Eventalizing ‘blackness’ In Colombia Dissertation Proposal Eduardo Restrepo Department

eventalizing ‘blackness’ in colombia dissertation proposal eduardo restrepo department of anthropology, university of north caro

Eventalizing ‘blackness’ in Colombia
Dissertation Proposal
Eduardo Restrepo
Department of Anthropology,
University of North Caroline at Chapel Hill
April 2003
Eventalizing ‘blackness’ in Colombia
“[...] la elección y la critica de una concepción del mundo
constituyen por sí mismas un acto político”
Antonio Gramsci (1970: 367).
“If the black subject and black experience are not stabilized by
Nature or by some other essential guarantee, then it must be the case
that they are constructed historically, culturally, politically […] ”
Stuart Hall ([1989] 1996: 446).
Statement of the Problem
------------------------
The notion —nowadays relatively widespread in Colombia and which
appears ‘natural’ for many people— that the black populations that
inhabit the rural area of the Pacific region constitutes an ethnic
group, with its own ‘culture,’ ‘territory,’ ‘ethnic identity,’ and
specific rights did not simply drop from the sky ready-formed. On the
contrary, this notion was historically and politically configured. In
fact, the first half of the nineteen-nineties witnessed the emergence
and consolidation of unprecedented forms of black ethnic organization
in the Colombian Pacific (Grueso, Rosero and Escobar 1998, Wade, 1995,
2002a). Throughout the decade, these organizations achieved
recognition of their collective ownership of large territories
covering hundreds of square miles (Oslender 2001). Networks of
organizations throughout the region both empowered local communities
to negotiate with the State and constituted a collective mechanism for
defense against the capitalist extraction of natural resources that
has historically prevailed in the region (Escobar 2001). These
organizations succeeded in configuring a novel and paradigmatic model
of ethnicization of blackness in Colombia (Pardo 2002, Restrepo
2002a). As Peter Wade recently noted (2002a), the dimension of this
articulation of blackness and empowerment of local communities remains
unique in Latin America. However, similar processes have taken place
in Brazil and Ecuador (Arruti 1999, Sanson 1999, Walsh 2002).
This ethnicization process was originated in the northern part of the
Pacific region, specifically in the Atrato River, during the
mid-eighties (Pardo 1997, Woutes 2001). For the first time in the
national or regional political imaginary, those who had been thought
of as poor black peasants, with backward life styles urgently needing
of the benevolent hand of development, began to be visualized and
articulated as an ethnic group with traditional production practices
environmentally sustainable, a territory, an ancestral culture, and an
ethnic identity and rights analogous to those existing for the
indigenous communities (Escobar 2001, Wade 1999). As John Anton
Sánchez recently argued (2003), this process constituted an ‘ethnic
revolution,’ which has radically changed the ‘political arena’ of the
region through the empowerment of local ethnic political subjects.
This ethnic discourse and organizational strategy, originally locally
bounded to the Atrato river, reached the national level with the
change of the Political Constitution.1 In 1991, according to the new
Political Constitution, the Colombian nation was defined as ethnically
and culturally plural. In other words, multiculturalism became a state
policy. This policy involved significant transformations in the
politics of representation of the Colombian nation. The Transitory
Article 55 (AT 55) of this Constitution included a the definition of
black communities as an ethnic group and, in consequence, introduced a
radical shift in their location into what Wade (1997) has called ‘the
cognitive and social structures of alterity.’ This Transitory Article
modified the state’s ‘grid of intellibiligility’ though which
blackness was articulated in the ‘imagination of nation.’ The
well-known Law 70 of 1993, which developed the AT 55 into law,
constituted the basis upon which the Colombian state specifically
recognized a set of territorial, economic and cultural rights for
black communities as an ethnic group.2 As activists often highlight
(Cortés 1999: 132), the AT 55 and Law 70 were not a simple concession
on behalf of the Colombian political elite, but the consequence of the
pressures of different black organizations as well as their confluence
and alliance with the increasingly empowered indigenous movement.3
Therefore, the ‘black community’ as an ethnic group has been made
possible through arduous political, conceptual and social processes
involving the inscription of ‘blackness’ in a novel ‘diagram of
subjugated alterities.’ This diagram implies crucial ruptures with the
previous articulations of blackness. The main rupture introduced by
this new articulation of blackness refers to the notion that the black
rural population in the Pacific region constitutes a radical other,
that is, a minority ethnic group, with its own culture, territory,
ethnic identity, and specific rights. Nevertheless, this new
inscription of blackness in the social and political imaginary has
been articulated from previous regimes that have not disappeared, but
which are differentially and contradictorily amalgamated in the
current diagram of subjugated alterities. My dissertation is a
genealogy of these regimes in Colombia.
Research question
My research examines different ‘regimes blackness’ and their
relationships with ‘subjugated alterities’ and ‘modalities of
governmentality.’ As I will explain, the notion of ‘regimes of
blackness’ is a conceptual attempt to eventalize ‘blackness’ avoiding
the assumed continuities and the obliteration of the historical
specificities. This eventalization is a theoretical intervention in
order to analyze how ‘blackness/black’ has been historically
articulated in relation with specific diagrams of ‘subjugated
alterities’ and certain ‘modalities of governmentality.’ ‘Subjugated
alterities’ are those ‘alterities’ produced as such in concrete
arrangement of relations of forces and games of truth. They are
specific ‘problematizations’ of the ‘social body’ that, thought
qualified/authorized knowledges, establish strategies and operations
of division, distribution, hierarchization and segregation.
‘Modalities of governmentality’ refers to a specific form of power
(different, for example, of sovereignty or discipline) that operates
through bio-political technologies of regulation of populations.
Although the ‘state’ has become an important locus of governmental
apparatuses, they are not circumscribed to the ‘state.’ In this sense,
governmental does not overlap with ‘state’ or government in the narrow
sense.
Thus, my research focuses in the description of the kind of
relationships that may exist among ‘regimes of blackness,’ ‘subjugated
alterities’ and ‘modalities of governmentality.’ More specifically,
there are three interwoven aspects of this question that will orient
my research. First, are there any historical conjunctions between
transformations in ‘regimes of blackness’ and changes in ‘subjugated
alterities’? Second, if this is the case, in what specific ways are
these articulations associated with ‘modalities of governmentality’?
Finally, could one establish then a relevant relation between
significant mutations in those ‘regimes of blackness’ and
transformations in those ‘modalities of governmentality’?
As I will address in my methodology, in order to explore these
questions I have identified some analytical pivots or points of
entrance. Starting with the most recent ethnicization of black
communities, I will examine back other four different moments. 1) The
emergence of an anthropology of ‘blackness’ in the second half of the
twentieth century and its articulations with the governmental
apparatuses. 2) The eugenics movement in the first decades of
twentieth century associated with the increasingly medicalization of
society and programs such as immigration policies and hygienic
campaigns. 3) The early nineteenth century movement of independence
led by a creole elite in its configurations of nation and its
abolitionist dilemmas. 4) The theological debates and descriptions
that took place in the foundational moment of the ‘first modernity’
and their relationships with the practices of government of colonial
populations.
Working hypothesis
------------------
My general working hypothesis is that, from the sixteenth century up
to the present in what today is Colombia, one can not only identify
different historical conjunctions between ‘regimes of blackness’ and
‘subjugated alterities’ (anchored, for example, in ‘caste,’ ‘race,’
and ‘ethnicity’), but also that in order to understand the emergence
and dominance of a given ‘regime of blackness’ it is pertinent to
trace its correspondences with the shifting ‘modalities of
governmentality.’
Conceptual scaffolding
“[…] any effort at empirical description takes places within a
theoretically delimited sphere, and that empirical analysis in general
cannot offer a persuasive explanation of its own constitution as a
field of inquiry […] theory operates on the very level at which the
object of inquiry is defined and delimited, and that there is no
givenness of the object […]”
Judith Butler (2000: 274)
Most academic conceptualizations are configured beyond the febrile
(and sterile) debate between ‘constructivism’ and ‘essentialism’ that
signed the academic labor two decades ago (Mato 1996). However, there
are different (and sometimes incommensurable) horizons of theorization
of the ‘constructedness’ of those social categories in general, and
race and ethnicity in particular (Comaroff 1996: 165). Moreover,
although many scholars predicate the historical ‘constructedness’ of
social categories (Norval 1996), there is a significant tendency to
de-historicize (in the sense of de-eventalize as argued by Foucault4)
their specific analyses.5
Rather than subsuming my research to one or more of the several
approaches to ‘race’ or ‘ethnicity’ that dominate the analysis of
‘blackness,’6 my dissertation is an attempt to eventalize blackness.
Eventualizing blackness constitutes a theoretical intervention in
order to both ‘de-racialize’ and ‘de-ethnicize’ the political and
conceptual imagination. Although this destabilizes widely accepted
assumptions of ‘black/blackness,’ the task is to trace other relations
and genealogies of domination, exploitation and subjection that have
been silenced because the a priori of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity.’ ‘Regimes
of blackness,’ ‘subjugated alterities’ and ‘modalities of
governmentality’ constitute the three most relevant instruments of my
toolbox.
a) ‘Regimes of blackness’
‘Regimes of blackness’ is an analytical category inspired by my
reading of Michel Foucault, which has been shaped by Deleuze’s (1988)
punctuations. First of all, by ‘regime of blackness’ I mean that
‘blackness’ must be analyzed as a discursive and non-discursive
formation. ‘Regimen of blackness’ as a discursive formation is not an
attempt to ‘textualize’ (a la Derrida)7 ‘blackness/ black.’ Nor is
‘blackness/black’ the effect of a frozen binary opposition defined by
its textualized negativity in a ‘metaphysic of presence.’ Contrary to
any sort of textualization, discourses are understood as practices
linked to certain conditions, obedient to certain conditions of
existence, susceptible to certain transformations, as well as being
part of a system of correlations with non discursive practices. While
‘blackness’ appears as a discursive formation that is articulated with
a set of non-discursive practices, ‘black’ is, paraphrasing Foucault’s
well-known statement about ‘sex’, a speculative element necessary to
its operation. Thus, ‘black’ must be understood as historically
subordinated to ‘blackness.’ Thus, ‘black’ does not exist, as such,
independent of the discursive and non-discursive formations that have
historically and differentially constituted it. In fact, not only has
‘black’ changed through time and place, but what matters is to
describe its multiple locations and transformations into a particular
discursive formation, as well as its relations with non-discursive
practices.
A relevant consequence is that ‘black’ does not have a clear or unique
referent in the ‘real world.’ Rather than trying to find this pristine
referent outside of, and previous to, any discursive event, one must
focus on the description of the plural, contradictory and overlapping
discursive (articulable) and non-discursive (visible) practices that
have constituted ‘blackness’ as such. Therefore, ‘black’ refers to
specific fields of discursivity and visibility that constitute its
conditions of existence and transformation. Thus, the question that
concerns us is not a supposed referent that determines ‘blackness,’
but what kinds of objects, practices and relationships have been made
possible by the different ‘regimes of blackness.’ In this sense, as
Foucault would argue, ‘black’ is a relation of a non-relation. Nor is
it a conventional ontology of the true essence of ‘blackness,’ but a
description of discursive and non-discursive events in their
occurrence and in their conditions of existence and transformation.
The goal is not a hermeneutics of hidden meanings behind the speeches
and texts, but a careful account of the discursive and non-discursive
events and their connections, emergences, ruptures, dispersions and
disappearances. Not a history of any idea that has developed slowly,
but a material examination of a set of statements and visibilities
inscribed in their materiality in speeches, documents, programs and
practices. In a nutshell, from a Foucaultian perspective, rather than
a phenomenology, a semiotics or a history of mentality, ‘blackness’
must be made the subject of an archeological and genealogical inquiry.
Second, though ‘regimes of blackness’ I attempt to incorporate
Foucault’s conceptualization of power in my analysis.8 In the first
place, one must identify how ‘blackness’ is constituted by power
relationships, not as a mechanism that works essentially through
prohibition, but as a productive set of tactics that transverse the
whole social body and other kinds of relationships such as class,
nation, race, place-based identities and gender relationships. Thus,
the power relationships articulated in ‘blackness’ must not be
examined as a superstructural effect of other kinds of relations
—‘blackness’ is not subsumed to class. On the contrary, the regimes of
power from which ‘blackness’ emerges and is deployed are deeply
inscribed in the different spheres and articulations of the social
order. Second, rather than understand these power relationships as a
substance that someone could possess, or might take over, it is a
regime exercised from different points at the same time and with
various intensities and directions. In the same way that power
relationships are not simply exercised following the dichotomy of
ruler/ruled, power relationships through which ‘blackness’ emerges and
is deployed are neither the simple expression of the monolithic
dominance of a clearly defined and invariant group over other.
Therefore, it is pertinent to take into account the tensions,
contradictions and multiple articulations that constitute the
boundaries and webs of the networks of dominance and resistance among,
inside, and across different ‘groups.’ In other words, the power
relationships through which ‘blackness’ emerges and is deployed must
be analyzed from a non-ontological, multidimensional and positional
perspective. Hence, if these power relationships are everywhere —both
as dominance and resistance, any social location might embody them.
Finally, the power relationships through which ‘blackness’ emerges and
is deployed are not the consequence of an individual’s rational
choice, but rather, these individuals are in many ways the result of
those relationships. Instead of the individual as a primordial and
irreducible atom of ‘blackness,’ one must examine how under a specific
regime of power certain gestures, discourses, desires and bodies have
become markers of ‘blackness’ that produce individuality itself.9
b) ‘Subjugated alterities’
‘Subjugated alterities’ is the second conceptual cornerstone that
defines my research problem and working hypothesis. ‘Subjugated
alterities’ is a conceptualization that avoids those perspectives that
subsume alterity as a simple derived or negative term of Identity,
which are ineluctability trapped in a ‘metaphysics of presence.’ From
those perspectives, not only alterity is collapsed in Identity (in
singular and with capital), but that also the plurality and
historicity of alterities are obliterated in their reduction to a
marked, negative and subordinate value. Thus, they are just a term of
the endless permutations of a logocentrinc and formal dichotomy.
Rather, my analytical perspective is an attempt to capture ‘subjugated
alterities’ in their positivity, singularity and dispersion.
‘Subjugated alterities’ refers to those ‘alterities’ that have been
articulable and visible (a la Deleuze 1988) as such within concrete
assembles of relations of forces and games of truth. Instead of
assuming preexisting or transcendental ‘alterities’ that have been
‘repressed’ or ‘(mis)represented’ from ‘above’ and from ‘outside,’
‘subjugated alterities’ are constituted as specific
‘problematizations.’ Following Foucault, “Problematization doesn’t
mean the representation of a pre-existed object, nor the creation
through discourse of an object that doesn’t exist. It’s the set of
discursive or non discursive practices that makes something enter into
the play of the true and false, and constitutes it an object for
thought (whether under the form of moral reflection, scientific
knowledge, political analysis, etc.)” (CT, 296). Thus, ‘subjugated
alterities’ does not refer to a pristine and previous ‘outside’ of
power/knowledge, but neither they are pure imaginary creation of
without any ground in the world. Their conditions of existence and
transformation are embedded in these relations, even thought those
‘subjugated alterities’ are not reducible to these relations. Rather
than a hermeneutics of a certainty, smooth and singular ‘alterity’,
the investigation must be defined as a political history of truth10 in
its vacillations, conflicts and plurality. It requires the scrutiny of
the regimes of truth in which ‘subjugated alterities’ have emerged,
been dispersed, deployed and transformed.
These ‘alterities’ are ‘subjugated’ because the games of truth through
which they are constituted as object of thought are those that appeals
to qualified and authorized knowledges that establish strategies and
operations of division, distribution, hierarchization and segregation
of the social body. ‘Subjugated alterities’ constitute, among other
possible points through which specific relations of force have passed,
a specific diagram or apparatus of capture: “The forces appear in
‘every relation from one point to another’: a diagram is a map, or
rather several superimposed maps. And from one diagram to the next,
new maps are drawn. […] It is on the basis of the ‘struggles’ of each
age, and the style of these struggles, that we can understand the
succession of diagrams or the way in which they become linked up again
above and beyond the discontinuities” (Deleuze 1988: 44).
‘Subjugated alterities’ are no necessarily radical exteriorities, nor
closed social totalities such as the ‘madman’ or ‘criminal’ illustrate
(AK). Nevertheless, they can be configured as a constitutive and
radical exteriority such as Orientalism (Said 1979) and Third Word
(Escobar 1995). ‘Blackness,’ along with other marked and non-marked
‘locations’ (such as indigenousness or whiteness), may constitute a
specific case of ‘subjugated alterities.’ It is a matter of empirical
research to examine the concrete and multiple assembles in which
‘blackness’ has emerged and operated. However, a specific feature that
requires detail examination is that, like sexuality (HS), ‘blackness’
lays embedded in a doubled inscription —in the anatomo-politics of the
individuals and in the bio-politics of the populations.
c) ‘Modalities of governmentality’
‘Modalities of governmentality’ is another analytical concept crucial
for my research. Even thought this concept has a theoretical anchor in
Foucault’s notion of ‘governmentality,’ my notion of ‘modalities of
governmentality’ deploys this concept in two opposite directions. One
the one hand, following the contributions of Walter Mignolo (2000,
2002), Aníbal Quijano (2000), Timothy Mitchell (2000) and Ann Laura
Stoler (1995, 2002), with ‘modalities of governmentality’ I want to
bring the colonial articulation into the picture. On the other hand,
based on suggestions by Ferguson and Gupta (2002) and Grossberg
(1997), I want to explore the more recent transformations of these
modalities of governmentality. Before developing these two directions,
it is useful to present a brief description of how Foucault understood
‘governmentality.’
For Foucault, working both at the micro level of the constitution of
bodies (and minds), and at the macro level of management of life and
populations, the ‘modern’ regime of power has produced effects of
individualization and normalization through techniques of discipline
and regulation. They constitute “[…] new methods of power whose
operation is not ensured by right but by technique, not by law but by
normalization, not by punishment but by control, methods that are
employed on all levels and in forms that go beyond the state and its
apparatus” (HS: 89). Hence, this particular regime of power not only
traverses bodies in order to make them docile for the accumulation of
capital, but also defines populations as targets of state
interventions and its ‘reason’ of existence. Individualization
techniques and totalization procedures configure the two sides of this
regime of power. On the one hand, an entire spectrum of micro
techniques that discipline individuals through displaying,
distributing and inscribing them in the order of the norm can be
identified (D&P, 182-183). This norm, however, is not just organized
as a transcendental grid, but it is essentially the result of these
displays, distributions and inscriptions: “This form of power applies
itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual,
marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity,
imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others
have to recognize in him. It is a form of power that makes individuals
subjects” (S&P, 212).
On the other hand, there are certain procedures of visualization and
intervention of ‘the social’ that allow the state’s regulations of the
populations in the name of life and social welfare (SMBD, 241-254).
Thus, an anatomo-politics of the human body and a bio-politics of the
population configure the distinctive features of ‘modern’ societies
and their specific regime of power over life (HS, 139; SMBD, 243-247).
Both constitute an axis from the normalization of power to the power
of normalization. Together, their main effects are both
individualization and normalization. While the anatomo-politics
operates though disciplinary techniques that define a micro-physics of
power, bio-politics works though the regulation procedures that refers
to governmentality.
For Foucault (G, 102-103), ‘governmentally’ had three interwoven
meanings: 1) the exercise of an specific form of power —constituted by
the ensemble of institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections as
well as by the calculations and tactics— that (a) its target is
population, (b) its principal form of knowledge is political economy,
and (c) its essential technical means are apparatus of security. 2) A
long historical tendency located in the West toward the dominance of
this form of power over others (such sovereignty or discipline), which
has resulted in both the formation of a set of governmental apparatus
and the development of intricate arrangement of knowledges (saviors).
3) The results of the process the state has gradually became
‘governmentalized,’ which contrast with the state of justice of the
Middle Ages and the administrative state during fifteen and sixteen
centuries. Foucault associated governmentality with a specific social
and historical location: “Maybe what is really important for our
modernity —this is, for our present— is not so much the étitisation of
society, as the ‘governmentalization’ of the state” (G, 103). He also
argued “We live in the era of a ‘governmentality’ first discovered in
the eighteenth century” (G, 103).
There are two interwoven critical aspects of Foucault’s
conceptualization that I want to consider in order to suggest the
concept of ‘modalities of governmentality.’ First, there are various
tendencies in the academic literature that have problematized several
assumptions about the geographical and historical equations of
‘modernity’ and Europe. A group of scholars, focused on the critical
study of colonialism, noted that Foucault neglected to consider the
colonial settings (Poole 1997, Redfield 2002, Stoler 1995, 2002). This
absence is not a marginal one, but one that destabilizes the
architecture of his argument at significant points. Thus, Ann Stoler
argued that “As we have begun to explore the colonies as more than
sites of exploitation but as ‘laboratories of modernity,’ the
genealogical trajectories mapping what constitutes metropolitan versus
colonial inventions have precipitously shifted course” (1995: 15). In
this sense, some scholars have stated that: “The emergence of ‘the
population’ as the primary object of governmental power […] and
certainly the invention of ‘culture’ as the features embodying the
identity of a population group, probably first occurred in the
colonization of non-European regions” (Mitchell 2000: 3).
A more radical critique can be deduced from those scholars who
introduced an epistemological shift from colonialism to coloniality.
This epistemological (and political) shift is the consequence of both
the transformation of the locus of enunciation from the irreducibility
of colonial difference (geopolitics of knowledge) and the
argumentation that coloniality is constitutive of modernity
(modern/colonial world system) (Mignolo 2000, 2002). Therefore, it
refers to a deepest transformation not only of the content, but also
—and essentially— of the terms of the conversation (Mignolo 2001: 11).
‘Modernity’, thus, must be analyzed as one of the “[…] tools
implemented in colonization that defines the coloniality of power and
produced the colonial difference” (Mignolo 2001: 29). That is why
Dussel (2000) argued that ‘modernity’ must be understood from a
non-eurocentric and world-wide perspective. Thus, contrary to the
mainstream argument, ‘modernity’ did not emerge with the
eighteen-century industrial revolution and the Enlightenment led by
England and France, but that the ‘first stage of modernity’ was
establish with Spain and Portugal’s conquest and colonization of the
Americas. Moreover, this ‘encounter’ is co-constitutive of both Europe
and America. Nevertheless, this was an uneven co-constitution because
“[…] Latin America entered modernity —well before North America— as
the ‘other side,’ that which was dominated, exploited, and concealed”
(Dussel 2000: 472). Quijano’s concept of ‘coloniality of power’ allows
us to understand why coloniality is constitutive of modernity and not
just its derivative. ‘Coloniality of power’ involves the modality of
domination and exploitation that naturalized the racialization of
labor and its geographical distribution associated with the emergence
and consolidations of eurocentrism (Quijano 2000). Thus, coloniality
is not a derivative or supplement of modernity, nor an historical
contingence or a rejected ‘excrescence’. Rather, coloniality is the
other side of modernity, a constitutive ‘exteriority’ of modernity
that is not an exterior or an untouchable outside. The effect of
totality, closure and self-centred of modernity is possible through
the constitution of an irreducible exteriority: the colonial
difference. Thus, from geopolitics of knowledge, there is not a
privilege non-location from which a disembodied universal subject can
articulate a neutral knowledge, but that knowledges are always
geohistorical and politically located (Mignolo 2002). The non-marked
‘I’ from which most of the western philosophy has been produced,
reproduce in its invisibility the coloniality of power. Rather than
external to, or supplemental to euro-centric notions of modernity and
Europe, coloniality of power indicates how the colonial difference and
racist thought were not only instruments of domination, but of uneven
constitutions of both colonized and colonizer.
The notion of ‘modalities of governmentality’ attempts to open up
Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’ in order to include these
critiques of his assumptions about the equation between ‘modernity’
and Europe. ‘Modalities of governmentality’ will enable us to capture
the specificities and articulations of ‘governmentality’ before the
eighteenth century and beyond the geographical scope of Europe.
However, in regard to the sixteenth century in what is now Colombia we
are whether dealing with a form of power identified as governmental
(in contrast to sovereign, disciplinary or other forms) or not, is a
matter of the empirical research in which I will engage in my
dissertation.
The second critical aspect of Foucault’s conceptualization of
governmentality comes from Ferguson and Gupta’s (2002) notion of
‘transnational governmentality’ and Grossberg’s (1997) critiques of
commonsensical understandings of ‘globalization’. With the category of
‘transnational governmentality,’ Ferguson and Gupta attempt to capture
the transformations behind the governmental modality of power that
until a few decades ago were basically anchored in the nation-state,
but that nowadays are increasingly articulated by transnational
entities and networks through global governmental apparatuses.11 Thus,
they emphatically argue: “We propose to extend the discussion of
governmentality to modes of government that are being set up on a
global scale” (Ferguson and Gupta 2002: 990). However, this
‘transnational governmentality’ does not simply erase or displace the
forms of power anchored in the state, but rearticulates them in a
novel modality.
Grossberg (1997) argues that the commonsensical understandings of
‘globalization’ and, particularly, of the logics of mediation and
temporality that, constitutive of modern thought, transverse many
analyses. In contrast, Grossberg proposes a double theoretical shift
“[…] from the logic of mediation to the logic of productivity, and
from the logic of temporality to a logic of spatiality” (1997: 16-17).
Drawing on both Deleuze and Foucault, he suggests an approach to
‘globalization’ as a ‘stratifying machine,’ as a diagrammatic
production of spaces and re-inscription of difference (1997: 28-29).
In this sense, my conceptualization of contemporary ‘modalities of
governmentality’ will incorporate Ferguson and Gupta’s suggestion of
‘transnational governmentality’ without falling into the logic of
mediation and temporality problematized by Grossberg and analyzing
‘globalization’ as a stratifying machine.
Methodological horizon
======================
“If one accepts that our actions are informed by the way in which we
make sense of our world, then we must be concerned with the political
implications of the concepts that we develop and the methods that we
use”
Paris Yeros (1999: 8).
Rather than a ‘social history’ or a ‘history of ideas,’ my
dissertation is a genealogy. As such, it is a contribution to a
‘history of the present.’ A history of the present is one moving
toward the ‘eventalization’ not only of the historical formations or
strata (the articulable and the visible), but also the specific
configuration of lines of force (those that are local, unstable and
diffuse that pass through —and partially constitute— particular
points), and the folding of self in order to understand what
constitutes our present.12 Eventalization was understood by Foucault
as (1) “[…] making visible a singularity at places where there is a
temptation to invoke a historical constant, an immediate
anthropological trait, or an obviousness that imposes itself
uniformity on all. To show that things ‘weren’t necessary as all that’
[…]” And (2) “[...] eventalization means rediscovering the
connections, encounters, supports, blockages, places of forces,
strategies, and so on, that in a given moment establish what
subsequently counts as being self-evident, universal, and necessary”
(QM, 226-227).
Based on Nietzsche’s distinction between ursprung (“origin”) and
erfindung (“invention/ emergence”), Foucault differentiated the
genealogical inquiry for the lines of ‘causal multiplications,’
transformations and multiple emergences of events or set of events,
from the metaphysical research on the monolithic origin and
teleological deployment of a transcendental entity. The genealogical
approach problematizes the kinds of analyses predicated on the
assumption of a preexisting, masterful, unified, transparent and
autonomous subject. In this sense, genealogy is a methodological
skepticism about the anthropological universals or premises of
volunteerism (AB). Rather that a ‘science,’ genealogies are
anti-sciences (SMBD: 8-9). They are interventions against the
paralyzing effects of both the totalitarian theories and disciplinary
machines that mask the historical contents and marginalize
‘disqualified’ knowledges. In short, genealogy is an intervention
toward the eventalization and de-anthropologization that does not
aspire to lay comfortably in the “[…] scientific hierarchicalization
of knowledge and its intrinsic power-effects” (SMBD, 10).
Archeology is the first and necessary moment of genealogy. Rather than
a history of documents, an archaeology is a description of monuments (AK,
TAK). In this sense, as Deleuze (1988) stated: an archeologist is a
novel archivist —while the genealogist is a cartographer. Archaeology
is not a hermeneutic, structuralist, or phenomenological methodology (Dreyfus,
and Rabinow 1983). Briefly, archaeology is not only about discursive
formations, but it also includes non-discursive formations, that is,
visibilities: “[…] the task of archaeology is double: it must open up
words, phrases and propositions, open up qualities, things and
objects. It must extract from words and language the statements
corresponding to each stratum and its thresholds, but equally extract
from things and sight the visibilities and ‘self-evidences’ unique to
each stratum” (Deleuze 1988: 53).
What are the relevant ‘monuments’ for my archeological inquiry? How
will my genealogical inquiry may be deployed in order to de-stabilize
and eventalize ‘blackness’? My methodological strategy is to define a
set of analytical pivots or points of entrance spread in time that,
hopefully, will allow me to explore my research questions and confront
my working hypothesis.
The first of my analytical pivots or point of entrance is the recent
ethnicization of black community. My master’s thesis focused on the
historical conditions of emergence and deployment of this
ethnicization of blackeness (Restrepo 2002b). For my dissertation, I
will examine the discourses and practices of ‘blackness’ anchored in
the National Constituent Assembly that wrote the Political
Constitution of 1991 (in which the Colombian nation was defined in
terms of its immanent multiple cultures and ethnicities —this is,
multiculturalism recaptured as a policy of the state) as well as in
its Transitory Article 55 and the Special Commission for Black
Communities (which the fundamental frame within which the politics of
the black community as an ethic group were distilled). I will analyze
the documents and transcripts of the oral debates in order to examine
the different articulations and visualizations of ‘blackness’ that
were circulated during the discussions and how they have inscribed
ethnicity and alterity in a broader discursive field. Needless to say,
though my analysis of those public documents, transcriptions,
newspaper articles, and legislations I will focus on the empirical
materials that will allow me to establish significant links among the
regime (or regimes) of blackness, the subjugated alterities, and the
modalities of governmentality.
The second analytical pivot or point of entrance is associated with
the emergence and consolidation of anthropology as an academic and
institutionalized discipline and, specifically, the disciplinary
inscriptions of ‘blackness.’ Colombian anthropologists such as Nina S.
de Friedemann (1984) engaged in a debate about the ‘invisibilization’
of ‘blacks’ in anthropology. In practice, most anthropologists did not
study ‘black groups’ because they focused on the ‘indigenous
communities,’ which were considered the paradigmatic terrain for
anthropological research. Only a few anthropologists studied black
populations, either in rural or urban contexts. Since the second half
of the eighties, there has been a conceptual and methodological
tendency in the work of some anthropologists and historians toward the
‘africanization’ of the analysis of blackness (i.e. Jaime Arocha, 1999
and Adriana Maya, 1996). I will analyze how ‘blackness’ has emerged
through these anthropological disputes and, overall, how these
disputes configure a set of multiple inscriptions of ‘blackness’,
which has been strongly punctuated by a specific anthropological
imagination of ‘indigenous communities’ as a paradigm of otherness.
Many of these anthropologies were working for government institutions
and their studies were implemented with specific policies. These
tensions among anthropologists as well as their engagements in
government institutions and programs are relevant for my analysis of
the emergence and development of a regime of ‘blackness’ within this
regime.
The eugenics movement in the early twentieth century constitutes my
third pivot, or point of entrance. As in other countries of Latin
America (Stepan 1991), in Colombia during the 1920’s a group of
physicians, psychologists, jurists and sociologists organized several
conferences and publications about the ‘racial problem’ from an
eugenics perspective. The discussions were framed in terms of the
‘degeneration’ of ‘race’ as a consequence of the racial mixture (mestizaje,
mulataje and zambaje) as well as the unfavorable environmental
conditions and inadequate hygienic practices that made impossible the
‘racial improvement’ of the nation as a whole. It is in the context of
this debate in which ‘race’ appeared as an anchor of public policies
such as migration laws and public programs to promote hygiene and
population control. In my dissertation, along with newspaper articles
and government programs, I will examine the most well known documents
and publications (such as El Problema de la Raza en Colombia) in order
to map the discursive articulations of ‘blackness’ by ‘experts’ in the
broader political technologies of re-invention of nation.
My fourth analytical pivot, or point of entrance, is the movement of
independence from Spain and the abolitionist debate in the
nineteenth-century associated with the emergence of the nation. In
fact, Benedict Anderson’s ([1983] 1991) widely cited work not only
argued that nations are a specific type of imagined community, but
that, in opposition to commonplace narratives, modern nations emerged
in the Caribbean and South America rather than Europe. As Mitchell
noted: “In such mixing of population lay the origins of the desire of
fix political identity in the racial categories of modern nationalism.
White and non-white, European and non-European, West and non-West,
were identities often elaborated abroad and only later, like
nationalism itself, brought to Europe” (2000: 4). Creoles, born in the
Americas but with undeniable European ‘blood,’ with a dense mixture of
fear and nostalgia, imagined national communities and shaped the life
of people in their names (De la Cadena 2000, Gros 2000, Radcliffe and
Westwood 1996). Even though these imagined national communities were
often predicated under the assumption of an actual (or virtual)
‘racial’ and ‘cultural’ homogeneity that distinguish ‘a people’; they
did not simply obliterate internal alterities but, actively configured
them. In fact, many authors argue that racism has been constitutively
intertwined with nationalism.13 The relationships among colonialism,
ethnicization/ racialization and nation have been explored by
Chakrabarty (1998) and Bhabha (1994).14 As it has noted, these
mutually implicated liaisons are the cornerstone of Quijano’s work and
his concept of ‘coloniality of power.’ In the same vein, Peter Wade
argued: “[…] a closer look at how nationalism itself is constituted in
relation to diversity (whether racial or otherwise) revels that
nationalist ideologies also actively construct difference […]” (2001:
854). The movement of independence and the debate of the emancipation
of slaves are closely interwoven into the liberal project of
imagination of nation and citizen. My research will pay close
attention to the specific production of, and the inscriptions of,
‘blackness’ in the discursive field constituted by the interplay of
social imaginaries of savage-savage, citizen, nation and progress. The
letters, speeches and documents of Simon Bolivar —main political
figure in the movement for independence— as well as the political
discussions and legislation about the emancipation of the slaves will
constitute my sources. Newspapers and government programs are
important sources for my research as well.
Finally, there is an important theological debate in the early Spanish
conquest of America that is crucial for my dissertation. Fray
Bartolome de las Casas and Juan Gines de Sepulveda were the most
visible figures in a debate about the ‘nature’ of the people that
inhabited that New World and Africa. As I already mentioned, from the
perspective of the coloniality of power developed by Anibal Quijano
(2000), trasnmodernity elaborated by Enrique Dussel (2000) and the
modern/colonial world system by Mignolo (2000), this debate —that took
place in the ‘first modernity’— was inscribed in the production of
‘colonial difference,’ and established one of the early moments of
creation of Europe as such. I plan to analyze other materials from the
early colonial period in order to explore how the regimes of blackness
appeared in the practices of government of colonial populations. Of
particular relevance is De Instauranda Aethiopum Salute, a book
published by Alonso de Sandoval in 1627, and Saint Pedro Claver
(1580-1654). Sandoval’s work, subtitled Naturaleza, policía sagrada i
profana, costumbres i ritos, disciplina i catescismo evangelico de
todos etíopes, is a detailed description of the practices and
discourses about the African slaves that arrived to Cartagena de
Indias during that time. San Pedro Claver, who was a well-know public
figure associated with the slaves, lived and worked with Sandoval in
Cartagena de Indias. From the Archivo General de la Nación in Bogotá,
I will introduce in my analysis a collection of decrees, census,
reports and laws about the control and knowledge of the colonial
population, specifically blacks and slaves.
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1Notes
 The process of ethnicization of blackness has been anchored in the
Pacific region, which appeared as the paradigm of its articulation
(Wade 1999). In fact, it has been a specific representation of black
rural communities, mostly encountered in the Pacific region, which has
constituted the discursive field of the politics of black ethnicity.
Activist from urban areas or from other regions have often complained
about what from their perspective is a limitation of the scope of
black ethnicity (Casiani 1999, Cunin 2000).
2 For a detailed description and analysis of the politics of ethnicity
of black communities in Colombia and their legal landmarks (Transitory
Article 55 and Law 70 of 1993) see Agudelo (2002), Almario (2002),
Grueso, Rosero and Escobar (1998), Oslender (2001, 2002), Pardo (1997,
2002), Pardo and Alvarez (2001), Restrepo (2002a, 2002b), Wade (1995,
1999, 2002a).
3 More recently, the dynamic of military conflict and violence has
recently introduced in the Pacific region a substantive disruption in
the conditions of existence and re/production of the politics of
ethnicity of the black community. In particular, this disruption has
involved both dislocations and re-articulations of the politics of
ethnicity of black communities. According to John Antón Sánchez (2003)
this disruption must be analyzed as a ‘counter-revolution’ with
respect to the ethnic political subjects of black communities. In the
same vain, Mauricio Pardo (2002: 72) considers that the irruption of
the military conflict in Pacific region has involved a strategic
foreclosing of the conditions of a possible advancement of the social
movement of black communities.
4 “It has been some time since historians lost their love for events
and made ‘de-eventalization’ their principle of historical
intelligibility. The way they work is by ascribing the object they
analyze to the most unitary, necessary, inevitable, and (ultimately)
extrahistorical mechanism or structure available. An economic
mechanism, an anthropological structure, or a demographical process
that figures in the climactic stage of the investigation —these are
the goals of de-eventalized history” (QM, 228).
5 For an interesting example of this expressed in what I would like to
call the ‘imperative of racialization’ of some of the analysis
produced from the Anglo-American or British traditions see Wade
(2002b).
6 Somewhere else (Restrepo, forthcoming), I mapped the different
tendencies on the study of ethnicity in order to locate Stuart Hall
contributions to the field. For general reviews of the literature
about race and ethnicity see Banks (1996), Briones (1998), Eriksen
([1993] 2002), Tompson (1989), Wade (1997, 2002).
7
 By ‘textualize’ I mean to reduce discursive formations to a textual
notion. For a conceptual distinction about Foucault and Derrida
approaches see Gibson-Graham (2000).
8
 Foucault’s discussion of power is based on a double rejection. On
the one hand, he rejects what he called the ‘repressive hypothesis.’
This hypothesis argues that power is mainly a negative force that
represses. Repression and negation are the basics features of power
from this perspective. This hypothesis has a ‘hydraulic’
conceptualization of power, this is, power is the force that contains
and maintains the equilibrium of a set of forces that are constantly
trying to emerge. In opposition to this position, Foucault states that
power must be analyzed also, and essentially, as a positive force
whose effects produce, incite and create: “Power ‘produces reality’
before it represses. Equally it produces truth before it ideologizes,
abstracts or masks” (Deleuze 1988: 29). This is why in the
relationships between (stratified) knowledge and (diagrammatic) power
there is not an exteriority, but they are unevenly co-constituted. On
the other hand, Foucault is arguing against those theories that try to
analyze power from the point of view of its internal rationality.
Rather, he analyzes power from the multiplicity of specific and
historical rationalities that are produced in certain antagonisms and
strategies (S&P, 211).
Foucault’s conception of power is based on a set of well-known
propositions or postulates (HS, 94-95). The first is that power is
not a substance, a ‘property’ that can be owned, held, shared or
stolen; it is exercised from different locations at the same time and
in dissimilar directions. Rather than a substance or property, power
operates as a strategy and its effects cannot be attributed to an
appropriation. The second proposition is that power is immanent in
other kinds of relationships. Thus, rather than being located in a
superstructural position with respect to other sorts of relations such
as economic relations, power is deeply imbricated in these
relationships, producing and operating through them. The third
proposition argues that power does not follow a simple binary division
between rulers and ruled, but it comes from below constituting a
general matrix that is spread though the social body. As a fourth
proposition, Foucault claims that power relationships are intentional
in the sense that they are imbued with calculation, although this does
not mean that they are just the consequence of the rational choice of
individual subjects. Power operates not only independent of the
consciousness of individuals, but also it “[…] is tolerable only on
condition that it masks a substantial part of itself. Its success is
proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms” (HS, 86).
Finally, resistance and power constitute a unity or, in other words,
the former is never in a position of exteriority in relation to the
latter. Hence, in correspondence with the multiplicity of power,
there is a plurality of resistances. In this sense, Foucault is very
clear in arguing that: “Instead of this ontological opposition between
power and resistance, I would say that power is nothing other than a
certain modification, or the form, differing from time to time, of a
series of clashes which constitute the social body, clashes of the
political, economic, etc. Power, then, is something like the
stratification, the institutionalization, the definition of tactics,
of implements and arms which are useful in all these clashes” (CQP,
188).
9
=
 As it will be obvious with my concept of ‘modalities of
governmentality’, this approach to ‘regimes of blackness’ does not
mean that my analysis obliterated the state as an important dense node
of imbrications of power relationships. However, as Timothy Michel
(1991) and Gupta (1995) reminded us, the state is not the smoothly
monolithic and rational entity that most politicians and politic
scientist have assumed and imagined in an ontological separation from
‘civil society.’ Mitchell (1991) argued that this boundary between
state and civil society is not one of a straightforward ontological
exteriority, but what produces and maintains this boundary is itself a
mechanism from which certain politics are deploy and exercised. From
an ethnographical perspective, Akil Gupta (1995) has taken in account
the ground practices, relations and representations of everyday life
that operate the re/production of state in its different (trans)local
settings. Recently, Ferguson and Gupta (2002: 981) claimed that states
must be also analyzed as ‘imagined’, this is, “[…] as constructed
entities that are conceptualized and made socially effective through
particular imaginative and symbolic devices […]”. In the same vein,
Negangast argued that is necessary combine an historical understanding
of the state: “But the state is not just a set of institutions staffed
by bureaucrats who serve public interest. It also incorporates
cultural and political forms, representations, discourse, practices
and activities, and specific technologies and organizations or power
that, taken together, help to define public interest, establish
meaning, and define and naturalize availed social identities”
(Nagengast, 1994: 116).
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10
 “[…] truth offers itself to knowledge only through a series of
‘problematizations’ and that these problematizations are created only
on the basis of ‘practices’, practices of seeing and speaking. These
practices, the process and the method, constitute the procedures for
truth, ‘a history of truth’” (Deleuze 1988: 64).
11
 It is important to keep in mind that, as I explained,
‘governamental’ is not reducible to ‘state,’ nor defined from
commsensial opposition between goverrment and non-goverment
organizations.
12
 In Discipline and Punish, Foucault defined ‘history of the present’
in the following terms: “I would like to write the history of this
prison, with all the political investments of the body that it gathers
together in its close architecture. Why? Simply because I am
interested in the past? No, if one means by that writing a history of
the past in terms of present. Yes, if one means writing the history of
the present” (D&P: 30-31)
13
 See, for example, Balibar (2002), Foucault (2003) Wallerstein
(1983).
14
 Questioning Anderson genealogical distinction between ‘nation’ and
‘race’, Bhabha argued: “[…] we see ‘racism’ not simply as a hangover
from archaic conceptions of the aristocracy, but as part of the
historical traditions of civic and liberal humanism that create
ideological matrices of national aspiration, together with the
concepts of ‘a people’ and its imagined community” (1994: 250)
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