May 27, 2020

Post-Colonialisms and Global Citizenship

Boaventura de Sousa Santos e José Manuel Mendes

With the aim of emphasizing possible contributions for social emancipation from contemporary indigenous struggles in Latin American contexts, this thesis proposes an effort to scrutinize the making of dominant and hegemonic world-system of entangled power relations. Considering previous works and reflections on a variety of anti-systemic social movements (specially those territorialized in the same continent) and their everyday conflicts and relationships tied to an Imperial/Colonial axis that have been ruling since first modernity, the concept of abyssal matrix is here forged and presented as such. As a longstanding combination and juxtaposition of capitalist, colonial and heteropatriarchal hierarchies, the abyssal matrix exists both in the scope of theories (epistemologically, for instance) and practices (praxis) and has been underpined impositions, inequalities and injustices through different and articulated times-spaces in the Earth. The same concept has a double source: from the "active production of non-existences", one of the keys of both abyssal thinking and abyssal line devised by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2005); and also from the black feminist thought´s notion of the matrix of domination (Patricia Hill Collins, 2002). From that colonial lives and societies (including sujects, collectivities, sociabilities, and autonomies) are intrinsically connected to "justified" perpretations of violence and appropriation which benefits (direct and indirectly) imperial way of life. The dialogue with indigenous struggles, during qualitative field researches in Brazil (with the CIR in Raposa Serra do Sol) and in Bolivia (with CRSUCIR in Raqaypampa), poses challenges, limits and opportunities for a possible post-abyssal condition. As pointed by the Marxist (and Latin American) theory of dependency, it was noticed also that overexploitation of colonial workforce and bodies/territories have been relying on strong extra-economic factors. On the other way, political and epistemic disobedience and new subaltern institutionalities led by indigenous movements are confronting the capitalist/colonial/heteropatriarchal world-system. Beyond class-based claims, organizations and legacies, their paths and demands show the relevance of oppressions of race and gender, which are part of the same arch of powers. In the wake of social sciences by demand of indigenous people (in this specific cases, related to contests in the areas of communication and political education for the youth), it is possible to broaden, problematize and refine interpretations and approaches to the abyssal matrix and its various forms of colonialisms. Both have in the operations of objectification, plunder and commoditification of human and nonhumans beings its modus operandi and its main rule; not as exception, excess or deviation.