Forced conversion alone never produced the structural genocide of modern colonial sovereignty

Evidence

These considerations somewhat problematize the arguments of several Latin American scholars and intellectuals, such as Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, who regard the “long sixteenth century” as the spatiotemporal site in which modernity and its peculiar forms of colonialism originated. Yet, insisting on Christianity as having fulfilled only a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition would simultaneously allow for their and my narratives to stand not only intact but also in complementary and mutually supportive ways. It is not essential for my account to deprive the “long sixteenth century” of the thrust of a protomodern colonialism, but it is clear that the later forms of colonial sovereignty transcended and qualitatively complicated those articulated in that century. It can hardly be argued, for instance, that the forced conversions of the Muslims and Jews in Andalusia possessed the same structures of domination as those embedded in juridicality and education of the nineteenth century, however particularly brutal these conversions were. Forced conversions surely existed for millennia and were practiced by several empires throughout Asia, but did not result in cultural, epistemic, or structural genocide. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 692

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to theories of modernity (Dussel, Mignolo) that locate colonial modernity’s origin in the long sixteenth century.