Haunting the Modern Andean State: Colonial Legacies of Race and Civilization
Contemporary Andean polities are haunted by colonial legacies. Looking at state-making from the off-centered view-point of emerging colonial institutions helps make sense of the trajectory of horrors and irrationalities – as well as idioms of political legitimacy and justice – that have profoundly marked modern Andean life. European state-making was chained to imperial endeavors and Spanish political ideologies, like those of Spain’s early modern competitors, reflect modernity’s beginnings in this dialectic of state-making and colonialism. My essay explores how colonial apparatuses of statecraft, washed in the dictates of imperial control, made race-thinking – and the imperatives of “civilization” – part of the body politic. And, while this essay can be suggestive at best, I hope it pushes us to ask why – and how – these beginnings have not been central to our perceptions of modern experience or modern states
