Sovereignty, indigeneity, territory: Zapatista autonomy and the new practices of decolonization

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 110, Issue 2, 2011, Pages 505-525

  Reyes, Alvaro ^a   Kaufman, Mara ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79953685647     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-1162561     Document Type: Article

References (64)

1. Subcomandante Marcos, EZLN, "The Fourth World War," Chiapas, November 20, 1999, published in La Jornada (Mexico City), October 23, 2001.
2. Michel Foucault, "Society Must Be Defended": Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 26.
3. This is not to imply that all struggles for "rights" are inextricable from legalism and sovereignty. For an instance of a struggle that doesn't fall into this category, see Shannon Speed and Alvaro Reyes, "'In Our Own Defense': Rights and Resistance in Chiapas, Mexico," Political and Legal Anthropology Review 25.1 (May 2002): 69-89.
4. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George D. Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 13.
5. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 18.
6. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 87, 98.
7. Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos Press, 2003), 39.
8. Jan-Werner Muller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 88.
9. and Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970).
10. Aristotle, The Politics, book 1, trans. H. Rackham (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1934), 19.
11. J. G. D. Sepúlveda, De Regno (Pozoblanco, SPA: Ayutamiento de Pozoblanco, 2001), 48.
12. This should not be confused with, or reduced to, Sepúlveda's application of Aristotle's theory of "natural slavery" to the indigenous peoples of the Americas; that formulation is immediately challenged by both Bartolomé de las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria.
13. Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 43.
14. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 78.
15. Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 76.
16. Hobbes, Leviathan, 77;
17. see also Hobbes, On the Citizen, 30.
18. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government: Second Treatise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), sec. 49.
19. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 93.
20. Foucault, "Society Must Be Defended," 103.
21. This analysis is inspired by Denise Ferreira da Silva. Although her work centers on the formation of the "transparent subject," we believe her thesis holds valuable insights for understanding political sovereignty. See Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
22. da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, 4.
23. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), 278-82;
24. and Stuart Elden, "Missing the Point: Globalization, Deterritorialization and the Space of the World," Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30.1 (2005): 15.
25. John Pickles, A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping, and the Geo-Coded World (New York: Routledge, 2004), 107-110.
26. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 140.
27. Schmitt as quoted in Alberto Toscano, "Carl Schmitt in Beijing: Partisanship, Geopolitics, and the Demolition of the Eurocentric World," Postcolonial Studies 11.4 (2008): 417-33, 428.
28. The argument we construct here should not be thought to delegitimate tactical struggles for the recognition of formal legal sovereignty. As Frantz Fanon points out, in struggle the colonized come to understand that the attainment of "sovereignty" is from the beginning inextricable from a larger strategic struggle for dignity, for the recognition that "people are no longer a herd and do not need to be driven." See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 139, 127.
29. See Alexandre Kojève, Outline of a Phenomenology of Right, trans. Bryan-Paul Fox and Robert Howse (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007);
30. Jean-Marie Guéhenno, The End of the Nation-State, trans. Victoria Elliott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995);
31. and Hardt and Negri, Empire.
32. Elden, "Missing the Point," 16.
33. Kenneth Surin, Freedom Not Yet: Liberation and the New World Order (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).
34. Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
35. Surin, Freedom Not Yet, 76.
36. Stefano Harney, "Governance and the Undercommons," InterActivist Info Exchange, April 7, 2008, http://interactivist.autonomedia. org/node/10926.
37. For an examination of the inextricable links between governance and contemporary forms of racialization, see Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, "Policy," Roundtable: Research Architecture, 2010, http://roundtable.kein.org/node/1164;
38. Anibal Quijano, "Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America," Nepantla: Views from the South 1 (2000): 533-80.
39. Zapatista, dir. Benjamin Eichert, Richard Rowley, and State Sandberg (Big Noise Films, 2001).
40. Gloria Muñoz Ramírez, "Interview with Subcomandante Marcos: A Time to Ask, a Time to Demand, and a Time to Act," Americas Program, January 16, 2004, www.cipamericas.org/archives/1120.
41. EZLN communiqué, "To the soldiers and commanders of the Popular Revolutionary Army," Flag.Blackened.Net, August 29, 1996, http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/mexico/ezln/ezln-epr-se96.html. The complete quote is, "What we seek, what we need and want is for all those people without a party or an organization to make agreements about what they don't want and what they do want and organize themselves in order to achieve it (preferably through civil and peaceful means), not to take power, but to exercise it."
42. Speed and Reyes, "'In Our Own Defense,'" 53-54.
43. Yvon Le Bot and Subcomandante Marcos, El Sueño Zapatista: Entrevistas con el subcomandante Marcos, el mayor Moises y el comandante Tacho, del Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Barcelona: Plaza y Janes, 1997).
44. Despite similarities between our interpretation of the Zapatistas and the work of Pierre Clastres, we feel a fundamental ambiguity remains in his work as to whether "a society against the state" is the product of political initiative or of some natural tendency within society as such. Here we hope to show that the Zapatistas do identify tendencies that move in the direction of eliminating the autonomy of the political sphere but simultaneously make such tendencies into a strong political project. See Pierre Clastres, Society against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology (New York: Zone Books, 1989).
45. As Gustavo Esteva notes, in contrast with Antonio Negri's formulation, the Zapatista notion of mandar-obedeciendo moves in the direction of definitively uncoupling the pair constituent and constituted power so that constituent power can become its own permanent state of affairs and not make its presence simply as the continual unsettling of constituted power. See Gustavo Esteva, "A Celebration of Zapatismo," Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 29 (2005): 127-67.
46. El Kilombo Intergaláctico, Beyond Resistance, Everything: An Interview with Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos (Durham, NC: Paperboat Press, 2008).
47. Raúl Ornelas, "La autonomía como eje de la resistencia Zapatista," in Hegemonias y Emancipaciones en el Siglo XXI, ed. Ana Esther Ceceña (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2004).
48. Subcomandante Marcos, "La Treceava Estela," part 5, July 2003, available at http://palabra.ezln.org.mx.
49. EZLN, Crónicas Intergalácticas: Primer Encuentro Intercontinental por la Humanidad y contra el Neoliberalismo (Montañas del Sureste Mexicano: Planeta Tierra, 1997).
50. This number is unofficial and much disputed; estimates range from 200,000 to 700,000. The higher number is most recently cited in Hermann Bellinghausen, "La otra campaña, opción para agrupar a las organizaciones campesinas en lucha," La Jornada (Mexico City), March 1, 2007.
51. Secretaria de Reforma Agraria, Estados Unidos de Mexico, "Acuerdo por el que se declara el cierre operativo y conclusión de Programa de Certificación de Derechos Ejidales y Titulación de Solares (PROCEDE)," Diario Oficial, November 17, 2006.
52. Lefebvre, Production of Space.
53. Carlos Walter Porto Gonçalves, "Da geografia às geo-grafias-um mundo em busca de novas territorialidades," in La guerra infinita-hegemonía y terror mundial, ed. Ana Esther Ceceña and Emir Sader (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2002), 217-56.
54. We owe this notion of paracoloniality to Kenneth Surin as developed in "The Sovereign Individual, 'Subalternity,' and Becoming-Other," Angelaki 6.1 (2001): 47-63.
55. See Gemma van der Haar, "El movimiento zapatista de Chiapas: dimensiones de su lucha" (LabourAgain Publications, International Institute of Social History, 2005), www.iisg.nl/labouragain/ruralmobilisation.php (accessed October 14, 2010).
56. National Institute of Geography and Statistics (INEGI), "Censo General de Población y Vivienda 2000," www.inegi.org.mx/est/ contenidos/Proyectos/ccpv/cpv2000/default.aspx (accessed November 14, 2009).
57. EZLN, "Informe de 1 año de la junta de buen gobierno corazón céntrico de los zapatistas delante del mundo," Radio Insurgente: La voz de los sin voz, September 24, 2004, available at www.radioinsurgente.org.
58. Sánchez Pérez H., Arana Cedeño M., and Yamin A., "Pueblos Excluidos, Comunidades Erosionadas: La Situación del Derecho a la Salud en Chiapas, México" (Physicians for Human Rights and El Colegio de la Frontera Sur, Centro de Capacitación en Ecologia y Salud para Campesino, Boston, 2006).
59. Pablo González Casanova Henríquez et al., "La Situación de la Nutrición de las y los niños preescolares en la selva, frontera y altos de Chiapas durante la crisis bélica y social de 1994," Revista CIMECH 6.1-2 (1996): 14.
60. Gustavo Castro and Miguel Pickard, "Los Derechos Economicos y Sociales en Chiapas: Salud y Educación," part 2, CIEPAC Bulletin no. 163, July 25, 1999, www.ciepac.org/boletines/chiapasaldia.php?id=163.
61. J. H. Cuevas, "Salud y Autonomía: el caso Chiapas" (report for the Health Systems Knowledge Network, World Health Organization, March 2007).
62. Pablo González Casanova Henríquez, "El Zapatismo avanza ante el desastre," La Jornada (Mexico City), January 24, 2009.
63. As reported by the Council of Good Government of Oventic in the "Second Encounter between Zapatista Peoples and Peoples of the World" (Oventic, Chiapas, Mexico, July 21, 2007).
64. Laura Castellanos, Corte de Caja: Una Entrevista al Subcomandante Marcos (Nezahualcoyotl, MEX: Grupo Editorial Endira México, 2008).