Latin American Dialectics and the Other

This chapter marks a turn toward the Latin American context, in part through Fanon’s own influence in the region, and the parallel decolonial influence of the Peruvian socialist José Carlos Mariátegui, who shares a similarly global view. The chapter then takes up the more recent work of Enrique Dussel, in particular his Philosophy of Liberation. Whereas Dussel appears to reject dialectics as itself colonial and—like Fanon—bound up with ontological domination, his rejection of dialectics is not complete. Instead, Dussel reformulates a decolonized dialectics that both begins from and opens out toward what he calls, following Emanuel Levinas, “exteriority.” This exteriority, which refers to a ways in which individuals and groups are situated beyond the categories of the present, provides the basis for a reformulation of first national and later popular identity.