Notes on Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein. “Americanity as a Concept"

Quijano, Aníbal, and Immanuel Wallerstein. “Americanity as a Concept, Or the Americas in the Modern World-System.” International Social Science Journal, 1992, pp. 549-556.

This article contrasts the development of North America and Latin America in the capitalist world-system. It begins by arguing (similar to Mignolo) that "[t]he Americas were not incorporated into an already existing capitalist world-economy. There could not have been a capitalist world-economy without the Americas" (549). 

They argue that the newness of the "New World" was "four-fold, each linked to the other: coloniality, ethnicity, racism, and the concept of newness itself" (550). They go on to describe coloniality as "an essential element in the integration of the interstate system, creating not only rank order but sets of rules for the interactions of states with each other" (550). Even if a state was able to move up in the rankings, it actually solidified the idea of the hierarchy, even when some colonies fought for independence. "Independence did not undo coloniality; it merely transformed its outer form" (550).

They also argue that the ethnicities that are how people are divided in the Americas today "did not exist prior to the modern world-system. They are part of what make[s] up Americanity" (550). They go on to show how ethnicity was "the inevitable cultural consequence of coloniality" because it allowed the delineation of "social boundaries corresponding to the division of labour" (550). 

They call racism, "theorized and explicit, ... a creation largely of the nineteenth century, ... a means of shoring up culturally an economic hierarchy some of whose political guarantees were weakening in the post-1789 era of 'popular sovereignty" (551). They argue that the US was more explicit about its racism than Latin America, although racism has become more subtle recently (remember that this was written in 1992; I'm not entirely sure that racism was particularly subtle at that time--at least not for Rodney King, the victims of the MOVE bombing, etc.--it's certainly not subtle nowadays). They tie the "subtler" form of racism to meritocracy, which "justifies racist attitudes without the need to verbalize them" (551). 

Finally, "newness" itself--valuing newness over appeals to tradition or privilege--was a product and productive of the "New World" and modernity: "Modernity became the justification of economic success, but also its proof. It was a perfectly circular argument, which diverted attention from the development of underdevelopment" (552). 

They go on to contrast North and Latin America through the ways that coloniality was practiced and what it meant--the differences between the way it was practiced in the Iberian colonies vs. the British colonies. I'm not going to get too much into this at this point, though.