In what ways can/ could global citizenship contribute to an anticolonial project of “unlearning” what the colonial matrix has held in place? What are the limits? Draw on the ideas of cosmopolitanism, globalization, citizenship/ global citizenship, and colonialism.
Identify key ideas you would like to develop further in your research project.
You may use point form and/or add a mind map to present some of your reflections if needed, although pay attention to the flow of ideas to ensure your ideas are clear. Use quotes and in-text citations to support your ideas. It is a short piece, so you must be clear on the main ideas you want to present from the beginning.
Summary of the chapter I got:
In the same period, the Humanities were the major branch of higher learning in European universities and their branches in the colonies. “Global Citizenship” implies overcoming the imperial and colonial differences that have mapped and continue to map global racism and global patriarchy. Changing the law and public policies is not of much help in this process. What is needed is that those who change the law or public policy also change themselves.
This is not a “deconstruction,” which means a delinking from the rules of the game (e.g., the decolonization of the mind, in Ngugi Wa Th’iongo’s vocabulary). What we are talking about are radical transformations in the assumptions of the world order. The naturalized assumptions are imperial/colonial (not universal), and require an epistemic decolonial shift.
The humanities, as a branch of knowledge in the history of the university since the European Renaissance have always been complicitous with imperial/colonial designs celebrating a universal idea of the human model. The moment has arrived to engage (and to further the process of learning to unlearn) the humanities in decolonial projects in their ethical, political, and epistemic dimensions.
Passports are part of a package that constructed an imperial idea of the “human” and traced the frontiers with “the less humans” and the “nonhumans”. People moving around the globe before the sixteenth century did not have a “global view” of the globe as we have today. Members of faith did not need passports or administrative identity that was required of citizens. The Kantian cosmopolitan citizen was ready to march all over the world and move at his will (because the idea of the citizen was modeled first at the image of Man), through the globe. Miguel León-Portilla argues that, in ancient Náhuatl, the word “tlapializtli” means “the action of preserving something” which is not something in general but what belongs to us.
What is universal is the human drive to build communities grounded on memories and experiences that constitute the house, the dwelling place of different people. León-Portilla’s concept of “toltécatl,” derived from the word “Tollan,” a word describing the place where the Toltecas (a community from whence the Aztecs emerged) lived, could be translated as “city” in the Latin tradition. León-Portilla: “Toltecáyotl” was the expression describing a certain style of life of all those who lived in a Tollan, i.e., in a city. For Christians, Tollan was a place inhabited by barbarians and pagans; and when the idea of citizen emerged in the West (in the 17th century), the memories of Tollan had already been erased from Mexican indigenous memory. The conclusion is that looking for the ontology of Western and post-Enlightenment concept of the citizen will not do.
Global citizenship means crossing the invisible and unconscious colonial and imperial frontiers of southern and eastern Europe and the U.S., as well as the so-called civil society. If you have a Brazilian passport in Japan and you are not an employee of the Brazilian Embassy in that country or a CEO of a Brazilian branch of a transnational company, your citizenship status is far from flexible. All is relative, as the dictum goes, and global citizenship applies to a very small percentage of the world population. The very idea of citizenship is today at stake for those who want to migrate from the rest of the world to Western Europe and the U.S. One could argue that not all migrations in the.
World move to Western European and the United States from the other 180+ countries. What is important for our argument is the directionality of migrations, for which the very idea of citizenship is at stake.
In Iraq, more than four thousand Americans died in a war that was justified for the good of Humanity while one hundred thousand Iraqis died in an invasion that was not. Similar examples could be found outside the U.S. and Europe. In the case of Chile and Argentina, the geographical parameters do not apply, because capital moves to the north and people to the south. The racialization of Bolivia’s population and colonial difference are equally at work. Racism is the condition under which the agents of the state and of capital decide who shall be poor, because in the capitalistic economic system, poverty cannot be avoided.
Being poor and white is not the same as being poor and of color. Before the citizen emerged in the imagination of the modern/colonial world, there were the heathens, the pagans, the barbarians.
The categories of pagans, gentiles, heathens, and barbarians are not found in Islamic, Arabic, or Aymara thought. The question is whether they made it with the virulence we find in many theologians of the Spanish Inquisition as well as progressive intellectuals of the time such as Bartolomé. After the Enlightenment and secularization, the role of the devil receded and lack of civilization took its place. Francis Bacon argues that Secularization led to the birth of the modern nation-state, in which those who were not born with a particular language, culture, or blood were not considered members of the state.
Kant’s political thought maintains a pyramidal order of society, from the top down, following the Western tradition in political theory. The civil constitution plays the role of master, because all human beings need a master, and no human being can be master of other human beings. Kant knew what nature’s designs were for a peaceful society and cosmopolitan peace. The civil constitution as the supreme document of state management is the document through which citizens are managed. From the recasting of the idea of civility and citizen, civilization also became the global secular design that took the place of Christianization. Kant’s cosmopolitan order and the universal history he needed to rewrite was the necessary knowledge to back up the state as well as its imperial designs.
When he gets out of Europe, he encounters the Russian, Polish, and European Turks, and the European Turks. So much for Kant’s cosmopolitanism?apparently derived from how Germans feel at home and bond among themselves in foreign land when they go as colonists. In his Philosophical Investigations, Kant takes on the Arabs, Chinese, Indians, Africans, and American Indians as well as Russians, Polish and Turks. He argues that national characters are natural characters who lie in the composition of the person’s blood. For that reason, the nation-state cannot be but a monoracial state and the citizen a composite of administrative and racially constituted entities.
For Kant, yellow people were in Asia, black in Africa, red in America, and white in Europe. The ethno-racial scheme, during the Nixon administration, presupposed the Kantian tetragon. A truly global citizenship presupposes overcoming colonial and imperial differences. Chicanos/as in the U.S., Aymaras in Bolivia and around the world, and Russians in Europe have the epistemic power to intervene. For the colonialists, Indians and Africans offered Spanish theologians the opportunity to remap the configuration of the chain of human being; and Blacks ended up at the lower level of the scale.
That is to say, if Indians were suspicious of not fulfilling the requirements established for humanitas; Blacks were out of the question simply because they were not considered human. The dispossession of human life in the formation of capitalism goes hand in hand with the emergence of the Atlantic commercial circuits.
Kant’s description of the Arabs, the Chinese, and the Indians were part of the transformation of the colonial difference from Occidentalism to the French and British construction of Orientalism. The Ottoman Sultanate was the closest case in the sixteenth century to which the emerging Christian empires could measure a period of differences. China was a second case in point; the first Jesuits arrived in Japan and China in 1582. France made its way to North Africa when the clout of the Islamic Caliphate was vanishing. Global citizenship is part of modernity (salvation, development, progress, well-being for all, and democracy), whereas the imperial and colonial differences are the invisible divides that maintain the logic of coloniality.
Gatekeepers are the tools of a historically formed belief that has been naturalized and transmitted from generation to generation in schools, colleges, universities, state institutions, tourism agencies, and the like. Reforms are better than nothing, but the result is making more palatable the chronicle of an announced dead. It may improve but not change the situation.
Citizenship can only be global if the colonial and imperial differences are erased. To achieve this goal it is necessary to delink from the imperial hegemony of the humanitas. Once again, decoloniality of being means to regain the dignity that humanitas took away from other humans casted as anthropos. How can we bring the Humanities into the previous historical scheme and toward encountering the decolonial option? First, let us go back to Kant, this time to his The Contest of the Faculty ([1798] 1955).
He introduced an internal shift in the history of modern Europe since the Renaissance, replacing theology with secular philosophy. And the third aspect is the reorganization of knowledge.
Kantian-Humboldtian University was a university in which the crucial role the humanities played in the Renaissance became secular but equally important. After World War II, the social sciences gained ground and the three hard social sciences (political science, sociology, and economics) came to dominate the scene. The humanities receded to a secondary role; Philosophy is now an exotic practice among the humanities that is struggling for survival in Europe and has been reduced to analytic philosophy and logic in the U.S.
Kant has the merit of articulating the concept of critique that in Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud took a decisive turn. Max Horkheimer articulated that change in terms of traditional and critical theory (1937). The two terms refer to two types of theorizing, one of which is constructed on facticity and the other which examines social phenomena and their social consequences.
Decolonial thinking and doing was already in place in European colonies in the Americas when Freud, Frantz Fanon and Bartolomé Las Casas wrote about colonialism. Decolonial thinkers were aware of colonialism but not of coloniality or that colonial responses were not limited to the European critique of colonialism. This is yet another instance showing the need for learning to unlearn. The emergence of imperial internal critique (Las Casas, Kant, Marx, Freud, and Horkheimer) silenced the emergence and continuation of the decolonial option. Waman Puma, in the Viceroyalty of Peru under Spanish rules, is one of the foundational examples.
Mahatma Gandhi is a second case in British India, under British imperial rule. We are now in the middle of a declonial epistemic shift, and it is from this shift that the role of the humanities could be imagined and reoriented.
The geopolitics of knowing brings to the foreground the relationship between geohistorical locations and epistemology. The decolonial is an option for all those human beings who want to participate rather than be managed and integrated to master plans that are not theirs. In the mid-1990s, Franco Cassano, Italian philosopher from Bary (south of Italy), raised the issue of colonial dependency in the history of the modern colonial world. Kant argued that there is no knowledge detached from experience, and that experience cannot be reduced to the universality of Human Experience. “Experiences” have been marked and continue to be marked by the imperial/colonial modern world order.
You can try to arcotize imperial and colonial differences if you are trying to assimilate to dominant culture or emulate ideas that emerged from local histories. Or you can accept?with pride?what you are, to embody the place you occupy in the colonial matrix of power.
The geopolitical and body-political shifts are decolonial in the sense that they delink. (i.e., it is no longer an internal critique, like those of Marx, Freud, or Horkheimer) from the hegemonic history of Western civilization. New spheres of knowledge came into being (women’s studies, gender and sexuality studies, Afro-American studies, ethnic studies, Latino/Latinas studies, etc.). The Enlightenment and the Reformation brought into the social sphere of knowledge the perspective from the damnés, those disposed of by colonial racism and patriarchy. They introduced a new justification of knowledge: knowledge not at the service of the church but knowledge for liberation. The ultimate question would be to determine the role of the humanities in dismantling global racism that prevents the full achievement of global citizenship.
The internal critique and decolonial humanities are two very different tasks for the humanities, but complementary. In the internal case, foundations supporting the humanities allow for a critique of the increasing corporate values within the university. If global citizenship requires the dismantling of racism, it is from the declonial shift (from the geo- and body politics of knowledge) that such a task will have its leadership.