TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World

This essay explores the epistemological decolonization of World History and the critique of modernity through a transmodern perspective. It challenges the Eurocentric periodization of history, emphasizing the erasure and misrepresentation of non-European civilizations in the global narrative. By examining the ideological constructs underpinning modernity, capitalism, and colonialism, the essay advocates for a pluriversal approach to knowledge and cultural traditions. It also critiques the inadequacies of postmodernism in addressing systemic inequities, proposing transmodernity as a framework for integrating diverse traditions and fostering dialogue among cultures of the Global South. Through this lens, the essay seeks to redefine the future of humanity and knowledge production.

This essay will study the relationship of religion and politics in the context of two specific liturgical practices. These practices originate in the historical congregations formed during the Liberation Theology movement in Latin America and in the context of the neo-Buddhist Ambedkarite movements in India. The idea of the congregation will be articulated with the liturgical logic of “public service” in so far as the Greek word(s) for liturgy refers both to the physical assembly of citizens and the structural capacity for creating a space for the “common.” Coupling congregation with the collective sharing of a “common feeling” (Ambedkar) provides the essential material for a political analysis of two historical societies of the global South. In the case of Chile, from the time of the reign of Pinochet, political resistance came from several quarters, including that of the Christian religion, not as practiced by the Church but as a subversive challenge posed by Liberation Theology. The Ambedkarite conversion from Hinduism to Buddhism in 1956 created a strange conjuncture, wherein conversion both signified liberation from the erstwhile religious oppression of the Hindus and the entry into a new form of communitarian thought. But the future of such an act of conversion could only be realized in history if the forms of thought of a new Buddhism were to be actualized in real ethical-political practices of a people called Dalits, which means being oppressed. This paper will confront the precarious task of a comparative analysis of incommensurable situations and affirm the political universalism of a world-historical tradition of the oppressed/Dalit.

Meena Kandasamy’s The Gypsy Goddess (2014) and Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness (2004) are both novels based on historical events. While the former chronicles the 1968 massacre of Dalit agricultural workers in Kilvenmani (Tamil Nadu, India) by upper-caste landlords due to caste and class conflicts, the latter thematizes the production and reception of the testimonio in the context of a genocide of Indigenous people in Guatemala that lasted more than thirty years. This essay attempts to read both texts dialogically to offer insights into the epistemic interactions between two parts of the Global South through formal experimentations around ethics, justice, and truth. I argue that both texts use “novel” means to assemble real events from within a testimonial impulse. This unconventional and self-reflexive metafictional mode enables the retrieval of subaltern histories and the assertion of indigenous non-Western perspectives of historical events. 

In this article, we will review two different visions regarding the relationship between Western Civilization and violence, two strategies used to expose the dark side of Enlightenment and the ways to overcome it. In In an Antique Land (1994), we will examine Amitav Ghosh’s attempts to modify the modern/colonialist practice of anthropology, shifting the traditional axis of hegemony and subalternity, deconstructing the fixity of representation, and proposing a new, more horizontal and familiar relation with the Other. In Nocturno de Chile (2000), Roberto Bolaño exhibits how Enlightenment (and literature) has been used to hide and justify the deployment of violence. Also, we will attempt to find Bolaño’s exit to that corridor, with apparently no way out.

India and Latin America have historically witnessed the presence of cross-cultural dialogue for centuries. Latin American intelligentsia was well informed about the struggle for Indian national liberation and thus formed critical opinions about the ideas emanating from there. One of the ways of information flow was through the travelers who visited Latin America. These ideas from India led them, sometimes, toward spiritual matters (Theosophical) and others towards revolutionary politics. I will deal with the second aspect based on my reading of the Memoirs of two Indian freedom fighters, Pandurang Sadashiv Khankhoje and Manabendranath Roy. Similar conditions compelled the two contemporaries from India to travel to Mexico in the 1920s. Their engagement with Mexican people resulted in strengthening the existing knowledges, as well as proposing new ways of knowing and being. These contacts represent their world according to their perspectives so that “the cognitive justice may mirror and enhance the cognitive diversity of the world.” (Santos and Meneses 243). My reading of these memoirs will focus on the transversal dialogue between India and Mexico and discuss the transfer and sharing of knowledge between the two nations in their formation.

The article reviews two episodes from the Chilean literary circuit of the early twentieth century: the 1921 publication of the book of poems Fragments by the Afghan poet Karez-i-Roshan and the accusation against Pablo Neruda of plagiarism in 1934. Both events describe an unusual situation: twice and in different ways, a Chilean poet was transfigured into an Asian poet. The proposed analysis of these events allows us to assess two levels at which the cultural and literary exchanges between Chile and Asia were hindered by European mediation: first, in the understanding of a system of production and dissemination of works, and second, in local writers’ sense of belonging to a Western tradition.

“Comunidad de Solentiname” was one of the main Ecclesial Base Communities (CEBs) that played a significant role, in both cultural-symbolic and politico-military terms, during the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua (1960-1979). In my perception and interpretation, I shall deal with the theoretical-methodological implications of the testimonies-artistic works of this revolutionary Christian community. How can a person from far away India listen to and interact with the voices from Solentiname, Nicaragua, and produce “scientific” knowledge about the same in a context where the very framework (terms, words, categories, concepts, methodologies, etc.) of the production of that knowledge, emanates from the processes of colonization/otherization/domination of the non-western? The point of discussion is the ambivalent tension between the “subject” and the “object” of the research, localized on the exteriority (the two “Others” are relatively different but not distinct) to the modern-colonial scientific paradigm, whose basic research framework must shape the process of research. Subsequently, it discusses a useful methodological-theoretical praxis of “Non-negligence”—of Buddhist soteriological origins—in interaction with the works of decolonial studies and, also with the concepts of reflexivity and epistemological vigilance debated in recent developments in social sciences, seeking to engage in a conversation by way of a pluriversal translation.