Ch'ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ch'ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui R. Aída Hernández Castillo (bio) Ch'ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui Polity Press, 2020 CH'IXINAKAX UTXIWA is the translation of a collection of essays that were first published in Spanish by the Argentinian publishing house Retazos & Tinta Limón in 2010. In these scant eighty-nine pages the author managed to unleash a political storm, as she transformed this book into a theoretical and methodological point of reference for decolonial studies in Latin America. More than ten years would go by before her work could be translated into English and her critiques against what she called the "colonial character of decolonial studies in the United States" could circulate through the Anglosphere's academia (59). Heir to the Latin American tradition of essay writing, the book does not have the formal structure of an academic text, as it combines political denunciation with epistemic and philosophical reflections. Thus, the work goes from sociohistorical analysis to the description of methodological routes and calls for political praxis. We could say we are faced with a "Ch'ixi" book, that is, a "motley text," to recover the concept the author proposes to refer to the Aymara understanding of a thing that is and is not at the same time, or the logic of "the included middle" (xx). Her literary style, not lacking in a touch of irony and sarcasm, is brilliantly transmitted in the English translation by Molly Geidel. The three essays that make up the book employ diverse perspectives to approach the need of a political economy of knowledge that articulates the decolonizing discourse through political practice. Those of us familiar with the activist and political history of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui understand the ethical coherence to which she summons us through her writings. In this sense, the introductory essay of Verónica Gago leads us into a comprehensive historical journey through the life and works of this author whom she characterizes as "one of the most lucid, inventive and galvanizing intellectuals in our continent" (vii). In the first essay, entitled "Another Bicentennial," the author centers her analysis on the Tupaq Katari rebellion of 1781 as an ethnohistorical window to reflect about memory and the "unsaid," two recurring themes that run through her work since the creation of the Taller de Historia Oral Andina [End Page 135] (THOA) in the 1980s. In this chapter Rivera Cusicanqui presents her political concern for the place of memory in peoples' struggles. She proposes that the memory of this rebellion was present in the 2000 and 2005 cycle of uprisings by inhabitants of El Alto, in Bolivia. In the second chapter, "Sociology of Image: A View from Colonial Andean History" Rivera Cusicanqui utilizes the analysis of the First New Chronicle and Good Government by Waman Puma de Ayala, (1612—15) a thousand-page letter directed to the King of Spain, in order to develop her epistemic and methodological proposal of uncovering the "unsaid." Starting from the premise that words, under colonial contexts, tend to hide more than reveal the truths of the colonized, the author takes us through a detailed analysis of the iconography that illustrates the letters of Puma de Ayala. The third chapter, which gives the book its name, unleashed the debate around the limitations and appropriations of the decolonial studies produced in the English-speaking academy. The text comes very close to a political manifesto, where the author reveals the colonial contradictions that are concealed both by academic discourse in the United States and the official multiculturalist rhetoric in Bolivia. She denounces the adoption of postmodern and postcolonial "gestures" by the intellectual elites at the same time they reproduce epistemic hierarchies, denying the Latin American theoretical genealogies within their debates and appropriating and decontextualizing those whom they may get to cite. Calling these authors by their name, Silvia Rivera denounces that "Walter Mignolo and company have built a small empire within an empire, strategically appropriating the contributions of subaltern studies school of India and the Latin American variants of critical reflection on colonization and decolonization...