Postcolonial Apologies, Politics of Regret and Temporal Manichaeism: A Theoretical Analysis Through the Case of the Conquest of Mexico

Abstract

The article analyzes the forms of temporality and morality which operate in the request for postcolonial apologies in modern democracies, focusing on the Mexican case. There is already rich literature on the changing mnemonic and historiographical interpretations of the Conquest in Mexican history up to the present day. In this paper the Mexican case serves as factual support to discuss theoretically the modes of temporal consciousness that underlie postcolonial apologies and the moral relations to the past that these entail. We will examine the topic in light of the “ethical turn” proposals found in historical theory. We will critically address the assumptions regarding historicity behind the so-called “politics of regret,” questioning the ideological premises that frame the request for apologies and the decolonial theories that support them. Finally, we will approach the problem based on moral philosophy works that have studied collective apologies’ paradoxical nature. The questions to answer are: does retrospective recrimination of colonial processes make sense? Can we reclaim apologies from history? We conclude that the postcolonial apologies demanded by President López Obrador depend on a mythologized vision of the past, which reproduces a logic of temporal Manichaeism, with a scant epistemological basis to judge historically the event that it condemns.