Content uploaded by Grant Silva
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Grant Silva on Feb 03, 2019
Content may be subject to copyright.
the pluralist Volume 13, Number 2 Summer 2018 : pp. 1–21 1
©2018 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
“The Americas Seek Not Enlightenment but
Liberation”: On the Philosophical Significance of
Liberation for Philosophy in the Americas
grant silva
Marquette University
liberation is a notion employed by many philosophers, theologians,
political theorists, and social thinkers engaged in sociopolitical action or in
academic and theoretical critiques of multiple forms of oppression, exclusion,
and domination. Throughout numerous examples, “liberation” often refers
to the long-awaited triumph over oppressive social, economic, and political
structures or regimes. In such works, however, the idea of liberation is rarely (if
ever) parsed for philosophical meaning. At the root of such hesitation is valid
concern: outside of a particular historical or sociocultural context, the idea of
liberation is rather vacuous and perhaps even meaningless. Worse, as I contend,
liberation is often reduced to approximations such as liberty, freedom, and even
“equality,” all of which can (unfortunately) set the stage for disappointment
and disillusionment when oppressive structures withstand change. Amidst such
concerns, might philosophical reflection on the idea of liberation itself yield
insights into the nature of oppression and the importance of liberatory struggle
against such things as racism, sexism, economic exploitation, the intersection
of these, and more? While focusing on the idea of America, anti-racist struggle,
and even philosophical embodiment, I argue that it does.
Inspired by Latin American liberation philosophy, as well as philosophical
and theoretical discourses and debates that can be considered part of a larger
liberatory tradition,1 this essay offers an account of the philosophical significance
of liberation and prescribes the special importance that ought to be attached to
this notion in context of inter-American philosophical dialogue. Although the
sense of “liberation” I employ owes much to Latin American philosophers such
as Enrique Dussel, Ofelia Schutte, Leopoldo Zea, Horatio Cerutti-Guldberg
This article selected by Dr. Gregory Pappas is the conclusion of the SAAP 2017 Confer-
ence Proceedings.
__s
__n
__l
lc
Pluralist 13_2.indd 1 5/7/18 9:56 AM
From The Pluralist, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2018. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois. Complimentary copy--not for distribution without permission.
2 the plural ist 13 : 2 2018
(and more), I offer an ample depiction of liberation, one that is broader and
more fundamental than even the Latin American tradition(s) of liberation
philosophy.2
My depiction is “broader” on account of an explicit inter-American ori-
entation (one that is justified not only in terms of content but also in terms
of genealogy, as I explain below). I draw from decolonial theorists and phi-
losophers in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as North American
philosophers and social theorists challenging racism, sexism, and other forms
of oppression, domination, injustice, and/or marginalization. These struggles
illuminate liberatory processes in multiple contexts and ground the idea of
liberation in concrete circumstances. In particular, I situate my analysis of
liberation in the contexts of multiple instances of anti-racist struggle since a
commitment to combating racism, and not necessarily the overcoming of it
(as strange as that sounds), exemplifies the process-orientation that “libera-
tion” entails. Besides its pedagogical value, an overview of the meaning and
significance of liberation in the Americas ought to include a variegated range
of experience focused on such things as race, racialization, and other forms
of objectification: socially stratifying conceptions of race (see Quijano), not
to mention overly narrow and biologized conceptions of gender and sexual
difference (see Lugones), serve as axes of domination through which control
over labor, land, property rights, and sexual reproduction is (and was) exerted
throughout all the Americas. Contemporary struggles against racism (and
sexism for that matter), therefore, ought to be viewed as not only thematically
part of a larger liberatory tradition but also causally connected to a concep-
tion of philosophy in which liberation is the central goal.
Because I think that a majority of philosophers situated throughout the
Americas have yet to understand how liberation serves as a springboard for
philosophical thought, I describe my understanding of liberation as more
“fundamental,” perhaps even philosophically orientating or foundational.
By this, I do not mean that every philosopher ought to be wedded to one
strand or another of Latin American liberation philosophy. Instead, for those
philosophical systems or traditions purporting to be autochthonous to this
hemisphere, the idea of America ought to (and indeed does for many) serve
as a catalyst for liberatory thought. Put differently, at the heart of multiple
American experiences, regardless of what adjective one places before the word
“American,” lays the challenge to confront the epistemic and ontological
forms of dependency associated with America. Liberation harbors similar
significance for the Americas as does the notion of “enlightenment” within
the context of Western intellectual traditions. I am even willing to contend
s__
n__
l__
lc
Pluralist 13_2.indd 2 5/7/18 9:56 AM
From The Pluralist, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2018. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois. Complimentary copy--not for distribution without permission.
silva : Philosophical Significance of Liberation 3
that liberation is to the Americas what the Enlightenment is to Europe. Libera-
tion serves as a knowledge- or wisdom-guiding “end” as well as an intellec-
tual movement. While both “liberation” and “enlightenment” are nouns, the
former is indicative of an action or process and the latter of a state of being.
Such a distinction makes possible two conceptions of the purpose of philo-
sophical knowledge and the practice of philosophy: philosophy for freedom
(liberation) and philosophy from freedom (enlightenment). This difference in
starting points impacts the types of questions considered “philosophical”;
the methodology and range of experience valid for philosophical inquiry;
the institutional or greater social significance of philosophy; and even the
overall purpose of philosophical knowledge, that is, whether it aspires toward
orthopraxy or orthodoxy, practical or theoretical knowledge.
In what follows, I first explain why philosophical perspectives wishing
to call themselves “American” ought to understand liberation as central to
their philosophical practice. I then offer an account of the process-oriented
dimensions of liberation, emphasizing the importance of “place” and lived
experience. Last, drawing from multiple thinkers and texts, I provide a brief
depiction of liberation as a philosophical heuristic (for lack of a better word)
analogous to enlightenment. Overall, my goal is to explain the sense of libera-
tion I have in mind and demonstrate the philosophical importance of libera-
tory discourses in the hopes of laying a foundation for an inter-American
liberatory tradition.
On the Significance of Liberation for the Americas
The origins of an explicit Latin American liberation philosophy can be found
in the attempt to answer the question: “Is there a Latin American philosophy?”
(Mendieta § 1.1). Such a question, asked by Zea in the 1940s and taken up
by Augusto Salazar Bondy in the 1960s, represents the initial stages of an
“American” awakening from a deep colonial slumber, a starting point for
decolonial philosophical reflection. As Zea puts it (“Actual Function”), “Is
there a Latin American philosophy?” is a metaphilosophical inquiry into the
importance of place or “culture” and its impact on the practice of philosophy.
As such, “Is there a Latin American philosophy?” is not simply asking if it is
the case that philosophy exists in Latin America. As a self-conscious and criti-
cal inquiry, this question goes beyond the mere recognition and development
of hegemonic conceptions of philosophy as they occurred in Latin America
or the Caribbean.3 If not interpreted in this more robust manner, then “Is
there a Latin American philosophy?” is a matter of historical contingency and
__s
__n
__l
lc
Pluralist 13_2.indd 3 5/7/18 9:56 AM
From The Pluralist, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2018. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois. Complimentary copy--not for distribution without permission.
4 the plural ist 13 : 2 2018
accidental to philosophy itself. Which is why, at least on my read, the above
question represents an inquiry into the philosophical relevance of America,
an inquiry into the ways in which the idea of America or the experience of
being American impact philosophy.4
While its colonial underpinnings might not be readily apparent in any
given use, ruminating on the full meaning and origins of “America” reveals a
concept “embedded in a European optic of the continent,” as put by María
Lugones and Joshua Price (lxx). It is difficult, perhaps even impossible, to
think about “America” and not acknowledge (or buy into) the European
“discovery” and colonization of the region. The semantic context in which
“A me ri ca” mak es s en se r eq uires a s pe cific c ar t og ra p hi c an d ge op ol it ic al i ma g i-
nary, one with Europe (and subsequently the United States) at the center of
not only the globe but also serving as the main protagonist of world history.
Stemming from this cartographic imaginary, appropriately dubbed “Euro-
centrism” by Dussel (“Europe, Modernity, and Eurocentrism”), are forms of
asymmetrical historicity and the normalization of a particular geopolitical
outlook. The supposed movement of world history from East to West, much
like the movement of geopolitical power from Europe to the United States,
reinforces the spatial normativity offered by the Eurocentric model (so, too,
is the technological and cultural development of “First World” nations, with
their supposed advancement or progress unfolding in a way that supports the
ideology of this cartographic imaginary).
“America” is thus a concept for Europe and subsequently for the progeny
of the Eurocentric outlook, that is, the United States. And while it, too, exists
in a manner dependent upon the other continents (i.e., Africa, Asia, America),
the idea of “Europe” does not immediately evoke this fact. The geospatial
normativity offered by Eurocentrism provides a false sense of independence
and erasure. Europe is thus capable of evading its intercontinental depen-
dency in a way similar to how whiteness operates in the racial contexts of
the United States, that is, as a self-enclosed, self-sustaining entity that exists
independently of denigrated categories of non-whiteness.5
The notion of “Americanity” brings to the fore the epistemic dependence
apparent within the idea of America. Coined by Quijano and Wallerstein in
the early articulation of the host of issues that remain the focus of contem-
porary decolonial thought, “Americanity” offers a carte blanche and histori-
cal fissure that constitutes a precondition for the possibility of the modern
capitalist world order (549).6 For Quijano and Wallerstein, the resources
acquired in the Americas, the quasi-legal strategies used in the justification of
land appropriation, the variegated methods of labor control that subsequently
s__
n__
l__
lc
Pluralist 13_2.indd 4 5/7/18 9:56 AM
From The Pluralist, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2018. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois. Complimentary copy--not for distribution without permission.
silva : Philosophical Significance of Liberation 5
articulated the parameters of race and ethnicity (and gender) as socially strati-
fying concepts, in addition to the (nation-)state model as the chief vehicle
for “liberation” in the Americas (which solidified the social, political, and
economic stratification of this region), all made possible the capitalist world
order. These axes of domination were then exported throughout the globe
and paved the way for the modern capitalist world system. “The creation of
this geosocial entity, the Americas,” Quijano and Wallerstein write, “was the
constitutive act of the modern world-system. The Americas were not incor-
porated into an already existing capitalist world economy. There could not
have been a capitalist world-economy without the Americas” (549).
In addition to providing the material conditions that made possible the
capitalist world economy, “Americanity” provided a historical break or rupture
that makes possible the modern world (Quijano and Wallerstein 550–52). It
is also the means through which “America” became a “discoverable entity,” to
use Edmundo O’Gorman’s terminology. Embedded within “Americanity” is
a sense of “newness” that simultaneously provides some with historical conti-
nuity, subjectivity, and depth while robbing others of any sense of historicity.
Whereas peripheral European countries or regions were also marginalized by
and subjugated to Western colonial metropoles, many European elites were
capable of alleviating their domination by resisting the kind of exploitation
and erasure suffered by the peoples of America. Historicity, or the continu-
ation of a necessarily undeniable and authentic historical subjectivity, was
the saving grace for those in the eastern and northern European peripheries,
argue Quijano and Wallerstein (549)—I write “necessarily undeniable” since
denying peripheral European countries their privileged status in light of the
linear movement or unfolding of world history would undermine the West’s
claim to historical progress. The Americas, however, did not fare so well. As
Quijano and Wallerstein explain, in the Americas,
the process of peripheralization involved less the reconstruction of eco-
nomic and political institutions than their construction, virtually ex
nihilo everywhere (except perhaps in the Mexican and Andean zones).
Hence from the beginning, the mode of cultural resistance to oppressive
conditions was less in claims of historicity than in the flight forward
to “modernity.” (549)
Quintessential to the idea of Americanity is a sense of “newness” and the
rush toward the present. The foremost indicator of this being the notion that
America was discovered, something new, unseen, unknown until revealed by
a particular (Eurocentric) point of view.
__s
__n
__l
lc
Pluralist 13_2.indd 5 5/7/18 9:56 AM
From The Pluralist, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2018. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois. Complimentary copy--not for distribution without permission.
6 the plural ist 13 : 2 2018
As Quijano and Wallerstein hold, the possibility for the modern world
system required a temporal disjunction metaphorically captured by the idea
of “newness.” The modern world is where reason and not faith, dogma, or
papal authority reigns supreme and serves as the foundation for knowledge.
Under the guise of “modern,” the capitalist world order is endowed with
the necessarily vantage point that makes possible the superiority of some in
contradistinction to the lack of modernity found in others, that is, the “pre-
modern,” savage, medieval, or ancient ways of being. The idea of modernity
is therefore not merely a temporal reference indicating a moment in time,
but signifies a stage in the unfolding and development of world history, a
sign of progress.
Lest one continue in bad faith or revel in culpable forms of ignorance
that often accompany First World privilege, those points of view that wish to
emphasize their situatedness in the Americas should strive to “liberate” them-
selves from the yoke of “Americanity.” Problem is, overcoming “Americanity,”
not to mention the various axes of domination that are part and parcel to it, is
not so easily achieved. “Americanity” persists on account of various ideologi-
cal mechanisms that are not easily done away with or overcome, and this is
why I offer a robust account of “liberation” below. Some of these mechanisms,
such as the continuation of the cartographic normativity in which “America”
is afforded its meaning, articulate the preconditions for the settler-colonialism
vital to the founding of the original colonies that became the United States of
America. Others, such as the methods of labor control that differentiated social
classes on the basis of race or gender in order to designate the type and range
of labor connected to each grouping, set the stage for identity formation that
persists today. To think that American societies will ultimately be freed from
the unjust land appropriation that undergirds the United States of America,
much like the notion that race will no longer serve as a “vortex for modern
human social relations” across American societies, to quote Jeffery Stewart’s
description of the importance of race for Alain Locke (qtd. in Locke xxvi), is
to misunderstand the nature of these oppressive structures and, therefore, is a
misunderstanding of the philosophical significance of liberation.
On account of Americanity—and I offer examples connected to the
workings of racism and processes of racialization below in order to relay this
point—oppression, objectification, and coloniality7 are woven into the fabric
of almost every American experience (even those on the privileged end of
human social relations are positively affected by the oppression of others).
Thus, to seek “liberation” from racism, sexism, or even “Eurocentrism” is not
easy to achieve and can possibly set one up for failure if one defines success
as the overcoming or erasure of these oppressive social relations.
s__
n__
l__
lc
Pluralist 13_2.indd 6 5/7/18 9:56 AM
From The Pluralist, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2018. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois. Complimentary copy--not for distribution without permission.
silva : Philosophical Significance of Liberation 7
The Idea of Liberation
“Liberation” is best understood as a process, or perhaps more appropriately an
ongoing praxis, harboring both critical and creative potentialities. Liberation
is best understood as a utopian goal (Dussel, Philosophy of Liberation 186).
Liberation is not something easily completed or checked off a laundry list. It
is not so impossible as to promote quietism, however. The idea of liberation
is indicative of a process; it is an ongoing endeavor or a “striving for” rather
than a single act or series of actions resulting in a definitive tangible end. This
is not to say that a particular liberatory movement cannot have a concrete
goal in mind. Say, for instance, ending apartheid. While such a specified
objective is possible, “ending” something like apartheid requires systemic
socioeconomic and political change as well as a commitment to forms of
rectificatory justice that work toward undoing, dismantling, and supplying
enough material and structural weight to outdo legacies of oppression caused
by it. Liberation from apartheid (or racism and sexism for that matter)—this
language is deceiving—suggests an orthopraxy, or as Dussel (Philosophy of
Liberation) describes, a “liberative orthopraxis” (188); apartheid, much like
racism, sexism, and even “colonialism” (in the sense of “coloniality”), does
not just “end.” The fight against them takes time and conscientious effort
and constitutes a life commitment.
Philosophers working against racism realize this point. Ending racism,
perhaps combating racism (I should say), is not limited to cognitive shifts or
intellectual awakenings seeking to change the hearts and minds of racists,
as Kenneth Stikkers reminds us (5–6). Instead, anti-racist struggle involves
challenging racist ways of inhabiting the world, racist ways of being. It in-
volves “performing the body’s racialized interactions with the world differ-
ently,” as George Yancy put it (843), even when those who are racist do not
see themselves as performing racism. Such praxis calls for a rethinking of the
divide between theory and practice (Márquez, xi; Villoro, “Ideological Cur-
rents” 185–87) and also requires the possibility that the struggle against a
particular instance of oppression might exceed one’s lifetime and never really
be “overcome.” José-Antonio Orosco’s description of Cesar Chavez’s rejection
of “crisis time” is useful here, specifically the Mexican dicho or saying, “Hay
mas tiempo que vida (there is more time than life)” (106). The fact that a
liberatory struggle might take more time to achieve than an individual’s life
span should not stop people from contributing their all to the cause. Such a
notion also manifests in Derrick Bell’s third tenet of racial realism: in light
of the permanence of racism, anti-racist advocates should find fulfillment
or “salvation” in the struggle itself; otherwise they may be disillusioned or
__s
__n
__l
lc
Pluralist 13_2.indd 7 5/7/18 9:56 AM
From The Pluralist, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2018. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois. Complimentary copy--not for distribution without permission.
8 the plural ist 13 : 2 2018
deceived by the type of social, political, and legal setbacks that often, if not
always, accompany racial “progress” (Bell 98).
Liberation amounts to an aspiration demanding a certain level of at-
tentiveness to the exigencies of one’s community, a principled commitment
acknowledging the role of “place,” and a point grounding any sense of uto-
pianism in a reality calling for philosophical attention. Put differently, from
where one thinks matters philosophically for liberatory thinkers. 8 This means
at least two things. First, particular persons from concrete situations practice
philosophy. When one philosophizes, she does so in way motivated by her
individual consciousness and shaped by a unique set of circumstances that
may or may not overlap, to a certain extent, with the predicament of others.
In more phenomenological terms, both the subject of knowledge (the “think-
ing self ” or the “thinking subject”) and object of knowledge (the object of
inquiry) are historically demarcated by the cultural, linguistic, and social/
political contexts in which they arise.9 As historically demarcated, there is
an indelible link between subject/object such that the division between the
two is reconfigured: both are relevant, or equally significant, to philosophical
inquiry. Any underlying metaphysical presuppositions inherited from modern
philosophy—for instance, the belief that the object of knowledge is radically
contingent whereas the subject is certain—is abandoned.
Second, liberatory philosophy takes reality to be the focus of philosophical
investigation. This does not mean metaphysical investigations into the existence
and workings of the “real world,” but first and foremost, a commitment to
contemplating and subsequently acting on (hence, “praxis”) instances of non-
freedom and oppression afflicting one’s community or its surroundings. There
is no need to cast metaphysical doubt on one’s reality when the experience or
sight of hunger or thirst makes such forms of skepticism difficult if not impos-
sible to maintain. Furthermore, when one’s circumstance requires immediate
attention and action, the best solutions tend to be those that take sociohistori-
cal particularities into consideration. Debates about the status of “organic” or
“rooted” intellectuals arise in such a context-driven approach (Sáenz 7–21),
as does the sense of philosophical practice as “commitment” or vocation (Zea,
“La filosofía como compromiso”). Driving the emphasis on place therefore is
a hallmark of liberatory philosophy: a principled approach concerned with
suffering, oppression, and multiple forms of alienation or objectification, all
of which take place in “real,” lived, or embodied circumstances.10
Liberation as the ideal of philosophical practice implies the need to ex-
plore the ways in which the particularities of individual human existence (e.g.,
race, class, gender, nationality, ethnicity) impact the philosophical process,
s__
n__
l__
lc
Pluralist 13_2.indd 8 5/7/18 9:56 AM
From The Pluralist, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2018. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois. Complimentary copy--not for distribution without permission.
silva : Philosophical Significance of Liberation 9
that is, the emplacement of philosophy. Construing philosophy in this man-
ner cannot help but bring identity to the foreground, a topic of concern for
many “American” philosophers and social theorists for whom their identity is
a “problem,” as expressed by W. E. B. DuBois (28). The problematic nature
of identity includes the experience of racial, ethnic, sexual, or gender-based
forms of oppression, just to name a few. It also includes philosophical reflec-
tion on the workings of unjust socioeconomic and political structures and
the support they garner from socially stratifying concepts (e.g., race, gender,
or class), exclusive categories group membership (e.g., citizen, denizen, or
immigrant), and domineering ideologies. Following Schutte (Cultural Iden-
tity), then, the sense in which identity is relevant for liberatory philosophers
is more aligned with “social” rather than “personal identity” (9–10), a priori-
tization that views social identity formation and practice as an inescapable
determinant for many, a point I return to below. Liberatory thinkers thus
focus on forms of subjective experience unfolding in the contexts of racial/
sexual objectivity, colonial “totalization,” and historical marginalization rather
than decontextualized, “idealized,” and abstract theories of the self.
While the idea of liberation emphasizes place, identity, and embodiment,
the question of utopianism might remain an issue for some, namely, historical
materialist who worry about a haunting idealism. Herbert Marcuse’s thoughts
in An Essay on Liberation might ease some worries. He writes that “what is
denounced as ‘utopian’ is no longer that which has ‘no place’ and cannot have
any place in the historical universe, but rather that which is blocked from
coming about by the power of the established societies” (3–4). The idea that
the dominant or prevailing social, economic, and political order denies or
“blocks” certain realities from coming into existence, realities that, as Marcuse
reminds, technological progress makes possible (e.g., ending resource scarcity
or global hunger or eradicating an assortment of diseases), fits nicely with
the thought of liberatory philosophers, especially the focus on victimization
and suffering. Acknowledging the importance of historical contingency and
individual agency plays an important role in this process, since imbalanced
or asymmetrical power relations and structural injustices are the products
of prior actions, such as enslavement, war, conquest, and colonization, or
fetishized forms of political practice. Along these lines, Paulo Freire writes
that liberation “cannot be achieved in idealistic terms.” He continues: “In
order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for their liberation,
they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which
there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform” (34).
Feasibility becomes an important theme of liberation, one that Dussel also
__s
__n
__l
lc
Pluralist 13_2.indd 9 5/7/18 9:56 AM
From The Pluralist, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2018. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois. Complimentary copy--not for distribution without permission.
10 the plural ist 13 : 2 2018
underscores in several places (Twenty Theses [Theses 8 and 20]; Ethics of Lib-
eration, 158–204, 413–32).
Amidst the emphasis on “freedom” or “liberty,” liberation cannot be
reduced to either of these, or, for that matter, to the achievement of politi-
cal independence. Reducing liberation to any of these ignores the complexity
of liberation. Due to its ameliorative ambitions, the idea of liberation holds
much instrumental value. Nevertheless, the process-orientation of “libera-
tion” suggests that its contribution is not merely a onetime event. It is not
just a means to an end. Liberation reduced to liberty also fails to recognize
why liberatory thinkers tend to maintain one foot in theories of decoloniza-
tion predicated on coloniality. The history of the Americas is littered with
instances of slavery, serfdom, and social stratification, and forms of passive
citizenship accompany national liberation or political independence,11 not
to mention that national independence was often inspired by and worked
in favor of colonial elites (Villoro, “Mexican and North American Indepen-
dence”). Liberation reduced to freedom or liberty also results in the unnec-
essary (and unwelcomed!) ascription of many philosophers to the liberatory
tradition (for instance, G. W. F. Hegel, who happened to write a great deal
on freedom). Just because a philosopher writes on liberty does not mean that
his concern is “liberation,” a point that begs the question as to what is unique
or significant about the sense of “liberation” at stake in the liberatory tradi-
tion: Is it merely the decolonial orientation that differentiates it from other
philosophical endeavors concerned with freedom, or the dynamic between
praxis and place?
Whereas all philosophy might be imbued with a liberating function
(Ellacuría 94), in professional academic philosophy today, greater weight
seems to be placed upon philosophizing from freedom and not philosophizing
for the sake of freedom. With the former, in the words of the Caribbean phi-
losopher, Paget Henry, philosophy is “an affirmation of the autonomy of a
thinking subject.” He continues: “As the primary instrument of this absolute
subject . . . philosophy shares in its autonomy and therefore is a discipline
that rises above the determinations of history and everyday life” (9). Such
a decontextualized, “liberated” understanding of philosophy is unduly bur-
dened by philosophical practices within which liberatory discourses are at
home. In this setting, the affirmation of the autonomy of a thinking subject
is not as important as the liberation of the subject-in-struggle, a struggle for
freedom. This sense of “freedom,” I must remind, is not idealized; for lib-
eration philosophers, “freedom” is concretized by an emphasis on place and
embodiment. With philosophy for freedom, the questions come from reality,
s__
n__
l__
lc
Pluralist 13_2.indd 10 5/7/18 9:56 AM
From The Pluralist, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2018. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois. Complimentary copy--not for distribution without permission.
silva : Philosophical Significance of Liberation 11
from life, rather than emerging from the skepticism or unbridled curiosity
of a thinking subject.
Nelson Maldonado-Torres demonstrated this when comparing René
Descartes’s Discourse on Method to Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism:
Both [texts] focus on impediments to the search for truth. But they high-
light different forms of deception. Descartes focuses on the deception
of the senses, tradition, and assumed certainties, while Césaire focuses
on the deception of those who, after apparently following Descartes’
method, believe not to be deceived but deceive themselves nonetheless
in regard to what is most fundamental: themselves and their relation
with others. (“Césaire’s Gift” 127)
There is no need to conceive of an evil deceiver who might have just fabricated
one’s customs, language, memories, and history, such that one cannot find
truth or certainty in these when the European colonizers and their distorting
representation of the colonized victim will serve such purposes. The imposition
of imperial culture, language, and even history all reveal that there is not much
“certainty” to be found in these sites of colonial domination when coercive
force does most of the work. Thus, skepticism is not an impediment to truth
as much as the perverse social arrangement imbedded in colonial domination.
Liberatory philosophical practice therefore does not occur in a vacuum or hy-
perbolic chamber but begins from the lived circumstance of thinking subjects,
“subjects” that have in many ways been objectified—yet another reason why a
particularly American approach to liberatory thought must include anti-racist,
anti-sexist, and other related forms of critical philosophical reflection.
Liberation as Philosophical Heuristic
A commitment to liberation is not easily compartmentalized or made a part
of philosophy. For this reason, Mendieta views liberatory philosophy as
metaphilosophy:
The philosophy of liberation’s philosophical orbit is defined by the axes
of critique, commitment, engagement and liberation. As a critique of all
forms of philosophical dependency and inauthenticity, it is consciously
and avowedly a metaphilosophy. The philosophy of liberation is thus,
among other things, a view about what counts as philosophy and how
it should be pursued. (§ 1.1)
I appreciate Mendieta’s depiction of liberatory philosophy. The most force-
ful or significant metaphilosophical contribution from the philosophy of
__s
__n
__l
lc
Pluralist 13_2.indd 11 5/7/18 9:56 AM
From The Pluralist, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2018. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois. Complimentary copy--not for distribution without permission.
12 the plural ist 13 : 2 2018
liberation points to legacies of colonialism (coloniality) impacting academic
philosophy, points I tried to convey above. Nonetheless, the significance
of “liberation” is often downplayed, sold short, when reduced to one of its
axes, that is, through criticism of those forms of philosophical practice that
promote dependency and inauthenticity. As forceful as it may be, such criti-
cism might remain committed to a hegemonic conception of philosophy.
For this reason, I suggest the idea of liberation as a philosophically orienting
ideal, a heuristic in the sense of providing a sense of purpose or direction for
philosophical inquiry, not just a critique of hegemonic philosophical practice.
While philosophers of liberation might conceptually draw from hegemonic
philosophical concepts and ideas, liberation philosophy does not take Euro-
centric modernity or the Enlightenment as its starting point. Arising from “the
underside of modernity” (Dussel, Invention of the Americas), this tradition’s
points of departure are the experience of colonization and the realization of
the importance of striving–for-liberty. It does not seek “enlightenment” or
wish to become “modern”; both would amount to a false start anyway since
modernity’s underside, that is, the experience of colonization, is already a
constitutive facet of modernity itself, as a plethora of voices have stated be-
fore (Dussel, Invention of the Americas; Quijano and Wallerstein; Zea, Role
of the Americas; Quijano, “Coloniality of Power”; Maldonado-Torres, “On
the Coloniality of Being”). Instead, one should think of liberation as itself
being analogous to the idea of enlightenment.
Liberation occupies similar conceptual space as the idea of enlightenment
in the history of European thought. As a philosophical-intellectual movement
(i.e., the Enlightenment) or even a goal, “enlightenment” constitutes the kind
of background knowledge that undergirds much European or “Western”
thought. It infiltrates everything from literature, art, philosophy, and science
to political revolutions, legal systems, human and political rights, and sys-
tems of governance. Throughout modern European intellectual history, the
idea of enlightenment is periodically “activated” by a philosopher or political
institution reflecting upon its meaning and significance or its failures and/or
absence. The same is true about the idea of liberation in the Americas; it, too,
is the explicit topic of inquiry (say, in liberation or decolonial philosophy),
an ideal or goal motivating independence and revolutionary movements, and
also serves as a kind of implicit or background knowledge.
With the idea of liberation as its “guiding light” (and I recognize the irony
in that phrasing), the pursuit of knowledge does not begin from a subjectiv-
ity already endowed with freedom. The great philosopher from Königsberg,
Immanuel Kant, assumes such a starting point in his response to the ques-
s__
n__
l__
lc
Pluralist 13_2.indd 12 5/7/18 9:56 AM
From The Pluralist, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2018. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois. Complimentary copy--not for distribution without permission.
silva : Philosophical Significance of Liberation 13
tion “What is Enlightenment?” As he explains, “[n]othing is required for this
enlightenment, however, except freedom; and the freedom in question is the
least harmful of all, namely the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters”
(42). Kant encourages his audience to think for themselves and endorses a
conception of freedom connected to intellectual liberty and freedom of con-
science (of course, with self-imposed restraints that have the betterment of
society and other people’s autonomy in mind). Freedom or liberty is already
part of the picture for Kant’s audience. He begins from a subjectivity that
seeks mental emancipation from the fetters of laziness, dogma, epistemic
hubris, or misuses of reason.
Liberatory philosophy begins with a “subject” wherein external obsta-
cles—serfdom, slavery, domesticity, exclusion, domination, poverty, hunger,
and more—hinder individual autonomy or social emancipation. It begins
from a subject that contemplates the need to remove, critique, or bring
awareness to those obstacles that render subjectivity or agency difficult if
not impossible. Dussel (Ethics of Liberation) describes this sense of subjec-
tivity as that which “in order to become a subject, it is necessary to make a
self-conscious critique of the system that causes victimization” (387). The
struggle is not against a self-imposed form of heteronomy but against forms
of intellectual nonage imposed by the alienating and objectifying nature of
conquest, colonialism, and coloniality, that is to say, “other-” imposed forms
of intellectual immaturity. These are perhaps more aptly described as ascriptive
forms inferiority and the kind of intellectual nonage that is not a product of
laziness but a product of being overworked in plantations, fields, mines, or
encomiendas, for instance.
While both “liberation” and “enlightenment” are emancipatory projects,
both cognitive realizations, they represent distinct kinds of “emancipation,”
one an “inner” or “introspective” sense of autonomy and the other, freedom
from oppressive social arrangements. Certainly, the liberatory standpoint also
underscores the importance of thinking from one’s own perspective, thereby
promoting a sense of philosophy as internally valuable. This sense of internal
value, however, is not easily reducible to Kantian understandings of autonomy.
How does the realization that one’s language or mode of thought is the product
of colonial imposition or domineering ideology and not just an initial stage of
heteronomy conveying the facticity or “thrownness” of one’s historical situated-
ness, necessitate that philosophy take shape in decolonial liberatory contexts?
How can one know the self when alienated from the language of thought itself,
when philosophical reason is an instrument of the objectifying and dehuman-
izing processes? How does the practice and meaning of philosophy change
__s
__n
__l
lc
Pluralist 13_2.indd 13 5/7/18 9:56 AM
From The Pluralist, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2018. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois. Complimentary copy--not for distribution without permission.
14 the pluralist 13 : 2 2018
when it serves the emancipation of body and mind not just from the shackles
of laziness, myth, or superstition, but freedom from slavery, conquest, and op-
pressive social, economic, or political structures?
For those aiming for liberation, their identity or sense of self is the site
of much oppression. These are identities born of struggle, to borrow Leon-
ard Harris’s terminology, forced to confront the hegemonic and domineer-
ing assumptions of dominant perspectives. These identities lack the ability,
the privilege, to disregard the opinion of others or presume uncontested
notions of freedom. In his interactions with white women who view him as
suspect or threatening prior to even knowing him, Yancy describes his body
as a battleground (844), the site of conflict between his sense of self and the
projection of black criminality imposed upon him on account of his black
skin. Similarly, in “Throwing Like a Girl,” Iris Marion Young explains:
Women in sexist society are physically handicapped. Insofar as we learn
to live out our existence in accordance with the definition that patriar-
chal culture assigns us, we are physically inhibited, confined, positioned,
and objectified. As lived bodies we are not open and unambiguous
transcendences that move out to master a world that belongs to us, a
world constituted by our own intentions and projections. To be sure,
there are actual women in contemporary society to whom all or part
of the above descriptions do not apply. Where these modalities are not
manifest in or determinative of the existence of a particular woman,
however, they are definitive in a negative mode—as that which she has
escaped, through accident or good fortune, or, more often, as that which
she has had to overcome. (42–43)
Within the above thoughts, I find a new argument in support of Glaucon’s
challenge to Socrates in Plato’s Republic, namely, that it is better to appear to
be good than actually be good. Racialized and/or gendered persons cannot
so easily dismiss what other people think about them or how they appear.
To do so has life or death consequences. Along these lines, the thoughts of
Yancy and Young are akin to those of Dussel: “Distant thinkers, those who
had a perspective of the center from the periphery, those who had to define
themselves in the presence of an already established image of the human person
and in the presence of uncivilized fellow humans, the newcomers, the ones
who hope because they are always outside, these are the one who a have clear
mind for pondering reality” (Philosophy of Liberation 4; emphasis added).
“Distant thinkers” are those residing on “the outside” of hegemonic circles
and totalizing systems, those in colonial peripheries in relation to a center
that is Europe; those for whom their status as a rational subject implies spatial
connotations, that is, an aperture or distance (hence, “place”) from the impos-
s__
n__
l__
lc
Pluralist 13_2.indd 14 5/7/18 9:56 AM
From The Pluralist, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2018. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois. Complimentary copy--not for distribution without permission.
silva : Philosophical Significance of Liberation 15
ing views of the center; those who had images of humanity’s past cast upon
them in terms of being considered barbarian, pre-modern, savage, inferior.
“Newcomers,” or those for whom creative interpretive practices are possible,
are best suited to ponder reality since, as Dussel continues, they do not seek
to defend any privileges or ideological perspectives.
Paulo Freire echoes something similar in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. “Lib-
eration is thus a childbirth, and a painful one,” he penned. “The man who
emerges is a new man, viable only as the oppressor-oppressed contradiction
is superseded by the humanization of all men. Or to put it another way,
the solution of this contradiction is born in the labor which brings into the
world this new man: no longer oppressor nor longer oppressed, but man
in the process of achieving freedom” (33–34; emphasis added). Note that
the solution to the oppressor-oppressed relation emerges in “the labor,” the
struggle. Along these lines, compare Kant’s thoughts above to what Angela
Y. Davis writes when examining Frederick Douglass’s understanding of the
liberatory process:
The slave could thus become conscious of the fact that freedom is
not a static quality, a given, but rather is the goal of an active process,
something to be fought for, something to be gained in and through the
process of struggle. The slave-master, on the other hand, experienced
what he defined as his freedom as an inalienable fact: he could hardly
become aware that he, too, had been enslaved by the system over which
he appeared to rule. (132)
While the above is meant to convey the sense in which liberation constitutes
a process wherein subjectivity is born of struggle, it also makes possible the
sense in which liberatory philosophy results in a transformation, hence, the
emphases on creativity and newness. Along these lines, Fanon explains that
decolonial processes ideally constitute a complete overhaul of societies shaped
by colonization. “Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon,” he writes.
“[It] is quite simply the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another
‘species’ of men. Without any period of transition, there is a total complete,
and absolute substitution” (1). Fanon summarizes this as the “veritable cre-
ation of new men”:
Decolonization never goes unnoticed, for it focuses on and fundamen-
tally alters being, and transforms the spectator crushed to a nonessential
state into a privileged actor, captured in a virtually grandiose fashion
by the spotlight of History. It infuses a new rhythm, specific to a new
generation of men, with a new language and a new humanity. Decolo-
nization is truly the creation of new men. But such a creation cannot
__s
__n
__l
lc
Pluralist 13_2.indd 15 5/7/18 9:56 AM
From The Pluralist, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2018. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois. Complimentary copy--not for distribution without permission.
16 the plura list 13 : 2 2018
be attributed to supernatural power: The “thing” colonized becomes a
man through the very process of liberation. (2)
One captures a glimpse at the extent of the totalizing nature of colonialism in
Fanon’s depiction of what is necessary to overcome it: decolonization would
have an ontological impact (it “alters being”); it projects the colonized to
world-historic proportions; it results in new rhythms and language, that is,
novel means of articulation and expression that reflect new ways of being
human, thereby calling into question the “humanism,” if we can call it that,
implicit to colonization. I call attention to the link between creativity, the
novelty required for decolonization to take place, and the process of libera-
tion in Fanon’s work.12
The liberatory endorsement of creativity and newness will no doubt
inspire many to think of the need for a “liberatory aesthetic.” This use of
“creativity” is not necessarily the sense employed in liberatory theory; creativ-
ity should not be limited to its aesthetic sense but should be understood as
an existential modality connected to “openness” and the rejection of closed
or fixed social and historical totalities. Creativity is therefore connected to
freedom, dynamism, and movement. Also relevant are conceptions of human
identity devoid of essentialized, normative, or socially stratifying content.
Because social identity is a site where culture plays a big role, the range of
human possibility and potentiality (human creativity and freedom) dwindle
within various attempts to totalize, historicize, or “cover over” cultural dif-
ference. Dynamic conceptions of human life therefore undergird many lib-
eratory works.
Rather than concentrate on theoretical debates or philosophical problems
emanating from the minds of professional thinkers, “liberation” comman-
deers philosophical thought, rendering it an instrument to the realization of
life, as grandiose as this might sound. A philosophy of liberation therefore
critiques, calls into question, and challenges those forms of social, economic,
and political organization—not to mention ideologies, theories of knowledge,
and/or philosophical approaches—that result in domination, “totalization,”
oppression, marginalization, and alienation, as well as pain and death. This
pursuit of knowledge or love of wisdom does not end in a static collection
of facts, with “certainty,” or a contribution to a technical debate, but in the
continued application of philosophical faculties and ideas that call into ques-
tion unjust social structures and hegemonic practices. The understanding of
philosophy must shift from an erudite “love of wisdom,” a benchmark on the
register of Western civility, to a process in which “the telos of thinking, if there
is any, is the struggle against dehumanization, understood as the affirmation
s__
n__
l__
lc
Pluralist 13_2.indd 16 5/7/18 9:56 AM
From The Pluralist, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2018. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois. Complimentary copy--not for distribution without permission.
silva : Philosophical Significance of Liberation 17
of sociality and the negation of its negation [coloniality]” (Maldonado-Torres,
“Thinking at the Limits of Philosophy” 261).
I emphasize “continued,” since in the above quotes, the thoughts of
Fanon, Freire, Davis, and Dussel refer to a process. This is also the sense of
“process” I used above to describe the idea of liberation. Because of the dy-
namic nature of coloniality, one should not think that we live in a time where
freedom or liberation has already been achieved, an idea suggested by such
notions as “post-racial,” “post-colonial,” and perhaps even “post-Enlighten-
ment.” Instead, as Kant suggests, “we may not live in an enlightened age but
an age of enlightenment” (44), yet another reason why one cannot reduce
“liberation” to liberty. Dussel (Twenty Theses) put it best when he wrote that
“[i]t is true that the bourgeois Revolution spoke of liberty, but what is nec-
essary now is to subsume that liberty and speak instead of liberation (as in
North American pragmatism, one does not speak of truth but veri-fication).
So now we do not refer to liberty but instead to liber-ation as a process, as the
negation of a point of departure, and as a tension pressing towards a point
of arrival” (137).13
For purposes of an Inter-American dialogue, if the idea of “America” is in-
dispensable to the production of knowledge, or, if it is case that the experience
of being American constitutes a crucial philosophical point of departure, two
variants of a methodology that challenges the prevailing subjectivity implicit
to academic philosophy today, then a liberatory hue ought to color the back-
drop of all Inter-American philosophical thought arising from this region. For a
philosopher to explicitly begin from the standpoint of the Americas and yet be
unbothered by his status as an “American” suggests a false start. A philosopher
cannot rest settled within his “American” context; it must be complicated (Lysa-
ker). For the above reasons, several liberatory theorists and indigenous thinkers
have either distanced themselves from the idea of “America” (Mignolo, Idea
of Latin America) or have attempted to reclaim the term in a more pluralistic
way (Martí, “Our America”). The challenge for philosophers of the Americas
therefore is to think through their colonial dependencies (as “Americans”) us-
ing their colonial inheritance (philosophy), an act done in good faith if one is
willing to rethink the nature and purpose of philosophical inquiry.
notes
1. By liberation philosophy, I refer to the Latin American tradition of liberation phi-
losophy. By liberatory tradition, I mean the larger understanding of liberatory philosophy
that I seek to justify in this essay, one that includes anti-racist, anti-sexist, and other forms
of philosophical struggle against oppression.
__s
__n
__l
lc
Pluralist 13_2.indd 17 5/7/18 9:56 AM
From The Pluralist, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2018. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois. Complimentary copy--not for distribution without permission.
18 the plural ist 13 : 2 2018
2. Secondary literature on liberation philosophy (Schutte, “Origins and Tendencies”;
Mendieta) differentiates between a strict or narrow usage of “philosophy of liberation,”
referring to a specific intellectual movement that occurred in Argentina in the 1970s, and
an inclusive use of “philosophy of liberation” that houses a variety of Latin Americans
working on liberatory themes (not all from Argentina). For reasons offered in this essay,
my attempt to “broaden” or make possible a larger liberatory tradition exceeds even those
Latin Americans who are thematically linked to liberation philosophy.
3. See the comments made by Manuel Vargas in “Multicultural Philosophy Panel 2:
Comparative Philosophy” (vimeo.com/58932466). For a brief discussion of the difference
between a characteristic (or autochthonous) Latin American philosophy and the history
of hegemonic conceptions of philosophy in Latin America (one that also explains how
they are compatible and not antagonistic), see Nuccetelli et al. 1–2.
4. I am drawing from Carlos Astrada’s description of two ways of formulating the
philosophical significance of Latin America, that is, as either a metaphysical question
pertaining to Latin American existence (understood in a Heideggerian sense) or in terms
of the inseparability of the subject-object of consciousness (the more Husserlian route).
See Dussel, “Philosophy in Latin America” 16.
5. This suggests the need to further explore the similarities between “Eurocentrism”
(as understood in the sense described above) and white racial normativity, an endeavor
that would bring out the “centrality” of white racial normativity as well as the normativ-
ity of geopolitics with Europe (and now the North Atlantic) as the center. For more on
whiteness as self-contained entity, see Yancy.
6. Quijano and Wallerstein argue that Americanity unfolds in four interrelated ways:
coloniality, ethnicity, racism, and the concept of newness itself (550).
7. “Coloniality” is the term used to describe the power dynamic implicit to colonial-
ism yet capable of surviving decolonial processes. Coloniality is not necessarily the rule
of a particular imperial regime, like that that of Spain in what became Mexico or Peru,
but the power dynamic implicit to colonialism leading to stratified social hierarchies di-
vided in terms of class, land rights, race, gender, political power, or education, and even
in terms of “knower” or “object-known.” Although national liberation may take place,
and thus a society may be “post-colonial,” there is a sense in which the power dynamics
implicit to colonization (i.e., coloniality) may still be operational. For more on coloniality,
see Quijano and Wallerstein; Quijano (“Coloniality of Power”); and Maldonado-Torres
(“On the Coloniality of Being”). See also Lugones (“Heterosexualism”) for a critique of
Quijano revealing how coloniality, especially in terms of narrow and overly biologized
accounts of gender and sexual difference, remains persistent within the work of someone
like himself.
8. In the Philosophy of Liberation, Dussel states:
I am trying, then, to take space, geopolitical space, seriously. To be born at the
North Pole or in Chiapas is not the same thing as to be born in New York City. . . .
Philosophy, when it is really philosophy and not sophistry or ideology, does not
ponder philosophy. It does not ponder philosophical text, except as a pedagogical
propaedeutic to provide itself with interpretive categories. Philosophy ponders the
nonphilosophical; the reality. But because it involves reflection on its own reality, it’s
set out from what already is, from its own world, its own system, its own space. (2–3)
9. See Sánchez (Contingency and Commitment) for an account of the significance of
place in regard to his reading of Mexican existentialists, especially the introduction, “From
Prejudice to Violence,” which I take to be a kind of apology. See also Ellacuría 107–12.
s__
n__
l__
lc
Pluralist 13_2.indd 18 5/7/18 9:56 AM
From The Pluralist, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2018. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois. Complimentary copy--not for distribution without permission.
silva : Philosophical Significance of Liberation 19
10. The liberatory-philosophical focus on suffering is shared with, if not inspired by,
the work of liberation theologians. “Liberation theology,” explains Christopher Rowland,
is a theology which is explored not just in tutorial or seminar but engages the whole
person in the midst of a life of struggle and deprivation. It is theology which, above
all, often starts from the insights of those men and women who have found them-
selves caught up in the midst of that struggle, rather than being evolved and handed
down to them by ecclesiastical or theological experts. (2)
Liberation theology begins from the experience of those suffering at the hands of eco-
nomic exploitation and neoliberal imperialism, not to mention those experiences and
circumstances afforded by histories of colonialism. Its point of departure is not “detached
reflection on Scripture and tradition but the present life of the shanty towns and land
struggles, the lack of basic amenities, the carelessness about the welfare of human per-
sons, the death squads and the shattered lives of refugees,” to quote Rowland once again
(2). Schutte (Cultural Identity 173–73; “Origins and Tendencies” 270–71) offers a brief
explanation for why a philosophy of liberation and theology of liberation ought to be
viewed as two separate types of projects.
11. From a Latin American perspective, Simón Bolívar’s “Address to the Angostura
Congress” is a great example of the specious nature of national independence.
12. Along these lines, one should think about the importance of the Harlem Renais-
sance to Alain Locke; I think Fanon’s thoughts point to how one should interpret the
“New” of the “New Negro.”
13. Dussel offers a more expansive account of the parallel between verification and
liberation in his Ethics of Liberation, 165 [§ 3.1 “Pragmatism of Charles S. Pierce”].
references
Bell, Derrick. Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. Basic Books, 1992.
Bolívar, Simón. “Address to the Angostura Congress.” Nineteenth-Century Nation Build-
ing and the Latin American Intellectual Tradition: A Reader, edited by Janet Burke and
Ted Humphrey, Hackett, 2007, pp. 3–22.
Cerutti-Guldberg, Horacio. “Actual Situation and Perspectives of Latin American Phi-
losophy of Liberation.” The Philosophical Forum, special double issue, “Latin American
Philosophy Today,” vol. 20, nos. 1–2, 1988–1989, pp. 43–61.
Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinckam, Monthly Review
P, 2000.
Davis, Angela Y. “Unfinished Lecture on Liberation—II.” Philosophy Born of Struggle:
Anthology of Afro-American Philosophy from 1917, edited by Leonard Harris, Kendall/
Hunt Publishing, 1983, pp. 130–36.
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Dover Thrift Edition, 1994.
Dussel, Enrique. Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion. Translated
by Eduardo Mendieta et al., translation edited by Alejandro A. Vallega, Duke UP, 2013.
———. “Europe, Modernity, and Eurocentrism.” Nepantla: Views from the South, vol.
1, no. 3, 2000, pp. 465–78.
———. The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity.
Translated by Michael D. Barber, Continuum, 1995.
———. “Philosophy in Latin America in the Twentieth Century: Problems and Cur-
rents.” Latin American Philosophy: Currents, Issues, Debates, edited by Eduardo Mend-
ieta, Indiana UP, 2003, pp. 11–53.
__s
__n
__l
lc
Pluralist 13_2.indd 19 5/7/18 9:56 AM
From The Pluralist, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2018. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois. Complimentary copy--not for distribution without permission.
20 the pluralist 13 : 2 2018
———. Philosophy of Liberation. Translated by Aquilina Martinez and Christine
Morkovsky, Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1985.
———. Politics of Liberation: A Critical World History. Translated by Thia Cooper, SCM
Press, 2011.
———. Twe n t y T h e se s o n Po l i t i c s . Translated by George Ciccariello-Maher, Duke UP, 2008.
Ellacuría, Ignacio. “The Liberating Function of Philosophy (1985).” Essays on History,
Liberation and Salvation, edited by Michael E. Lee, Orbis Books, 2013, pp. 93–119.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press, 1963.
Fernández, Carlos. “La Raza and the Melting Pot: A Comparative Look at Multiethnicity.”
Racially Mixed People in America, edited by Maria P. P. Root, Sage, 1992, pp. 126–43.
Frankowski, Alfred. The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization: Toward a Political Sense
of Morning. Lexington Books, 2015.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagog y of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Berman Ramos, Continuum,
1968.
Gandolfo, David Ignatius. “Liberation Philosophy.” A Companion to Latin American
Philosophy, edited by Susana Nuccetelli et al., Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, pp. 85–198.
Harris, Leonard. Philosophy Born of Struggle: Anthology of Afro-American Philosophy from
1917. Kendall/Hunt Publishing, 1983.
Henry, Paget. Journeys in Caribbean Thought: The Paget Henry Reader. Edited by Jane
Anna Gordon et al., Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.
Kant, Immanuel. Perpetual Peace and Other Essays. Hackett, 1983.
Locke, Alain. Race Contacts and Interracial Relations. Edited by Jeffrey C. Stewart, How-
ard UP, 1992.
Lugones, María. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.” Hypatia,
vol. 22, no.1, 2007, pp. 186–209.
Lugones, María, and Joshua M. Price. Translators’ Introduction. Indigenous and Popular
Thinking in América. By Rodolfo Kusch. Duke UP, 2010, pp. lv–lxx.
Lysaker, Jo hn. “Essaying America: A Declaration of Independence.” Journal of Speculative
Philosophy, vol. 26, no. 3, 2012, pp. 531–53.
Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. “Césaire’s Gift and the Decolonial Turn.” Radical Philosophy
Review, vol. 9, no. 2, 2006, pp. 111–38.
———. “On the Coloniality of Being.” Cultural Studies, vol. 21, no. 2, 2007, pp. 240–70.
———. “Thinking at the Limits of Philosophy and Doing Philosophy Elsewhere: From
Philosophy to Decolonial Thinking.” Reframing the Practice of Philosophy: Bodies of Color,
Bodies of Knowledge, edited by George Yancy, State U of New York P, 2012, pp. 251–70.
Marcuse, Herbert. An Essay on Liberation. Beacon Press, 1969.
Márquez, Iván. “Liberation in Theology, Philosophy, and Pedagogy.” A Companion to
Latin American Philosophy, edited by Susana Nuccetelli et al., Wiley-Blackwell, 2010,
pp. 297–311.
———. Preface. Contemporary Latin American Social and Political Thought. Edited by
Iván Márquez, Rowman & Littlefield, 2008, pp. xi–xiii.
Martí, José. “Our America.” Nineteenth-Century Nation Building and the Latin American
Intellectual Tradition: A Reader, edited by Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey, Hackett,
2007, pp. 258–68.
McKenna, Erin, and Scott L. Pratt. American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Pres-
ent. Bloomsbury, 2015.
Mendieta, Eduardo. “Philosophy of Liberation.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
Spring 2016 ed., edited by Edward N. Zalta, plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/
entries/liberation/.
s__
n__
l__
lc
Pluralist 13_2.indd 20 5/7/18 9:56 AM
From The Pluralist, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2018. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois. Complimentary copy--not for distribution without permission.
silva : Philosophical Significance of Liberation 21
Mignolo, Walter. The Idea of Latin America. Blackwell, 2005.
Nuccetelli, Susana et al., editors. Introduction. A Companion to Latin American Philoso-
phy, Wiley-Blackwell, 2007, pp. 1–6.
O’Gorman, Edmundo. The Invention of America. Indiana UP, 1961.
Orosco, José-Antonio. Cesar Chavez and the Common Sense of Nonviolence. U of New
Mexico P, 2008.
Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla:
Views from the South, vol. 1, no. 3, 2000, pp. 533–80.
Quijano, Aníbal, and Immanuel Wallerstein. “Americanity as a Concept, or the Ameri-
cas in the Modern World-System.” International Journal of Social Sciences, no. 134,
1992, pp. 549–57.
Rowland, Christopher. “Introduction: The Theology of Liberation.” The Cambridge
Companion to Liberation Theology, 2nd ed., edited by Christopher Rowland, Cam-
bridge UP, 2007, pp. 1–16.
Sáenz, Mario. The Identity of Liberation in Latin American Thought: Latin American His-
toricism and the Phenomenology of Leopoldo Zea. Lexington Books, 1999.
Sánchez, Carlos Alberto. Contingency and Commitment: Mexican Existentialism and the
Place of Philosophy. State U of New York P, 2016.
Schutte, Ofelia. Cultural Identity and Social Liberation in Latin American Thought. State
U of New York P, 1993.
———. “The Master-Slave Dialectic in Latin America: The Social Criticism of Zea,
Freire and Roig.” The Owl of Minerva, vol. 22, no.1, 1990, pp. 5–18.
———. “Origins and Tendencies of the Philosophy of Liberation in Latin American
Thought: A Critique of Dussel’s Ethics.” The Philosophical Forum, vol. 22, no. 3,
1991, pp. 270–92.
Silva, Grant. “Why the Struggle against Coloniality Is Paramount to Latin American
Philosophy.” American Philosophical Association Newsletter for Hispanic/Latino Issues
in Philosophy, vol. 15, no 1, 2015, pp. 8–12.
Stikkers, Kenneth W. “. . . But I’m Not Racist”: Toward a Pragmatic Conception of ‘Rac-
ism.’” The Pluralist, vol. 9, no. 3, 2014, pp. 1–17.
Villoro, Luis. “The Ideological Currents of the Epoch of Independence.” Major Trends in
Mexican Philosophy, edited by Mario de la Cueva. Translated by A. Robert Caponigri,
Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1966, pp. 184–219.
———. “Mexican and North American Independence: Parallels and Divergences.” Lib-
eration in the Americas: Comparative Aspects of Independence Movements in Mexico and
the United States, edited by Robert Detweiler and Ramón Ruiz, The Campanile Press,
San Diego State University, 1978, pp. 19–42.
Yan cy, Ge or ge. “E lev ator, So cia l Spa ces, an d Rac ism: A P hilo soph ical An aly si s.” Philosophy
& Social Criticism, vol. 34, no. 8, 2008, pp. 843–76.
Young, Iris Marion. On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Es-
says. Oxford UP, 2005.
Zea, Leopoldo. “The Actual Function of Philosophy in Latin America.” Latin American
Philosophy for the 21st Century: The Human Condition, Values, and the Search for Iden-
tity, edited by Jorge J. E. Gracia and Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert, Prometheus Books,
2004, pp. 357–68.
———. “La filosofía como compromiso.” Filosofía de lo americano. 6 Coleccion Cuad-
ernos Americanos. Editorial Nueva Imagen, 1984, pp. 136–55.
———. The Role of the Americas in History. Edited by Amy Oliver, Rowman & Little-
field, 1992.
__s
__n
__l
lc
Pluralist 13_2.indd 21 5/7/18 9:56 AM
From The Pluralist, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2018. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois. Complimentary copy--not for distribution without permission.
