonial pode se misturar, embaralhar as regras pré-estabelecidas e funcionar como elemento de contestação das relações de poder, saber e, inclusive, ser.

Se é inegável que não chegou a dar forma final a um projeto alternativo completo (não só no aspecto epistemológico e intercultural, mas também nas esferas política, econômica e social) de relação entre sociedade e Estado, capaz de articular os níveis local, nacional e global, também é possível afirmar que ajudou a ampliar e embaralhar as margens que dividem o previamente bom do irremediavelmente ruim, o válido do inválido, o possível do impossível e, em última instância, o real do utópico.

Em larga medida, o movimento katarista inspirou e abriu as portas, com décadas de antecipação, a uma série de mobilizações, reivindicações e programas políticos que vieram a se consolidar na Bolívia desde então[20].

Por não permanecerem confinados e se afastarem de “purismos” conceituais adotados por grupos políticos mais convencionais de esquerda, os militantes kataristas colocaram a “interseccionalidade” na prática e ganharam espaço em diversas frentes de atuação. Atualmente, a imagem do movimento pode ser associada por alguns à demasia “flexibilidade” de alguns de seus notórios membros – como é o caso de Victor Hugo Cárdenas, que ocupou o cargo de vice-presidente entre 1993 a 1997 na gestão francamente neoliberal de Gonzálo Sanchéz de Lozada (MNR). Ainda assim, o Katarismo segue como relevante referencial político-ideológico de contestação para as organizações camponesas-indígenas até hoje.

Na prática, a experiência katarista ratifica a problemática das dicotomias como obstáculos à interpretação da “ecologia dos saberes”, apresentada por Santos (2007) como alternativa diante do sistema colonial, capitalista e imperialista que, nos últimos séculos, tem determinado o desperdício da experiência social que o próprio Santos (2000) define pela desigiação de “epistemicídio”. A escolha pelo diálogo e combinação recíproca entre diferentes conhecimentos contribuiu para furar os bloqueios e limitações armadas pelos esquemas e relações de poder estabelecidas.

O questionamento à relação intrínseca entre colonialidade/modernidade – duas faces da mesma moeda, conforme conceituação de Mignolo (2000) – não implica o anseio por “sociedades congeladas no tempo, ilhadas e essencializadas”, como adverte Blaser (2007: 14). “É muito fácil constatar que estas sociedades não existem, que são fantasias românticas”, conclui este último.

“A capacidade inovadora, a adoção de tecnologias e conhecimentos ‘externos’ úteis, a adaptação e a mudança, a conexão com e a abertura relativa com relação a outras sociedades”, prossegue Blaser (2007: 14), “não são atributos exclusivos da sociedade moderna; são atributos de todas as sociedades”. Não se deve, contudo, assumir que as diferenças sempre significam antagonismos, mas tampouco se “deve dar por certo que existe complementaridade entre elas ou que essa complementaridade pode ser imposta de cima para baixo” (Blaser, 2007: 14).

Uma formulação interessante para essa mescla sobreposta de culturas pode ser encontrada em Rivera Cusicanqui (2006: 11). Ao se auto-definir ela própria, ela diz se considerar uma mestiça – não mais nos moldes da integração por meio dos programas modernos de mestiçagem, mas no sentido de mistura conflitante – ou simplesmente chhixi, em língua aymara. A palavra chhixi, de acordo com ela, tem diversas conotações: é uma cor produto da justaposição, em pequenos pontos ou manchas, de cores opostas ou contrastantes: o branco e o negro, o roxo e o verde, etc. “A noção chhixi, como muitas outras, obedece à ideia aymara de algo que é e não é ao mesmo tempo, ou seja,a lógica do terceiro incluído” (2006: 11).

Além disso, na arena imaginária em que os diversos e recombinantes conceitos pós-coloniais estão em contínuo encontro, conflito e sobreposição, a experiência do Katarismo dialoga diretamente com a escolha do “essencialismo estratégico” (Spivak, 1999), pois apresenta um componente de ressignificação da condição do subalterno por ele próprio como protagonista da ação política e sujeito social. Também guarda relação com as reflexões acerca da “outra modernidade” (Chatterjee, 1997) forjada por diferentes pontos de vistas e das especificidades dos contextos de ex-colônias.

De alguma maneira, este trabalho procurou seguir a dica deixada pela própria Spivak. “Se o sujeito (…) foi mascarado como o sujeito de uma história alternativa, devemos refletir sobre como ele está escrito, em vez de simplesmente ler sua máscara como uma verdade histórica.” (Spivak, 1994: 188)

O que a autora indiana reforça é que escrever e ler, em um sentido mais amplo, “marcam duas posições diferentes em relação à ‘oscilante e múltipla forma de ser’”. (Spivak, 1994: 188). Segundo ela, “produzimos narrativas e explicações históricas transformando o socius, onde nossa produção é escrita, em bits – mais ou menos contínuos e controlados – que são legíveis”.

A forma como essas leituras emergem e a definição a respeito de qual delas será legitimada são questões que têm implicações políticas em todos os níveis possíveis, reitera. Ou seja, o subalterno e seu discurso não são apenas e necessariamente as formas como alguém é capaz de lê-los, mas é inclusive como ele mesmo se produz por meio da ação social. Por isso, o Katarismo como “epistemologia do Sul” é resultado não de heranças ou legados mantidos pelos camponeses-indígenas do Altiplano Andino, mas da iniciativa coletiva daqueles que agiram diante da subalternidade e conferiram um significado convertido em conhecimento contra-hegemônico, ou seja, em “outros saberes” que, diferentemente da “pureza” reivindicada pelas teorias produzidas pelas ciências sociais do Norte[21], são repletas e constituídas de “contaminações” e interferências mútuas, no sentido do que pode ser definido como exercício prático de “tradução intercultural” (Santos, 2006).

Imagem 4 – Manifestações em El Alto: wiphalas tremulam ao lado da bandeiras nacionais – Fonte: Maurício Hashizume (2009)

5. Conclusão

No campo dos estudos coloniais, é bastante comum ver citada a obra do  psiquiatra e ensaísta negro Frantz Fanon, nascido na Martinica, como um dos principais referências “históricos”, visto que sua obra data justamente da década de 1960: a mesma em que se deram desdobramentos determinantes para a formação do Katarismo. É notável a convergência entre os escritos de Fanon sobre os conflitos socioculturais na Argélia e as formulações kataristas no que diz respeito à “inadequação” dos marcos teóricos do Norte hegemônico para o Sul Global.

Quando se examina de perto o contexto colonial, é evidente que a divisão do mundo começa pelo fato de pertencer ou não a uma determinada raça, a uma determinada espécie. Nas colônias, a estrutura de base econômica é também a superestrutura [da teoria marxista]. A causa é a consequência; você é rico porque é branco, você é branco porque é rico. Esse é o motivo pelo qual a análise marxista deve sempre ser ligeiramente alargada toda vez que temos que lidar com o problema colonial (Fanon, 2001: 31)

Tal “coincidência” não reflete exatamente uma espécie de pensamento único e uniforme a respeito das experiências coloniais na Argélia (principal referência para as inquietações de Fanon) e na Bolívia, mas antes uma latente discordância, moldada pelos respectivos contextos sociais, quanto aos quadros-gerais eurocêntricos e etnocêntricos.

No caso mais específico do Katarismo, os camponeses-indígenas Aymaras bateram de frente não só com a colonialidade (do poder, do saber e do saber) – que, como ressalta Quijano (2000), vai muito além do colonialismo em sua concepção convencional e se perpetua através de práticas sociais de subalternização assimiladas e incorporadas pelos próprios colonizados, mas também do supracitado colonialismo interno (Gonzáles Casanova, 1969), desafiando conspirações elitistas a partir de massivas mobilizações de nações e povos indígenas, originários e camponeses.

Esta forte vinculação com as experiências sociais vividas no terreno faz dos pensamentos pós-descoloniais não uma escola de pensamento “de vanguarda”, conforme léxico usado com frequência no âmbito das ciências sociais convencionais. Em vez disso, ancoram-se na concepção de pensamento “de retaguarda”, em linha com as reflexões de Santos (2012). Daí a relevância de sublinhar os processos de enfrentamento protagonizados pelos movimentos por trás da emergência de tendências acadêmicas. As lutas dos movimentos sociais são prévias a quaisquer giros pós-descoloniais. Estes últimos podem ter sido beneficiados pelo acúmulo, consistência e abrangência derivados do aparecimento de um conjunto posterior de escritos – que incluem o aclamado Orientalismo (1981), de Edward Said -, mas as primeiras são as fontes e as bases da concretude e repercussão da perspectiva pós-decolonial como crítica sociopolítica.

Sob o manto das pretensas neutralidade e universalidade (repletas de pré-concepções, direcionamentos e limitações de caráter eurocêntrico e etnocêntrico), destacadas lutas como as do movimento katarista têm enfrentado cânones, postulados, proposições e intervenções modelares de transformação social. Esses sujeitos sociais expuseram problemas e exigiram direitos, cavando e ganhando terreno em espaços científico-acadêmicos. Empurrada por interpelações “sentidas na pele” e por contestações vigorodas dos movimentos sociais, as portas, então, se abriram. Como detalha um reconhecido investigador dedicado aos estudos pós-descoloniais, desenvolveu-se, desde o início dos anos 1980, “um corpo de escritos que tentam deslocar as formas dominantes pelas quais são vistas as relações entre povos ocidentais e não-ocidentais e seus mundos” (Young, 2003: 2).

O que isso significa? Isso significa virar o mundo de cabeça para baixo. Isso significa olhar a partir do outro lado da fotografia (…). Isso significa se dar conta de que quando os povos ocidentais olham para o mundo não-ocidental o que eles enxergam é frequentemente mais a imagem deles mesmos e de suas próprias suposições do que a realidade daquilo que de fato lá está, ou ainda a forma como as pessoas fora do ocidente realmente sentem-se e entendem-se a si próprias (Young, 2003: 2).

O segmento final da referida definição (“a forma como as pessoas fora do ocidente realmente sentem-se e entendem-se a si próprias”) remete novamente às experiências protagonizadas por sujeitos políticos do Sul, tais como o movimento katarista, que desafiaram o status quo (político, econômico, cultural, epistemológico e ontológico) com a sua opção pelo ativismo sindical com forte influência étnico-cultural.

Isso faz com que se torne imperativo evitar a delimitação territorial, temporal e sociocultural da ideia de interseccionalidade e do pensamento pós-descolonial. Há evidências de que essas proposições analíticas não são propriamente “novidades” das últimas décadas, desconectada das lutas anticoloniais do passado levadas a cabo pelos povos colonizados. Muito antes da “onda” de produções e reflexões que passaram a ser categorizadas “técnica e cientificamente” como pós-descoloniais, diversas mobilizações concretas protagonizadas no Sul já tinham sido formadas não só para pensar, mas para aplicar programas político-ideológicos que não se restringiam aos manuais engessados e moldes pré-fabricados dos setores “de vanguarda”. Tais iniciativas, a despeito de suas incomensuráveis heterogeneidades, se coadunam no diálogo e intercâmbio horizontalizado entre diversos conhecimentos e modos de vida ocidentais e não-ocidentais, ou seja, tendem a combinar justamente, cada um da sua forma, elementos “clássicos” da luta de classes com a defesa dos direitos “diferenciados” nos campos étnico-culturais.

Este artigo foi desenvolvido no âmbito do projeto de investigação “ALICE, espelhos estranhos, lições imprevistas”, coordenado por Boaventura de Sousa Santos (alice.ces.uc.pt) no Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade de Coimbra – Portugal. O projeto recebe fundos do Conselho Europeu de Investigação, 7.º Programa Quadro da União Europeia (FP/2007- 2013) / ERC Grant Agreement n. [269807]

The post Colonialidades em xeque – Lições a partir da experiência do movimento katarista da Bolívia appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

[H]e was considered the foremost of authorities on the Mexicans of Texas.  Hank Harvey had been born in New York City some sixty years before.  He had gone to grade school there and then worked in a delicatessen to make some money so he could come down to his dreamland, Texas….  After he had come to Texas with only a few years schooling, he resolved to become an authority on Texas history and folklore.  In a few years he had read every book there was on the early history of Texas, it was said, and his fellow Texans accepted him as the Historical Oracle of the State.  There was a slight hitch, it is true.  Most early history books were written in Spanish, and K. Hank didn’t know the language.  However, nobody mentioned this, and it didn’t detract from Harvey’s glory.

—Américo Paredes, George Washington Gómez:  A Mexicotexan Novel

What, then, does the de-colonisation of culture actually mean:  the recuperation of an essential culture that existed before the historical moment of colonisation, or the idea of admitting different histories to a complex and syncretic present composed of cross-cultural transfigurations?

—Iain Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity

******

“We Americans,” Walt Whitman wrote in 1883, “have yet to really learn our own antecedents . . . Thus far, impress’d by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States have been fashion’d from the British Islands only . . . which is a very great mistake.”[1]  Whitman’s critique of the skewed understanding of the U.S. and of U.S. history viewed from the limited vantage point of the Northeastern seaboard remained pertinent well over a hundred years later. David J. Weber writing a history of the Spanish frontier of North America in the nineties found himself once again having to confront this seemingly intractable ideological stance. As he writes, “Although the United States has always been a multiethnic society most general histories of the nation have suggested that its colonial origins resided entirely in the thirteen English colonies.”[2] Little has changed in the intervening years. In fact, at no other time has the US turned its back on Latin America so long and so blatantly as today.

As a Latin American living in New England and teaching at Dartmouth College, it has been difficult if not impossible not to notice (and ponder) the intersection between colonial past and imperialist present that is so apparent here, and to which Whitman’s critique alludes. The “new” in New England of course refers us back to a colonial history still visible today in the quaint British-style towns with their “village green” and churches mapped onto indigenous cultures. The enormous pines that were cut down in the eighteenth century to make masts for the British Royal Navy have been replaced by forests of smaller, second or third generation growth trees, reminding the newcomer that the “new” also refers to a new understanding of nature.  The gloomy forests of long ago have given way to a “managed,” instrumentalized landscape.  The indigenous presence, erased from the landscape and re-situated on the margins of this society, has been displaced onto the symbols of the “college on the hill” where I teach:  as the kneeling Native American receiving “the Book” from a man of learning who occupies a central position (still central today, alas), and as the much-disputed “Indians” sign of the football team still adamantly worn by some students who mistake insult for resistance to change—or perhaps, even worse, intend it.

The College’s biblical VOX CLAMANTIS IN DESERTO voices Dartmouth’s initial mission.  By turning existing indigenous cultures into a wilderness, it reproduces Columbus’s gesture three hundred years earlier, of claiming populated islands in the Caribbean for the Spanish Crown by planting a flag on their shores and whispering empire-building words into the wind. In the logo VOX CLAMANTIS IN DESERTO, colonial past and imperial present intersect:  the British colonial subject, the subject created and interpellated by an empire, is in turn already intent on colonizing and/or Christianizing other subjects. Indeed, in the race between France and England for North America, evangelization (Catholic vs. Protestant) plays a crucial role.  As one of the historians of the College writes:  “The country able to win the allegiance of the Indians might ultimately gain the huge prize of North America.”[3]  Understanding this, Eleazar Wheelock’s lifelong goal had been that of founding a college where American Indians could be Christianized and hence also acculturated.  His goal however was not devoid of imperialist ambivalence:  Dartmouth College, previously known as Moor’s Indian Charity School, ended up being a missionary college where the future evangelizers of Native Americans were trained.  As one account of Dartmouth’s founding has it, “The Indian charity school, which he instituted in 1755, proved reasonably successful; quite a good many Indian boys came to it, and quite a good many English youths, also on charity, came there to prepare for college. Wheelock saw that if these English youths could be induced to become missionaries to the Indians, they might be of even greater worth than the Indians themselves.”[4] That is, Dartmouth fast became a college of paying white students and not a college for Native Americans.  In fact, shortly after its founding in 1771 as the “ninth of America’s Colonial institutions of higher learning and the last to receive its charter from the Crown of England,” the Trustees in Scotland and England were “adamant in their criticism that funds intended for the schooling of Indians were being spent for whites.”[5]  In a gesture which repeated Columbus’s infantilization of the natives of the New World—and which prevails to this day in representations of the colonial and/or so-called “Third-World” subject—Wheelock justified the derailment of funds destined to Native Americans by attributing his failure to the Native American worse-than-childlike “sloth” and total unconcern with the future. Despite his growing conviction about the futility of Christianizing and educating Native Americans and because he needed to gain economic support, Wheelock’s son was teaching twenty one Native Americans in Hanover by 1774.[6]  Indeed, because of father and son’s diplomatic and educational efforts among indigenous communities, Dartmouth was the only college that did not close during the Revolution irrespective of whether the tribes in the vicinity fought for or against the British and today prides itself on its annual Pow-wow and Native American Studies Program.

The story of Dartmouth’s founding poignantly illustrates three things: the intersection of and tension between the colonial and the imperial has to be read not only within the “new” of New England but also as the underlying ideological framework that shaped the establishment of the disciplines at Dartmouth.  Unlike the history of any Latin American country which saw a pre-Columbian, colonial, and independence period and which is now struggling to surmount that legacy while at the same time facing multinational neocolonialism, the U.S.—in little over a hundred years— effected the transition from colony to empire in its own right.  Partly because this transition came about so fast and partly because the “logic” of empire has dominated the present, the colonial legacy of this country, which includes the reach of Spain into most of what is today the U.S. is invariably by-passed with the one exception being to tell the foundational story of the thirteen colonies of the eastern seaboard. Wheelock’s dealings show the imbrication of education with politics or perhaps, better put, the fact that epistemologies are also always ideological—something we all know yet knowingly forget when we talk about the “Ivory Tower” or when we tell one another that academia is not the “real” world or—more seriously—when in our critical praxis, we overlook the fact that disciplines arise during different historical junctures and out of different political needs (i.e., Area Studies). Finally, the story of Dartmouth’s founding shows that the Caribbean and its complicated multi-imperial (Spanish, British, French, Dutch) colonial history were “present” in New England from the start. We must also not forget that Wheelock, also a key player in Dartmouth’s founding, was a Yale graduate and that Yale too owed its existence to the fabulous fortune its founder had made as a clerk in the East India Company and as governor of Madras.[7]  As with the official or popular history of the U.S. which erases the Spanish/Mexican colonial past of this nation, even in an Ivy League institution which would imagine itself as a near to perfect British copy, much like the relegation of the colonial and Antillean source of England’s wealth in Jane Eyre to the “attic,” the Wheelock household too, as recalled by a student, was notorious for its detestable “cookery.” Bad food stood in stark contrast to the fine “furnishings of the house, the linen sheets and pillow cases trimmed with lace . . . brought to Hanover by Wheelock’s wife, the daughter of a former governor of the island of St. Thomas.”[8]

Likewise, the “new” in New Mexico or in New Spain (Mexico) reproduces the colonial action of making the unknown known and the foreign familiar by mapping a past and a space left behind onto a here and now.  Spanish names such as California, Montana, La Florida, Los Angeles serve as an index of that previous Spanish and Mexican colonial presence just as the “new” in New England points to a former British colonial presence.  However, given the preponderance of a historiography and a dominant culture shaped from the bird’s eye view of the thirteen English colonies, the Hispanic and Native American subtext of the U.S. is deleted from that history despite the fact that ¾ of what is today the U.S. was once first a part of the Spanish Empire and then independent Mexico.  That historiographic and historical marginalization continues today in the form of racial and cultural discrimination.  Someone born with a Hispanic or Native American surname is denied full citizenship rights in the United States regardless of how many generations their family has been here and whether or not their family had been “here” before the U.S. acquired its present boundaries in 1848 and 1898—crucial years which saw the birth of the greatest empire of modernity.  The uneasy overlapping of two spaces and two times in the United States is perhaps best illustrated by the state of New Mexico’s 1990 decision to address the confusion between Mexico and New Mexico by issuing license plates that clarify:  New Mexico, USA.

As a Latin American academic situated between Spanish and Portuguese, Comparative Literature, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Latin American and Caribbean Studies, I was drawn, of course, to Fernando Ortiz and Angel Rama’s theorizations of transculturation as a way of countering top down models of acculturation or assimilation. And I find it more relevant to focus on the Americas hemispherically than I do to think of them in terms of discrete nations or to view the history of “Our America” in Martí’s famous formulation, in terms of this country’s English colonial history. However, I am constantly confronted with new generations of students that arrive at Dartmouth completely unaware of this country’s US Hispanic colonial legacy. While this lack of knowledge might be excusable in other parts of the country and among less educated classes, this is often the case with students hailing from the US Southwest—many of whom are Hispanic yet have never been taught that history. Increasingly too, as the country shifts ever more to the right and efforts intensify to literally whitewash its history, we are witnessing attempts to ban ethnic studies from universities in the Southwest—not to mention the “editing” of textbooks in Texas currently underway eliding the Spanish colonial period of US history. It might not be entirely hyperbolic, then, to assert that this country’s idea of the national has come to depend on the suppression of that Native American and Hispanic indigenous subtext giving the impression that “the English and Americans expanded west and south onto vacant lands, except for those held by a few wild aborigines.”[9] Largely because of these efforts, the fact that the greater part of the territory that is today the U.S. was once first a Spanish colony and then Mexico continues to be overlooked in the American popular imagination despite all the debates regarding multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and transculturation we are having across US academia.  Hence North Americans continue to celebrate “Columbus Day” as the day of “discovery” whereas Latin Americans celebrate October 12th as El Día de la Raza, that is, as the celebration of the birth of mestizaje or a new race and culture as a consequence of the conquest.

The kind of historiographical sleight of hand that creates a wilderness where there are many different cultures and peoples in fact is made possible when a whole Spanish and Mexican colonial legacy is erased turning all Hispanics into “wetbacks” just as the term “American” which until 1776 had referred to the indigenous population of the whole continent (e.g., Joseph François Lafitau’s Moeurs des savages américaines (1724) or Corneille de Pauw’s Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains 1768) came to designate “exclusively those who have “inherited” the right to the land:  the European colonists who, by shedding their blood on American soil and wrenching it from the hands of the British, believe to have established themselves as its rightful owners.”[10] Thus, all other Americans have had to adopt a minority status as evidenced by the special designations “Native” American or “Latin” American that also go hand in hand with stereotypical characterizations which arose as early as 1492. Since then, indigenous peoples have been seen either as friendly (read gullible and servile) natives or as savages/cannibals (read guerrillas today).[11]  That is, they are read as “others” whose difference is invariably weighed in negative terms and measured in terms of distance in space and time thus denying them contemporaneity or co-evalness. U.S. academia does little to contest this erasure in part because the disciplines in the U.S. have emerged in a colonial/imperial context. As Fabian points out, given that the temporal discourse of anthropology and of related disciplines “was formed decisively under the paradigm of evolutionism [and] rested on a conception of Time that was not only secularized and naturalized but also thoroughly spatialized…. ever since, anthropology’s efforts to construct relations with its Other by means of temporal devices implied affirmation of difference as distance.”[12]  Reflecting on this praxis Vine Deloria will write:  “To be an Indian in modern American society is in a very real sense to be unreal and ahistorical.”[13]  Today, even the term “Our America” coined by José Martí, the Cuban thinker who was so instrumental in criticizing increasing U.S. imperialism in Latin America already at the end of the nineteenth century and recuperated today by Mexican-American critics has been appropriated by the U.S. academy to designate the US exclusively.[14]

Along with this subalternization of Latin America and the Spanish and Mexican colonial era of the U.S. comes a hierarchization in academia, which mirrors the political, economic, and racial division of the world and which belies our belief in our academic independence.  In fact, the nineteenth century, as the modern/colonial period, is the moment in which European languages (English, French, and German) constitute themselves as the languages of modernity; Amsterdam replaces Seville; the “center” of Europe shifts away from the Iberian peninsula and Castilian and Portuguese; the languages of waning empires are relegated to a marginal position and came to be thought of as not well suited for “scientific and philosophical discourses.”[15]  It is no accident then, that the current debate in “postcolonial studies” is dominated by the English language:  the Indian subcontinent and Africa are “central” while there is hardly any mention of either Latin American colonial theories or the Spanish and Mexican colonial legacy of this country.  Superficially, the focus on British colonialism in India and Africa would seem to be attributable to the sheer intellectual prominence of thinkers like Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and others. But the main reason is obviously the preponderance of English as a theoretical lingua franca. Thus  critics like many of us who fall into the new category of the “migrant” intellectual and who bring into the “center” problems of the periphery from which we stem as well an in-depth knowledge of two or more cultures, two or more languages, and hence an intrinsically transcultural critical practice do not always succeed in being heard.  That ex-centric knowledge has to be translated into English and Latin American intellectuals have until recently resisted the English-only bias of US academia. Given that publishers tend to translate more from the French, it should come as no surprise that the most important French intellectuals who are transcultural as well such as  Héléne Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Tzvetan Todorov, et al. all have been translated into English whereas prominent Latin American intellectuals have not until quite recently and only, seemingly, once the debate around colonialism and neocolonialism had waned.

In fact, there are prominent Latin American intellectuals both in the U.S. and in Latin America who have been intent on thinking about colonialism, imperialism and neocolonialism and who have applied these critiques to the US academy, yet they have not even managed to be incorporated into what we now know as “postcolonial studies.”  I am thinking of intellectuals such as Josefina Ludmer, José Martí, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Angel Rama, Nelly Richard, Edmundo Desnoes, Eduardo Galeano, Beatriz Sarlo, Rigoberta Menchú, Antonio Cornejo Polar, Edmundo O’Gorman, Leopoldo Zea, Paulo Freire­, Edmundo Dussel—to mention but a few—who have theorized Latin America’s troubled relation to the Colossus of the North, refusing to think in terms of “post” colonialism, and who have instead highlighted the processes of globalization and transnationalization as yet another guise colonialism has taken. Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos Jáuregui’s collection of essays including and reflecting on the contributions of these thinkers has achieved quite a lot in this respect but it seems that this volume has come too late in some ways, since the raging debate around questions of coloniality has largely been superseded by current debates on globalization and transnationalism.[16] The refusal of Spanish as a national and academic lingua franca is also to blame since the dominance of English will necessarily skew the discussion towards the English and American empires.

Indeed, Spanish—and by extension anything Hispanic such as Latino Studies—is relegated to a second-class position geopolitically as well as academically.  Thus, to advocate for multiculturalism and/or interdisciplinarity without also pushing for multilingualism is merely a superficial gesture and we end up in the ridiculous position of advocating a monolingual multiculturalism.  It is indeed ironic that the “English Only” movement arose precisely around the same time as the inception of NAFTA which we would have assumed, would have led to a much greater investment in language acquisition, particularly Spanish across the US. While that has indeed happened, and increasingly students enter college with 3-4 years of high school Spanish, that has been achieved thanks to students’ living in ever more bilingual contexts and despite the government’s disinvestment in schools across the nation and despite the fact that Spanish is still being called a “foreign” language. Indeed, as Mary Louise Pratt observed long ago, in the United States, to call Spanish, French, Cantonese, Italian, Japanese, Lakota, Navajo, Cree foreign languages is a misnomer (these are not “foreign” languages).[17]  Spanish, which has had a long and rich literary production before English became dominant in the U.S. is ideologically being made to become more foreign than ever by and in the publishing and film industries given the current practice of assuming an Anglophone audience.

In her introductory essay to the path breaking volume Cultures of United States Imperialism Amy Kaplan suggests there is a “denial of history” in the U.S., which cuts across English, American studies and history departments.  The pattern reproduced ad absurdum is the following:  “the absence of culture from the history of U.S. imperialism; the absence of empire from the study of American culture; and the absence of the United States from the postcolonial study of imperialism.”[18]  These “absences,” in fact, make it conceivable to talk about the U.S. as a world power and at the same time dismiss the notion that it is also an empire.  Yet in this edition too—which is crucial, even radical—from within the context of American Studies and English departments, Kaplan starts with Perry Miller’s conception of American studies on the banks of the Congo in an attempt to reinscribe and recuperate what Toni Morrison has called “an africanist presence” as subtext to the U.S. imaginary.[19]  While Kaplan’s attempt to reinscribe Africa at the heart of America is timely and welcome—especially in relation to the vindication of African-Americans—in so far as it avoids coming to terms with the Hispanic and Native American present and past of this country as well as the African, it again only reinforces what I have been arguing.  In fact, while trying to undermine the insularity of American studies which mirrors the insularity of a historiography based on/in New England, Cultures of United States Imperialism unwittingly reproduces the academic and linguistic hierarchy that literally makes impossible any kind of dialogue between American studies and Latin American studies.  Significantly only 5 essays out of 26 partially relate to Latin America. Yet an even lesser ratio prevails in most publications in this country since then whether academic or popular.  And while there were over three hundred movie theaters in the US showing Spanish language films, particularly Mexican films of the Golden Age in the 30s and 40s we would be hard put to find one anywhere in the US today.

While we pride ourselves, then, in the (apparent) breakdown of the insularity of the disciplines in the last twenty years—an era characterized by the development of multicultural and cross-disciplinary curricula—and hence once again potentially open to Bolton’s seminal idea of a “Greater America” we nevertheless have not managed to transcend the parochial historical vision criticized by Whitman. Whereas a Chicano performance artist like Guillermo Gómez Peña will argue that every encounter between two people taking place here today constitutes a “border experience,” the lack of a connection between the Spanish/Mexican colonial past of this country and its present Latinization is accompanied by the increasing rigidity of conceptions of the border as well as the literal transformation of a once fluid border into a new iteration of the Berlin Wall. Despite the fact, then, that “the signifier Latin American itself now refers also to significant social forces within the United States” [20] and that people do not tire of pointing out that New York is the largest Puerto Rican and Dominican metropolis and Los Angeles the second-largest Mexican metropolis (not to mention Chicago and other cities increasingly becoming Latin American centers in the heartland of the US), indeed, given the increasing Latinization of the US one would expect that it would no longer be possible to erase the Spanish/Mexican colonial legacy of this country —not to speak of the presence of Latinos. But that is unfortunately not so given the power of the media, the English only approach of the publishing industry, as well as the academic reproduction of archaic epistemological and disciplinary hierarchies. Symptomatic of these times, a senior administrator at Dartmouth College recently justified gross inequality in pay scales among male and female full professors at the College in the following manner: “Determining salaries varies by individual, … so the range of salaries among full professors is relatively large. …For example, computer science and economics will typically pay more than Spanish literature.” While he is stating the obvious, that he chose Spanish (and not French or German or even English) as his example for pay disparities across the disciplines is telling.

As is implicit in the theory of transculturation, we have to recuperate the past in all its fullness and radical heterogeneity in order to create the conditions for the possibility of finally establishing a true transcultural politics and epistemology. For, even if submerged and/or banished to the margins, our intellectual praxis should entail a mere shifting of accents, for colonization in effect only means “that dominant views of languages, of recording the past, and of charting territories become synonymous with the real by obstructing possible alternatives.”[22] Transcultural critics have therefore opted to study continuums such as Plantation America, the Black Atlantic, the Pacific Rim, and the indigenous continuum across the Americas as is perhaps best evidenced by Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead in which the Native American interfaces with the Latino on both sides of the border. This new hemispheric, transcultural and transborder understanding is of course undermined by the powers of globalization to continue all that 1492 has signified historically, culturally, and economically—only by other means. Indeed, as Masao Miyoshi argued in the nineties at the height of the debate around postcolonialism, our preoccupation with questions of post-colonialism and multiculturalism, look “suspiciously like another alibi to conceal the actuality of global politics [given that] colonialism is even more active now in the form of transnational corporations.”[23] He forgot to mention the actuality of global politics in US academia’s reproducing ad nauseam the epistemological biases that arose when the US transitioned from colony to empire and which lies at the heart of the disciplines here, now, still.

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The place that I occupied in the world made itself apparent very early. The first time I experienced direct racism was in my first year of primary school when a fellow pupil called me a “black bum”[1] and I got in trouble for pushing her. Many incidents followed that point, throughout the schooling years. Some were blatant, but others were more subtle, such as a teacher informing my mother that I must have been “drawing attention” to myself when I’d complained about being bullied. I simultaneously encountered gendered comments that would make me feel uncomfortable. I knew that I wasn’t supposed to be as strong and boisterous as the boys. I was supposed to like playing with Barbies and My Little Ponies, and enjoying the ballet classes I was enrolled in despite my other inclinations. In short, I felt continually limited and ridiculed by virtue of my race and sex and therefore considered the oppressions interconnected and to be contested together.

That’s how I continue to see it now. My responses to issues of gender are very much informed by my experience of race, and vice versa. My experience of structural forms of oppression was heightened due to these intersecting forms of oppression, and are particularly acute due to being of a working class background. Therefore, when it comes to Aboriginal feminism, I very much see our questions and tactics occupying the more “radical” end of the feminist spectrum. By radical, I am referring to streams such as socialist/marxist feminism, anarcha-feminism and radical feminism. I feel personally that the issue of race keeps me focussed on community rather than individual advancement, and therefore my feminism reflects this. Additionally, I seek self-determination as both an Aboriginal person and a woman, and therefore need to challenge the structures that negate this freedom. To borrow a quote from the Combahee River Collective Statement: “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression”. In an Australian context this carries a slightly different resonance due to the experiences of colonisation, but to decolonise from both a race and gender perspective is imperative.

I strongly believe that as Aboriginal women, whilst our fights are related to ongoing feminist struggles within other racially marginalised groups, they are not the same. By virtue of the fact that we are first peoples who have suffered under the process of colonisation within our own homelands, our struggles can be quite unique. Recently, for example, I was engaged in a markedly frustrating discussion on the concept of “fair skin privilege” as someone of a migrant background took issue to how I was utilising the term “black”. Fair skin privilege of course exists to an extent in an Aboriginal context, however the “Stolen Generations”[2], for example, highlight how limited this privilege has historically been. Additionally, migrant populations, whilst suffering marginalisation in Australia, also benefit from the displacement of Aboriginal people. Therefore there is a need to tell our own stories, and expand our own theories rather than simply drawing upon the experiences of others.

When I am highlighting why I feel a specific Aboriginal feminism is necessary, I tend to point to three formative elements that structure this need: the white patriarchy, the black patriarchy and “mainstream” feminism. As a point of oppression, the white patriarchy is self explanatory given its continuing historical legacy and political privilege. Aboriginal women feeling excluded by mainstream feminism is a topic that has been covered many times, most recently in an article by Kelly Briggs, which poignantly proposed that arguments regarding the lack of racial diversity in parliament are sorely lacking from mainstream feminism. Yet how the patriarchy operates within the Aboriginal community is not something that is discussed as often. It does have impact, even if the politics of race bind us. I am seeking to define how these elements play out in our communities more and more, because through better understandings we can build better and more inclusive movements that don’t leave the most vulnerable behind.

Many Aboriginal feminists have been rightly critical of mainstream feminisms in the past, due to lack of collaboration that centralized the individual over the communal, or the imposition of privileged viewpoints as if these were a universal experience for women. In addition, an “Orientalist” understanding that misread Aboriginal culture has sometimes been applied by feminists to cultural issues and practices that are ours to challenge. This is not because we necessarily perceive these things differently but rather, we need the space to interpret and challenge these things in our own communities. One example I like to highlight is the constant questions I receive from non-Aboriginal feminists regarding whether women should be allowed to play the didgeridoo, an Aboriginal wind instrument typically played by men. Considering the multitude of pressing issues that Aboriginal women face in Australia, a question such as this is not a defining Aboriginal feminist question, and the questioning of this cultural practice by non-Aboriginal women simply comes across as another act of imperialism. There is nothing to be gained for the feminist movement as a whole by non-Aboriginal feminists challenging these cultural practices; rather it just negates our rights of self-determination and indeed cultural ownership.

Over time, Aboriginal feminists (for example, Aileen Morton-Robinson in “Talkin’ Up to the White Woman”, 2000) have continued to highlight additional hurdles that they face due to the intersection of race and gender. Aboriginal women experience the issues that non-Aboriginal women experience due to the process of colonisation, but often there are additional complexities. For example, whilst equal pay is important for all of us, for many years Aboriginal people were historically not paid for their labour at all, and this acutely affected Aboriginal women working as domestic servants. Our wages were, in a lot of cases, held in trusts by the governments and therefore our “stolen wages” claims are ongoing many years later. “Victim blame” is something we face often, and indeed, a number of the Indigenous movements’ more conservative commentators tend to replicate these viewpoints. When we experience victim blaming as women, it is compounded by race to the point where Aboriginal women dying from domestic homicide at a rate ten times that of other women in Australia barely rates a mention. We tend to be subjected to the same issues of body shame and arbitrary and commercialised notions of beauty, but we are also judged on our skin tone and whether or not we possess certain features deemed to be tellingly “Aboriginal” (eg: a wide nose, deep-set eyes, etc). We can also experience fetishisation on the basis of our skin tones despite being mainly socially excluded because of them. In short, our experiences can add layers to feminist understandings and there are many ways in which a notion of a universalised women’s experience can exclude us or only tell part of the tale.

When it comes to the notion of a “black patriarchy”, I see this being perpetuated on two fronts. The first is through the patriarchal structures that we inherit through the process of colonisation by the mainstream culture, and the second manifests itself in our own community-based forms, through our traditional practices and how we view and deploy gender roles. To start with our internal patriarchy, it is always interesting to me when members of the Indigenous community argue that traditional societies had gender equality due to our understandings of gender complementarity, which presumes that the separate and set roles of men and women had equal importance in communities. This is not necessarily the case. From one side of this vast country to the other, different practices existed in different clan groups and therefore the experiences of “equality” for women via a notion of gender complementarity would have differed. If we state otherwise, then as black people we run the risk of universalising our own experiences similar to what mainstream feminism has been accused of doing. Secondly, gender complementarity has not been known to equal gender equality in many regions of the world. We have practices such as polygynous marriage that are arranged from birth, alongside norms such as specific forms of governance and punishment for women. At times, due to the fact that we (as Aboriginal people) are protecting family and culture in the face of ongoing colonialism, we lose the ability to critically examine our own practices because we are worried that anything perceived as negative will be used to further discredit us as peoples.

The patriarchy we inherited and in some ways continue to perpetuate from the dominant culture tends to manifest itself when we adopt external cultural practices and use them in ways that may enhance pride in Aboriginality but reinforce gender disparities. Examples of this are events such as the Miss NAIDOC pageants, which are based upon the idea that we need to celebrate the “beauty” of Aboriginal women. Beauty, as a concept, may be harmful to women as it often centralises the appearance of a woman as being her most important attribute. One of the points I made back when I first examined this in the above linked article was that we actually come from a culture that values age and wisdom, assigning great value to our older women. When it comes to beauty however, older women are almost completely excluded. Additionally, our women have been achieving highly in a number of fields for a long time; we have been obtaining tertiary education qualifications at a rate nearly double that of Aboriginal men. So why do we consider it important to celebrate the “beauty” of Aboriginal women whilst barely mentioning these wonderful achievements? The idea that something becomes empowering if it is community organised and run fails to examine what it is that we are instituting from the cultures of those we have been oppressed by, and if these are indeed worthwhile things to adopt. Without such questioning, we run the risk of merely contributing to the subjugation of our own rather than enacting true positive change.

It continues to be imperative to challenge the prevailing structures of power on the dual fronts of race and gender, both internally and externally. Australia, despite the rhetoric to the contrary, continues to privilege a very white and patriarchal culture in which exclusionary legacies, rather than being a source of shame, tend to be celebrated. I would even go so far as to argue that due to our complex history and culture wars, begun in the early 1990s then reinforced by the Howard government, we have gone backwards when it comes to being a space inclusive of race and gender. During the Howard years, Aboriginal people were continually rebuked for “focussing on the negative” when telling the true stories of what we have faced under centuries of colonisation. Women were told that fights for gender equality were “political correctness gone mad,” or otherwise not essential. Australia reflects this perspective today. Australia Day, which was of little importance to most of the population only a couple of decades ago, is now a day to drape flags across your shoulders and be “proud” at the cost of any acknowledgement of the true history of this day and what it has meant to Aboriginal peoples. ANZAC Day, which was also criticised because feminists drew attention to victims of war and rape as a tactic of war in particular, is again focussing on the “brave people who served our country” in the various conflicts. There is a need to challenge Australian historical narratives on a number of fronts, and Aboriginal feminists have an incredibly important role to play in this.

I strongly feel that Aboriginal feminism is going to continue to grow and develop. We have a number of incredibly strong Aboriginal women who are moving to the forefront of public discourse. A lot of them are unapologetic about their race and their gender, are highly educated, and ensure that they use these knowledges to continue educating and inspiring others. Through social media and online platforms such as blogging, their bodies of work continue to grow and circulate. The Internet offers a wonderful opportunity for those that have been traditionally denied a voice to claim a space. And claim it, we shall!

The post Intersectionality and Indigenous Feminism: An Aboriginal Woman’s Perspective appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

The German author Stefan Zweig, who fled to Brazil from Nazi Germany, already considered Brazil a paradise characterized by hybridity and said in 1941 that Brazil “has taken the racial problem, that unsettles our European world ad absurdum in the simplest manner: in plainly ignoring its validity.” (translation S.L.)[2] According to Zweig, “for hundreds of years the Brazilian nation relies on the sole principle of free and unrestrained mixing, perfect equality of black and white, brown and yellow. (…) There are no limits to colours, no boundaries, no supercilious hierarchies…”[3]

Hence the image of Brazil as a tolerant, peaceful, “mestiço” nation is not at all new. But it ignores then and still today the multifaceted forms of discrimination and specifically Brazilian shapes of racism.

From a subaltern colonialism

The aforementioned sociologist, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, contributed one of the major analyses on Portuguese (post)colonialism.[4] Using the characters Prospero and Caliban from Shakespeare’s piece “The Tempest” he describes the Portuguese colonists as bipolar: Sometimes they are more like Prospero, the former Duke who now reigns the island and therefore embodies the typical colonist for Santos. Sometimes they rather resemble Prospero’s slave Caliban, his name an anagram for “cannibal”, who stands for the colonized people.

Santos derives the “Caliban” elements of Portugal from its increasing semi-peripheral position in the world capitalist system from the 17th century onwards and the loss of its naval and trade supremacy which it held in the 15th and 16th century. After temporarily being a Spanish province, the country was increasingly dependent on England financially and regarding external and economic policies. Thus England had strong influence on Brazil – the largest Portuguese colony – and acted as a co-colonist, hence the reason for often referring to Portuguese colonialism as subaltern. To some extent the Portuguese were colonists as well as colonized people and in that period settlers and immigrants in their colonies at the same time.

Santos’ image of Portugal as a “mix” between Prospero and Caliban runs the risk of trivializing Portuguese colonialism. Accordingly, cultural scientist Fernando Arenas warns not to overemphasise the subaltern character of Portuguese colonialism. After all, Portugal “was still able to forge a tightly centralized and interdependent triangular trade system across the Atlantic after it lost its commercial and military hegemony in the Indian Ocean by the end of the sixteenth century”, and the history of Portuguese colonialism also showed some “unambiguous Prospero-like figures”.[5] However, Santos’ interest is not to present Portuguese colonialism as non-violent and peaceful, but rather to analyse its specific characteristics – without proclaiming its exceptionality like national ideologues in Brazil and Portugal later did.

Hence, according to Santos, the main difference between British and Portuguese colonialism for example was “that the ambiguity and hybridity between colonizer and colonized … was the experience of Portuguese colonialism for long periods of time.”[6] The boundary between colonizer and colonized was not so easily to be drawn in Portuguese colonialism; the issue of difference was far more complex. Many Portuguese settlers were poor farmers, criminals or “New Christians” (converted Jews) and thus to some extent colonized “others” themselves. In contrast to the British colonists they did not have a “strong state” supporting them and nor were they so rigid in maintaining the boundary between colonists and colonized people. This influenced the identity regime of the Portuguese colonialism, which was far more penetrable than the Anglo-Saxon.[7]

Even nowadays the porosity of Portuguese colonialism is apparent in Brazil from the variety of ethnic categories and self-designations. Unlike the USA, where the strict bipolarization of black and white predominated for a long time due to the one-drop rule, Brazil developed a highly refined spectrum with many intermediate stages. However neither in colonial times nor today this high degree of flexibility means absence of racism. In fact for decades, sociologists and anti-racist activists analyse the cordial racism as a (post)colonial singularity of Brazil – a racism that is subtle but still powerful.[8]

… into an internal colonialism

Due to the expansion of other European naval powers from the 17th century onwards, Portugal lost its supremacy in the spice trade with Asia and its bases in Africa were mainly used to guarantee the participation in slave trade. Brazil then became the most important colony for Portugal, whose economic performance and natural resources hugely outpaced the small motherland for many years and thus led to economic dependence on the colony. When gold was found in the Brazilian hinterland in the early 18th century, many Portuguese emigrated and Brazil’s population swelled to two million and around 1800 it reached the three million mark. The strong bond between Brazil and Portugal is exemplified by the Portuguese court’s flight to Brazil in 1808 to escape Napoleon’s troops. The seat of parliament was moved to Rio de Janeiro until 1821 – a unique act in the history of European colonialism, “whereby the metropole became a de facto appendix of the colony”.[9]

The relocation of the capital to Rio de Janeiro laid the foundations for Brazilian independence. Within the framework of the “United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and Algarve” at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Brazil formally gained equality to its motherland. Public riots in Portugal forced King João VI to return in 1821. His son Pedro remained governing Brazil and declared its independence in 1822. While other South American states led by Simón Bolívar gained their independence as republics, Brazil implemented a monarchy and thus fulfilled “one of the most conservative and oligarchic independences of the Latin-American continent”.[10]

Independent Brazil enjoyed a high degree of autonomy towards Portugal under emperor Pedro I. However the strong political, economical and cultural alliances persisted, not least to the fact that father and son were governing the two countries. The Brazilian empire was “firmly anchored in a conservative, plantation-based, slave-holding system that critics…describe as tantamount to the continuation of colonialism”[11]; even though this gradually changed under Pedro II (1840-1889). This “internal colonialism”[12] of the Portuguese descendants towards enslaved Africans and Indigenes is the essential characteristic of the young independent Brazil. Slave labour was of substantial economic relevance for this system, which is why the Luso-Brazilian elites had a strong interest in continuing slave trade. A British intervention in 1850 ended the transatlantic slave trade, but internally it continued between the North and South of Brazil. The changes in the agricultural and population structure were followed by a slow transition from slave to wage labour: coffee replaced sugar as the most important export product. The coffee boom attracted European immigrants and thus made slave labour increasingly redundant. In 1871 a law declared all children from slaves born after this date as free and finally in 1888 crown princess Isabel abolished slavery. Many supporters of abolitionism were also opponents of the monarchy and in fact only a few months later on the 15th of November 1889 the monarchy was overthrown and the republic proclaimed.

The praise of the miscigenação

In the following decades the ensaios de interpretação do Brasil (essays on the interpretation of Brazil) became a very popular genre for Brazilian intellectuals to reflect on the development and specifics of the “Brazilian Nation” – and thus widely contributed to its construction.[13] One of the best known examples is the work “Casa Grande & Senzala” (English: “The Masters & the Slaves”) by sociologist Gilberto Freyre published in 1933, where he interpreted the Brazilian colonial society as a dynamic, contradictory system of social intimacy and violence. For him one of the reasons for the social and cultural proximity of the colonists and colonised compared to other colonial powers, was the repetition of the process of cultural and ethnical “mixing”, which the Portuguese supposedly had undergone with Arabs and Jews in the motherland and then – according to Freyre – again took place in colonial Brazil between Portuguese, enslaved Africans and Indigenes.[14]

This understanding ignores the violent history of slavery and genocide of indigenous inhabitants respectively and legitimizes it through a trivial romanticisation. Yet this myth, even today, forms the basis of the powerful narrative of mestiçagem/miscigenação (miscegenation), which also appears in other national ideologies of Latin America. Advocates of this narrative, Sérgio Costa explains, wanted to “coin the model of a culturally and biologically ‘mixed’ nation, in which ethnic and racial lines of demarcation dissolve” (translation S.L.)[15] and thus drafting an alternative to the powerful race theories of the beginning of the 20th century that advised against any “racial interbreeding”. Freyre’s innovation was the positive interpretation of this miscigenação, which until then was always considered the source of degeneration and obstacle for the development of Brazil. Nevertheless his approach is also founded on racist arguments as he assigns inherent characteristics to different population groups, which then constituted the “mestiço Brazilian race”.

Freyre’s approach fit perfectly into the nationalistic discourses of the prevailing Estado Novo from Getúlio Vargas in the 1930s that proclaimed the idea of a Brazilian “racial democracy” (democracia racial) and euphemised the inequality of the different groups. Praise of the miscigenação was thus also a measure for Brazilian elites to disguise racist structures and discrimination, and to retain power. Expert on roman languages, Claudius Armbruster, writes that, “the generally progressive idea of a mestiço-democratic Brazil turns into a dangerous ideology for Afro-Brazilians to the extent in which this utopia is being presented as reality” (translation S.L.).[16] For many advocates of miscigenação, the “mixing” also, if nothing else, pointed the way to the embranquecimento (“whitening”) of the Brazilian population. Additionally the miscigenação was determined by sexist rules that in fact allowed relationships between white men and Black or Indigene women, but not vice versa.[17] It was therefore by no means a consequence of the absence of racism but a consequence of a specific form of racism that combined images intentionally propagating the excessive sexuality of people of African and Indigenous descent with the mystified encouragement of interracial mixture.

Freyre’s ideas also provided the basis for the lusotropicalismo – one of the most powerful and controversial meta-narratives in Portuguese colonialism.[18] Its underlying assumption states that the Portuguese have “mixed” stronger with people from the tropics as a result of several geographical, historical, cultural and genetic factors and hence were softer colonists than other European colonial powers.[19] The perception of a Portuguese exceptionalism particularly gained importance under the Salazar dictatorship ruling Portugal from 1926 onwards. Aiming at the reestablishment of a Portuguese global power, the authoritarian regime attributed great significance to the remaining colonies especially in Africa and created an image of Portugal as a “pluri-continental and multiracial” state. Besides, it integrates Portuguese colonialism in the bigger narrative on the role of Portugal in the European expansion already happening since the 15th century.[20]

Miguel Vale de Almeida notes that Brazil already was a projection of the fantasy that the Portuguese were the better colonists at that time. In acting as a role model for the alleged humanistic, multicultural colonization in Africa, it was the symbolic resource for the construction of a Portuguese colonial empire in Africa.[21] Freyre’s ideas fitted the strategy and he was accordingly invited by Portugal to visit the African colonies in 1950. He only then started to use the concept of Lusotropicalism in his work. While it only received little resonance in Brazil, it played a central role in the official discourse in Portugal.[22]

Only the Brazilian military dictatorship established in 1964 transferred Freyre’s lusotropicalistic ideas to Brazil as parts of the military envisaged a central role for Brazil in Africa.

The military regime adopted an ambiguous position in regard of the Portuguese colonialisation in Africa and pursued a policy of “active neutrality”, which caused strong resentment in political leaders not only in the Portuguese colonies but in other African countries too. They had hoped for more support and solidarity from Brazil in the anti-colonial fight.[23]

Brazil in Africa, Africa in Brazil

This is one of many examples of the ambivalent role of Brazil compared to other Portuguese (ex)colonies especially in Africa, which also depicts Brazil’s general position in the world: On the one hand, Brazil has always been an ally to the west and maintained privileged relationships to Portugal, Western Europe and USA – though they were characterized by classical centre and periphery asymmetries. On the other hand, Brazil is progressively oriented towards the global south and thus trying to break away from the economical dependence on the north and establish itself as a regional or even global leading power.[24]

Brazil shows a certain historico-political sensitivity in regards of slave trade. In view of the fact that Brazil imported the largest quantity of enslaved Africans in the Americas, the government today emphasises the historic debt and responsibility towards Africa. Nevertheless the coalitions with African countries are clearly motivated by realpolitik and economic interests. Even though Brazil has especially strong bonds to Lusophone Africa, the interest in the African continent relies upon the long-term goal of changing global market and trade patterns in Brazil’s favour and not primarily on the idea of a community induced by Portuguese colonialism.[25]

At the same time the idea of “Africa” repeatedly plays a central, albeit ambivalent, role in the construction of a Brazilian national identity, which is still partially based on Freyre’s image of Brazil as a melting pot, in which Africans, Indigenes and the Portuguese have merged harmoniously. Although “African” was associated with traditionalism and backwardness for a long time, this changed with the strengthening of the Black civil rights movement at the end of the 1970s and the connected appreciation of the Afro-Brazilian heritage.

This also led to an intensified debate on racism in Brazil, in which the paradigm democracia racial was strongly attacked. It states that there is no racism or racial inequality in Brazil as a result of the high degree of “ethnic mixing”. For organizations like the United Black Movement (MNU – Movimento Negro Unificado) this myth “was not only a manipulation of the reality, but also an instrument of political domination that disguises black people’s subordination” (translation S.L.).[26]

The constitution of 1988 was an important milestone. While the military dictatorship that ruled until 1985 pursued the policy of (forced) integration of ethnic minorities into the “mestiço” Brazilian nation, the new constitution of 1988 accounted for the tendencies of (re)ethnicising of the mainly Indigene and Black populations since the beginning of the 1980s. In guaranteeing the protection of indigenous cultures and the land claim of Quilombo communities, the Brazilian state turned away from the assimilation strategy and now rather follows a policy of recognition towards ethnic differences.[27]

Affirmative Action – an attempt at reconciliation

Regardless of the theoretical appreciation of the “mestiço” heritage, Afro-Brazilians and Indigenes are still today more affected by poverty and discrimination than white Brazilians. At the beginning of this millennium many state universities therefore established quotas for Afro-Brazilians, Indigenes and pupils from public schools to actively fight racial discrimination. Critics regard the quotas as a danger to the equality of all citizens in the country, but the Brazilian Supreme Court nevertheless confirmed their constitutionality in April 2012. The anti-racist movement especially welcomes the establishment of quotas as a measure of reconciliation of historical inequalities. The implementation of university quotas relaunched the public debate about racism in Brazil, which is closely linked to questions of national identity. Some fear that the quotas jeopardize the flexible “ethnic” categories typical for Brazil and thus the mestiçagem, the cultural and biological “mix” that plays a central role in the national narrative. In contrast Black Brazilians argue that despite the alleged flexibility of racial categories in Brazil, all non-white Brazilians tend to be considered as Black and are hence affected by discrimination. They therefore request that the category negro in statistical surveys should be used in order to aggregate the categories preto (black) and pardo (brown).[28]

In a manner of speaking Brazil is undergoing a “typical postcolonial” debate on the definition of Black people and the position of Afro-Brazilians in society. One major problem, also found in similar discussions, that comes along with combating racism and discrimination is the creation of respective categories.

Although much has happened in the past years, there are still good reasons for affirmative action measures like quotas. The formal equality before the law is a mere myth as long as the social reality is shaped by discrimination and racism. And in this regard Brazil is miles away from the well-presented ideal of the “rainbow nation”, as there are still some people who are “more equal than others”.

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Maja Milatovic: In your article “Strategies for Inclusivity: Indigenous Women and the Academy,” you highlight intersecting oppressions such as racism and sexism impacting Indigenous women in academia, which remains a “bastion of white male privilege.” What are some of the strategies for challenging colonising knowledge and institutionalised whiteness and obtaining recognition for Indigenous knowledge in academia?

Celeste Liddle: I think in the first instance it is important for people to be aware that the existing knowledges are indeed skewed toward certain ways of knowing, and that the act of colonisation has privileged these knowledges in the academy. As a result, no matter how open universities are to knowledge-exchange and contributing to knowledge pools, they can still exclude because Indigenous knowledges have been considered, over a vast number of years, to be second class, and the way Indigenous people acquire those knowledges – via community, family, experiences, etc. – are different to the teacher-and-student methods preferred by most Universities.

One of the simplest strategies is to lobby universities to employ more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The number of Indigenous staff has doubled in a 10 year period and that’s the same time the NTEU included an Indigenous mandatory claim in the bargaining round. By having Indigenous people engaged in a number of capacities across a university, the existing entrenched systems are challenged. Additionally, with more Indigenous staff come more Indigenous students and the numbers here are roughly proportional. With more Indigenous students comes the capacity for more research higher degree students, and therefore the opportunity for existing departments to supervise more Indigenous people doing research from their own perspectives; thus more opportunity for an active knowledge transfer. Indigenous academic staff are vital here as mentors. So in short, I’d say targeted employment strategies to get more people working in the sector, and more encouragement for students to go further with their studies with the aim of eventually becoming university staff themselves.

MM: One of the elements you address in your writing is “authenticity” or the notion of a “true” Indigenous heritage. In your piece, “An Open Letter to Bess Price MLA,” you state that “Culture is not a static entity and has never been pre- or post- colonisation,” highlighting your belief in “a shared historical experience which is as valid a cultural element as anything else.” Can you elaborate on this argument more, especially considering current Indigenous politics?

CL: There is a tendency to refer to Indigenous culture as “traditional” and “contemporary” in this country (Australia). I feel that whilst colonisation has obviously had a huge impact on Indigenous culture, to label things as such paints a static image of what it was like prior to colonisation whilst also reducing the authenticity of what we have today. There is an entire knowledge pool and a system of governance that was built up before colonisation. Those rules and knowledges came from experience: from experiencing environmental fluctuations; from people challenging systems; from trade with neighbouring countries. Additionally, kriol languages, traditional-style dances about contemporary experiences, sports carnivals, etc: all these have become a part of our shared cultural landscape and are important.

Following colonisation, there have been many experiences that Indigenous people have shared as a people. There were, for example, very few families that were not pulled apart by the policies that led to the Stolen Generations and have not been impacted by transgenerational trauma. Language revitalisation programmes nowadays are, in a lot of cases the direct result of language removal back in the 1930s. Struggling to reconnect is therefore a common experience for Indigenous people. We’ve also had a number of key political movements such as the Freedom Rides, the Tent Embassy, Land Rights. All of these experiences form our histories. We have family that took part in them or we were there ourselves, and because the stories of those struggles are relayed on, they become a part of our shared cultural landscape. A good many of the things we now celebrate annually started as Indigenous political movements and these events are part of our cultural landscape.

MM: In your article published in Daily Life entitled “A platform for the people who are not always heard,” you write that Indigenous events and conferences provide opportunities for “being heard,” create inclusive spaces where “Indigenous ways of knowing can dominate” and challenge hegemonic culture. In your view, how do these events offer transformational and collaborative potential amongst Indigenous people globally?

CL: I have now had the privilege of collaborating with Indigenous peoples from other countries on a number of occasions. One of the things that always strikes me are the similarities colonised peoples share. There are enough similarities recognised that we now have the UN Declaration on Indigenous Peoples! So the sharing of these similarities as Indigenous peoples globally helps break down the isolation we have within our own countries and we can then collaborate on how we address the issues we face on a global level.

There are, however, many differences as well. One such difference I can think of is the existences of treaties that many peoples have, but that we don’t have here in Australia. Hearing how the Maori, for example, have a set of principles and conditions that they can hold their government to and how this works for them inspires and drives us in Australia. Hearing where they feel their treaty has not served the people as well as it could have allows us to learn from their experiences and push for different inclusions.

I often say that attending one of these conferences in the first place is what radicalised my mind. As an Aboriginal woman I was so moved and so inspired by what I experienced talking with other indigenous peoples and sharing knowledge, but I also became so aware of how the situation in Australia compares. It was a wake-up call and since then I have not only become more active in a number of ways here, but I have also relished the opportunity to engage more internationally. At the next WIPC:E conference in Hawaii in 2014 we are hoping to run a panel session on Indigenous trade unionism with educational activists from Australia, New Zealand and Canada represented. Fingers crossed this comes into fruition and from this engagement, a regional Indigenous education union caucus begins to grow! Academia is one of the most mobile fields a person can work in so it makes sense, as Indigenous unionists, to organise globally.

MM: In recent years, social media and blogging in particular have become increasingly popular ways of breaking silences surrounding structural inequality and challenging exclusions as well as a means of networking, strategizing and making marginalised voices heard. You use Twitter and were involved with curating the IndigenousX Twitter account. You also write your own blog called Rantings of an Aboriginal Feminist. What is the potential of social media in connecting, constructing and empowering Indigenous people in Australia? Are there any risks involved with the use of social media?

CL: Had someone told me when I started my blog back in June 2012 that I would end up writing commissioned pieces for mainstream, and non-mainstream, media within 6 weeks, I would not have believed them. It happened though, and in one fell swoop I became aware of the potential of social media. From an Indigenous perspective, this is particularly powerful. Traditionally our issues, voices, opinions and so forth have been represented by non-Indigenous people in non-indigenous publications. We have had little control over how we are portrayed and the diversity of our opinion has been stunted by those the media sources deem are the “leaders” or at least the most palatable.

Social media throws that wide open. Aboriginal people are allowed to represent themselves, argue their opinions and engage in discussions in a way that we haven’t been able to do in traditional media. It’s no surprise that we’re seeing more diverse voices getting out there at this point in time from a number of political perspectives (and if you ask me, also no surprise that the Aboriginal left-wing have particularly embraced it). Additionally, Facebook became an invaluable tool to connect family and community over vast distances and from some incredibly remote communities. Because so many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people use Facebook regularly, it has become an even more important tool for us as a point of connection and information dissemination than it probably has for everyone else. Twitter is important as well, but personally I find that it’s more useful as a tool for Indigenous people to broadcast our works externally, and that Facebook allows a more in-depth engagement.

The main danger is that social media removes the filter. Back in the “old days” opinions were countered via “Letters to the Editor” pages. Nowadays, people contact you directly and want to argue the points. I particularly got annoyed when I had hoards of non-indigenous conservative men writing diatribes on my blog telling me what the “real issues” were. From that point, I took the stand of actively moderating the space and stating that black and female opinions took precedence in my space. People are also only a Google search away from someone’s email address or contact details nowadays. I had to block people from my site after some regular commentators received abusive emails. We are more likely to be attacked directly if we do put ourselves out there on social media and I feel that turns many people  off. Why would you put yourself out there to be abused virtually when you’ve been dealing with racism/sexism/etc your entire life?

MM: You self-identify as a black feminist. Are there any particular feminists or inspiring individuals who motivate your work and have influenced your feminist vision?

CL: I have been a bit of a magpie, to be honest: collecting shiny objects, or information that appeals anyway, and putting it all together. What I’ve found I’ve done more than anything is identified particularly with broader radical thought and adapted those thoughts into black feminist standpoints. I’ve also been one for analysing my own experiences and using these for the basis of broader analysis. So every time I am asked this question, I tend to fail it!

Therefore, my list of those that have inspired my thoughts may look a little random. Whilst a lot of them I would agree with, this is not a requirement and others I admire for their sheer capacity to analyse structural forms of oppression. The ability to engage, disagree and formulate an opposing argument is incredibly important particularly when investigating where systems of oppression intersect. Audre Lorde, Augusto Boal, Lisa Bellear, Catharine Mackinnon, Judith Butler, Dennis Altman, and William Cooper are a few names that spring to my mind. The book “The Bridge Called My Back” stands out as a key text. Former lecturers that challenged my view and expanded my horizons are Sheila Jeffreys, Geoffrey Milne, Peta Tait, Verity Burgmann and many others.

A lot of the people who inspired me the most though have been people within my own family: my mother, my grandmothers, a number of very politically-minded relations. Finally, because I have worked at universities and then at a union I have been lucky enough to have been continually surrounded by people who question everything. That environment has definitely encouraged my own views to grow.

MM: In her article “Australian feminists need to talk about race,” Aboriginal Australian feminist Kelly Briggs highlights the importance of intersectionality, writing that “Australian feminists must recognise and join the fight for racial diversity.” Taking this into account, what do you identify as current challenges in Australian feminisms, especially in the context of forming productive transcultural and transracial alliances?

CL: The main challenge I find right now is the focus on individualism rather than collectivism. With Indigenous politics, due to the fact that we make up such a small proportion of the population and because “choice” is something we were denied for many generations, a lot of our politics focuses on the collective, or at least needs to. A good deal of the dominant feminist theory at this point, however, seems to be more focused on individual agency. I honestly feel this is the point where Indigenous feminist voices can get lost. When Kelly states “I am uneasy about the narrow confines the term “equality” has taken in regards to feminism,” I strongly believe this is what she is highlighting too: Structures are not being questioned and challenged enough and black women are being left out because of this. When you’re engaging with more liberal narratives that highlight the rights of individuals and a group doesn’t have access to a great deal of choice in the first place due to structural oppression then clashes will occur. I think this is why I have found more synergy in radical thought. Indigenous women, at least in Australia, due to their intersecting sources of oppression, have much to share here and because they are not always actively engaged with, their voices get left out of feminist analysis.

On saying that though, I have run up against similar issues with leftist organisations. Because they argue that class is the foremost site of oppression, they can close off when issues of gender or race are brought to the table. I have had openly hostile responses when I have suggested that some patriarchal systems existed prior to colonisation and the installation of capitalism in this country. Recently I stated that I am not interested in a revolution that leaves the most vulnerable behind. Intersectionality is key for me.

MM: You frequently state that you are a socialist and a unionist. Your writing frequently underscores the importance of community and unionisation for Indigenous women. What drew you to getting involved with the trade union? What are some of the issues you encountered in the context of equality and diversity issues for women and Indigenous people, while working for the union?

CL: As mentioned earlier, I feel universities remain bastions of the white patriarchy, and when I worked within the university structure, I was working in Indigenous student equity. As a staff member though, I found that I, and other Indigenous staff in the sector, faced the exact same issues the students were facing. Universities remained somewhat hostile environments for Indigenous people. They excluded via preferred knowledges, via preferred life experiences to gain entry and remain in the institution, via their sheer elitism as places of educational excellence. In addition, as a woman I found continually that whilst we made up the majority of the university staff, we rarely held the top positions and therefore women were continually excluded from the highest level of decision making within the institution. Women’s and Gender Studies departments were continually under threat, and sadly, a good many of them ended up scaled down or even closed. The ability to cast a gender lens over existing subjects and topics was being continually diminished within the sector.

I was always a unionist and the opportunity to draw on the collectivism provided within an organised union structure to try and achieve equity for Indigenous people on campus was the main reason for me becoming more active. It is much easier to achieve equity when you have a collective of workers willing to stand alongside you. Becoming active at a branch level eventually led to me earning the job I am currently in. Since I started here three years ago, we have run Indigenous members surveys on their experiences of racism, discrimination, cultural respect and lateral violence in the academy. The results were shocking, although unfortunately not surprising, with a vast majority stating that they had experienced these issues within the sector. I am also a member of the Women’s Action Committee of the NTEU and our Indigenous membership just happens to be 70% female. I was able to cast a gender lens over the members’ survey data and I concluded that the intersecting forms of oppression – gender and race – were contributing to the high rates of racism and discrimination our members were facing. I also highlighted that lateral violence, a phenomenon initially highlighted within the women’s movement in the field of nursing, was even more prevalent in Indigenous communities due to intersecting forms of oppression. Essentially, our Indigenous female staff were at the coal face and therefore had much experience to draw on to benefit all working women.

I believe unions are important because they are the voice of the workers, and the more that women and Indigenous people get involved, the more that this voice reflects our needs within the sector and can therefore push for change.

MM: You are the National Indigenous Organiser for the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU). In an article published by Crikey focusing on Aboriginal Australians and their personal identity, you describe your experiences of working in an “identified role” and acknowledge the advantages that come with undertaking such a position.  You also identify issues which come with such roles such a patronising assumptions regarding Indigenous applicants’ competence. You write that “The Indigenisation of workplaces is still very much a work-in-progress.” In your experience, what is the transformative potential of identified roles in increasing community cohesion and improving Indigenous access to tertiary education?

CL: Identified roles acknowledge that there is a specific expertise and life experience that an Indigenous person will bring to that role. They acknowledge that this life experience leads to a better cultural understanding than most non-Indigenous people will have, and they also acknowledge that sometimes there is a need to have an Indigenous voice in an organisation in order to better communicate with broader Indigenous communities. More than anything, they make a statement that universities want to address disparities and see Indigenous employment as an important first step to achieving this.

As also mentioned earlier, one of the things I have continually found is that Indigenous student numbers are almost always directly proportionate to Indigenous staff numbers, so if universities wish to increase their student loads then it is in their interest to have proper Indigenous employment programmes in place. Indigenous people serving at many different levels, and in many different areas of a university means that existing structures get challenged. Universities have to become more inclusive to ensure that they are retaining those staff and students. In the past, a lot of this engagement has been tokenistic, where universities bring in guest lecturers for specific purposes. When there is an ongoing commitment by Universities to employ Indigenous people and recognise the unique skill sets they bring to a university, then this offensive tokenism is reduced and Indigenous knowledges can become core university business. Which is the way it should be in this country.

MM: In the panel discussion preceding the Australian federal elections published in The Guardian, you argue that “the Indigenous vote is of little importance to the major parties” and you identify a lack of diverse Indigenous policy and engagement. Considering Australia’s election results, the current political climate and discourses on minorities, what are some of the future challenges the country faces in terms of achieving equality?

CL: To start on a very cynical note, the new Prime Minister has already defunded an expert Indigenous educational panel, and has installed a new Indigenous Advisory Committee (IAC). This IAC is chaired by a person of the Prime Minister’s selection. So on one hand, we’ve lost yet another autonomous voice, and on the other, we’ve gained a committee that will be completely regulated by the government. Our Indigenous leadership has continually been chosen for us, particularly since the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) was dissolved, and this government looks to be taking this even further. We don’t have designated seats in parliament, we don’t have autonomous Indigenous elections for our political leaders and we don’t always get a say in what our important issues actually are.

What’s even scarier though is at this point the major parties seem to almost agree with each other on Indigenous issues. Indigenous people, whilst always political, are more disillusioned with a system where this agreement between major parties occurs. It means that our own debate is politically stunted. Take the recent push for Constitutional Recognition. There are many grassroots Indigenous groups opposed to this move because they fear that being written into the Australian Constitution will negate our claim as sovereign peoples of this land and therefore the ability to negotiate a treaty. Yet both major parties are stating that being recognised in the Constitution is important for Indigenous people and there is a huge campaign in full swing at this moment selling the idea to the public with the hope that when this question goes to referendum, it gets passed. How can voting Australians make an informed decision on this issue when many are not even aware that there is a debate occurring due to major party agreement?

So what I am most fearful of is that in 2013 we still have almost no autonomy. Our voting power is 2.5% of the population and we therefore don’t have the opportunity to use the current system as it stands to further our causes. We do not get to define our own issues in any comprehensive way politically, nor do we have much say in the policies that affect our lives and the lives of our families. We are still spoken for most of the time, and Australia will never be a place of true equality for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people whilst this continues.

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