Postcolonial/Decolonial/Anticolonial Theories in Translation

In a colonial situation where the oppressed are denied an “enunciatory position” from which they could articulate their own historicity (Spivak), the improbable task of restoring this voice could only be accomplished through a meticulous analysis of the traces, distortions, and silences inscribed in the dominant discourses themselves, whose legitimacy and prescriptive power would thus be called into question.

—Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Rossana Barragán, Debates Postcoloniales: una introducción a los Estudios de la Subalternidad

What happens when the colonizers officially leave but their systems remain? “Postcolonial” refers to a geopolitical and corporeal situation that follows explicit colonial domination. This domination gives way to the formation of independent nation-states on the part of “former” colonies. Mechanisms of colonial domination, however, persist, continuing to operate through hidden or unconscious processes at both institutional and everyday levels. The end of formal empire does not mark the end of colonial power; it merely metamorphosizes into new forms.

From academic and activist spheres, thinkers have experimented with ways to reverse and respond to this repressive system, generating a body of active thought that questions both the hegemonic historical narrative and current forms of colonialism. Within this panorama, approaches positioned as postcolonial, neocolonial, decolonial, anticolonial, and autocolonial have emerged, along with terms like “coloniality” and “the colonial unconscious.” Each of these positions represents a specific way of narrating the historical and contemporary forms of this global system, emphasizing, for example, the structural condition of the colonial system (coloniality), the ways in can be dismantled (decolonial), and opposition to it (anticolonial). The central question emerges: How do postcolonial, decolonial, and anticolonial theories get translated, transformed, and sometimes betrayed when they encounter the constraints of cultural institutions?  

We can identity at least three cores of thought on the colonial, each implying a distinct narrative of origin: one written in English, another in French, and a final one in Spanish. The first emerged from South Asian scholars who were part of the Subaltern Studies Group (SSG), founded in the 1980s by historian Ranajit Guha. Based since the early 1950s in Great Britain—which was dealing with migrant aftershocks following the end of its great empire—Guha revived the Gramscian term “subalternity,” which the Italian thinker had developed in his Prison Notebooks. Despite the reference to a European thinker, the SSG, made up of intellectuals from different countries, opposed narratives based on both Eurocentric thinking and South Asian national elites, proposing instead a history “written from below.”1

Among SSG’s members, the scholar Gayatri Spivak stands out. Her work was first translated into Spanish in 1997 by Bolivian feminists Rossana Barragán and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui. In Spain it was first translated for the 1999 book Feminismos Literarios, edited by Neus Carbonell and Meri Torras. Her most recognized essay—“Can the Subaltern Speak?” originally published in 19852—was a response to French poststructuralism, employing a contemporary academic language that sought validity by using the same signifiers of the European university that it critiqued.

Spivak situated herself within an expanded literary criticism that has both interpreted and questioned Gramsci’s work, while also engaging with Derridean deconstruction and introducing geopolitical and feminist perspectives. Her concept of “strategic essentialism” has spread globally as an enunciative strategy for entering and exiting hegemonic discursive systems of race, class, and gender.3 Perhaps the lingering question in this debate is to whom the subaltern can speak, or with whom it wants to speak—that is, which interlocutors we/they consider valid to engage with for critical dialogue.

Spivak’s thought—as well as that of white authors like Donna Haraway, validated by Anglophone academia—draws on currents of Black and Chicano feminist thought that developed in the United States during the 1970s and ’80s. In the eighties, Audre Lorde and Gloria Anzaldúa—who spoke of the “open wound” of colonialism—stood out as key figures in understanding situated and strategic knowledge in terms of sexual and racial dissidences. These were radicalized women who embodied theory rooted in their colonial wound and their lived experience. Something comparable, at least in terms of embodiment, occurs with the anticolonial thought developed by African thinkers and writers such as Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Cheikh Anta Diop, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o.

While Anglophone postcolonial criticism was founded on the living memory of English colonialism in India and on racial conflicts in the United States, the French case emerged from the négritude movement of the Antilles, many of whose islands remain European or American colonies today, such as Martinique4 and Puerto Rico. Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant, and Aimé Césaire, among others, generated radical anticolonial critique directed not only at forms of oppression exercised by white privilege, but also at processes of self-colonialism among racialized subjects. This was evident, for example, in Fanon’s book Black Skin, White Masks.

Fanon’s thinking, like that of the others mentioned, didn’t stem from mere theoretical impulse, but—as was the case in India and the United States—from the lived experience of colonialism and racism. In his case, this was related to French troops stationed in Martinique during World War II, which led him to fight in the Algerian War for independence. Fanon has significantly influenced African thought, reaching the present day though authors such as Achille Mbembe. Glissant proposes a “poetics of diversity” that highlights forms of dialogue between different spaces and modes of expression, promoting peripheral, local frameworks that also think in global terms.5

This undoubtedly connects with traditions of thought developed in Latin America. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui—who coedited with Barragán the 1997 translation of An Introduction to Subaltern Studies, as a gesture of South-South dialogue—put forth the possibility of conceiving the globe through Andean experience. This experience is reconstructed not only from the barbarities of colonialism but also from forms of resistance that have survived, hidden, in an ambivalent, unresolved system of permanent tension that the author refers to in Aymara as “ch’ixi.”

Since her activism in the Katarista movement of the 1970s and the subsequent founding of the Taller de Historia Oral Andina in the 1980s, Rivera Cusicanqui has been a key agent of rebellion against academic norms. She seeks to generate a situated mode of thinking that is committed to reinventing the long memory of colonialism. In books like Ch’ixinakax Utxiwa: A Reflection on Decolonizing Practices and Discourses6 she seeks to recover a key response to early Spanish colonialism developed by Felipe Guamán Puma de Ayala. At the beginning of the seventeenth century Puma de Ayala wrote The First New Chronicle and Good Government, a thousand-page letter that the “mestizo” sent to King Philip III of Spain. It was lost in transit and only came to light in the early twentieth century when it appeared in Denmark’s Royal Library in Copenhagen.

Sharing a spirit with Rivera Cusicanqui’s work, two research groups dedicated to decolonization were founded in Latin America in the 1990s. The Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, formed in 1993, took up the premise of its Indian namesake. The Modernity/Coloniality Group, formed in 1998, comprised largely male intellectuals such as Walter Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano, Arturo Escobar, and Enrique Dussel. Beginning in the 1960s, Dussel had posited a critique of Westernism and the persistence colonialism in his book Philosophy of Liberation.7 Since then, he has articulated a counter-history to the history of Western philosophy, proposing to dismantle the foundations of European thought, whose origins lie—according to German Romanticism—in the logocentric myth of ancient Greece.

Similarly, this line of thinking has sought to philosophically reframe modernity’s origins as they relation to Spanish colonialism. The so-called Valladolid Debate, for example, focused on modernity’s founding element: the status of humanity. However, these approaches have erred in that they have produced a geopolitical reconstruction that ignores intersectional perspectives on how heteropatriarchy operates within the logic of colonial domination—perspectives advanced by authors such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins, Angela Davis, and bell hooks, along with Latin American and Caribbean decolonial feminists like Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, Ochy Curiel, and Carmen Cariño Trujillo.

Spain’s engagement with post/de/anticolonial theories has revealed tensions between academic discourse and artistic practice, as embodied theories meet institutional realities, tokenism, and appropriation.

The first text by the Indian theorist Homi Bhabha translated in Spain, “The Postmodern and the Postcolonial,” appeared in the catalog of the European conceptual art exhibition “No Man’s Land,” part of the Universal Exposition in Seville. This expo took place in 1992, the five-hundredth anniversary of the conquest of the Americas, which was the advent of the modern and global configuration of the European imperial system. The anniversary revealed how cultural institutions simultaneously acknowledge and sanitize colonial history.

Since then, a process of transference has occurred, at least in the sociological sphere and in artistic and curatorial practices. In the former, Heriberto Cairo initiated debates on colonial history at the Complutense University of Madrid through academic gatherings, such as the one culminating in the publication Decolonizing Modernity, Decolonizing Europe,8 which introduced decolonial authors like Nelson Maldonado-Torres, along with the aforementioned Dussel and Mignolo.

A key figure in conceiving this gathering was Ramón Grosfoguel. This Puerto Rican academic at the University of California Berkeley was also the seed from which grew the Decolonialidad Europa network, which held its first meeting in Madrid in 2012 and was composed of activists and researchers dedicated to racial and colonial issues. Grosfoguel also promoted the “Decolonizing Knowledge and Power: Postcolonial Studies, Decolonial Horizons” summer schools in Barcelona and Granada, affiliated with the Center of Study and Investigation for Decolonial Dialogues.

With regard to the artistic sphere, a limited number of significant projects have brought the issue of colonial history to the foreground—a problem still prevalent in contemporary Spain, even though it is virtually nonexistent in academic publications.9 In the creative sphere, artists such as Rogelio López Cuenca, Elo Vega, Miguel Benlloch, Lucía Egaña, and Daniela Ortiz have emphasized local critiques of Spanish colonial memory from the differing perspectives of migrant artists and Spaniards.

Inca Accountant (Collca = Warehouse) with Khipu, According to Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, 1613.