Sousanuestraamerica

Theory, Culture & Society

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Nuestra America: Reinventing a Subaltern Paradigm of Recognition and

Redistribution

Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Theory Culture Society 2001; 18; 185

DOI: 10.1177/02632760122051706

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Page 185

Nuestra America

Reinventing a Subaltern Paradigm of

Recognition and Redistribution

Boaventura de Sousa Santos

The European American Century

CCORDING TO Hegel, we recall, universal history goes from the

East to the West. Asia is the beginning, while Europe is the ultimate

end of universal history, the place where the civilizational trajectory

of humankind is fulfilled. The biblical and medieval idea of the succession

of empires (translatio imperii) becomes in Hegel the triumphal way of the

Universal Idea. In each era a people takes on the responsibility of conducting the Universal Idea, thereby becoming the historical universal people, a

privilege which has in turn passed from the Asian to the Greek, then to the

Roman, and, finally, to the German peoples. America, or rather, North

America,...