Decolonial thinking and Brazilian Labor Law: contemporary intersectional subjections/ Decolonialidade do saber e direito do trabalho brasileiro: sujeicoes interseccionais contemporaneas.

AutorMuradas, Daniela
CargoTexto en ingles - Ensayo
  1. Introduction (1)

    The main objective of this article is to provide, under a juridical-sociological aspect (2), a critical dialogue between the conception of decolonial thinking and the dominant doctrinal approach of Brazilian Labor Law protective core: free and subordinate labors. Above all, it goes beyond to overcome the intersectional continuities of subjection (3) structured by a racial-sexual labor division, derived from colonization in Latin America, in contemporary Brazilian labor relations, as such subjections remain invisible by the prevalent Labor Law doctrine.

    This article is inserted in the paradigm of theories from the South (4), which propose, firstly, through a juridical-interpretative theoretical investigation, to analyze the conception of decolonial thinking in the postcolonial studies. So, it is based on the central concept of coloniality of power elaborated by the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano (2005, p. 117), emphasizing the concept of decolonial thinking as a movement of epistemic detachment from Eurocentrism, which is also intersected by other postmodernism concepts, such as the Enrique Dussel's transmodernity (2005, p.31), the criticism of the point zero notion by Grosfoguel (2005, p.14) and the idea of Walter Mignolo's epistemic disobedience (2008, p. 288).

    Subsequently, this conception is related to the prevailing doctrinal approach of the protective nucleus of Brazilian Labor Law--free and subordinate labors--which reproduces the theoretical-temporal parallel of contraposition in face of the slaveservile work, derived from the Eurocentric legal paradigm, exalting the employment relationship as the great achievement of modern society.

    However, this linear transhistorical approach ignores that such forms of labor in the Latin America colonization were simultaneous and associated with the idea of race and gender to naturalize inferior functions in the social division of labor. Consequently, the performance of precarious and subaltern functions in contemporary labor relationship in Brazil affects workers and peripheral workers, who have been oppressed by race and gender intersectionality since colonization, and who still been silenced by a single Eurocentric matrix narrative of freedom celebration by subordinate labor, as result of colonial thinking still present in the Brazilian Labor Law.

  2. Decolonial thinking in postcolonial studies

    The postcolonial studies are permeated by distinct and variable axes, but these are presented as a common characteristic of the methodological effort for deconstructing essentialisms, searching to consolidate a critical epistemological reference to dominant modernity conceptions, that are closely related to the colonial experience (COSTA, 2006, p. 117).

    The postcolonial approach establishes a production process critique of scientific knowledge that, favoring Eurocentric matrices, reproduces the logic of the colonial relationship (COSTA, 2006, p. 118). As Costa (2006, p. 118) points out, the experiences of subaltern groups (5), as well as the transformation processes in "non-Western" societies, still been treated from their similarity or divergence relations called center. This hierarchical binarism requires a modern epistemology rupture through a criticism of otherness, but not in the sense of being against the center, against the "other one." The aim is to strive to introduce subaltern groups into the dialectic of the "Me" and the "Others" (6); a Latin American struggle that does not be only included in the scope of social interactions, but also in relation to the reason and to the knowledge (GORDON, 2008, p.16).

    The core of this criticism, as Ballestrin (2003, p.108) points out, is not an original finding of postcolonial studies. However, the author (2002, p.108) points out that these studies have a central role to play, because they have promoted the revaluation of theories from the South, which seek to discover transmodern (7) perspectives for epistemological decolonization, through strategies of disobedience, and epistemic suspicion, which propitiate the road of pluriversality as a universal project (8), according to Walter Mignolo (2000, p.25).

    Walter Mignolo, as well as Anibal Quijano, is part of the collective "Modernity and Coloniality", a dissenting side of the Latin American Group of Subaltern Studies (9), which aims an epistemological project that must consider the perspective of critics from the Global South, who think with and from subalternized ethnic-racial-sexual bodies and places (GROSFOGUEL, 2008, p 118). Grosfoguel (2008, p. 117) says that, as epistemological projects, postmodernism and poststructuralism are still trapped within the Western canon, reproducing a certain form of power / knowledge coloniality. Thus, the group "Modernity and Coloniality" perceived from the dialogue with the Latin American Group of Subaltern Studies the need to transcend--what means, to decolonize--Western epistemology and canon, in defense of the "decolonial option" to understand the world marked by the permanence of global coloniality in the different levels of personal and collective life (BALLESTRIN, 2013, p.89).

    Among the central concepts used by the collective there is the coloniality of power, elaborated by the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano. The coloniality of power demonstrates that the colonial, economic, political, social, and epistemic relations did not end with the destruction of colonization, that is: coloniality allows us to understand the continuity of colonial domination forms beyond colonization.

    According to Quijano, the modernity was characterized by a world power pattern which dominated and disputed the control of the various forms of social existence, forming a structural complex, whose character is always historical and specific (QUIJANO, 2002, p.4). From this perspective, the phenomenon of power in modernity was characterized as a type of constituted social relation by the permanent co-presence of three elements--domination, exploitation and conflict--that affect areas of social existence, among which we can note work; the space of collective authority; the sex, within their resources and products; and the modes of knowledge production capable of shaping subjectivities (QUIJANO, 2002, p.4).

    The modern power pattern imposed, as a way of labor control, the capitalism allied to codification of the differences between conquerors and conquered through the idea of race (10), that is, it is a supposed distinct biological structure that destined some ones in natural situation of inferiority in relation to others; the Nation-State borned as a central form of collective authority control; the bourgeois family institution predominates in sex control; and, finally, the Eurocentric paradigm, as a hegemonic form of knowledge production (QUIJANO, 2002, p.4). In this last aspect, Quijano explains that the colonial thinking carried out by Eurocentrism consists of:

    Eurocentrism is here the name of a knowledge perspective whose systematic elaboration began in Western Europe before the middle of the XVII century, although some of its roots are undoubtedly older, or even ancient, and that in the following centuries became hegemonic movement through the same flow of bourgeois Europe (...) It is not, therefore, a category that involves all cognitive history throughout Europe, nor in Western Europe in particular. In other words, it does not refer to all modes of knowledge of all Europeans and all ages, but to a specific rationality or knowledge perspective that becomes worldwide hegemonic in order to colonize and overlap all others, previous or different, and to their respective concrete knowledges, both in Europe and on the rest of the world (QUIJANO, 2005, p. 126).

    Mignolo (2010, p.15) points out the Anibal Quijano's concept, analytically, opening possibilities for reconstruction and the restitution of the silenced histories, subjectivities, languages and knowledge repressed through the idea of the European totalitarian rationality. Moreover, according to Mignolo (2010, p.15), the coloniality of power, in programmatic terms, proposes a project of "detachment (11)" from Eurocentric knowledge. Thus, the decolonization of knowledge is a project of epistemic detachment in the social sphere, as well as in the academic sphere, that is a dimension of the social (MIGNOLO, 2010, p. 15). In the words of Quijano (1992, p. 447):

    The criticism of the European paradigm of rationality / modernity is indispensable. Even more, urgent. But it is doubtful that the way consists in the simple negation of all its categories; in dissolution of reality in discourse; in pure negation of the idea and the perspective of totality in the knowledge. Far from this, it is necessary to detach from the links of rationality-modernity with coloniality, in the first place, and ultimately with all power not constituted in free decision of free people. It is the instrumentalization of reason by the colonial power, in the first place, that produced distorted knowledge paradigms and failure in liberating promises of modernity. The alternative is therefore clear: the destruction of the coloniality of world power.

    For Mignolo (2010, p.10), the idea that knowledge is part of colonizing processes already existed in academic debates in Latin America before post-colonial studies. The author (2010, p.10) recalls that the Brazilian Darcy Ribeiro, in the early 70's, clearly expressed that the empire marches to the colonies with weapons, books, concepts and prejudices. In general, as discussed by Quijano (2005, p. 122), this debate was dominated, especially after the Second World War, by the issue of development underdevelopment, through the modernization theory, which argued, among other arguments, that modernization necessarily implies the Westernization of non-European societies and cultures, because it is a phenomenon of all cultures, not only Eurocentric or Western.

    However...

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