Decolonial Thought

Course Description

Modernity has a dark side to it, colonialism, without which it would not have come into being. The history of coloniality is that of an imposition of power structures at various levels: economic, epistemic, political, and racial and gender based. This coloniality of power did not end with the process of decolonization experienced with the independence and formation of the Latin American countries in the early 19th century. It continues in the subjugation, through that matrix of colonial power, of millions of inhabitants of the hemisphere. Decolonial thought attempts to uncover these different legacies of subjection and oppression still ocurring in the present. In this sense, it aims to counters the main Eurocentric narrative determining the course of the world, creating spaces of contestation and undoing some of the constructs that support the idea of one global history inexhorably advancing towards a better more prosperous and free future.