(1996). Is national history a thing of the past? On the growing reality of world history in the Twentieth century. The European Legacy: Vol. 1, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the study of European Ideas, pp. 696-702.

In what follows, I attempt to show that a look at some curious examples of translations from European texts makes us think about issues in translation theory and post-colonial theory from a slightly different angle. The metaphor of translation can very well be employed for understanding the relation between European texts, and some texts and some social and political practices in India in the colonial period, and this in turn helps us look critically at what I shall call our fuzzy (...) post-colonialism. I also argue that Walter Benjamin's metaphor of translation as the after-life of a work can be extended to posit two basic modes of after-life. (shrink)

The article addresses the relationship between modernity and coloniality in the field of colonial theories, both postcolonial and decolonial, emphasizing the problems of representation and putting in the foreground the problem of not having a language suitable to express the tensions that the same relationship produces. For this, it discuss the crossroads of the coloniality and modernity, present in representative authors of these theories, and it assumes such a crossroads as a cultural and theoretical arena. From there, a reading exercise (...) is proposed, as an example, in texts by Joseph Conrad and Frantz Fanon. Finally, the article discusses some nuances of the problem of representation that could affect our understanding of the processes of subjectivity, their histories and the morphologies of our knowledge. (shrink)

This essay examines theoretical arguments surrounding the use of post-colonial theory as a way to fill in the epistemological lacuna in the studies of post-socialism. It reviews the various streams of this theoretical development and employs Edward Said’s notion of “traveling theory” to demonstrate that theoretical claims made by proponents and opponents of this particular comparative perspective are historically, socially, and geographically situated, although not fixed. Disciplinary, national, and institutional affiliations, instead of theoretical justifications, are identified as important factors in (...) the propensity to accept or resist the introduction of post-colonial perspective on Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The essay concludes by acknowledging the potential usefulness as well as the limits of post-colonialism in the conceptualization of the post- socialist space. (shrink)

This paper is a preliminary version of the introduction to my forthcoming book, Modernidades periféricas. It offers a retrospective insight into the problematical question of the nature and character of the “periphery” in the case of Latin America. I start by presenting a general diagnosis of “Modernity” from a peripheral perspective, namely, by approaching synchronically, rather than diachronically or chronologically, the relationships between pre-modernity, modernity, and post-modernity in the case of Latin American thought. I then follow this diagnosis with an (...) exposition of the methodology that I have developed throughout my research as an appropriate theoretical framework for my project. It is here that I want to insist on the need for a move beyond the concept of “mestizaje” to that of “mimetism,” both in its historical and cultural significance, as well as from a philosophical perspective. This step is a key turn, I contend, for tackling the question of “our” Latin American Modernities. I conclude by exposing the pragmatic implications of the liberal, the Marxist and the pos-structuralist approaches to these questions. My position is an attempt to bring to light the shortcomings of each one of these perspectives and to develop a new possibility of approach, together with a new methodology, to the question of Latin American Modernities. (shrink)