Bolivar Echeverria - Modernity and Whiteness

The publication of this series was made possible with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

• Nelly Richard, Eruptions of Memory
• Nstor Perlongher, Plebeian Prose
• Bolvar Echeverra, Modernity and Whiteness

Bolvar Echeverra

Translated by Rodrigo Ferreira

polity

First published in Spanish as Modernidad y blanquitud Ediciones Era, Mexico, 2010. All rights reserved.

This English edition Polity Press, 2019

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3360-2

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3361-9 (pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Names: Echeverria, Bolivar, author.

Title: Modernity and whiteness / Bolivar Echeverria.

Other titles: Modernidad y blanquitud. English.

Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2019. | Series: Critical South | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018061204 (print) | LCCN 2019011285 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509533633 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509533602 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509533619 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Group identity--Latin America. | Whites--Race identity--Latin America. | Capitalism--Latin America. | Multiculturalism--Latin America. | Civilization, Modern. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / General.

Classification: LCC HN110.5.A8 (ebook) | LCC HN110.5.A8 .E5425 2019 (print) | DDC 305.809/08--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018061204

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For Bolvar Echeverra, white skin is not a guarantee of whiteness. However, the latter is in fact an essential requirement of the way of life demanded by capitalist modernity. The difference between these two notions is not just a play on words or a subtle linguistic shift (a gesture so typical of our time, when making an intervention in the use of language has become a primary tool for critique), although there is an element of both of these in this move. Without a doubt, it is a provocation that challenges the long-standing identification of racial whiteness with the image or representation of the modern way of life and its dominant ethos. Yet, above all, it is evidence that the foundation of modern identity does not have in principle a specific racial scheme, although, contradictorily, it has been and continues to be constituted by a kind of racism. Echeverra uses the concept of whiteness to introduce a fundamental question: to what extent is the capitalist way of modern life necessarily entwined with the identity category established by white skin? Or, in other words, is modern identity based on elements even if not fully separate ones different from the ethnic and racial features of whiteness?

Echeverra (19412010) was a philosopher of Ecuadorean origin who spent a large part of his life, and developed a significant portion of his theoretical work, in Mexico. Like that of many of the most renowned Latin American intellectuals of recent decades, his thought was in a close relationship with some of the most important debates in critical thinking in twentieth-century Europe, and followed a strategy that, in his own terms, could be called semiophagic. Referring to Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrades 1928 Anthropophagic Manifesto which proclaimed, We are not only barbarians, we are not only Caliban, we are anthropophagous, as a means to deliberately take ownership of the barbarity attributed to native Latin Americans by colonizers Echeverras appropriation of European thought voices a similar claim. Native Latin Americans took the conquerors cultural code and transformed it from within to make it their own. They reassigned the symbolic meaning of the Other, recreated and revitalized it into a new meaning that they could absorb and integrate into their own code.

In this regard, Echeverra goes even further, as he takes up the term mestizo (whose semantic and political force has had a long presence in the history of Latin America, particularly in Mexico), and mobilizes it in relation to the survival strategy created spontaneously by the urban indigenous population after the destruction of their ancestors world during the conquest. He thinks of mestizaje as the strategy that artisans, servants, construction workers, etc. quietly executed while building the new colonial temples, plazas, and cities. Knowing that they were unable to go back to their pre-colonial world and that they would never be able to be the same as their colonizers, the indigenous population played with the conquerors code and represented it in a way that turned it de facto into something new, into a new world that they could inhabit. Following this strategy, they managed to perform as Europeans, to infiltrate and transform Europeanness from within. For Echeverra, this spontaneous practice of mestizaje was an indirect means of resistance and fundamental to Latin Americas particular mode of interiorizing modernity.

Bolvar Echeverra was trained in European critical thought, as first practiced by the Frankfurt School, itself determined by Karl Marxs critique of political economy and strongly inspired by ontological phenomenology. He first arrived in Freiburg, Germany, in 1961 with the explicit objective of studying with Martin Heidegger, whom he had enthusiastically read alongside texts by Jean-Paul Sartre and Miguel de Unamuno previously in Quito, where he was part of the avant-garde intellectual Ecuadorean group Tzntzicos (Headshrinkers) and their journal Pacuna. This group of Ecuadorean poets and philosophers defined themselves by their radical critique of what Echeverra called the intellectual marasmus of their time. Without having the opportunity to study with Heidegger who by that time no longer offered open courses Echeverra entered the Free University of Berlin in West Berlin, and joined the group of students who edited Der Anschlag, a journal created in 1962 by Rudi Dutschke, who was the most prominent leader of the German student movement of 68 and with whom Echeverra maintained a long friendship until his death in 1979. As Echeverra himself pointed out, Berlin at the time was not only geographically and politically divided, it was also fraught with social tensions, which in their explosiveness gave way to a highly creative underground intellectual and political life. Studying Marxs work in this environment, Echeverra developed a reading of Marx that distanced him from the ideological discourse of the Soviet Union, but, at the same time, brought him close to a broader wave of re-readings that helped reinvigorate Marxism. These readings affirmed the radical power of Marxism to critique the powerful mechanisms of social subordination developed both by twentieth-century capitalism and by the Soviet bloc.