The Trace of a Mark That Scatters: The Anthropoi and the Rhetoric of Decoloniality

ABSTRACT

The turn to Latin American rhetoric has broadly been galvanized by the need for a politics of difference. Critics have drawn from Latinamericanist theories of decoloniality to mobilize epistemological alternatives to Western forms of knowledge production and to critique the representations of alterity in the Western rhetorical tradition, posing variations of a common question: how to proceed from merely tolerating difference in the Western paradigm of rhetoric to actually theorizing rhetoric from the locus of non-Western (that is, non-logocentric) space? In this essay, we analyze the aporia dredged up by Latinamericanist theories of decoloniality as a prism through which to renew and rethink the terms and conditions of comparativist inquiry. We conclude by setting to work on preparing the non-nostalgic grounds for an alterity yet to arrive under the heading of the X.

KEYWORDS:

• Colonial difference
• comparative rhetoric
• cultural rhetorics
• decoloniality
• rhetorical theory

Acknowledgments

We thank LuMing Mao and anonymous reviewers for reading this essay and providing thoughtful and critical feedback. Also, we thank RSQ editor, Jacqueline Rhodes, for welcoming the essay and for offering support throughout the entire process.

Notes

¹ According to Quijano, coloniality brought together previous structures of control of labor, slavery, and serfdom “around and upon the basis of capital and the world market” (“Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America” 534) for a “control of a specific form of labor could be, at the same time, the control of a specific group of dominated people” (“Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America” 537).

² “Delinking,” Mignolo argues, “cannot be performed … within the frame of the theo and the ego-logical politics of knowledge and understanding” (“Delinking” 461).

³ Cf. Baca, Mestiz@ Scripts; Bokser; Delgado; Kennedy; Noe; Olson and Casas; Olson and de los Santos; Romano, “Grand Convergence”; Serviss; Soto Vega and Chavez; Villanueva; Walsh.

⁴ For more on the question of subalternity in Latin America, which serves as a genealogical grounding of the question of decoloniality, see Acosta; Beasley-Murray; Beverly; Hatfield; Moreiras; Pérez; Williams; Yúdice.

⁵ See, for example: Baca & Villanueva; De los Santos; Medina; Ramírez; Romney. Also, see Mignolo’s reading of Tojolab’al as a nonrepresentational language (“The Zapatistas’s Theoretical Revolution”).

⁶ Burke (45).

⁷ When we use this term throughout this essay, we invoke Latinamericanist critic Abraham Acosta’s claim that “orality cannot serve as the grounds upon which to critique or resist the West, for orality already lies at the heart of the former” (73).

⁸ See: Abbott; Bizzell & Herzberg; Kennedy; Murphy et al.; Romano, “Orality and Presence.”

⁹ A “nostalgia for the lost origin,” Gayatri Spivak reminds us, “can be detrimental to the exploration of social realities within the critique of imperialism” (“Can the Subaltern Speak” 87).

¹⁰ See: Grosfoguel, “Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies”; Moreiras, “The Fatality of (My) Subalternism”; Williams, “The Subalternist Turn.”

¹¹ Quijano extends this conversation to race in “Coloniality of Power,” where he writes, “the ‘inferior’ ‘races’ are ‘inferior’ because they are ‘objects’ of study or of domination/exploitation/discrimination, they are not ‘subjects’, and most of all, they are not ‘rational subjects’” (221).

¹² It is important to elaborate here that the sign anthropoi, in the humanitas/anthropoi binary, can be understood analogously to Giorgio Agamben’s articulation of “bare life”: the domain of life common to all living beings, whose exclusion founds the domain of politically qualified life (polis, the community) (8).

¹³ A notable exception: Olson’s Constitutive Visions.

¹⁴ Cf. Acosta (65–73).

¹⁵ In addition to the scholarship we cover here, see García and Baca.

¹⁶ If language is a form of signification, then intent or motive can be divorced from rhetoric. Mignolo argues, “The enunciation [of the anthropos] doesn’t name an existing entity, but invents it. The enunciation needs an enunciator (agent), an institution (not everyone can invent the anthropos), but to impose the anthropos as ‘the other’ in the collective imaginary, it is necessary to be in a position of managing the discourse (verbal, visual, audial) by which you name and describe the entity (the anthropos or ‘the other’) and succeed in making believe that it exists” (“Geopolitics of Sensing” 134). Here, he is describing a telos. We are interested in how this telos emerges in a reversal of a system: us/them | them/us.

¹⁷ Grosfoguel echoes this when he writes, “The fact that one is socially located in the oppressed side of power relations, does not automatically mean that he/she is epistemically thinking from a subaltern epistemic location,” and continues by saying, “the success of the modern/colonial world system consists in making subjects … to think epistemically like the ones of the dominant positions” (“The Epistemic Decolonial Turn” 213). His misstep, like Mignolo’s, is naming exteriority under the heading of the proper name, “the subaltern.”

¹⁸ Cf. Agamben; Bhabha; Galli; Guidotti-Hernández; Schmitt.

¹⁹ “These oppositions have meaning only after the possibility of the trace. … The trace must be thought before the entity” (Of Grammatology 46–47).

²⁰ See, for example, Mao; Stroud; Swearingen; Wang.