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Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of
Self-KnowledgeVolume 5Issue 1 Othering Islam Article 3
9-23-2006
Islamophobia/Hispanophobia: The (Re)Conguration of the Racial
Imperial/ColonialMatrixWalter D. MignoloDuke University,
[email protected]
Follow this and additional works at:
http://scholarworks.umb.edu/humanarchitecturePart of the Chicano
Studies Commons, and the Islamic World and Near East History
Commons
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by
ScholarWorks at UMass Boston. It has been accepted for inclusion in
Human Architecture:Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge by an
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information, please [email protected].
Recommended CitationMignolo, Walter D. (2006)
"Islamophobia/Hispanophobia: The (Re) Conguration of the Racial
Imperial/Colonial Matrix," HumanArchitecture: Journal of the
Sociology of Self-Knowledge: Vol. 5: Iss. 1, Article 3.Available
at: http://scholarworks.umb.edu/humanarchitecture/vol5/iss1/3
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Okcir Press). All Rights Reserved.
HUMAN ARCHITECTURE
Journal of the Sociology of Self-
A Publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative
Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics)
I
We have been invoked to respond to theincreasing culture of fear
and rejection of the
specter of Islam that unfolded in recent yearsmainly in Europe
and the U.S., but also in theRussian Federationthat is to say, in
the re-gions of the world where the so-calledJudeo-Christian spirit
is entrenched in the
Walter D. Mignolo is William H. Wannamaker Professor and
Director for the Center of Global Studies and the Humanitiesat Duke
University. He is an active member of the project
modernity/coloniality/decoloniality and has been exploring
thedecolonial option as an epistemic and political avenue to
overcome the limits of modern and Western epistemologyfounded in
the Greco-Latin legacies and Western Christianity and its
reincarnation in Secular philosophy and sciences.Among his recent
publications: The Idea of Latin America (2005), received the Frantz
Fanon Award from the CaribbeanPhilosophical Association in 2006.
Co-editor with Madina Tlostanova of Double Critique: Knowledge and
Scholars at Risk inthe Post-Socialist World (2006). In
collaboration with Arturo Escobar, Globalization and the Decolonial
Option (2007). Co-editedwith Margaret Greer and Maureen Quilligan,
The Black Legend. Discourses of Race in the European Renaissance
(2007).
Islamophobia/HispanophobiaThe (Re) Configuration of the
Racial
Imperial/Colonial Matrix
Walter D. Mignolo
Duke University
[email protected]
Abstract: There are enormous historical and social differences
in the imperial making of Islamo-phobiathe fear and the hatred
toward a powerful and widespread religionand Hispanopho-biathe fear
and hatred toward secular subaltern forces with mixed religious
beliefs thatemerged in the seventies in the U.S. without the
extended political connections or support fromLatin America. We
need to understand how the imperial imaginary constructs phobias in
themind of civil society, but at the same time be aware that on the
other side of the imperial/colo-nial phobias potent de-colonial
forces are at work, among Moslems and within Hispanics in theU.S.,
and Indians and Afros in South America (or the Latin America of the
white population fromEuropean descent). There are enormous
differences, but we have overcome the belief in
abstractuniversalism and that the proletariat or the multitude will
provide one single solution for thewretched of the earth. It so
happens that the wretched of the earth know that if they are
proletar-ian or part of the multitude, they are also
imperial/colonial wretched, that is, racialized beingsbeings marked
by the colonial wound, that is to say, the lower rank in the human
scale of beingthat, built by Christian theology during the
Renaissance, were reactivated and maintained bysecular philosophy
during and after the Enlightenment. Islamophobia and Hispanophobia,
itseems to me, are entrenched in the colonial horizon of modernity.
However, de-colonial projectsare at work, all over the world.
Unveiling and uncovering the imperial foundations and
repro-ductions of phobias (Islamic or Hispanic) are ways of
de-colonizing (and de-naturalizing) whatimperial rationality
convinced us to be real, and that the real is accountable by only
one rational-ity. The racial matrix holding together the
modern/colonial worldmatrix is unfolding andupdated in what we are
witnessing today as Islamophobia and Hispanophobia.
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government and in the media. There is noneed to review the
transformation of subjec-tivities and social consciousness in the
Westwhere Islamophobia has been mainly locat-ed after 9/11.
Literature, the mainstream me-dia, independent media, etc., have
respond-ed profusely to the event. Islamophobia inthe Russian
Federation, however, is notnourished so much by the collapse of
thetwin towers but by the conflict with Chech-nya that, of course,
precedes 9/11. We havehere the traces of two interrelated and at
thesame time singular histories. And we shalltreat them in their
singularity rather than tosubsume Islamophobia in Russia to a
uni-versal Western history. Both histories, how-everas in that of
Christianity, i.e., WesternChristians (Catholics and Protestants)
andEastern Orthodox Christianity in Russiahave a common origin and
a moment of di-vergence. Although I am not familiar withthe
particularities of Islamophobia in theRussian Federation,
1
I think it is importantto have it in mind to avoid the mirage
thatwhat happens in the West (that is, WesternEurope and the U.S.)
happens all over theworld. Another approach would be to takeinto
account Islamophobia in South Asia andin East Asia, where
Christianity made in-roads but is not the dominant religion. I
will
limit my observation, however, to the localeswhere Christianity
became increasingly hos-tile to Islam at the same time that it
increasedits complicity with Judaism and with theState of
Israel.
In the United States, the specter of Islamat a global scale has
been accompanied bythe rising specter of Hispanophobia.
Inter-estingly enough, Samuel Huntington hasbeen the ideologue that
connected both intwo influential books timely published. Thefirst
one, that is more well-known,
The Clashof Civilizations
(1995), was published afterthe collapse of the Soviet Union. The
secondone,
Who Are We
?
The Challenges of AmericasNational Identity
(2004), was published after9/11 which gave the U.S. an excuse to
inten-sify the politics of national security. A chap-ter of
Huntingtons second book was pre-published with the title The
Hispanic Chal-lenge. How are these two historical se-quences and
social imaginaries linked in theimperial global designs? Neither of
the twohistorical sequences and social imaginariesare objective or
natural happenings butinvented and placed in a map of global
de-signs. How then does the Western imperialimaginary manage to
connect Islamophobiaand Hispanophobia as a challenge (or athreat?)
to the West and to the U.S. respec-tively? I suggest some answers
to thesequestions in the following pages.
II
There is a common history that linksWestern and Eastern
Christians. The divi-sion between Rome and Constantinople, be-tween
Western and Eastern Christians, iswell known in the history of
Christianity.Eastern Christianity unfolded collectively inGreece,
the Balkans, and Eastern Europe.Western Christians (or Christendom)
werelocated in the territory that eventually be-came secular
Europe. The differences be-tween both were based on languages,
theo-logical principles, and political projects. Re-ligious
divisions and distinctions were
1
See Madina Tlostanova in this volume.Originally printed in
Trans-Cultural Trickstersin Between Empires: Eurasian Islamic
Border-lands in Modernity. In
Culture of the Differencein Eurasia: Azerbaijan-Past and Present
in the Dia-logue of Civilizations
. Baku, April 19-21, 2006,Texts the Reference. Academie de la
Latinit.Edit by Candido Mendes. Rio Janeiro:UNESCO/Universidade
Candido Mndes,2006, 217-253. Also relevant for my argumenthere is
her Post-Socialist Eurasia in Civilizationof Fear:
Another
Christianity and
Another
Islam,in
Hegmonie et Civilisation de la Peur.
9eme Col-loque International, Academie de la Latinit.
Al-exandria, Avriel 13-17, 2004. Textes de Referenceedite par
Candido Mndes. Rio de Janeiro:Unesco/Universidad Cndido Mndes,
2004,389-412. Much of what I say here about historiesand cultures
in Russia/Soviet Union, its colo-nies and relationships with
Western capitalistempires, I owe to other publications and
person-al conversations with Madina Tlostanova.
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complemented by ethnicity. The Slavic peo-ples are defined by
their linguistic attain-ment of the Slavic languages. They
inhabit-edsince the 6th century, about a centurybefore the
emergence of Islamwhat is to-day Central Europe, Eastern Europe,
andthe Balkans, while in the West Latin lan-guage became the
trademark of Christianityand inhabitants ethnicity. Anglo-Saxons
oc-cupied the territories to the west of Slavicpeoples. For the
people inhabiting thenortheast of the Mediterranean Sea (fromGreece
to Spain) there is not a single namebut several: Hispania, Gaul,
Italia (originallyVitalia). Thus, Western and Eastern Chris-tians
in religion and the variegated ethnici-ties that embraced
Christianity in its variousEastern and Western versions all
confrontedthe other religions of the book, Judaism andIslam.
Wide ranges of both Islamic and Chris-tian traditions defined a
variety of interrela-tions, conflicts, and cooperations in the
longstretch from India, to Central Asia, the Cau-casus, Eastern and
Western Europe, wherepeople of Islamic or Christian beliefs,
per-suasions, and institutions interacted. Allthat began to change,
radically, toward theend of the fifteenth century and the
begin-ning of the sixteenth century. That changewas introduced by
Western Christians ex-
pulsion of the Muslims from the lands ofChristendom in Garnhata
in 1492. This sin-gular event did not affect, immediately, thewide
range of relations between Christianand Muslims from Spain to
Central Asia andIndia. There was no CNN at the time to
havesimultaneous coverage of the immediateconsequences of the
events, as there was nophotographer in Granada at the very mo-ment
that Christians raised the flag over theAlhambra!
The conflict between Christianity andIslam became more focused
in the IberianPeninsula. The rapid rise of Castile from aKingdom to
a world and capitalist empirere-mapped the long history of
conflicts be-tween Muslims and Christians. It is to thisradical
qualitative transformation that wemust turn our attention.
III
Tariq Alis opening of
The Shadows of thePomegranate Tree
1
describes a week in earlyDecember of 1499, when Cardinal
Franciscode Cisneros gathered in his house, in Toledo,a group of
selected knights. A few days afterthat meeting, the knights with a
few dozensof soldiers began the ride to Garnhata.
1
London: Verso, 1993.
Source: The March of the Titans: A History of the White Race.
Chapter 23 (http://www.stormfront.org/whitehistory/hwr23.htm). The
preface reads, The invasion of Western Europe by a non-White
Muslimarmy after 711 AD, very nearly extinguished modern White
Europecertainly the threat was no less se-rious than the Hunnish
invasion which had earlier created so much chaos. While the Huns
were Asiatics,the Moors were a mixed race invasionpart Arabic, part
Black and part mixed race, always easily distin-guishable from the
Visigothic Whites of Spain.
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When the knights and soldiers arrived, theyentered into the
houses of the Muslim elitesand confiscated their libraries. The
next stepwas to make a pile of books in the centralplaza except, as
Cardinal Cisneros ordered,a few books on medicine, astrology and
ar-chitecture. At the end of the day, when allthe books were piled
up, one of the soldiersignited the fire. Toward the end of the
open-ing chapter, the story is told of a beggar whojumps into the
pile and immolates himself.What is life without knowledge are
hislast words. The opening chapter closes withCardinal Cisneros
walking around the ashesand celebrating the final victory.
The novel tells the story of the increas-ing persecution of
Muslim families in thefollowing two decades. An additional aspectof
the narrative relevant for my argument isone of the final chapters
of the novel when anew character is introduced. An
unnamed,red-headed, young and merciless Capitanleads one of the
most violent scenes at thisend to the novel, when the last Moors
are ex-pelled. The unnamed Capitan is describedas a rootless
soldier at the service of Carde-nal Cisneros. The novel does not
end hereand has a closing chapter, parallel to andsymmetric with
the opening one. In the clos-ing chapter we find that the rootless
Capitanis someplace else several years later, nolonger in Garnhata,
walking through hills ofthick vegetation. He is not walking
alone.An unnamed local guide is accompanyinghim. They stop at some
point at the top of ahill, looking down and in admiration of
thespectacle of an urban center, a majestic citybuilt over and
surrounded by water. Doyou know the name of this fabulous place?the
Capitan asks his assistant. The city isnamed Tenochtitlan and its
King is Mocte-zuma It is a very rich nation, CapitanCorts
(Epilogue, 244), says the local guide.
Tariq Ali underlines, at the beginningand end of the novel, a
structural and heter-ogeneous moment of history setting thestage
for the foundation of the modern/co-lonial racial matrix.
Islamophobia today, Icontend, is the accumulation of meaning in
building the rhetoric of modernity, from theexpulsion of the
Moors to the war in Iraqand the conflict with Iran. Isnt this too
bigof a claim, you may be wondering? Howev-er, and paradoxically,
the end of the novelpre-announces what cannot be predicted atthat
point: the emergence of Hispanophobiafive hundred years later. Lets
see.
1.
In the sixteenth century, Christian theol-ogy offered a frame
and a conception of
thehuman
that took a particular turn in relationto co-existing
civilizations (often called em-pires), like the Mughal and the
Ottoman Sul-tanates, the Russian Tzarate, or the Incanatein the New
World. Christian theologicalclassification overruled, with time,
all theothers and served as the basic structure forthe secular
classification of races in the late18
th
and 19
th
centuries.In 1526, shortly after Charles I of Castile
and V of the Holy Roman Empire came topower, Babar (one of the
descendents ofGenghis Khan) was on the road toward thefoundation of
the so-called Mughal Sultan-ate. His son Akbar was the Sultan of
the Mu-ghal Empire from 1556 to 1605, during al-most the same years
that Elizabeth I reignedin England and Philip II, son of Charles
V,reigned in Spain (1556-1598). Suleiman theMagnificent extended
his period of domi-nance and the preeminence of the
OttomanSultanate (1520-1566), co-existing with thereign of Charles
as Holy Roman Emperor(1519-1558) and King of Spain
(1516-1556).While the Mughal and Ottoman Sultanatesco-existed
during the sixteenth century withthe emerging Spanish Empire, the
Incanatein Tawantinsuyu and the Tlatoanate inAnahuac were
destroyedthe formeraround 1548, twelve years after FranciscoPizarro
set foot in the lands of Tawantin-suyu, and the latter in 1520, a
few years afterHernn Cortsthe merciless red-headCapitanmoved from
the coast of Veracruzto Tlaxcala and finally to Mexico
Tenochtit-
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lan. Last but not least, the Russian Tzaratewas on its way to
imperial expansion, afterMoscow was declared the Third Romearound
1520 and Muscovite Russia endedtheir tributary dependence with the
GoldenHorde.
Thus, the point of departure of my argu-ment is that current
debates about whetherrace is an eighteenth- and nineteenth-cen-tury
discourse, or whether in the sixteenthcentury caste was the proper
system ofclassification, both assume that the classifi-cations
concocted by Renaissance men ofletters or Enlightenment
philosophieswere universal. My point of departure isthat the system
of classification and hierar-chies during the Renaissance or during
theEnlightenment was a local one in this pre-cise sense: people in
India, China, Ottoman,Tawantinsuyu, Anahuac, etc., certainly
werepart of the classification but none of them,except Christian
theologians, had any say inthe classification. The only possibility
tothose who did not participate in the imperialorganization of
knowledge was either to ac-cept how they were classified or to
reclassifythemselves for their own pride but with lit-tle effect on
the organization of world powerthat was at stake. Let me
explain.
Discourses of difference in the Europe-an Renaissance went hand
in hand with dis-courses of fear.
1
There is plenty of evidenceabout Christians in Spain but also in
En-gland. British travelers to the Hapsburg orAustro-Hungarian
Empires expressed theirstrangeness and the discomfort vis--vis
theTurks. The European Renaissance could betaken as a reference
period in which severalempires (a general name extended afterthe
name of the Roman Emperor instead, for
example, of Sultan or Tzar) coexisted; al-though the discourses
of Christianity andlater on of political theory and
politicaleconomy emerged as the dominant imperialdiscourses of
Western capitalist empires.Racism went hand in hand with the
histori-cal foundation of capitalism as we know ittoday.
Take the Black Legend as a good andearly example of the
propagation of theMuslim menace from the Iberian Peninsu-la to the
Atlantic countries, north of thePyrenees. The Black Legend is,
first andforemost, an internal conflict in Europe andfor that
reason I will describe it as the impe-rial internal difference. But
the Black Leg-end, initiated and propelled by England,shared with
the Spaniards the Christian cos-mology that distinguished itself
from theMuslim, the Turks and the Russian Ortho-dox. That is, the
Black Legend contributed tothe reinforcement of an imperial divide
thatwas already carried out by the SpanishKingdom of Charles I and
the Spanish Em-pire under Philip II.
We all know it: in1492, the Moors andthe Jews were prosecuted in
the Iberian Pen-insula; Indians were discovered in theNew World and
massive contingents of Af-rican slaves were transported through
theAtlantic. The discovery of the New Worldposed a different
problem for WesternChristians dealing with Muslims, Jews andTurks:
if Jews and Moors were classified ac-cording to their belief in the
wrong God, In-dians (and later on Black Africans), had to
beclassified assuming that they had no reli-gions. Thus, the
question of purity ofblood acquired in the New World a mean-ing
totally different from the one it had inthe Iberian Peninsula.
Nonetheless, the factremains that with the double expulsion ofMoors
and Jews from the Iberian Peninsula,the New World brought a
different dimen-sion to the classificatory and hierarchicalsystem.
While in Spain Jews and Muslimsidentified themselves with those
racializedlabels, there were no Indians in the NewWorld. To become
Indian was a long and
1
The fundamental fear we are witnessingand experiencing today, is
the latest manifesta-tion of five hundred years logic of
coloniality:defending the sites of power be it Christianity orthe
West. On current production of fear see Bob-by S. Sayyind,
A Fundamental Fear. Eurocentrismand the Emergence of
Islamism
. London/NewYork: Zed Books, 1997 and Corey Robin,
Fear.The History of a Political Idea.
London: Oxford,2004.
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painful process for the diversity of peoples,the diversity of
languages, and the diversityof memories and rituals from todays
South-ern Chile to Canada. And there were noBlacks either. Africans
transported to theNew World from different regions of thecontinent
had different languages, memo-ries and religions, but now all of
them be-came Blacks in the New World. In otherwords, whatever the
system of classificationin the Iberian Peninsula and in the
NewWorld, that system of classification was con-trolled by
Christian Theology as the over-arching and hegemonic frame of
knowl-edge. Neither the Turks, nor the Mughal,nor the Christian
Orthodox in Russia hadany say in iteven less, of course, Indiansand
Blacks.
Lets take a closer look at this first draw-ing of the sixteenth
century scenario in theMediterranean and in the Atlantic.
Threefoundational articles for the logic of the ar-ticulation of
race into racism at the endof the fifteenth and during the
sixteenth cen-tury are: Anibal Quijanos seminal article
in-troducing the concept of coloniality; (1992);Sylvia Wynters
(1992); and the joint articleby Anibal Quijano and Immanuel
Waller-stein (1992).
1
These three articles have shift-ed radically the perspective and
conceptual-ization of race/racism from the internal his-tory of
European modernity (Foucault) tothe interrelated histories of
modernity/colo-niality. Several common assumptions in allthree
arguments are: (a) the conceptual re-configuration of previous
mutual conceptu-alizations between Christians, Moors andJews; (b)
the new configuration betweenChristians, Indians and Blacks in the
NewWorld; (c) the interrelations between (a) and(b); andlast but
not least(d) the transla-tion of race into racism that took place
in thesixteenth century that was (and still is)strictly related to
the historical foundationof capitalism. The link between capital
accu-mulation and a discourse of devaluation ofhuman beings was
absent in co-existing six-teenth centuries empires like the
Mughal,the Ottoman, the Aztec, the Inca, the Chi-
nese and the emerging Russian one. Thecomplicity between
political economy andpolitical theory, based on the racialization
ofhuman beings, languages, places, cultures,memories, knowledge,
etc., is what charac-terizes modernity/colonialitythat is, theWest
and Eurocentrism. This was the nov-elty of the sixteenth century
and the histor-ical foundation of the racial colonial matrixwhose
logic is still at work today. The con-tent has been changing but
the logic remainsquite the same. The Black Legend should
beunderstood in this scenario as the historicalfoundation of a mild
form of racism amongEuropean Christians and the North-Southdivide
in Europe itself. But lets first explainthe translation of race
into racism and thehistorical foundation of
modernity/coloni-ality.
Race was a concept that referred to alineage, particularly
applied to horses.Horses had, in Arabic history, a distinctionthey
did not have among Christians. Thus,the fact that in Spanish
dictionaries horsesbecame the primary example of lineageand still
today, pure blood is an expres-sion applied to horses with
distinction that
1
Colonialidad y Modernidad/Racional-idad. En
Peru Indigena
, Vol. 13, No. 29, pp. 11-20. Lima, Per. Reproducido en Heraclio
Bonilla(comp.):
Los Conquistados
. Flacso-Tercer Mun-do, Bogot, 1992. En Ingls Coloniality and
Mo-dernity/Rationality. En Goran Therborn, ed.
Globalizations And Modernities
. FRN, 1999. Stock-holm, Sweden; with Immanuel
Wallerstein;Americanity as a concept. Or The Americas inthe Modern
World-System, in
InternationalJournal Of Social Sciences
, No. 134, Nov. 1992,UNESCO, Pars, Francia. Discutido en el
Simpo-sio Mundial por el 5000. Aniversario de Amri-ca, organizado
por UNESCO en Pars, enOctubre de 1992, ha sido traducido a todos
losidiomas de Africa, Asia, Europa y del MedioOriente, que forman
parte del conjunto de idio-mas de las Naciones Unidas; French
translation,De lAmericanite comme concept, ou les Ame-riques dans
le systeme mondial moderne. InLes Ameriques: 1492-1992
. Revue Internationaledes Sciences Sociales
, No. 134, pp. 617-627, No-vembre. Paris, France; Sylvia Wynter
1492: aNew WorldView:;
(http://muweb.millers-ville.edu/~columbus/data/ant/WYNTER01.ANT).
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invaded the vocabulary in English andSpanish [pura sangre
inglesa, pura sangreespaola)is telling about the fact that ani-mals
were classified by race and peopleby ethnicity (Greek
nous
, Latin
natio)
.Ethnicity refers to a lineage of people forwhom blood is not
the only factor (and Iwonder when blood became a crucial factorto
redefine ethnicity), but rather memoriesand common histories,
languages, rituals,everyday practices, food, songs and musicwere
elements connecting a community ofpeople through history. However,
whenSpanish Christians defined race on the ex-ample of horses and
added the slippage to-ward the human (
Race in [human] lineages isunderstood pejoratively
, as having someMoorish or Jewish race),
they planted theseed for the historical foundation of racism
.
Rac-ism, in other words, is not a question ofblood or skin color
but of a discursive classi-fication entrenched in the foundation
ofmodern/colonial (and capitalist) empires.
Race in the famous Spanish dictio-nary by Sebastian de
Covarrubias, is synon-ymous with blood and implied religion;that
is, the
wrong
religion. In the New Worldthe situation was different. There
were nopeople of the book. Christopher Columbussurmised that the
people he met in the Car-ibbean were people with no religions.
Lateron, Spanish missionaries in the powerfulInca and Aztec empires
had difficulties infiguring out what kind of religions werethose
that were so different from the threereligions of the book they
were so used to.They decided that indeed people in theTawantinsuyu
and Anahuac lived in spiritu-al idolatry and under guidance of the
Devil.They assigned themselves the task of extir-pating idolatry.
Indians, therefore, were castaside and placed in a different
category fromJews and Moors. Thus, while in the IberianPeninsula
conversos and moriscos des-ignated ex-Jews and ex-Moors converted
toChristianity, in the New World the termmestizo was coined to
identify an emerg-ing population of mixed blood, Spanish(and
Portuguese) and Indian. In the process,
Blacks in the New World lost their Euro-pean identification and
relationship withthe Moors. In fact, Moor was the identifica-tion
of indigenous nomadic Berber people inNorth Africa that were
converted to Islamaround the 7
th
century. It came to meanMuslim people from Berber and Arab
de-scent. The name itself, as is well known,comes from the Kingdom
of Mauri (Mauri-tania), a province in the Roman Empire lo-cated in
what is today North Africa andmore specifically Morocco. Since the
Mauriwere dark-skinned people from Africa,Moor was extended to
African populationsbeyond the North of Africa. As Fuche pointsout,
in the growing vocabulary of the BlackLegend, Spaniards were
sometimes pejora-tively designated as Moors and as
Black.Shakespeares Moor of Venice is indeed aBlack person, a
blackamoor (type thisword in Google and click on
http://imag-eevent.com/bluboi/blackamoors, and youwill understand
what I mean).
1
Detachedfrom that memory, Blacks in the New Worldbecame for
European Christians (from theSpaniards to the British), relegated
to sla-very and as slaves their memories and spir-itual belongings
were not taken into ac-count. In the New World, Blacks were
notMoors but Ethiopians.
2 In the Spanish andPortuguese colonies a new word
wascoinedmulatto/ato designate peopleof new breed, a mixture of
Spanish andBlack.
1 In England, and in Shakespeare, the mean-ing of Moor was far
from being precise. SeeEmily C. Bartelss Making More of the
Moor:Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashioningsof Race in
Shakespeare Quarterly. 41.4 (1990):433-452.
2 Alonso de Sandovala Creole in the Vice-royalty of Nueva
Granada (today Colombia andVenezuela) published during the first
half of theseventeenth century, De instauranda Aethiopu sa-lute:
Naturaleza, policia sagrada i profana, costum-bres i ritos,
disciplina i catechismo evangelico detodos etiopes (1627, 1647). I
owe this informationto Eduardo Restrepo (a graduate student in
An-thropology at UNC, writing his dissertation onthis work). For a
general overview of Sandovalstreatise, see M.E. Beer,
http://www.kislakfoun-dation.org/prize/199702.html.
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2.
Now we have the basic elements of theracial modern/colonial
matrix. Christiansplaced themselves at the centertheepistemic
privilege of Theology and thetheo-politics of knowledgeboth as
mem-bers of the right religion and of the hege-monic theological
discourse and as WhiteSpaniards and Portuguese. On the onehand, we
have Christians and confrontingthem, Moors and Jews. On the other
wehave Spaniards and Portuguese and, con-fronting them, Indians and
Blacks. In be-tween the first triad, we have conversos/as and
moriscos/as. In between the sec-ond triad, we have mestizos/as
andmulattos/as. The first presupposed reli-gion. In the second
religion is a non-existingentity and so Spaniards and Portuguese
inthe New World become the substitute ofChristians in the Iberian
Peninsula. When,in the late eighteenth and early nineteenthcentury,
the concept of race is reconfig-ured, it is reconfigured in a
secular frame.Thus, skin color began to replace blood as aracial
marker. Consequently, the Peninsulartriad is forgotten because it
was based on re-ligions and the second triad was forgottenbecause
it happened in the colonies andthat was not part of European
history! Thus,today, scholars revisiting the concept ofracemost of
them in England, the U.S.,Germany and Francestart in the mid
eigh-teenth century. H.F. Augsteins edited vol-ume Race. The
origins of an Idea, 1760-1850(1996), has evidently no idea of what
hap-pened before 1760, as if the idea reallyemerged in the heart of
Europe (England,France and Germany) without any relationto the
European colonies since the sixteenthcentury. More to the point,
and surprisinglyfunny, the first chapter from Buffons Natu-ral
History is on what? On the natural historyof the horse! There is no
indication, even forone second, that the origin of the
modern/colonial idea of race emerged when the lin-eage of the horse
was linked to Christians
undesirable human beings, Moors and Jews.This double-blindness
among intellectualsand scholars from and in the heart of Europeis
the (unintended) consequence of the BlackLegend. How come?
What I have said up to this point was asketchy summary of the
idea of race/racismas it was articulated by Christians in the
Ibe-rian Peninsula. For them Theology was themaster epistemic
frame. Theology offeredthe tools to describe and classify
peoplewith the wrong religion and people withoutreligion.
Christianity was one among otherworld religions, but it was the
right one.How was that decided? Because Christiansmade the
classification on the basis of Theol-ogy as the supreme Archimedean
pointfrom which the entire world could be ob-served and classified.
Christians, who werealso Castilians and Portuguese in the NewWorld,
were among Indians and Blacks, butCastilians and Portuguese were
superior tothem. Thus, Theology allowed for a concep-tualization of
Humanity for which Castilianand Portuguese were taken as the
exemplarof what human beings are supposed to be.But then came
Elizabeth I, and with her theenactment of a discourse of race in
Englandthat was mainly directed toward the Span-iards. Of course
British men of letters and of-ficers of the State did not look at
the Otto-man Empire with friendly eyes. The tribula-tions of Roger
Ascham at the frontiers ofWestern Christians with the Ottoman
Em-pire (Reports and Discourse of the Affairs inGermany, 1550)
where the presence of theTurks was disturbingly felt, are a telling
signof the fundamental self-inflicted fear of dif-ference. And with
respect to the New World,England was more interested in
followingthe Castilian example of empire buildingthan in debating
whether Indians andBlacks were human beings. Thus, the dis-course
of race in England, during the Euro-pean Renaissance, does not
contradict theSpaniards classificationon the contrary,they made the
Spaniards the target, forSpaniards were the Moors, Jews, Indiansand
Blacks. In other words, the Black Leg-
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end is a racial discourse internal to Europe:the racialization
of the Latin and CatholicSouth in the mouth and pen of the Angloand
Protestant North.
The logic underlying the discourses onrace during the European
Renaissance wenthand in hand with the historical foundationof
capitalism as a new economic formationcould then be summarized as
follows. Barto-lom de Las Casas offered a blueprint of thislogic in
his classification of barbarians. Ananalysis of the logic of his
classificationshows a set of underlying principles. Longafter the
end of the Crusades, Christian Eu-rope continued to be under
pressure fromthe expanding Ottoman Empire. The Otto-mans had
impressive victories, includingthe capture of Constantinople, last
outpostof the Roman Empire and spiritual center ofOrthodox
Christianity. Eventually WesternChristians would mount effective
counter-attacks and keep Ottoman forces out of cen-tral Europe, but
for a long time the TurkishMenace would haunt European dreams.
Inthe Iberian Peninsula, the racial differencebetween Christians,
on the one hand, andJews and Moors, on the other, follow
twodifferent principles. The Turks and theMoors were not of course
the same in anyChristian mind. However, they knew thatthe Moors had
an imperial Islamic past andthe Turks an imperial and bright
present.Thus, calling the Turk and the Moors bar-barians was a way
to construct the externalimperial difference.
By external I mean, that the differencewas with non-Western
non-Christians andtherefore non-Europeans. And it was impe-rial
because neither the Moors nor the Turkswere colonized in the way
Indians and Blackslaves were. Moors were expelled from Eu-rope and
the Turks were already in whatwould become Eurasia. The Jews were
ex-pelled but most of them remained withinEurope wherein, after the
16th century theywould have a remarkable presence and atragic
outcome: the Holocaust. On the char-acterization of the Jews
(people without anempire or state), Christian theologians con-
structed the internal colonial difference. AsAim Csaire pointed
out in his Discourse onColonialism, Jews as the internal others
(thatis, marked by the internal colonial differencewithin European
history itselfas distinctfrom Indians and Blacks defined by the
ex-ternal colonial difference from Europeansown history) was one of
the historical conse-quences of European discourse on race/rac-ism
during the Renaissance. What WesternEuropeans cannot forgive Hitler
for, Csaireobserved, are not the crimes against manit isnot the
humiliation of man as such but thecrimes against the white man, the
humilia-tion of the white man, and the fact that heapplied European
colonialist procedureswhich until then had been reserved
exclu-sively for the Arabs of Algeria, the cooliesof India and the
niggers of Africa.1 (In-terestingly enough, to understand how
colo-niality of knowledge works, we should no-tice that even Csaire
forgot about the Indi-ans of the Americas.)
Internal and external are not characteriza-tions of an objective
observer, from anArchimedean point of observation, who de-cides
what is inside and what is outside inthe objective reality of the
world! Hegelsdictum that the real is rational and the ratio-nal is
real is an obvious imperial statementthat remains in the history of
philosophy asthe intricate connection between a rationali-ty that
corresponds with one reality: the re-ality of the imperial logic of
theArchimedean point from where races andracism were constructed
and continued tosurvive. Both characterizations are construc-tions
of Christian theological discourses thatI am reporting in a
free-indirect style. Thereis not, and cannot be, an Archimedean
pointat which the observer is not implied in thedescription of his
or her observation. By de-scribing the Christian point of view in a
free-indirect style I am, at the same time, speak-
1 Aime Csaire, Discourse sur le colonialisme(1955). A new
edition, followed by Discours surla ngritude was published by
Prsence Afric-aine, Paris, in 2004.
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ing from the perspective of those who havebeen racialized; and
in doing so, I am at-tempting to de-colonize the structure
andcontent of knowledge on race and racismthat has been framed by
Christian theologyand by European secular science and philos-ophy.
With this caveat in mind, lets thenmove to the construction of the
external colo-nial difference. As you may have guessed,and that the
example of Csaire makes clear,Indians and Blacks were like Jews
(and asa matter of fact the comparison between In-dians and
Jewsmade by Spaniards andCreoles from Spanish descentabound inthe
sixteenth century). Indians and Blacks,like the Moors, were people
alien to thesphere of Christianity. They werein prin-cipleexternal
to Christianity. Thus, even ifthere were Black Christians coming to
theNew World and, even though during thesixteenth century Indians
were converted toChristianity, nevertheless, Indian Christiansand
Black Christians were still considereddifferent from Spanish or
PortugueseChristians. Indians became stateless peoplein
Tawantinsuyu and Anahuac after the de-feat of Atahualp and
Moctecuzoma. Indiansand Blacks were the target for the
construc-tion of the external colonial difference.
And where shall we place the Black Leg-end in this scheme? We
are back in the six-teenth century. Philip II became King ofSpain
in 1556 and he would transform theKingdom he inherited from his
father,Charles I, into the glorious moment of theSpanish Empire.
The Hapsburg or Austro-Hungarian Empire changed its role
andfunction from the second half of the six-teenth century to its
demise, during WWI. Itbecame a buffer zone where the OttomanEmpire
was stopped; and it became a mar-ginal region of Western
Christendom nowthat the center of the world economy movedto the
Atlantic, from Spain and Portugal toHolland and England. Vienna and
Munichstill today conserve the garb and the magnif-icence of
Imperial cities (while Moscow andIstanbul entered a process of
visible decay).Elizabeth I became Queen of England in
1558; Ivan the Terrible was the Grand Princeover all the Rus
since 1533 and the first Rus-sian Tzar since 1547Moscow as the
ThirdRome competed with and complementedIstanbul (the second Rome)
and Rome prop-er. China and Beijing were far away, butwere the
center of attraction in a world thathad no center. It was Columbus
and WesternChristians who dreamed of Cipango, not theChinese who
desired the land of Christen-dom. For Chinese scholars and officers
ofthe Ming Dynasty, Western Christendomwasif known at allin the
territory of thebarbarians. It was in that scenario that Rich-ard
Eden traveled from England to the lim-its with the lands of the
Turk toward themiddle of the sixteenth century and wrote areport
that could be considered a blueprintof the aforementioned Black
Legend.
The promoter of the Black Legend em-ployed the troops already in
place to de-scribe and classify people in relation to amodel or
standard of Humanity and in-fringed upon Christian Spaniards, at
theheight of the crisis of the Church in the mid-dle of the
nineteenth Council of Trent.1 Byaccusing Spaniards of being
barbarians (forthe atrocities they committed in the NewWorld), and
naming them Moors, Blacksand Sarracens, no British men or women
ofletters confused the Spaniards with theMoors or the Turks, much
less with Blacksor Indians in the New World. The externalimperial
and colonial differences weremaintained. And also the internal
colonialdifference: no Englishman or Englishwom-en would fail in
making the distinction be-tween a Christian and a Jew. If the
previousracial distinctions were maintained, whatwas added was the
internal imperial difference.
1 The nineteenth ecumenical councilopened at Trent on 13
December, 1545, andclosed there on 4 December, 1563. Its main
objectwas the definitive determination of the doc-trines of the
Church in answer to the heresies ofthe Protestants; a further
object was the execu-tion of a thorough reform of the inner life of
theChurch by removing the numerous abuses thathad developed in
it.
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The Black Legend inaugurated a racializeddiscourse within, that
is, internal to, Westernand capitalist empires of the West. As is
wellknown, the Black Legend was part of the po-litical purpose of
England to displace Spainfrom its imperial domination. What
theBlack Legend does not mention is that theBritish were as brutal
and greedy as theSpaniards. In fact, the Black Legend waspart of an
imperial conduct as well as dis-course that we have seen at work
since thenin England to the present-day United States.
3.
The Black Legend is a piece of a largerpuzzle that transcends
the particular mo-ment of its origin. Similar ideas filtered
intothe U.S. in the nineteenth century and in-formed very popular
narratives like WilliamPrescotts History of the Conquest of
Peru(1847). Notice that the book was publishedone year before the
signing of the Treaty ofGuadalupe-Hidalgo that gave the U.S.
pos-session of a vast territory previously belong-ing to Mexico.
That is, the book was pub-lished at a moment in history when
historyrepeats itself and the U.S. of the nineteenthcentury, like
England of the mid-sixteenthcentury, is affirming its imperial
ambitions.Imperial ambitions that had already beenmapped by the
discourse on race/racismduring the European Renaissance have giv-en
authority to imperial powers to repro-duce themselves and to
reproduce the senseof superiority of agents in a position
ofepistemic authority to classify the world. Afew decades before
Prescott, Hegel in Eu-rope collected the legacies of the Black
Leg-end and asserted the superiority of the heartof Europe
(England, Germany andFrance)that is, the three countries that inthe
nineteenth century consolidated and ex-panded Western capitalism
and imperial-ism.
Hegel was clear in capturing the unfold-ing of this story when
he stated, at the end ofhis introduction to Lessons in the
Philosophy of
History, the three sections of Europe requiretherefore a
different basis of classification(pp. 102). And he went on to offer
the fol-lowing geo-political map:
1) The first part is Southern Europelooking towards the
Mediterranean[] North of the Pyrenees, mountainchains running
through France, con-nected with the Alps that separate andcut off
Italy from France and Germany.Greece also belongs to this part of
Eu-rope.
2) The second portion is the heart of Eu-rope [] In this centre
of Europe,France, Germany and England are theprincipal
countries.
3) The third, said Hegel, consists of thenortheastern States of
Europe-Po-land, Russia and the Slavonic King-doms. They came late
into the series ofhistorical States, to form and perpetu-ate the
connection with Asia. In con-trast with the physical singularities
ofthe earlier division, these are alreadynoticed, not present in a
remarkable de-gree, but counterbalance each other.
Hegel wrote about States but neglectedto mention that the States
of the heart of Eu-rope constitute the new imperialism. Heclaims
that the States of the heart of Europeare pure and clean, have no
connection withAfrica, as in the case of Spain and Portugal(which
is why it is important for him tohighlight Italy and Greece), and
no connec-tions with Asia, like the northeastern States.It was in
1853 (a few years after PrescottsHistory of the Conquest of Peru),
that JosephArthur, comte de Gobineau, published thenew
configuration of the discourse on race/racism, the discourse that
would serve thepurpose of the new Western empires. Thattreatise was
titled Essai sur lingalit des raceshumaines.
The internal imperial difference that theBlack Legend put in
place had diminishedits rhetoric, through time. In Europe, En-
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gland, Germany and France are the strongplayers of the European
Union. The Latinand Catholic South still form an imperialcore.
England and the U.S. had joined forces,in spite of their
difference, since Ronald Re-agan and Margaret Thatcher opened
theway to the fatal alliance of Tony Blair andGeorge W. Bush. Five
hundred years afterthe expulsion of the Moors from the
IberianPeninsula and five hundred years after theinvasion and
invention of America, SamuelHuntington identified the Moors as
enemiesof Western civilization and Hispanics (thatis Latinos and
Latinas) as a challenge to An-glo identity in the U.S. Racism dies
hard andthe specter of the Black Legend is still aliveand well,
helping to diminish Spaniards inEurope and criminalize Latinos and
Latinasin the U.S. If Indians were the victims ofSpaniards that the
Black Legend de-nounced, Black slaves were the victims ofEngland
that the Black Legend contributedto hide under Spanish
barbarism.
However, none of the discourses onrace/racism went uncontested.
In the firstmodernity Waman Puma de Ayala in Perin the late
sixteenth and early seventeenthcentury and Ottabah Cugoano in
England inthe eighteenth century, after being enslavedin the
Caribbean, contested imperial racial-ization. Before Gobineau and
before Pres-cott, Frederick Douglas in the nineteenthcentury
published (in the U.S.) Narrative ofthe Life of Frederick Douglass,
an AmericanSlave, Written By Himself (1845). HaitianAntnor Firmin
published in France a well-documented study against
Gobineau.Firmins book was entitled De lgalit desraces humaines
(1885). W.E.B. DuBois andFrantz Fanon followed suit in the
Americas;and Gloria Anzalda stood up, as a Latina,to claim for
women of my race the Spiritshall speak. These voices of dissent
notonly contest the Black Legend but all impe-rial discourses on
race and racism (includ-ing Spaniards), of which the Black Legend
isone piece of the puzzle.
IV
Lets return to the White Lands Ishowed at the beginning. As it
is wellknown, the process of expelling the Moorsfrom Western
Christians lands (and todayWhite Held Lands), were supported
byPapal Bulls authorizing the dispossession ofpagans lands and
legitimizing Christian ap-propriation (see for example the edict
ofPope Nicholas V, Jan 8, 1455). Thus, whenWestern Christians
arrived to las Indias Oc-cidentales on Columbuss map, they
alreadyhad the experience of dispossessing peoplefrom their land
and legitimizing Christianappropriation. The (in)famous
Requerimien-to remains as the signpost of a long processof massive
land appropriation from the In-digenous population. As it is well
known,the enormous diversity of the population inTawantinsuyu and
Anahuac (as well as theland in between both, named Abya-Yala)
aswell as the Islands renamed the Caribbe-an, all became in spite
of themselves, Indi-ans. And all of them were constructed aspeople
without religion and therefore vic-tims of the Devil. There was an
empty spacein their souls that the Devil took advantageof, as they
were empty lands that the Chris-tians began to take advantage
of.
Theology and law came together in theSalamanca school, and in
the pioneeringwork of Francisco de Vitoria, Relectio de
Indis(1539), the justification of Christian land ap-propriation
with the recognition that Indi-ans have to keep possessions of
their par-cels was discussed. In this regard, Fran-cisco de Vitoria
is the direct antecedent ofJohn Lockes. The difference between both
isthat Vitoria not only was concerned with therelationships among
theology, law, and landpossession, but he charted the principles
ofinternational law that, from then on, will gohand in hand with
Western imperial expan-sion. In that regard, Vitoria is also the
ante-cessor of Hugo Grotiuss (1583-1645) inter-national law and
Immanuel Kants cosmo-politanism. While Vitoria devised a system
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of international law to legitimize land pos-session, Grotius
extended it (during the firsthalf of the seventeenth century) to
the open-ing of the sea. In Mare Liberum (Free Seas) heformulated
the new principle that the seawas international territory and all
nationswere free to use it for seafaring trade. Gro-tius, by
claiming free seas, provided suit-able ideological justification
for the Dutchsbreaking up of various trade monopoliesthrough their
formidable naval power (andthen establishing their own
monopoly).
El Requerimiento
(http://www.ciudad-seva.com/textos/otros/requeri.htm) was adouble
edged sword. On the one hand, it re-sponded to the complaints of
many theolo-gians that protested the Spaniards treat-ment of the
Indians and the way they tookpossession of their land. On the other
hand,it served as a legal-theological document totake possession of
Indians land wheneverthey did not comply with regulations im-posed
by the King and the Church. And weknow how easy it is to fabricate
violations ofthe rule and to criminalize the people thatthe
dominant system needs to marginalizeor disposes. The Requerimiento,
read in Span-ish and sometimes in Latin to the Indians,offered them
the opportunity to surrenderand obey or to be captive and
dispossessed.At this initial moment of the consolidationof Western
empires and capitalism, throughthe emergence of the Atlantic
economy, landpossession went together with theologicaland legal
justifications. The sixteenth centu-ry was the turning point of
what CarlSchmitt (1952) described as the nomos of theearth (we
could invent the expression land-nomia in parallel to astro-nomia,
the law ofthe stars): the appropriation of land (togeth-er with the
exploitation of labor) to producecommodities for the global market,
andwhat African political theorist, Siba NZa-tioula Govogui (1995),
writing from the si-lenced half in Schmitts narrative, describesas
the complicity between racism, interna-tional law and
justifications for the appro-priation of land and exploitation of
labor.1
That switch is what Quijano described as the
transformation of capital into capitalism(before the industrial
revolution) and therole the invention of modern racism playedin
that transformation. Such a turning pointtook place more radically
during the seven-teenth century, when the Dutch, the Frenchand the
British intensified the slave tradeand established the profitable
Caribbeanplantations. While the Spaniards and thePortuguese
concentrated on the extractionsof gold and silver (from Zacatecas
in NewSpain to Potosi in Bolivia to Ouro Pretto inBrazil), the
northern Atlantic economy con-centrated mainly on sugar, tobacco,
coffeeand cotton. This distinction in economic ap-proaches is
revealing of the chanting orien-tation of the economy and another
explana-tion for the emergence of the Black Legend.
However, what is important for my pur-poses here is that in both
economic configu-rations (extraction of gold and silver
andcultivation of sugar, coffee, cotton and to-bacco), capitalism
emergedas AnibalQuijano explained on several occasionsasthe happy
complicity between several formsof labor (serfdom, slavery,
handicraft andsmall commodity production, and reciproc-ity) and
capital (forms of economic controlby currency or other means): that
is, the con-junction of massive appropriation of land
1 It is interesting to notice that a sector of theprogressive
and Marxist left is taking nowSchmitts book as the bible to tell
the forgottenpart of the modern/colonial world, that ofSpain. But,
still, this is half of the story, the storytold from the
perspective of modernity. Schmittcannot be read, today, without
reading the im-perial and racist dimensions of internationallaw.
One can imagine that if a person, beyondbeing a political theorists
trained in the West,takes seriously the inscription of his or her
Afri-can body and the geo-politics behind it, s/he re-ally doesnt
need to read Schmitt to understandthat law and land went hand in
hand in themodern/colonial formation of capitalism, sincethe
sixteenth century. See Siba NZatioula Gro-vogui, Sovereigns, Quasi
Sovereigns, and Africans.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press,1995; Carl Schmitt Les nomos de la terre. Dans ledroit des
gens du jus publicum Europeaum (1952).Traduit de lallemand par
Lilyane Deroche Gur-cel. Paris: Press Universitaires de France,
1988.
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and massive exploitation of labor (e.g.,mainly African slaves)
occurred in the NewWorld to produce commodities for the glo-bal
capitalist market. From the Requer-imiento in the early sixteenth
century to theintensification of labor and massive produc-tion of
natural commodities (e.g., sugar),from the nomos of the earth to
the exploita-tion of the land, the racialization of the pop-ulation
in the New World (Indians andBlacks) was consolidated.1
And what happened to the Moors, inthe meantime?
Let me jump three centuries ahead andfocus on the end of the
nineteenth and thebeginning of the twentieth century and thengo
back to establish some landmarks in thelate eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. Al-fred Thayer Maham (The Influence of
SeaPower upon History, 1660-1783, published to-ward the end of the
nineteenth century) iscredited with the invention of the
geo-polit-ical region today known as the Middle East.We also know
that England was also veryactive in inventing the region. Roger
Ander-
son described it in his book titled London andthe Invention of
the Middle East Money, Power,and War, 1902-1922 (1995). Up to that
point(and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire),the Moors of early
Christian imaginary hadbeen convertedsince the late
eighteenthcenturyin part of the Orient. Oriental-ism as Moroccan
philosopher AbdelkebirKhatibbi taught us in the early seventies
andEdward Said popularized in the late seven-ties, was an invention
of the second moder-nity dominated by England, France andGermany
both in the economic, political andepistemic domains. Orientals
took the placefor the new imperial powers and their intel-lectuals
of Occidentals for Spanish and Por-tuguesea reminder that America
wasnamed Indias Occidentales in all Spanishand Portuguese document.
Indias Occiden-tales was the land of the Indians and Africanslaves.
The Orient was the land of Arabs, In-dians, Chinese, Japanese and
of course,Muslims. But at the time of secular nationstates (in
which Immanuel Kant and GeorgeW. Friedrich Hegel imagined a
cosmopoli-tan world and a world history), ethnicity(e.g., the
Arabs) took precedence over reli-gion (e.g., Islam).
Another transformation relevant for myargument was the
Industrial Revolution.The industrial revolution required
naturalresources. Capitalism at that point addedto the production
of natural products (ev-erything related to agriculture for
humanconsumption) to natural resources (every-thing related to
feeding the machines, to ma-chines consumption). The invention of
theMiddle East was an operation to mark a ter-ritory, within the
larger picture of the Orien-tals, rich in natural resources,
particularlyoil. The history from the discovery of oil andthe
invention of the Middle East to the GulfWar and the invasion of
Iraq has been toldmany times and it is well know in its
generalunfolding. Of interest for my argument arethe
transformationsin the imaginary cre-ated and propelled by Western
capitalistempires and the continuation of ChristianTheologians in
the sixteenth and seven-
1 The history of the Requerimiento is notjust past history. It
is very present. A recentevent, reported in the publication Indian
Coun-try, on May 26, 2006, described an event in whichIndians claim
the devolution of their land. AMay 18 event called Papal Bulls,
Manifest Des-tiny and American Empire featured Oren Ly-ons,
Faithkeeper of the Onondaga Nation(Haudenosaunee); Tonya Gonnella
Frichner,Onondaga Nation; Esmeralda Brown, of Pana-ma, chair of the
Non-Governmental Organiza-tions for Sustainable Developments
southerncaucus; and Yolanda Teran, Kichwa from Quito,Ecuador, and a
member of Ecuadors NationalCouncil of Indigenous Women. In a
similar vain,the so-called nationalization of natural resourc-es,
by the government of Evo Morales, is part ofthe same history. Today
the imperial struggle forthe appropriation of land continues
through theappropriation of natural resources. Iraq is a casein
point, but also the Caucasus and Central Asiawhere Western imperial
countries have to con-tend with the Russian Federation (the
successorof second-class empiresRussia and SovietUnionthat is in
the process of reconstitution;cf. Tlostanova 2003, Janus Faced
Empire) and Chi-na (an empire that went into recession duringthe
period that the power of Western capitalistempires increased).
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teenth centuriesof the ancient Moors intoArab nations
controlling vast amounts ofnatural resources. And what is also of
inter-est here is that after WWII it was no longerLondon (only) but
Washington (mainly)who took the lead in public relations andwars
with the Middle East. And the situa-tion was further complicated by
the exist-ence of the Soviet Union. Once again: wewitnessed during
the Cold War the transfor-mationwithin the colonial matrix of
pow-erof the role of the Russian (Orthodox)empire in the sixteenth
century. The Eisen-hower Doctrine on the Middle East, A Mes-sage to
Congress (January 5, 1957) set thestage for the triangulation
between the U.S.,the Soviet Union and the Middle East. Then,the
Soviet Union collapsed. CondoleezzaRice expressed her concern about
lacking areason for national security after the col-lapse. And then
the events of 9/11 marked,by themselves as well as by the political
con-sequences of the Western media, a turningpoint in the
connection between economyand racism. Metaphorically, the collapse
ofthe twin towers, as the symbol of a capitalistsociety, could be
seen as closing a cycle thatstarted with Cardenal Cisneros burning
ofthe books, as the symbol of Islamic society.Islamophobia today,
it seems to me, unfoldsin the blurry sphere of the production
offears between capitalist exploitation of natu-ral resources and
immigrations (mainlyidentified as Arabs and/or Moslems), to thecore
of capitalist imperial countries (En-gland, France, Germany, Spain
and theU.S.that is, the countries more heavily in-volved in the
history of capitalism).
V
Let me close with two examples that, Ihope, will bring together
all of what I saidup to this point.
In the U.S. neither Arabs nor Moslemswere visible in what became
known as Nix-ons ethno-racial pentagon: that is, Whites,Hispanics,
Asian-Americans, African-
Americans and Native-Americans. In theethno-racial pentagon, the
grouping of peo-ple by religions (common in the sixteenthcentury
Christian classification) was erased.The ethno-racial pentagon is
the re-articula-tion of the secular imaginary of the late
eigh-teenth and nineteenth century, when racialclassifications
became scientific instead ofreligious(!) Thus, declaring whether
youare Christian, Islamic, Buddhist or Hinduwas not a requirement
in official forms keep-ing track of nationals as well as
foreigners.As far as I know, the Nixon ethno-racial pen-tagon has
not been changed in official forms.But we all know that Arabs,
Middle Eastern-ers and Moslems are no longer invisible. Notonly
that, the racialization of the MiddleEast created an agency that is
both visibleand fearedvisible and feared as whereCommunists during
the Cold War. For Con-doleezza Rice, the events of 9/11
presentedthe opportunity to justify and intensify na-tional
security. For contractors and the oil in-dustry, 9/11 offered an
excuse to intensifyand justify the control of authority (e.g.,what
happened to Saddam Hussein) and theefforts of the U.S. to demonize
MahmoudAhmadinejad. Thus, we make a general dis-tinction between
interacting spheres of thesocial, such as the control of the
economy,the control of authority, and the control ofcivil society.
We can understand how West-ern imperial configurations (e.g.,
politicaland economic complicities between the U.S.,France, England
and France, mainly), ad-ministers fear through the control of the
me-dia. Thus, the control of the civil society isthe control of
subjectivity by re-inscribing,actively, a racial matrix of power
that, sincethe sixteenth century, was an imperial in-strument:
control of authority, control of theeconomy, control of labor, and
control of thepopulation of all those who have been in-tegrated
into the Christian civilizing mis-sions of the market economy and
those whobecome the rest, who cannot be integratedand that could
rebel.
A global political society has alwaysbeen in the making
(sometimes through
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28 WALTER MIGNOLO
HUMAN ARCHITECTURE: JOURNAL OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE,
V, 1, FALL 2006
anti-imperial reactions, other times throughclear de-colonial
projects), from the Indige-nous rebellions in the sixteenth
century, tothe Black Maroons fleeing from plantations,to Indians
nationalists and different mani-festations of uprisings in Africa.
Today, mul-tiple and diverse configurations of politicalsocieties
(in their diverse local historiesthrough the encounter with Western
capital-ism and racism), are coming together inpushing a common,
although diverse(pluriveral and not universal) agenda: de-linking
from the magic bubble of universaltotalitarianism which means
engaging in arelentless de-colonial processde-coloniz-ing
authority, de-colonizing the economy,de-colonizing knowledge and
being. Isla-mophobia is nothing else than the re-in-scription of
racial fears to generate racial ha-tred among the sector of the
population (civ-il society) that the empire needs as a
bufferzone.
The second example brings us back, fullcircle, to the sixteenth
century on the com-mon ground of Islamophobia and Hispano-phobia.
Samuel Huntington provided thenew map of the two phobias that I
indicatedat the beginning. The imperial and colonialphobias,
however, shall not make invisiblethe emergence of de-colonial
forces.
There are enormous historical and so-cial differences in the
imperial making of Is-lamophobiathe fear and the hatred to-ward a
powerful and widespread reli-gionand Hispanophobiathe fear
andhatred toward secular subaltern forces withmixed religious
beliefs that emerged in theseventies in the U.S. without the
extendedpolitical connections or support from Lat-in America. We
need to understand howthe imperial imaginary constructs phobiasin
the mind of civil society, but at the sametime be aware that on the
other side of theimperial/colonial phobias potent de-colo-nial
forces are at work, among Moslemsand within Hispanics in the U.S.,
and Indi-ans and Afros in South America (or the Lat-in America of
the white population from
European descent). There are enormousdifferences, but we have
overcome the be-lief in abstract universalism and that
theproletariat or the multitude will provideone single solution for
the wretched of theearth. It so happens that the wretched of
theearth know that if they are proletarian orpart of the multitude,
they are also imperi-al/colonial wretched, that is, racialized
be-ings beings marked by the colonialwound, that is to say, the
lower rank in thehuman scale of being that, built by Chris-tian
theology during the Renaissance, werereactivated and maintained by
secular phi-losophy during and after the Enlighten-ment.
Islamophobia and Hispanophobia, itseems to me, are entrenched in
the colonialhorizon of modernity. However, de-colo-nial projects
are at work, all over the world.Unveiling and uncovering the
imperialfoundations and reproductions of phobias(Islamic or
Hispanic) are ways of de-colo-nizing (and de-naturalizing) what
imperialrationality convinced us to be real, and thatthe real is
accountable by only one rational-ity.
In sum, Tariq Alis novel, The Shadows ofthe Pomegranate Tree is
indeed prophetic. Itreveals the underground of Samuel Hun-tingtons
fears. By linking, at the beginningand at the end of the novel,
Cardinal Cisner-os hateful campaign to expel the Moorsfrom the
Iberian Peninsula with the con-quest of Mexico (the expulsion of
the Aztecfrom their own lands), Ali indeed connectedtwo radical
heterogeneous historico-struc-tural momentsconstitutive of the
racialmatrix holding together the modern/colo-nial world. This
matrix is unfolding and up-dated in what we are witnessing today as
Is-lamophobia and Hispanophobia.
Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of
Self-Knowledge9-23-2006
Islamophobia/Hispanophobia: The (Re) Conguration of the Racial
Imperial/Colonial MatrixWalter D. MignoloRecommended Citation