Critique of Latin American Reason is one of the most important philosophical texts to have come out of South America in recent decades. First published in 1996, it offers a sweeping critique of the foundational schools of thought in Latin American philosophy and critical theory.
This long overdue translation of Santiago Castro-Gómez's groundbreaking Crítica de la razón latinoamericana is timely. Despite being a record of debates very much of its time, twenty-five years past, the book provides invaluable insights and methodological approximations for our troubled times. A Foucauldian genealogy guides the book's critical exposition of the construction of 'Latin America,' which Castro-Gómez considers a colonial motif of Othering during the twentieth century by Latin American intellectuals. This exoticization posits an epistemic exteriority that more than homogenizes the complexity of that object-'Latin America.' It recenters an elite through discursive practices that establish it as located 'outside of' and 'antagonistic' to modernity. Readers today might find the specific debates and their framing in need of update. Look again and find here important precursors to and critical keys for engaging the coloniality of power in knowledge production; contemporary pressures on the categories of 'Latin American,' 'Latinidad,' and 'Latinx'; the complexities of the racial order that defines the afterlife of colonialism in the region. Indeed, Crítica is the first installment in what Castro-Gómez considers a trilogy that, along with La hybris del punto cero (2005: Zero-Point Hubris: Science, Race, and Enlightenment in New Granada (1750-1816 (forthcoming) and Tejidos oníricos (2009), provides a Foucauldian genealogy 'to rethink the colonial inheritances of Latin America.' Containing a preface by Castro-Gómez written for this superb Andrew Scherl translation, a forward by Linda Martín Alcoff, an introduction by Eduardo Mendieta, the appendix to the second edition of the Spanish original (an interview with Castro-Gómez conducted by Alejandro Cortés), and a new appendix with provocations by Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, Nadia Yala Kisukidi, Don Deere, Barnor Hesse, Cintia Martínez Velasco, María del Rosario Acosta López, Jesús Luzardo, Jimmy Casas Klausen, Rafael Vizcaíno, and myself, this volume is essential reading for any engagement with Latin American thought.
