Global Coloniality of Power in Guatemala

Racism, Genocide, Citizenship

By (author) Egla Martínez Salazar

Publication date:

20 July 2012

Length of book:

296 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739141229

In this engaged critique of the geopolitics of knowledge, Egla Martínez Salazar examines the genocide and other forms of state terror such as racialized feminicide and the attack on Maya childhood, which occurred in Guatemala of the 1980s and '90s with the full support of Western colonial powers. Drawing on a careful analysis of recently declassified state documents, thematic life histories, and compelling interviews with Maya and Mestizo women and men survivors, Martinez Salazar shows how people resisting oppression were converted into the politically abject. At the center of her book is an examination of how coloniality survives colonialism—a crucial point for understanding how contemporary hegemonic practices and ideologies such as equality, democracy, human rights, peace, and citizenship are deeply contested terrains, for they create nominal equality from practical social inequality. While many in the global North continue to enjoy the benefits of this domination, millions, if not billions, in both the South and North have been persecuted, controlled, and exterminated during their struggles for a more just world.

Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2:Genealogical Backgrounds of Power
Chapter 3: Structural and Everyday Practices of Racism
Chapter 4: Genocide as Tool to Eliminate the Racialized and Politically “Undesirable”
Chapter 5: The Bureaucracy of Death and Vilified Memories
Chapter 6: Citizenship as Repression and a Space of Inclusion-Exclusion
Chapter 7: Some Concluding Thoughts

This is a very clearly written, richly detailed polemic by a sociologist of contemporary Guatemalan society. Martínez Salazar (Carleton Univ., Canada) argues that a nation such as Guatemala, while ostensibly freed from the former bonds of colonialism, is still permeated by the racism, economic injustice, and patriarchy typical of colonial oppression and terror. She reviews Guatemalan history from conquest to the present, and then, often referring to interviews she conducted with people from various walks of life, documents enduring injustices. Martínez Salazar pays special attention to racism, exhibited not only by postcolonial elites, but by progressives and revolutionaries as well. She also explores the heavy toll that state power and genocide exacted from Maya women. And she traces the important international connections between state power and the great powers that have so powerfully influenced Guatemala's oppression of its own citizens. The author's emotionally moving documentation of individual episodes of oppression, rape, torture, and murder lead inexorably toward the conclusion that decolonial resistance--the continual struggle for economic, social, and cultural liberation--is still alive and necessary in Guatemala. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.