ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the points of contact between the Global South and the decolonial turn by focusing particularly on the privileged position that race occupies in the organizational logic that grounds both fields of study. The rubric of the Global South has become a term that aims to name postnational forms of organizing networks of relations, collaboration, and solidarity that emerge as a response to global forms of capitalism that subjugate and afflict sections of the globe. As Anne Garland Mahler's From the Tricontinental to the Global South demonstrates, race played a key role in the deterritorialized coalition-building efforts and forms of anti-racist and anticolonial struggles taking place in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Conversely, in what is now known as the decolonial turn, a field of study that has now over two decades of existence, race has always been an integral part of the mechanisms of domination under what Aníbal Quijano termed “the coloniality of power.” For Quijano and other decolonial scholars (Mignolo, Grosfoguel, and Maldonado-Torres, among others), the creation of racial categories, which harkens back to the sistema de castas, and the imposition of racial ideology served to legitimize a hierarchy of power that led Europeans (now part of the Global North) to subjugate native populations and enslave African with the aim of expanding European empires.
This chapter is a closer examination of two key terms, namely whiteness (blanquitud) and resonances. I aim to tease out how race appears and resonates across time in La vorágine [The Vortex] by Colombian novelist José Eustasio Rivera (1888-1928) and in Los monos enloquecidos [“The Mad Monkeys”] by Ecuadorian fiction writer José de la Cuadra (1903–1941). In so doing, these two novels illustrate racial configurations in South America, while bringing into dialogue the Global South and the decolonial through their investment in questioning race.
