A Transnational Feminist Paradox: Property, Rights, and the Pursuit of Ownership, a letter essay

August 11, 2014

Dear Reader

My mother, a diasporic Korean who came to the U.S. in the 1970s, used to communicate to me in the form of letters. She would handwrite a note on a notepaper (it was always on a yellow notepaper). At the end of her letter, regardless of how difficult the subject matter, she would always sign with love. She would then fold the letter into an origami shape and leave it in a place where I could easily see the letter: on the bathroom counter where I would get ready for work or the day, on my desk, on my school bag when I was still in school, or on my bed. Her intention was always to communicate. When our spoken communication seemed impossible, my mother left letters, love letters so to speak, that have since left me with the impression that some letters, no matter how difficult the subject matter, were my mother’s commitment to communicating with love. While I don’t know if I love you as a reader, for our notions of love and intimacy vary, I can say that here in this letter I am committed to communicating, even if the subject is difficult; therefore, this is my commitment to communicate a transnational feminist paradox: property, rights, and the pursuit of ownership.

My desire to unravel the paradox I am in, stems from events that have unfolded since 2013. In 2013, the Institute for Impossible Subjects (IIS) formed, comprising of feminists, activists, artists, and scholars from various locations: Berlin, France, South Korea, Spain, and the United States. The idea: we would create a publishing platform via the web. IIS envisioned navigating the complex question of: how does one create a transnational and decolonized space for thinking, visualizing, theorizing, and practicing (art, activism, and scholarship)? As IIS’s earlier conversations navigated imagining what sort of spaces “we” would collectively create, and how this platform would enable creation, “togetherness” and ruptures, it also included how the online platform could not be solely defined by IIS; documentation of IIS meetings illustrate an envisioning of the space as including other voices, perspectives, visual aesthetics, sounds, movements, and invocations, as being integral to shaping IIS. And to invite other sounds, voices, visualities, perspectives, words, into IIS, in these neoliberal times, our conversations could not avoid issues of intellectual property, the commons, ownership, and property.

As IIS discussed ownership and the commons, questions arose: Who would “own” the work on IIS? Would it be IIS? The author? Will it be appropriated? Are the works on IIS part of a (creative) commons?

This letter is neither a call for a particular type of ownership nor is it a call for a rights framework. Instead, I am committing to what Maile Arvin has described as the “productiveness of the uncomfortable.” As I navigate writing through what it means to own and property, I find it useful to navigate the coloniality of ownership and how it is also embedded in slavery, so as to theorize the contradictions that I find myself immersed in as I participate in conversations about ownership and property. A recognition of such contradictions, or what I refer to as paradoxes, are needed to even begin envisioning for myself the (im)possibility of a radical positioning in regards to ownership.

In this letter “A Feminist Paradox: Property, Rights & the Pursuit of Ownership” I take on the question of what it means to property in neoliberal times, and the impositions that are sustained by not navigating the paradoxes one is obligated to. First, I define property and ownership. Second, I frame the paradox of language and elisions that occur in incidents where rights violations and ownership conflict with one another (I examine the recent history through United States v. Cortes-Meza). And third, I close with radical visions, where the question, then, is not about ownership, but rather, what does it mean to envision and enact a radical space of the commons when my/our reality is inextricably linked to neoliberal capitalist structures. I conclude with the positioning of a radical vision and also its (im)possibility: ritual hacking of ownership. That is, there are rituals that societies establish in regards to ownership. The structures and ideologies that shape how one relates to ownership are ritualized in the everyday; therefore, to call for new visions is to call for a hacking of the rituals that (we) partake in everyday.

1. Properties and Owners

Ownership is imbued in modern nation-states where the rise of the nation-state went hand-in-hand with capitalism. And to property and own property, is internationally recognized as a human right by nation-states and a right of states (i.e., federal properties). For some, it is recognized as “inseparable from liberty.” Property is a colonial construct (with material and human consequence). For John Locke, property is defined as “the labour” and “work” of a person by his own hands – the land that “man tills” and product of such work. In this sense, Locke’s argument in regards to work, labor and land as intrinsically defining characteristics of ownership, reflects western belief systems of land as property. As Locke saw that land is property to those who work the land, Mishuana Goeman has illustrated how property is “distinctly a European notion that locks together labor, land, and conquest.”

The trail of tears and the forced relocation of native peoples through the “Indian Removal Act” (1830) and the Alien Land Ownership and the Kuleana Act (1850) in Hawaii that propelled the Kanaka Maoli into a foreign system of land ownership were among some of the policies that changed indigenous people’s relationship to land from one of communal use (and non-ownership) to one of western practices of ownership. Western ownership led to indigenous dispossession and displacement. This violence and rationale for property are ideologies that are my (and yours if you live in this global modern economic system) inheritance today.

What is “property”? If it is a possession, then what does it mean to possess a thing (and what kinds of things)? The turning into property occurs in ways that is innocuous at times. Property is often assumed to be a noun: material like owning a house, cars, immaterial as my argument, human such as slaves, and nonhuman like a pet. However, property is defined by rules of ownership. For Aristotle, the rules of ownership make property a part of a household, where a slave is synonymous with property. In Politics, Aristotle defines the slave as: “he who is by nature not his own but another’s man, is by nature a slave; and he may be said to be another’s man who, being a human being, is also a possession. And a possession may be defined as an instrument of action, separable from the possessor.” In the rules of property, slaves are possessions, and a free person is someone who owns herself/himself. And the rules of ownership in general govern how this paper becomes my property (i.e., agreements to creative commons).

To participate in ownership is to engage with the rules of property; property is defined by rules. There are three ways that property is governed: private (individual), common (things owned by more than one person such as water), and state (the exclusive right of an artificial person). Just because I write this letter while am sitting in my apartment, it does not make the apartment my property. What makes it my property in the 21st century are the rules of economic exchange and contract signing to claim a property – I own a house when I participate in the rules of property through purchase, a real estate agent may help me to acquire and enact the purchase the house (where he/she are knowledgeable about the rules of house buying), and so forth. This letter is written in an apartment I rent. The rules of property means that property is relationally constituted by the owner. In this way, “property” does not exist without an “owner.” My home is owned by someone else. My letter a gift of communication. I own a website, that lists other publications I co-own with publishers. As property does not exist without an owner, what makes an owner unique is the assumption of his/her rights as an owner. Although property is relationally constituted through the owner, it is solidified through the language of rights – the owner’s right to his/her property. The discussion of rights is also a global north framework.

For Crawford Brough Macpherson, “the concept of property is, historically, and logically, a concept of rights in the sense of enforceable claims.” A copyright on an essay is enforced by laws that privilege private ownership. It is only when I need to enforce my privileges (i.e., someone copies my article and reposts it without proper attribution or permissions), does my ownership become a rights claim. One has to exert their rights through actions. And to focus on rights to property means that the rules of property are only upheld (or even needed) when the rights to property are violated. However, to solely see property as a right is then to call for the naturalization of liberal ideologies about individualism, freedom, and rights. Even as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (who were critical of private property) called for the abolition of private property because private property reified class divisions, their call for was for the radical disruption of class and ownership. But, it did not necessarily mean eradicating ownership altogether; they were proponents of “community of property.” Their call envisioned new constitution of the relations of property — one that disrupted how the proletariat had been denied their right to property — through redistribution. However, is it possible to envision non ownership? Such a question is to envision decolonial relationships beyond property and ownership.

What I am left with is: property is a western ideology that led to violence and colonial dispossession of indigenous peoples. While the language of rights may be useful, it is also limiting, and what I hope for (but I have to situate my context in the global north, as an academic, and as I write in English) is a maneuver towards being with the discomfort when acknowledging the paradoxes, so as to envision a new mode of ownership.

As IIS creates a space to publish works, we are promoting a particular type of ownership – the creative commons. Creative commons enables other artists, internet users, writers, scholars, and others, the right to use, repost, and build-upon works published on the IIS, and (re)appropriated with proper attribution. In this way, the work is still individually owned, but also available to the commons. However, if property in itself is embedded in liberal and colonial structures, historically constituted, and seen as a right, then how radical is the Creative Commons? Is it enough? Am I even ready for a process that could be even more radical than the creative commons? To envision this space (the space of IIS) as outside of the contours of capitalism and neoliberalism, would mean to deny my physical and mental reality. My reality: I am tethered to global modern capitalism and neoliberalism. What follows next is a grappling with how the contradictions of ownership (as an individual right) can (and does) collide with other notions of freedom. Therefore, regardless of the rules, even the rules fail us/me.

2. The Paradoxes: Language and Practice through the “Case Study” of Slavery

In 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNDHR) that encompassed thirty articles collectively painting a universalizing image of the rights of “man”.  UNDHR reifies the centrality of nation-states with implementing rights, where the collection of articles are reflective of an agreed upon declaration, of intentions, of the participating nations.  Today, the declaration is translated in 437 languages, including sign language espousing the rights of “man” as: being born free and equal; to life, liberty and security; to not be held in slavery or servitude; and the right to own property (nor be deprived of property); just to name a few. During antebellum slavery and legal slavery, one’s slaves was their property. The 1926 League of Nations Slavery Convention, reads: ‘slavery is the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised’. And in slave states, property was a right of the owner. Fugitive slave laws such as the Fugitive Slave Act (1850) protected the rights of the slave owner, requiring the cooperation of free citizens. The popular ideology and images deployed about slavery is that slaves are humans turned into nonhumans. Orlando Patterson discusses how slavery is the turning of a person into a social nonperson. Once a human becomes a slave he/she becomes property/a nonperson. Today, there is a shift in belief systems that there is an ethical boundary of acceptable ownership (and unacceptable ownership such as owning people as slaves). Slavery and the ownership of other people is now seen as being the normative ethical limit in international dialogues and local discourses about when ownership is unacceptable. On the one hand, a universal claim is that ownership is a right, and on the other hand, ownership cannot impede on another’s right to freedom. To turn a human into one’s property is a rights violation.

Let me paint a picture of how ownership – the owning of another human – is contested in the present. Yet, even in issues where it seems obvious (examples of slavery in the 21st century), there is a skirting around grappling with the contradictions of ownership. To begin, I start with a legal case, an example of capitalism gone awry.

In brief, it’s important to define some terms. Human trafficking is codified as a criminal act in many states, including the United States. A common definition of human trafficking is found in Article 3 of the Palermo Protocol. Human trafficking encompasses slavery – the ownership of another person. In fact, human trafficking is not slavery, although it is popularly referred to as “Modern Day Slavery” or in scholarship as “contemporary slavery.” Instead, trafficking is, inclusive of human slavery (albeit, not limited to slavery, but encompassing forced labor). Some trafficked people are bought and sold, not all trafficked people become property to their traffickers. But it can and does happen in some cases as see with Javier and Angelica.

“Javier” and “Angelica” are emblematic of how even in the 21st century, after the abolition of human slavery, slavery occurs in ways that are less visible, not contractual, but rather a belief system that is reinforced through coercive relationships. Yet, instead of calling it slavery (in examples where ownership is discussed), other words are applied, moving the public away from seeing how in examples where ownership as a right and rights violation are entangled. In 2011, a federal jury in Atlanta Georgia convicted a Mexican national, “Javier,” on charges of illegal harboring aliens, conspiracy to defraud the U.S., importation of “aliens” for “immoral purposes,” coercing minor females, and sex trafficking children. During the jury trial, “Angelica,” from Oaxaca, Mexico, described her experience of going from living in a town where people work in fields, planting food like corn and beans, and the language is Chinanteco, to meeting Javier. Angelica met Javier in a park where he invited her to a Quinceanera. Instead of a party, she found herself going on a journey that would take her from her hometown of Santos Tomas to Puebla, to Mexico City, to Sonora, to Arizona, to Vegas, and her final destination in Georgia. Her travels across borders were multiple from ideological to physical. Angelica crossed ideological borders of being witnessed as an “illegal immigrant” to “victim.” She also traversed geographical borders across nation-state borders on foot, and state borders by plane, bus, and car. And another border she oscillated between was the boundary of being seen as human and nonhuman. In spite of having no desires to travel to the U.S., Angelica found herself in debt $20,000 and forced into sexual economies. Angelica states, “I had to work doing [prostitution] because in that job it was easier to make money.”

Angelica states: “because he put me in that job; and if I didn’t do it… he beat me.” Prostituted in Georgia, Angelica gave Javier all of her money, saying, “I was his own property, so he would take all the money.”

Angelica’s story is a legal one that circulated in media networks. Latino brothels like that found in Angelica’s experience, are described as being like fast food chains. The imagery of the fast food brothel reinforces through language the dehumanization of women in sexual economies: “Fast food chains have a common product and common method of selling that product, but each franchise has a different owner.  Yet consistently they are able to provide a similar experience.  These brothels are able to do the same.  In franchise systems there is somebody at the top, but the extent to which there is a central office for these sex operations is not known.” The image of how victims of human trafficking are propertied, turned into objects to be consumed, and again re-consumed by the public as a spectacle (what Wendy Hesford refers to as a spectacular rhetoric), travels transnationally.

What is not addressed in the legal documents describing Angelica: whether or not it mattered that Angelica believed she was treated as Javier’s property. The circulation of of Angelica’s narrative in media and legal networks does not call the reader and consumer of the story to question rights to property in itself, but rather to see Javier (and criminalized migrants like Javier) as a threat to U.S. democracy and rights. The abuse of the women circulated in press releases. And particular types of abuses were privileged (and led to convictions). The convictions: sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion, transporting minors for the purpose of prostitution, and smuggling aliens into the United States. To call it “sex trafficking” does not enable public to disentangle whether or not Angelica’s being property of Javier mattered. Because if it were the focus, we would have to add to the list of trafficking, “slavery.” Javier was never convicted for “slavery,” but rather, sex trafficking. And a common misperception is that slavery and trafficking are the same (but as I have discussed already, legally, they are not the same but relational). Instead, the convictions suggest what is priority: prostitution, crimes against the border, and child abuse. All of this is important, however, I am troubled by the multiple ways that property is naturalized – and that the gender, racial, and national investment into what it means to turn something into a property was unquestioned by the multiple actors that participated in circulating the story about human trafficking.

Although no one would question that violation of turning another human into property, the issue at hand: to property is naturalized and un-interrogated. At the end of the case, what is touted as resolution are the solutions through capitalist structures (to restore Angelica as the owner of her self, propertied to herself). And the discourse of rights is privileged. I find it productive to point to an uncomfortable aspect of the case that has become borderline an ambivalent issue in larger international dialogues about trafficking – how “slavery” as a rhetoric did not matter in the legal case. Was it because there was no legal contract that made Angelica a “slave”? What does it mean to be seen as property to another human being; Angelica was seen as a slave, but no fugitive slave laws or slave policies legally legitimized what is meant when Angelica describes herself as Javier’s property. In many cases, “modern day slavery” is used to describe human trafficking (and has been critiqued because as addressed earlier, not all trafficking is slavery). However, when the language of ownership does come into the fold, why is there an avoidance of grappling with the inherent contradictions of ownership? I believe it’s because in spite of its colonial and slave legacies, ownership is naturalized – turned into an aspect of my and your everyday ways of relating to objects and the people that surround us.

Angelica and Javier, teach me the fluidity of language, the need for specificity and context, to suggest, that in thinking through ownership, it is an unstable terrain to navigate, even in incidents (or examples) where it seems that it would be obvious (human slavery and human trafficking). And yet, in spite of its instability, it is a concept that is legally, politically and socially normalized. To conclude, I consider the (im)possibility of radical solutions.

3. Radical Visions: Ritual Hacking of Ownership

I have spent a good chunk of the time in this letter maneuvering through the paradoxes that I have inherited with regards to ownership: it is embedded in colonial violence, dispossession and slavery. And while there are certain kinds of unacceptable ownerships, it is an issue that the public has naturalized – the rules property – which means amnesia (or an ignoring) of when what is being witnessed (i.e., Angelica and Javier) are the major contradictions of ownership (some acceptable forms, others are unacceptable). I am not trying to find an absolute definition of “ownership.” Instead, I want to say that it is important to sit with this uncomfortable reality. I am not the owner of what happened to Angelica by Javier, but I am the “owner” of my words on this paper having written about the legal case with my own original argument about the complexities of language (and how language even elides and naturalizes universal assumptions about the rights to property). The effect, through language, have I re-enslaved “Angelica” and also her trafficker by turning them into the objects of this letter? If ownership is not absolute, but raises significant paradoxes, and I am in a context where I have inherited the coloniality of ownership, then what sort of radical visions are possible?

Indigenous feminists have already paved the way for understanding ownership as part of colonial systems, therefore to move towards a decolonial act, I draw upon what Gayatri Spivak referred to as “ritual hacking”and I call for the ritual hacking of the way that one relates to ownership. Spivak conveys, “To suture thus the torn and weak responsibility-based system into a conception of human dignity as the enjoyment of rights one enters ritual practice transgressively, alas, as a hacker enters software.” Turning to the subaltern as the site of knowledge, Spivak calls for “ritual hacking” as a means to disrupt and transgressively counter hierarchies (since rituals normalize hierarchies). What are the rituals that one partakes in that continue to sustain dominant practices and ideologies of capitalism and coloniality? Is not ownership one of the rituals that we partake in? So instead of being complacent, I want to participate in the ritual hacking of ownership by suggesting that this paper is not simply mine, but my letter to you.

Instead of calling this an essay, which would mean that these words are “my property” through the word “by”, I write to you, dear reader, a letter. This letter is my public commitment as one of the multiple members of IIS, that each time I write, that I commit to what my mother embodied: not only through her words, but also through each fold of the paper that led to her making me an origami figure, she left me gift of communication in place, somewhere for me to find. I leave this letter on a website, for someone like you to find, it is my gift to you in writing. But because how I relate to love requires a particular intimacy, I cannot say just yet, if this is a love letter, but rather, a letter inspired love.

I hope you read through each part like an unfolding of an origami paper. Through the process of finding and then unfolding, as you unfold, I express, a deep desire to communicate to you, dear reader, the paradox that I am left with about ownership, property in times where the norm is the pursuit of ownership. This letter is a gesture towards rethinking ownership through ritually hacking how I relate to ownership in writing as not simply something I own, but rather, a commitment to communication. While property, rights, and the pursuit of ownership leaves me, a transnational feminist in dialogue with other scholars, activists, and artist in various contexts of IIS, with a paradox. I sit with the uncomfortable, I see the productiveness of this discomfort, and I work towards new visions and possibilities.

Always, Annie Isabel Fukushima, Ph.D.

Translation as Erasure: Thoughts on Modernity’s Epistemic Violence

Abstract This essay opens the question of translation so as to reflect upon the movement at the borders of modernity. In particular it focuses on the question of translation as erasure, that is, as a mechanism through which modernity expands and demarcates its proper place, its territory. This operation of translation renders invisible everything that does not fit in the “parameters of legibility” of modernity’s epistemic territory. Modernity’s epistemic territory designates both the realm where the discourses of modernity thrive and their very horizon of intelligibility. Translation brings to view the epistemic borders where a politics of visibility is at play between erasure and visibility, disdain and recognition. To recognize the political content of modernity’s epistemic territory is to recognize that the question of global social inequality cannot be addressed simply as the consequence of an incomplete modernity. It is to acknowledge that knowledge has been part and parcel of the modern / colonial systems of oppression and destitution. The epistemic territorial practices are such that all that lies outside their realm is made invisible, is excluded from the real and is actively disdained, even unnamed. At the borders their is the movement of rejection but also the movement of incorporation; where translation appears as a process of selection, classification and appropriation that erases all that does not fit into the proper place of the already established epistemic territory. The final part of the essay looks for that which escapes from the movement of translation as incorporation and addresses the question of untranslatability. This question help us reveal elements that are outside the field of appropriation of modernity. Finally we speak of translation as struggle. Thinking in terms of epistemic translation is already to begin thinking with a vocabulary of transition, of the borders; not transition in terms of chronological change, but rather referring to a transit at the borders of modernity’s epistemic territory. The epistemic hegemony of modernity rests in a politics of border keeping, a politics of epistemic translation.

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1 Translation as Erasure

Translation designates the permeability, the movement at the borders of a given language, a given system of meaning and more generally, of a given epistemic territory. This essay reveals two divergent processes. The first, translation as erasure, speaks of the coloniality of translation; that is, the way in which translation performs a border-keeping role and expands the epistemic territory of modernity. The second, translation as plurality, speaks of the configuration of dialogues and the thinking of the borders that challenges the modern/colonial system of oppression. The fight against destitution and disdain makes use of translation to define a territory of difference that is dialogical and plural. This article puts greater emphasis on the first process, translation as erasure, in an effort to show modernity’s mechanism of epistemic exclusion and oppression. The second process, translation as plurality, is briefly explored in the final section, but it has been extensively discussed by authors such as Boaventura de Sousa Santos and is being practiced by various social movements (Santos 2006).

* Rolando Vázquez is Assistant Professor of Sociology, Roosevelt Academy, University of Utrecht. 

We follow the perspective achieved in translation studies that has unveiled the political content of translation. “Both translation studies and cultural studies are concerned primarily with questions of power relations and textual production. The idea that text exist outside a network of power relations is becoming increasingly difficult to accept” (Bassnett 1998: 135). The notion of translation is extended beyond its practice in literature to speak of how it designates the border of a system of knowledge, of modernity’s epistemic territory. Thus, here, translation is thought beyond the realm of literature as a constitutive practice of modernity, that is, as a necessary practice for the hegemony and expansion of modernity’s epistemic territory.

When looking at translation as erasure, translation is seen initially as a mechanism through which the scriptural machine of modernity expands and demarcates its proper place, its territory. This operation of translation renders invisible everything that does not fit in the “parameters of legibility” of its epistemic territory. Modernity’s epistemic territory designates both the realm where the discourses of modernity thrive and their very horizon of intelligibility. This territory is the proper place of modernity; it is the ground that bestows stability to its discourses. The borders of the epistemic territory signal the rift between modernity and coloniality. They are the borders that appear in the very slash in-between modernity/coloniality. They are the burgeoning hiatus, the swirling borders in the liminal tension between incorporation and exclusion, between visibility and erasure, between validity and disdain.

In exploring the question of untranslatability we will see how the epistemic territory of modernity determines the parameters of legibility, of recognition in accordance with modernity’s metaphysical principles such as the notion of time and its rule of presence (VЗzquez 2010a). The epistemic territory of modernity establishes its field of certainty, its reality, by a movement of incorporation that subdues the multiple, the discontinuous, difference into the realm of presence. Incorporation is the reduction of difference into sameness, of contingency into continuity. “In short, incorporation proceeds in terms of a logic of identity and similitude” (Ansell Pearson 2006: 235). Modernity’s movement of incorporation that is grounded and grounds its epistemic territoriality takes its historical forming a series of mechanisms of appropriation and representation. The epistemic territory of modernity is coeval to the movement of appropriation that we find at play in modernity’s economic, political, cultural and scientific systems. On the other hand, it is the proper place of modernity’s regime of representation (Vázquez 2010b).

The notion of modernity’s epistemic territory enables us to avoid the over-geographical determinism present in various critiques of “eurocentrism”. To be sure its configuration is closely related to the history of the hegemony of the geographical-west but its field of operation is not limited to a geographical location. Epistemic hegemony and violence is not simply distributed across geographical divides, there is a history of epistemic violence in every geographical location, including the geographical West (Fornet-Betancourt 2008; Santos 2009).

We will pursue this thought by drawing on examples from Latin America. We will demonstrate how the writing of the history and geography of the “discovered” territories meant the erasure of the local histories and geographies, furthermore, of the local notions of memory, land and language. Translation makes very explicit the coloniality of power (Mignolo 2005) and the epistemic violence (Santos 2006) that have enabled the expansion of modernity.

Finally, in order to address translation as plurality, we will look at how the movements that are fighting for visibility, for recognition around the world, are also challenging the borders of modernity’s epistemic territory. Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2006) speaks of the need of translation as a political strategy to attain mutual intelligibility, to build common grounds for the recognition of diversity, of other knowledges that have been erased or excluded from the epistemic territory of modernity. Translation thus also designates a territory of difference, of plurality and inter-cultural dialogue. Translation as an activity of and at the borders, as the in-between multiple knowledges holds unique possibilities of emancipation.

2 Epistemic Violence

[T]he epistemological alternative proposed by the WSF is that there is no global justice without global cognitive justice (Santos 2006: 14).

In this section we will show how the question of translation contributes to better understand the political content of knowledge, so as to reveal knowledge as an arena of struggle between hegemony and emancipation. Translation brings to view the epistemic borders where a politics of visibility is at play between erasure and visibility, disdain and recognition. To acknowledge the political content of modernity’s epistemic territory is to acknowledge that the question of global social inequality cannot be addressed simply as the consequence of an incomplete modernity. It is to acknowledge that the very epistemic grounding of modernity is constitutive of global social inequality. Knowledge has been part and parcel of the modern / colonial systems of oppression and destitution. The epistemic territorial practices are such that all that lies outside their realm is made invisible, is excluded from the real and is actively disdained, even unnamed.

“The epistemological privilege granted to modern science . . . was . . . instrumental in suppressing other, non-scientific forms of knowledges and, at the same time, the

subaltern social groups whose social practices were informed by such knowledges. In the case of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and of the African slaves, this

suppression of knowledge, a form of epistemicide . . . , was the other side of genocide”

(Santos, Nunes and Meneses 2007: xix).

The practices of translation have been instrumental for the epistemicide; translation is a particular mechanism of the other side of modernity: coloniality.

“Translation in the rhetoric of modernity . . . was always unidirectional and served the need of imperial designs. . . . [a] modern/colonial translation that captures and

transforms people, cultures, and meanings into what is legible and controllable for those in power” (Mignolo 2005: 144).

This hegemonic form of translation shows to what extent the establishment of modernity’s epistemic territory was violent. The establishment of modernity’s beliefs was not simply performed through the “light of reason”, but rather through colonial practices of expansion, disdain and erasure like those associated with what Michel de Certeau calls the scriptural machine.

“ ‘Progress’ is scriptural in type. . . . The ‘oral’ is that which separates itself from the magical world of voices and tradition. A frontier, a front of Western culture is

established by that separation. Thus one can read above the portals of modernity such inscriptions as ‘Here to work is to write,’ or ‘Here only what is written is

understood.’ Such is the internal law of that which has constituted itself as ‘Western’ ” (de Certeau 1988: 134)

The scriptural practices cannot be underestimated if we are to understand the establishment of modernity’s epistemic territory. In speaking of the Reformation and the Enlightenment, de Certeau makes an observation that is directly applicable to the origins of modernity/coloniality in the conquest of America.

“Writing acquires the right to reclaim, subdue or educate history. . . . Writing becomes science and politics . . . It becomes violence, cutting its way through the

irrationality of superstitious peoples or regions still under the spell of sorcery” (de Certeau 1988: 144).

The violence of the expansion of modernity’s epistemic territory is the disdain of all that doesn’t belong to its parameters of legibility and certainty. We can exemplify the movement of translation as a scriptural practice of incorporation with one of the earliest colonial works of translation and “ethnology”, written at the very start of the Spanish colonization in America, the work of Fray Bernardino de SahagЬn (c.1488–1590), “The History of the Things of the New World” (SahagЬn 1956). The work of SahagЬn sits at the origin of “modernity”, at the origin of the planetary expansion of modernity’s epistemic territory. In the work of SahagЬn we encounter the ambivalence and entwinement between the incorporation of the other into the scriptural archive of modernity and her erasure.

Nobody can deny the importance of the work of Sahagún for our understanding of what was lost, for understanding the ways of living that preceded the colonial encounter. Sahagún is credited as a major contributor to our knowledge and to the scriptural survival of pre-Hispanic Mexican culture, next to Fray Andrés de Olmos, Fray Alonso de Molina and Fray Toribio de Benavente MotolinТa (Edmonson 1974: 3). The enormous size of the bibliography around

his work bears testimony to his importance as “the first anthropologist of the Americas” (León-Portilla 1999).

“Even if only from the methodological point of view the work of Sahagún grants him the title of the father of anthropology in the new world, it is necessary to add that the

materials that he gathered are so rich and important for the current research on the pre-Hispanic world, that they continue to be one of the most valuable sources for

the researcher of Mexico’s indigenous past” (León-Portilla 1966: 13).

In spite of Sahagún’s undeniable importance for today’s scholarship, his work is emblematic of the movement of translation at the borders of modernity, where the incorporation into the corpus of modern knowledge designates a movement of appropriation as erasure.

Bernardino de Sahagún together with other early “scribes”, “translators” of the colonies witnessed the colonial destruction of other cultures and often showed admiration for the societies that were being colonized. In this sense their work is also an essential source for a study of the origins of the dark side of modernity.

“This work would be of great utility to make known the greatness of this Mexican people, which remains unknown . . . they have been destroyed, them and all their things, so much so that they could not even keep

the appearance of what they were.So that now they are seen as barbarians as worthless people . . .” (SahagЬn 1956: 29)

Witnessing the erasure of a whole culture, Sahagún strove to preserve it by incorporating it into the written language of modernity. However, through this operation he reduced the other to be “an object determined by the categories of the European. . . . – and – he would declare the Indians world-view appearance and reality the sacred scriptures” (Villoro 1989: 23).2

Although the specialized literature in pre-Hispanic studies acknowledges Sahagún’s work as a preservation of pre-Hispanic cultures, this moment of incorporation and translation of pre- Hispanic ideas into the body of European knowledge marks as well the historical moment of their erasure as practices, as living memory. Though Sahagún’s text is a bilingual text in Nahuatl and Spanish, it is built on various levels of translation and scriptural practices: first it performs the appropriation of “oral knowledge” into a pictorial and scriptural language and then the passing from pictorial to written language. All these translations can be seen as an exercise of inscription, appropriation, incorporation, marking thus, the very moment of the demise of these living oral traditions under the hegemony of modernity’s scriptural enterprise.

“Sahagún himself details all the manipulations to which he had to subject the original transcriptions of the elders’ accounts. He cut synthesized, and arranged the

materials to adapt them to the guidelines of his time concerning the writing of books. He had to organize the material by books, chapters, and paragraphs. . . . The

combination of oral transcription and literary manipulation typical of SahagЬn gives us in a nutshell a view of the confrontation between two worlds” (Marcos 2006: xxii).

The demise of oral traditions and the institution of a scriptural economy of knowledge comes hand in hand with the erasure of the past as a living experience, with a colonial politics of time (VЗzquez 2009). The notions of memory (ancestors/memoria), land (tierra) and language (palabra) represent examples of the untranslatable, namely that which is erased by translation and replaced by the modern notions of chronology, space and writing. The untranslatable is discussed in the fourth section. The expansion of modernity’s epistemic territory relies on this manner of incorporation as erasure where there is a survival of written history and a loss of living memory, of memory as experience. Coloniality has performed this uprooting of the “non-western”, this un-naming, in order to inscribe them in a system of classification as the other, the backward, the savage, the primitive other. Translation is here revealed as erasure.

Both the expansion of modernity’s epistemic territory and the way in which the frontier has been constituted and secured call forth the question of translation. Translation designates the movement at the borders and their very constitution. It brings into legibility a double movement: on the one hand, an economy of appropriation and expansion of modernity’s epistemic territory, and on the other, the active rejection, the making invisible of modernity’s elsewhere, of modernity’s others. Appropriation cannot be thought without exclusion, universality without otherness, modernity without coloniality.

“Modernity is a condition of compulsive, and addictive designing. . . . When it comes to designing the forms of human togetherness, the waste is human beings. Some

human beings who do not fit into the designed form nor can be fitted into it. . . . Flawed beings, from whose absence or obliteration the designed form could

only gain, becoming more uniform, more harmonious, more secure and altogether more at peace with itself ” (Bauman 2004: 30).

The stability of modern designs implies the segregation, marginalization and if possible the making invisible of all those that do not fit in the design. In this way, we begin to see how the movement of coloniality is always already implied in the movement of modernity. The mediation between modernity and coloniality points here to a movement that means at one and the same time incorporation and exclusion, continuity and rupture. As we have suggested, appropriation comes not only with destitution but also with erasure. The epistemic territory of modernity is such that it constitutes its field of visibility as the totality of the real (Vázquez 2010b). The equation of the real to visibility that underlies its forms of appropriation is also at play in its mechanisms of representation, in its visions of novelty, progress, modernization and the like, in the artifice of a utopian future. Modernity’s mechanisms of appropriation and representation comes hand in hand with the uprooting of the past as a site of diverging experience, of discontinuity, of epistemic transformation and political action. In the following section, we will move beyond the question of translation as a scriptural enterprise to look at it as an epistemic mechanism of appropriation into modernity’s territory.

3 Classification and the Appropriation of the World

Translation has to be understood not only as a “technology” of the scriptural enterprise of modernity, but also as a movement of appropriation of the world, of incorporation into modernity’s territory, its reality and visibility. Translation appears thus as a process  of selection, classification and appropriation that erases all that does not fit into the proper place of the already established epistemic territory.

The literature around modernity / coloniality is key to see how these epistemic politics were concretely played out in the expansion of modernity. Anibal Quijano, for instance, shows how the socialclassification around the idea of race is a constitutive element of the expansion of modernity and capitalism since the unfolding of the modern / colonial system in America. The idea of “race” enabled the

“codification of the difference between the conquerors and conquered . . . a supposedly different biological structure that placed some in a natural situation of inferiority

to the others. The conquistadors assumed this idea as the constitutive, founding element of the relations of domination that the conquest imposed” (Quijano 2000: 533).

Quijano shows that the relations of power and domination in the colony cannot be sufficiently explained only by referring to the economic processes of extraction and exploitation. “[R]ace became the fundamental criterion for the distribution of the world population into ranks, places, and roles in the new society’s structure of power” (Quijano 2000: 535).The colonial economy as well as colonial politics depended on the establishment of an epistemic apparatus of domination. At this very moment, modernity deployed its own “universal” categories so as to establish its epistemic territory, its monopoly over the real. What Martin Heidegger (1993) calls the mode of appropriation of modern science is explicitly seen in the practices and politics of knowledge that constituted the expansion of European hegemony. This modern/Euro-centric knowledge came to transform the practices of everyday life, the very notion of the real, including the exercise of identity.

“Social relation founded on the category of race produced new historical social identities in America–Indians, blacks, and mestizos–and redefined others. . . .
[R]ace and racial identity were established as instruments of basic social classification” (Quijano 2000: 534).

The classification of the world is a key process in the expansion of modernity’s epistemic territory. It designates the particular mode of appropriation of the “disciplines”. It at once appropriates and represents the world within modernity’s parameters of legibility. It subjects the world to the power of modernity. Classification objectivises, constitutes series of objects. It institutes an ordering, a mapping of the world. It defines the real as presence. Classification brings into the order of continuity and sameness the diversity of the world.

Classification upholds, “naturalizes” hierarchies. It creates an image of the world as representation, one in which the real is vacated from experience. Experiences of the past, the land, the voice, the word remain in excess of modernity’s territory. Modernity’s epistemic territory seems to be contained in its own selfreferential representation, within its totalizing myth of reason and universality, bound by its horizon of appropriation and representation. Concurrently, through classification those experiences outside and in excess of modernity’s territory are deprived from reality; they remain erased, unnamed or discredited as myth.

Let us take the example of the notion of race to see how the expansion of modernity’s epistemic territory involves appropriation as erasure. The condition of entrance of the “non-Western” into modernity’s epistemic territory was their classification and the erasure of their own experiences and knowledges.

“In the moment that the Iberians conquered, named, and colonized America, . . . they found a great number of different peoples, each with its own history,

language, discoveries and cultural products, memory and identity. . . . Three hundred years later, all of them had become merged into a single identity: Indians” (Quijano 2000: 551).

The mechanism of classification configures a particular politics of naming and un-naming. The power of naming incorporates “alterity” to and subsumes it under modernity’s epistemic territory. Its power of inscribing “alterity” determines the parameters of visibility, of identity, of recognition of “alterity” within the epistemic territory of modernity. Language is brought under the sway of the scriptural economy; it is turned into an instrument of appropriation. The power of the disciplines rests in appropriation, in their ability to make into their own, into their proper place, their territory, the multiplicity of the “world”. Classification speaks of translation as a mechanism of expansion, incorporation and erasure.

The institution of the idea of race, just as the mapping of the world that sits at the origin of modernity, speaks of modernity’s mechanisms of classification and appropriation, of the modern “writing of the world”, of modernity’s scriptural machine. As we will see in the last section, this same manner of appropriation is today at play in theexpansion of global hegemonic discourses, such as that of “global capitalism”. But let us first address in the next section the question that calls to be asked, the question of untranslatability. Now that we have seen translation as a movement of incorporation and erasure, we will approximate the question of that which is being lost, that which remains invisible, that which is erased in the movement of expansion of modernity’s epistemic territory.

4 Hegemony and Untranslatability

“Cada lengua es una visión del mundo, cada civilización es un mundo” (Paz 1973:58).

Translation as a movement of incorporation calls for the question of untranslatability. What is that which remains untranslatable, outside the scope of translation? What is excluded from its movement of incorporation? What is in excess of modernity’s epistemic territory and escapes its economy of the real? This is a question that belongs to the urgent task of circumscribing modernity, of divesting it from its semblance of totality.

Various critiques of the hegemonic discourses of modernity have uncovered its Eurocentric parameters of observation (Bhambra 2007a; Chakrabarty 2000; Mignolo 2000; Said 1991). For example, Gurminder K. Bhambra shows how in the discussion on multiple modernities the European institutional framework remains as the unquestioned yardstick. “[W]hilst purporting to offer new ways of understanding the concept of modernity theories of multiple modernities continue to rest on assumptions of an original modernity of the West which others adapt, domesticate, or tropicalize” (Bhambra 2007b: 71). In a similar vein, she argues that in historical sociology there is a prevailing “western exceptionalism”, whose meta-narratives remain unquestioned. In other words historical sociology has kept “western modernity” as the main framework of reference, as its underlying “ideal type” (Bhambra 2010). Now our argument is that parameters such as “Western exceptionalism”, or that of the “European institutional framework”, or more generally methodological Eurocentrism find their condition of possibility i modernity’s epistemic territory and in its economy of the real. In other words, the question of translation and the untranslatable shows that modernity not only imposed “Western-centric” macronarratives, but furthermore, that in establishing an epistemic territory, it came to define the very borders of the intelligible, ofthe “real”.

How can we elucidate the parameters of visibility and certainty that circumscribe the epistemic territory of modernity? What are the coordinates into which difference and multiplicity are being incorporated? There is, to be sure, a variety of ways in which we could approach this question. We suggest addressing it here through the question of time; thus intimating that all that is excluded from the epistemic territory of modernity is that which does not fit into its notion of time. The modern notion of chronological time connotes and enforces the notion of space as presence, thus making of presence and the present the sole site of the real (Vázquez 2010a).

In “historiography” we find an instance of the implementation of the modern notion of time that is directly related to the scriptural enterprise of modernity. Historiography deploys the linearity of time, it appropriates what has been, the “past” into the modern epistemic territory, into the field of “history”. Historiography reduces the past to a re-presentation, to presence, to the present. Under the representation and ordering of the past as a series of elements, the “notion” of the past as a site of experience is made meaningless. In the appropriation and representation of the past, the chronology of linear time emerges as the primary ordering principle. The incorporation of the past, its enclosure within the modern epistemic territory has been a central instrument of coloniality’s domination and the concurrent epistemicide.

“[T]he Europeans generated a new temporal perspective of history and relocated the colonized population, along with their respective histories and cultures, in the past

of a historical trajectory. . . . that departed in the state of nature and culminated in Europe” (Quijano 2000: 541–2).

In Quijano’s reflections we can see how the incorporation into modern chronology is exercised as a form of “temporal discrimination” (Vázquez 2009). The linear representation of history in its often evolutionary form of classification has been a key instrument of discrimination.

“Thus, all non-Europeans could be considered as pre-European and at the same time displaced on a certain historical chain from the primitive to the civilized, from

the rational to the irrational, from the traditional to the modern, from the magicmythic to the scientific” (Quijano 2000: 556).

Modern epistemic translation comes to light as the incorporation of different realities into the parameters of legibility, where reality is ascertained as the field of presence and the present. What remains invisible, the untranslatable, are all those forms of understanding and relating to the world that constitute the exteriority of modernity. What is erased belongs to the temporalities and the spatialities of other social realities. In this way, notions such as land (tierra), word/language (palabra), past (memoria) are divested of their temporal depth to enter modernity’s epistemic territory, to enter its economy of the real.

“We are rebels because the land is rebel, there are those who sell and buy it as if the land was not [had no being] and as if the colour of the land that we are was non-existent” (Marcos 2001).3 When people of Chiapas say land / tierra, they do not mean a measurable, or quantifiable extension of land, an object of geography and even less a commodity. Tierra exceeds the modern limit of reality in presence, it implies the past, heritage, memory. Tierra has to be defended not for the sake of property but for the sake of protecting the ancestors, of preserving an origin that is both “past” and always already “present”. This political responsibility towards the ancestors is not conservative but revolutionary vis a vis the modern notion of time, in which the present and presence are the sole locus of the real, and where political action is always oriented towards a future design, towards an as yet inexistent rational utopia (Vázquez 2010b).

A parallel reflection can be done around the notion of language / palabra. The decolonial, or better un-colonial meaning of “palabra” is not that of a language as an instrument of cognition, of knowledge. Furthermore, it is not the property of an individual, a “speaker”, a “writer”; rather here “palabra” refers to the realm of memory, of the ancestors, it belongs to an in-between, to a shared community in the present as in the past. Palabra is a site of experience that is only made possible in the coming together, in plurality, also in the coming together of the various pasts in the present. It is in this in-betweeness and not in its objectivity that “la palabra” gains its strength and credibility.4

Another example of the movement of erasure and incorporation is that of the coloniality of gender. MarТa Lugones helps us to illustrate this when she quotes The Invention of Women of OyОronkО OyewЭmТ. “No gender system was in place. Indeed, she tells us that gender has ‘become important in Yoruba studies not as an artifact of Yoruba life but because Yoruba life, past and present, has been translated into English to fit the Western pattern of bodyreasoning’ ” (Lugones 2007: 196).5 In the case of Mesoamerica, the gender system in place before the colony was radically different from modernity’s gender ordering. The modern male / female dichotomy did not exist rather we could speak of non-dichotomous approaches to gender. “[T]o be relevant to the Mesoamerican universe, gender must be freed from assumptions of fixed dichotomous characteristics grounded on anatomical distinctions . . . [A] gender theory true to Mesoamerican sources must be open, fluid, and nonstratified” (Marcos 2006: 14–15).

Modern epistemic translation has been the imposition of an economy of truth, of a notion of language as textuality, of time as chronology, of presence as the site of the real, of gender as dichotomy, and so forth. Modern epistemic translation is the operation of subsuming difference under an established framework of legibility, of certainty. The conditions of entry into modernity’s economy of truth are coeval with coloniality’s mechanisms of disdain and erasure. The moment in which the epistemic territory of modernity establishes itself as the reference for social practices, marks also the moment of the widespread destruction of other forms of life, of the diversity of human experience.

It is important to clarify that such a translation is not ruled by a single language but rather by a single economy of truth. In other words the economy of truth that constitutes the epistemic territory of modernity operates across different languages. In this very article, we have made an exercise of linguistic translation by using the words “tierra” y “palabra” in order to show that which remains untranslatable. We have been able to demonstrate how these words bear a different relation to time and an idea of togetherness that disappears when incorporated into the modern epistemic territory. The use of another language (Spanish) has facilitated the task of explanation, as a pedagogical device, a metaphor to make visible for the English speaking reader the difference with the established notions of land and language. But we must avoid the confusion and be aware that this doesn’t mean that in hegemonic Spanish “tierra” and “palabra” do not bear the same meaning of “land” and “language” in English as they both belong to the same modern epistemic territory, the same economy of truth.

To ask the question of untranslatability reveals what is being lost in the movement of translation as incorporation. It is also to enquire into modernity’s economy of truth. This exercise shows the importance of the “internal” critique of modernity in the tradition of romanticism, continental philosophy, critical thinking, and postmodernism that have uncovered various genealogies of modernity, they speak of what is known from a decolonial perspective as the local history of the west. These critical traditions have divested modernity’s economy of truth from its claim to universality by making it socially and historically constituted. Heidegger’s history of metaphysics, Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge, Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of the Enlightenment, Derrida’s Grammatology are prominent examples in this still ongoing effort to reveal and humble modernity’s machinery from the inside. Yes, it is true that their perspective is Eurocentric as they also very much belong to the local-history that they are challenging, their critique is somehow circumscribed by the “totality of modernity”, by its epistemic territory. However, it is of paramount importance that decolonial thinking recognizes their relevance for the humbling of modernity, for the disarticulation of modernity’s claims to truth and universality. They have proven wrong a modernity whose hegemony and power of expansion remains bound to its economy of truth, to its regime of representation, to the imposition of its epistemic territory as a universal reality. One task that remains open is that of bridging the gap between the “intra-modern” critiques of modernity and the critique that knows the borders, the “external” critiques of modernity. Let us now go to the final section where we will offer in the manner of a conclusion some thoughts on the possibility of understanding translation not as incorporation, but rather as struggle.

5 Translation, Struggle and the Vocabulary of the Borders

“Le consentement universel est dОjИ un prОjugО bien miraculeux et incomprОhensible”. Alfred Jarry 1897 (Jarry 1980: 32)

This final section departs from the question of translation as erasure in order to open some final thoughts on translation as struggle. Thinking in terms of epistemic translation is already to begin thinking with a vocabulary of transition, of the borders; not transition in terms of chronological change, but rather referring to a transit at the borders of modernity’s epistemic territory. The epistemic hegemony of modernity as we have seen rests in a politics of border keeping, a politics of epistemic translation.

Understanding epistemic translation is to understand how the borders of the intelligible are kept and defined; how the modern epistemic territory constitutes itself by incorporating and by doing so also by objectifying and rejecting. To recognize the erasure of difference in the politics of translation is at one and the same time the recognition that behind the semblance of unity, there is always already difference. “[O]n the one hand, translation suppresses the differences between one language and the other; on the other, it unveils them with more clarity; thanks to translation we become aware that our neighbours speak and think in a different way from our own6” (Paz 1973: 59).

To speak of translation and the borders of the epistemic territory of modernity is already to recognize that there is an elsewhere to modernity, to its economy of truth, to its universal validity claims. Translation thematizes at one and the same time modernity’s contours of visibility and the very same borders as the site of its coloniality, of the mechanism of disdain and erasure, of the production of invisibility.

The limits of modernity’s epistemic territory are also sites of rebellion of creative fracture and celebration of plurality. The emancipatory notion of border thinking, as elaborated by Mignolo (2000), is consistent with the realization that “[a]lternatives to modern epistemology can hardly come only from modern (Western) epistemolog itself” (Mignolo 2000: 9). Today it is clear that modernity’s economy of truth, its politics of visibility, is being challenged by a thinking and a politics that are precisely bringing to question the borders of its epistemic hegemony.

Many non-Western (indigenous, rural, etc.) populations of the world conceive of the community and the relationship with nature, knowledge, historical experience,

memory, time, and space as configuring ways of life that cannot be reduced to Eurocentric conceptions and cultures. . . . Differences between worldviews become

explicit and turn into sites of struggle . . . (Santos, Nunes and Meneses 2007: XX)

In the context of our discussion on the epistemic territory of modernity, social struggles appear as struggles that are challenging and redefining the oppressive grammars of power. In this way, many terms are being displaced and re-signified, they are endowed with a meaning that articulates emerging political practices, alternative forms of justice, other ways of living.

“Just when the global discourse on democracy has become one-dimensional, purveying the neoliberal model of market democracy as the only universally desirable

model . . . significant countervailing processes have emerged in the form of political and social movements at the grassroots. . . . In this process of opposition to globalization,

the micro-movements have begun to raise a new discourse on democracy and to invent political practice . . .” (Sheth 2007: 3).

It is worth noting the specific meaning that the notion of translation has taken within social movements, particularly in the context of the World Social Forum. “A politics of cultural diversity and mutual intelligibility calls for a complex procedure of reciprocal and horizontal translation” (Santos, Nunes and Meneses, 2007: xxi). Here translation appears as a practice of plurality, it is a form of translation that is not performing a border keeping role and expanding modernity’s epistemic territory, but rather articulating a common ground of struggle for challenging modernity hegemony. For Boaventura de Sousa Santos this formof translation in-between movements is the condition of mutual intelligibility and articulation of struggle. “This theory of translation allows common ground to be identified in an indigenous struggle, a feminist struggle, an ecological struggle, etc., without erasing the autonomy and difference of each of them” (Santos, Nunes and Meneses 2007: xxvi). In other words, translation enables the coming together of a plurality of movements and by turning difference into a site for struggle it comes to fracture, to challenge the forces of erasure of modernity’s epistemic territory.

To speak of translation as struggle enables us to change the terms of the conversation from an economy of truth into a politics of difference, an ecology of differences. It brings the recognition that there is difference outside the paradigm of unity of modernity, that modernity’s epistemic territory has been kept and expanded precisely by the incorporation and disdain of difference. By exposing the hegemonic politics of border keeping, of epistemic translation as erasure, we can behold the existence of other knowledges and the possibilities of configuration of “intercultural dialogues”, of a politics of plurality.

The thinking of translation is an effort and a call to continue searching for a vocabulary of the borders, for a view of modernity as a powerful and hegemonic, but also limited, epistemic territory. One of the essential tasks of critique is that of revealing the contours of modernity so as to divest it from its semblance of totality, so as to disprove the claims that say that there is no outside to modernity, to capitalism, to globalization etc . . . By showing the contours of modernity’s epistemic territory, the thought of translation as erasure contributes to the humbling of modernity. It enables us to take seriously “modernity’s elsewhere”, the lands of difference, of plurality. Translation as struggle, translation not as border keeping but as border breaking, not as erasure but as the preservation of difference, speaks of a movement of recognition, remembrance and emergence.

Notes

1 My translation.

2 My translation: “El otro sЧlo puede ser comprendido en cuanto se le

niega su papel de sujeto y se reduce a un objeto determinado por las

categorТas del europeo. Puede entonces ser dominado. . . . declararЗ apariencia

la del indio y realidad la que la Escritura revelada.”

3 My translation: “Rebelde somos porque es rebelde la tierra, y hay

quien la vende y compra como si la tierra no fuera y como si no existiera

el color que somos de la tierra”.

4 It is interesting to note that one can find in European poets similar

relations to language, this shows how what we know as modernity’s

hegemonic “notion of the real” has also erased or marginalised other

experiences within “European modernity” in order to establish its economy

of truth.

5 My italics.

6 My translation: “[P]or una parte, la traducciЧn suprime las diferencias

entre una lengua y otra; por la otra, las revela mЗs plenamente;

gracias a la traducciЧn nos enteramos que nuestros vecinos hablan y

piensan de un modo distinto al nuestro”.

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