Notes for a Postcolonial Politics of Translation. Temporality and difference in Dipesh Chakrabarty and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui

Abstract

In the last three decades, the political processes carried out by the Indigenous Peoples have had a strong impact on the Social Sciences and especially in those areas that had non-Western societies as their field of study. However, for History with capital letters, the discipline that orders and classifies discourses about the past, indigenous history remains a marginal issue. In this article, I propose a dialogue between two critical analyzes of historical discourses, focused on the notions of temporality, translation and difference, based on the theoretical contributions of the postcolonial historian Dipesh Chakrabarty and the Aymara-mestiza intellectual Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui. Assuming the effects of coloniality in the epistemic field of History and an interest in addressing the problem of temporality in the context of indigenous pasts, the article proposes an analysis of indigenous discursivities, not in terms of discourses "of origin" and “essence” of their positions, cultures or pasts. Neither in a search for its exoticism, or a supposed uncontaminated exteriority, but rather, in a critical confrontation, between these discursivities and the colonial knowledge that has been built on them in history.