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Operating within the framework of postcolonial studies and decolonial theory, this important work starts from the assumption that the violence exercised by European colonialism was not only physical and economic, but also ‘epistemic’. Santiago Castro-Gómez argues that toward the end of the eighteenth century, this epistemic violence of the Spanish Empire assumed a specific form: zero-point hubris. The ‘many forms of knowing’ were integrated into a chronological hierarchy in which scientific-enlightened knowledge appears at the highest point on the cognitive scale, while all other epistemes are seen as constituting its past. Enlightened criollo thinkers did not hesitate to situate the Black, Indigenous, and mestizo peoples of New Granada in the lowest position on this cognitive scale. Castro-Gómez argues that in the colonial periphery of the Spanish Americas, Enlightenment constituted not only the position of epistemic distance separating science from all other knowledges, but also the position of ethnic distance separating the criollos from the ‘castes’. Epistemic violence—and not only physical violence—is thereby found at the very origin of Colombian nationality.
Critique of Latin American Reason is one of the most important philosophical texts to have come out of South America in recent decades. First published in 1996, it offers a sweeping critique of the foundational schools of thought in Latin American philosophy and critical theory. Santiago Castro-Gómez argues that “Latin America” is not so much a geographical entity, a culture, or a place, but rather an object of knowledge produced by a family of discourses in the humanities that are inseparably linked to colonial power relationships. Using the archaeological and genealogical methods of Michel Foucault, he analyzes the political, literary, and philosophical discourses and modes of power t...
A state-of-the-art anthology of postcolonial theory and practice in the Latin American context.
This is the first book in English profiling the work of a research collective that evolved around the notion of "coloniality", understood as the hidden agenda and the darker side of modernity and whose members are based in South America and the United States. The project called for an understanding of modernity not from modernity itself but from its darker side, coloniality, and proposes the de-colonization of knowledge as an epistemological restitution with political and ethical implications. Epistemic decolonization, or de-coloniality, becomes the horizon to imagine and act toward global futures in which the notion of a political enemy is replaced by intercultural communication and towards an-other rationality that puts life first and that places institutions at its service, rather than the other way around. The volume is profoundly inter- and trans-disciplinary, with authors writing from many intellectual, transdisciplinary, and institutional spaces. This book was published as a special issue of Cultural Studies.
Applying contemporary intellectual perspectives, including aspects of gender, modernity, nation, and visual representation itself, José Rabasa reveals new perspectives on colonial order. Folio 46r becomes a metaphor for reading the totality of the codex and for reflecting on the postcolonial theoretical issues now brought to bear on the past. Ambitious and innovative (such as the invention of the concepts of elsewhere and ethnosuicide, and the emphasis on intution), Tell Me the Story of Howl Conquered You embraces the performative force of the native scribe while acknowledging the ineffable traits of 46r-traits that remain untenably foreign to the modern excavator/scholar. Posing provocative questions about the unspoken dialogues between evangelizing friars and their spiritual conquests, this book offers a theoretic-political experiment on the possibility of learning from the tlacuilo ways of seeing the world that dislocate the predominance of the West.
"Of all the differentiated regions comprising contemporary Spain, Galicia is possibly the most deeply marked by political, economic and cultural inequities throughout the centuries. Processes of national construction in the region have been patchily successful. However, Galicia's cultural distinctness is easily recognizable to the observer, from the language spoken in the region to the specific forms of the Galician built landscape, with its mixture of indigenous, imported and hybrid elements. The present volume offers English-language readers an in-depth introduction to the integral aspects of Galician cultural history, from pre-historical times to the present day. Whilst attention is given to the traditional areas of medieval culture, language, contemporary history and politics, the book also privileges compelling contemporary perspectives on cinema, architecture, the city of Santiago de Compostela and the urban qualities of Galician culture today." -- Provided by the publisher.
This volume explores possibility of constructing a political outcome from the theory of the early years of the Frankfurt School, countering the commonly-made criticism that critical theory is highly speculative. With chapters exploring the work of figures central to the Frankfurt School, including Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Habermas and Honneth, Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis reveals that it is only with a fixed and dogmatic model of politics that critical theory is incompatible, and that it can in fact yield a rich variety of political models, ranging from new forms of Marxism to more contemporary ’dialogical’ models centred on the politics of identity. With attention to new ways of contrasting alienation and reification in contemporary forms of social organisation, this book demonstrates that the thought of the Frankfurt school can in fact be an invaluable tool not only for developing a critique of advanced capitalism, but also for originating alternative models of political praxis. As such, it will appeal to scholars of social and political theory, with interests in classical sociological thought and continental philosophy.
This is a collection of eleven chapters and an introduction that develop key arguments in decolonial feminism, particularly, the coloniality of gender, the critique of white and Eurocentric feminisms, the imbrication between gender, race, and colonialism, feminicides, and the coloniality of democracy and public institutions. The introduction addresses the path of decolonial feminism: from a new approach to understanding the relationship between gender as a category, race, and colonialism that combined U.S. Third World feminism and scholarship on coloniality and decoloniality to its exponential growth in the hands of activists and engaged scholars from Latin America and the Caribbean. Today, much of the literature on decolonial feminism in Latin America and the Caribbean remains unknown in the U.S. This anthology seeks to start remedying this problem with seven translations of work originally written in Spanish, and three essays originally written in English that address the fundamental concepts of decolonial feminism as well as its contributions to important contemporary political and intellectual debates.
A new journal inspired mainly by but not limited to Latin American, Caribbean and US Latinidad perspectives, Nepantla: Views from South is committed to fostering innovative reflection at the intersection of the humanities and the social sciences. Drawing on the international and interdisciplinary conference Cross-Genealogies and Subaltern Knowledges, while also including outside essays, the premier issue significantly advances the subaltern studies debate.
Does the growing economic might of regional superpowers like Brazil mean that dependency theory of the 1960s was all wrong? The answer to this and many other enigmas of development is found in Sub-Imperialism Revisited, a theoretically rigorous study by the brilliant Mexican analyst Adrián Sotelo Valencia. In analysing the 21st Century conditions of Latin America, Sotelo systematically explores the concept of "sub-imperialism" as advanced in the pioneering work of Ruy Mauro Marini. Himself a former student of Marini, Sotelo elucidates the explanatory power of a fully Marxist conception of imperialism and underdevelopment while providing considerable insight into opposing conceptions of dependency. This timely book ultimately enables readers to appreciate why radical dependency theory remains more relevant today than ever.