2012/01/01 by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui · 4 citations
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Historical Studies in Central America #Latin American history and culture #Politics and Society in Latin America
paper · doi:10.1215/00382876-1472612
crossref issued 2012/01/01 · crossref published 2012/01/01 · crossref published-print 2012/01/01 · openalex publication_date 2012/01/01 · crossref created 2012/01/19 · crossref deposited 2022/04/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref indexed 2026/07/30 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui explores the possibilities for decolonization through an analysis of the “multicultural” state as an ongoing practice of coloniality that recognizes and incorporates indigenous people but only as static, archaic figures defined by a continuous relationship to an idealized past. As Cusicanqui demonstrates, this truncated recognition subordinates indigenous people, depriving them of their contemporaneity, complexity, and dynamism and, therefore, of their potential to challenge the given order. Coloniality and its relations of domination, she claims, are also reproduced in the knowledge production of academic scholars of decoloniality, primarily from the global North. These academics, she argues, appropriate the language and ideas of indigenous scholars without grappling with the relations of force that define their relationships to them, thus decontextualizing and depoliticizing these concepts and marginalizing indigenous scholars from their own debates. Counterposing the Aymara concept of ch'ixi—a parallel coexistence of difference—to multiculturalism and hybridity, which incorporates and flattens or distorts difference, Cusicanqui shows that decolonization must be not only a discourse but also an affirmative practice.