This section explores the operations of coloniality and resistance to it under the expansion of extractive capitalism in the countryside. I explore what forms the spatialization of race/racialization take under the expansion of extractive capitalism in the countryside. Understanding the colonial dimension of landed relations will help this thesis to explore what is the role of race in the constitution and performance of landed relations and how is it changing under the emergence of extractive capitalism in the framing of the modern-colonial countryside. Taking enclosure as a colonial artefact, I will explain the ways by which ‘racial difference’ is produced in order to discipline people and fix them to land and how is used as means of power contestation.
Given that this thesis pays attention to the location of emerging ideas, notions and discourses (such as property, mundial, extractivism to mention some), I explain the geographical context and position of the authors I have chosen incorporate here. I follow the ‘political economy of knowledge’39 (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2012, p.102) of
authors that I am discussing in the thesis in order to inform on a critical point of this thesis about Situated Knowledges (Haraway 1988), because our own position (physical, material and discursive) matters. These thinkers – from Locke, Grotius, Marx, to Harvey, Mignolo to Cusicanqui – are all situated within webs of race, class and gender as well as with their object/subject of study. Depending how it is conceived, thinking of land, this entity is perceived as a living entity with knowledge and agency or is treated as dead matter with potential to become a productive and a speculative financial asset. This assessment is also affected by how we relate to land in our everyday experience, hence the way thinkers write about it. From the critical court, it is not the same affective involvement for a ‘decolonial project’ writing from North Carolina or New
39 Cusicanqui uses the ‘political economy’ of knowledge against the concept of ‘geopolitics of
knowledge’ applied by Mignolo to designate the imaginaries of the South. She contests this notion because it is applies as solely a gesture but does not leave the sphere of the linguistic and the superstructure. Cusicanqui wants to demystify the role of the struggle of the South and indigenous people as one of economic strategies and material mechanism. In this same light, she denounce the ‘gesture’ to the ideas and intellectuals from the South that are capitalised by those in the North, becoming the source of salaries and teaching and publishing opportunities while in the Latin America universities are being empty and come dependent of the patronage of the North (Rivera Cusicanqui 2012, pp.102-3).
87 York than from Catamarca, Argentina (open pit Mining Alumbrera ltd.) or Bolivia (facing the worst drought in twenty-six years result of unrestricted deforestation under the expansion of soybean agroindustry) where extractivism takes place. I am not claiming that this positionality is determinant of these epistemologies of land, but these distinctions accompany different paths of critical work. As such, Aymaran scholar- activist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s approach to decolonial thinking contrasts with the emphasis the decolonial group40 to find concepts and vocabulary ‘outside’ Western
paradigms (disciplines, perspectives and fields of knowledges) (Castro Gomez and Grosfoguel 2007, p.17). For Cusicanqui, in contrast to the decolonial group:
There can be no discourse of decolonization, no theory of decolonization, without a decolonizing practice…it is necessary to leave the sphere of the superstructures in order to analyse the economic strategies and material mechanisms that operate behind discourses (2012, pp.98-102).
As presented in the critical historiography of land as property in Chapter I, dominant discourses around land have been oriented to political-economy; under The decolonial
turn (Castro-Gómez y Ramón Grosfoguel 2007) however this approach suffers the risk
of creating a new academic canon:
building pyramidal structures of power and symbolic capital — baseless pyramids that vertically bind certain Latin American universities—and form clientelist networks with indigenous and black intellectuals (Cusicanqui 2012, p.97).
The ‘Power of Land’ section is elaborated under this tension between discourses, material enactments and structural conditions attempting to not lose ground over the centrality of social space for land relations. Keeping this problem in mind is crucial because it reveals different treatments of the ‘matter’ of land, ranging from creating
40 The decolonial group is formally named as the ‘Proyecto Latino/latinomaericano
modernidad/colonialidad’ or Proyecto Modernidad/Colonialidad/Decolonialidad. Their members are Walter Mignolo from Duke University, Arturo Escobar Chapel Hill University, Edgardo Lander (Central University of Caracaras) and Ramon Grosfoguel (Berkley) Maldonado Torres (Brown University), Anibal Quijano (based in Venezuela, directo of Anuario Mariateguiano), Dussel, Coronil, Castro- Gomez (Pontificia Universidad Javeriana de Bogotá), Catherine Walsh (Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar)
88 boundaries and expanding networks, as well as explaining alternative assemblages between land, power-knowledge and race. As a result, different branches of critical thought looking at colonial forms of subjugation in modern societies arrive at different spatial imaginations, ranging from the creation of motley spaces or in perusing purist notions of exclusive and excluding space, both in tune with ontological assumptions about land and the role of native populations in the modern world.
Coloniality
Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano explains the specificity of race in Latin America not as corresponding to a genotype, but as a historical mechanism. He coined the term “coloniality of power” (cited in Quijano 2010) which explains that the fundamental axis of power operating in modern society is a social classifier of world population around the idea of race. This form of othering corresponds to a location and to a locality; it is a process of racial placing. It explains the production of race as a border for domination, subjugation and conquest. These structures are founded on a notion of human development departing from a state of nature (America) that arrives at modernity (located in Europe) while creating a dividing notion of European and non- European ‘as natural (racial) differences and not consequences of a history of power’ (Quijano, 2000, p.542). It refers to an Eurocentric classifier articulating power relations from which the hegemonic Western perspective of knowledge is organised in colonial power structures.
The term coloniality, or neo-colonialism, or what Pablo Casanova calls ‘internal colonialism’ (2006), is currently applied by a broad group of critical studies all theoretically influenced by the experience of resisting social movements in Latin America. In the 1990s, a tradition emerged around the project of ‘decolonial thinking’ (Quijano, Lander, Escobar, Mignolo, among others) thinking about the maintenance of colonial structural of power articulated to the establishment of a modern/capitalist world system (KULA, 2012, p.9). It is important to distinguish, however, between colonialism and coloniality: colonialism as a political system is over, but coloniality – referring to the apparatuses of domination and exploitation – of colonial violence (Fanon, 1967) persist.
89 Coloniality was coined as a term that condensed the notion of the other side of modernity, or, as Mignolo calls it, the darker Side of Western Modernity (2011). The development and expansion of this line of work made coloniality of power (and other extensions) key concepts among Latin Americanist scholars. It became an active proposal for thinking that ‘another world was possible’ (Foro Social Mundial 2001) along with notions of pluriverse, indigenous constitutions (i.e.: Ecuador 2008; Bolivia 2009) and emerging academic terminologies attempting to transform colonial epistemologies through the realm of discourse practices (with neologisms such as decolonial, transmodernity, pluriverse and so on).
Other academics (Gonzalez Casanova 2006, Rivera Cusicanqui 2010, Machado 2014; de Sousa Santos 2009, among others), activist scholars and militants – while not reducible to opposing a homogenous set of perspectives – share a scepticism around a ‘coloniality of power’. Instead they employ concepts of ‘internal colonialism’, ‘colonialism’ or ‘neo-colonialism’ (Gonzalez Casanova, 2006, Rivera Cusicanqui, 2010, Caniuqueo Huircapan 2011, Mezzadra 2006); or plainly ‘coloniality’ (Machado 2014, de Sousa Santos 2009) to explain contemporary modes of colonial power relations taking place in Latin America. Rivera Cusicanqui is critical of this emerging theoretical group of decolonial thinking emerging from the (North) American academia. She argues that while there is a long tradition among academics, communities and activists reflecting and actively struggling in response to contemporary conditions of oppression and colonial structures, an emerging body of knowledge produced by Latin Americanists working in the West has created a new academic canon of thought around ‘geopolitics of knowledge’ furthering away the radical aspects of any decolonial project (Cusicanqui 2012. P.103).
Cusicanqui touches upon the tension between space and knowledge. Searching for the spatial element of the decolonial project, it is necessary to criticise the primacy that philosophers have given to epistemological thinking. As Lefebvre questioned in his own writings, in the assumption that knowledge is ‘“structurally” linked to the spatial sphere’ (1991, p.4). Cusicanqui also expresses frustration with the Western decolonial project headed by ‘Mignolo and co.’, calling it a neutralisation of ‘practices of decolonization by enthroning within the academy a limited and illusory discussion
90
regarding modernity and decolonization’ (Cusicanqui 2012, p.104). The radical element of the decolonial is dissipated when limited to academia – knowledge and discourse – and excluded from social space. Mignolo’s ‘border epistemology’ (Mignolo 2010, 2012) looks at the experiences of subaltern communities on the margins of modernity. However, this enforces the idea that modernity can have an ‘outside’. Seeking the margins of modernity can become a return to Cartesian/Western logos, returning to a binary opposition between the modern/colonial, the urban/rural, and the margins/the centre of modernity. This is, however, difficult to find in space, as Lefebvre contests:
Epistemological thought, in concert with the linguists’ theoretical efforts, has reached a curious conclusion. It has eliminated the “collective subject,” the people as creator of a particular language, as carrier of specific etymological sequence (1991, p.4).
My intention here is to expose this permanent theoretical tension that runs along academic research coming from the North and otherwise and working in the South – also affecting my own positionality as a white South American researching from the North. Cusicanqui’s critique of academic discourses on decolonial thought coming from the West (Mignolo, Quijano, Walsh, etc.) also reflects on the modern dimensions of indigeneity (Cusicanqui 2012, p.96) as one of entanglement with modern practices in places – markets, shantytowns, cities, mining centres, industrial plantations, among others. In the same way, when Lefebvre explains the science of space (1991), he also brings the dialectic triad of knowledge, discourse and practice. Lefebvre targets Chomsky’s work on Cartesian linguistics (1966), to point out that Chomsky ‘completely ignores the yawning gap that separates this linguistic mental space from that social space wherein language becomes practice’ (Lefebvre 1991, p.5). In the same vein criticisms of the semiotician Mignolo, from post-colonial scholars like Cusicanqui, have emphasised the place of decolonisation practices to pay attention to ‘economic strategies and material mechanisms that operate behind discourses’ (Cusicanqui 2012, p.102). Lefebvre’s dialectic reminds us that we are looking for the ‘concrete subject’ that creates its own terminology in the practice.
The theoretical framework of this thesis looks to separate itself from this mental-space, whereas Lefebvre would say ‘space is fetishized and the mental realm comes to envelop
91 the social and physical ones’ (Lefebvre 1991, p.5). This analytical framework attempts to move away from purist notions of indigeneity and look for those collectives that create their own language that is ‘inserted into the contemporary world’ (Cusicanqui 2012, p.95). The dialectic treatment of land also deals with the risk of fetishizing land. As argued before, land has no intrinsic qualities. Lands is not a category external to society. This means that lands’ materiality is the result of the mutual production of social relations and nature (Escobar 2008, p.126). That is why the boundaries drawn by Mignolo between the modern and the outside the modern are so dangerous, because they reify a notion of indigeneity as a pre-colonial site and not as a result of a complex assemblage of power-knowledge and space. While in Chapter I, land as property has been shown as a process of mutual constitution between people and land, the same dynamic relation should not be applied to native communities and land. Ancestral lands for native communities derive as such by associations and resistance. The attachment to land also operates to an extent entangled in colonial European enlightenment of land as property. The notion of ‘ancestral territory’ is not intrinsic in the land but is a result of a process of connection between the non-human (land) and human, social construction and strategic political uses. In the next subsection, the colonial imbrication of social relation in space through the prism of race will be further developed.
Space and Coloniality
As Mignolo suggests, the visibility of the colonial difference in the Modern world emerges with the independent movements from the eighteen to the twentieth centuries (Mignolo 2000, p.36). Then, capitalism and modernity appear to emerge from Europe becoming the centre of the world - and the colonized periphery re-emerges, in its redemptive sacrifice, as civilization (Dussel 1993, p.65). In this new spatial colonial disposition, as Mezzadra describes:
West’s project of colonial exploitation, and the resistance against it no longer organise a cartography capable of unequivocally distinguishing the metropolis from the colonies since they shatter and recompose themselves continuously on a global scale (2006, p.2)
92 Hence, it is important to highlight that under an emerging modern-colonial countryside land contestation operates in a more diffuse spatial ordering in the uneven ensemble of centre and periphery in the same regions of the Global South. Likewise the calibration between race and borders start to gain flexibility. It is in this new global economy of alterity that the relation of land and race become under question.
From the postcolonial perspective, we cannot disentangle from the constitutive role of colonial violence in the formation of the global geography of modernity (Machado 2015, p.176). Instead of thinking of the colonial space outside of modernity, although uneven, the relationship between modern (metropole) and colonial (periphery) is one of constant tension and mutual formation. Modernisation in its spatial forms has been articulated along with capitalism in different forms of governance since the conquest of the American continent. The modern-state, heir of the colonial metropolis, organized capitalism in space through property relation and a mundial system, or in Lefebvre’s terms, the ‘State Mode of Production’ (2009a) put land under state governance in order to guarantee the continuation of the expropriation and selective exploitation. In the postcolonial context, the dispositions of bodies and lands were organized creating technologies of power that used race (and gender) as guiding principles for the formation of an economy of alterity in the synchronicity of marginal peoples and lands. As Silvia Federici argues while looking at female body patriarchal appropriation and racialized groups’ selective exploitation:
primitive accumulation has been above all an accumulation of differences, inequalities, hierarchies, divisions, which have alienated workers from each other and even from themselves (2004, p.115).
In this light, the precondition for the accumulation of Land as Commodity (Chapter I) rest on the violence inflected to ‘indigenous people’ and the dispossession of their lands. Or as Segato proposes, ‘racial difference is not a sufficient cause for social conflicts, actual or from the past, but it is an effect of interest and the concentration greed’ (2007, p.152). As such racial violence becomes the premise for modern governance.
93 As introduced before, applying the Cartesian logos of Western philosophy to the imaginary geography of Modern European knowledge created a world subsumed into a mathematical abstraction. Land in this process becomes desocialized and depoliticised, classified as a scarce resource to be efficiently exploited. The formation of private property was described in Chapter I, as a process of abstraction, commodification, and separation. However, it also entails a violent process. Particularly in the colonial context, where the ‘savage’ geography was seen as negative (state of nature) different forms of spatialized technologies of power are used to frame land as part of an a priori world of objects, against the lawless, and consequently violent, space of the savage (Blomley, 2003, p.125-127). In the colonial context, people’s separation from land constituted a process of subject formation qualified by its differentiation. Depending the needs of the political-economy of land, the ‘native’ either becomes landless and forced into slavery or servitude relation, or is given ‘peripheral’ lands while the land is grabbed for the making of modern-territory and property relations in the establishment of social hierarchies, citizens and positive rights.
This is violence aligned to differentiation: the framing of people and land as native, to either fix them to it or displace them from it, inventing a ‘natural’ condition for them as marginal, ‘savage’ or ‘untamed’, has become one of the main productive disposition for accumulation (primitive or by dispossession). However, the emergence of a new mode of production is producing a new layer of spatial difference altering the violent premises that fixed them to those lands. With the arrival of new technologies and needs coming from global markets all lands become potentially valuable. For the racialized bodies historically attached to those lands, with the new forms of corporate space production, they become re-disposed from their ‘natural’ dispossession to those lands. This new speculative valorisation of lands, on the other hand, has also ignited a revitalization of political-identity attachment to land taking place among indigenous movements. These uneven competing stakeholders articulate novel forms of negotiation and resistance in the emerging modern-colonial countryside. The next- subsection presents these ‘tectonic’ movements in changing landed relations aligned to novel forms of accumulation and capitalist need through the prism of colonial
94 violence. This means to give centrality to a persistent violence as the main governing logic of differential extraction.
The Development of the Modern-Colonial Countryside
Following Woods’ concept of the global countryside (2007), and influenced by the notion of mu/ondial – Portuguese and French – (Santos, 1988 and Lefebvre 2009a), and the immanent colonial violence at the centre of capitalist land acquisition, I arrive to the ‘modern-colonial countryside’ to explore globalization from the perspective of peripheral subjects and lands in the Rural South. The concept of ‘modern-colonial countryside’ seeks to bring to light the imbrications between new fixities (enclosures of lands and people) and movements (flow of capital and goods) under an emerging regime of extractive capitalism in southern rural lands.
As developed, technologies of enclosure can explain more than the formation of private property as an economic means. The colonial experience, through the lens of power, gives a historical account of the appropriation of land of the ‘new world' that established the foundations for the formation of law and property, and the modern nation-state territory. Enclosure, in the Marxist account, became a means to ‘liberate’ the peasant from his means of production (i.e., land) and enable the development of the capitalist mode of production. But enclosure in its imperial mission became means to immobilise people while simultaneously produced racialized subjects for the expansion of the accumulation process over land and subjects. In both accounts,