Coloniality and Ways of Knowing

Coloniality

• Proposes decolonization of knowledge as an epistemological strategy with political and ethical implications.
• Possible strategy: intersectionality.
• Coloniality is the lasting effect of colonization, including the domination of the world and structure of domination.
• Subjects of this power are active in this action.
• Problem of unjust relationship between dominant and dominated groups.

Intersectionality

• About location.
• Individuality (universal, abstract).
• Singularity (local, concrete, historical).
• Western, white, male, owner-specific social/political relations.
• Western universality imposes a single way of life.
• Colonialism as 'cognitive injustice'— failure to recognize different ways of knowing.
• Western modernity marginalized the global south.
• China—global north.
• Human struggle to solve the problem of truth and injustice in different ways.

Cosmopolitanism

• All humans are part of a single community.
• Colonial criticism evolves into a discussion of injustice.

Critical project to de-colonial options

• Differences between decolonization of knowledge and other critical projects.
• Frankfurt School and its connection to racism and colonial context (Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno).
• Holocaust as racial crime, paralleling colonial actions.
• Jewish critical traditions as internal response to European imperialism.
• Master paradigms are options, not universal truths.
• Historically-biased linear views of history are incorrect.
• Decolonial option requires different type of thinking (non-linear, chronological break).
• Border epistemology, non-capitalist political economy, and pluri-national states.
• De-colonial Manifesto.
• De-linking and negativity from a perspective of silenced, repressed, and devalued spaces.

Coloniality and Global Domination Order

• Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality article (published in the 90s).
• Matrix of the De-colonial approach.
• Colonial conquest of societies/cultures.
• Global power encompassing the whole planet.
• Violent concentration of resources for a European minority.
• Continued process in different forms, sometimes moderated.
• Eurocentric colonialism- formal system of Western European domination.
• Western imperialism--a pattern of social relations.
• Colonial structure of power produces specific social discrimination.
• Categorization as racial, ethnic, anthropological, or national, varying over time.
• Non-objective constructions: historical significance.
• Eurocentric worldview has its own colonizing forces on other cultures.
• Colonization of the imagination.
• Colonization as a product of systematic repression– specifically of belief, ideas, symbols, and knowledge.
• Global colonized knowledge is not limited to the colonizers.

Coloniality of Power and Power

• Coloniality of power emerged with America/Western Europe.
• Social category of 'race' as key to colonial classification.
• Mutated relationship to the colonized, from superiority to biological/structural hierarchy.
• Eurocentric criteria used for global societal categorizations.
• Colonial divide and classification produce varied social identities (whites, Indians, blacks, etc.).
• Production of labour in global capitalism follows racial lines.
• Global social classification of colonized and colonizers.
• European colonial expansion.
• New social identities in the new world.
• Social classifications of colonialism.
• Differences in labor across different social classes/groups.
• Colonial Matrix of Power.
• The need to overcome the Eurocentric framework of Western modernity.
• Global Capitalism and its ideological structures.
• Historical analysis and the question of class.
• Non-Eurocentric thought and class analysis.

The Epistemic Decolonial Turn

• Location of theory in the global North, with subjects of study in the South.
• Western thinkers as theoretical apparatus for studies of the subaltern.
• Practice conscious path change.
• Using subaltern perspectives to study subalternity.
• Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism—a postmodern critique.
• Decolonial critique (of Eurocentrism) from subalternized, silenced knowledges.
• Intercultural approach
• Need for a broader intellectual canon.
• Decolonial methodology—a non-linear and chronological epistemic break.

Coloniality and the Post-Fordist Capitalism

• The crisis of Eurocentric approaches to modernity and progress.
• The problem of epistemological plurality.
• The singular validity of Western scientific-technical forms of knowledge.

The 'Ego-politics of Knowledge'

• Western philosophy privileges the myth of a non-situated 'Ego'.
• Decoupling of ethnic/racial/gender/sexual from the subject that speaks.
• Colonial power produces a myth of a truthful, universal knowledge.
• Distinguishing between epistemic location and social location.
• Subaltern epistemic perspectives critique hegemonic knowledge.
• Geopolitics and body politics of knowledge in the context of colonial power/knowledge.
• Western Cartesian paradigm.

The Political-Economy Paradigms

• Globalization studies.
• World-system analysis, with few exceptions, has not accounted for the epistemic critique of subaltern locations.
• Lack of theoretical and critical implications of the critique.

The Coloniality of Gender

• The intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality within the colonial/modern system.
• The ways in which women of color are socially and epistemically devaluated.
• The critique of non-white female chastity.

Gender, Race, and Class

• Interlocking nature of oppressions, particularly those facing Black women.
• Historical context of capitalism and colonization.
• Intersectional understandings of oppression.

The Combahee River Collective Statement

• Committed to challenging racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression.
• Black feminism as a political and intellectual strategy.
• Addressing the specific oppressions of women of color.
• The lived experience of Black women in America.
• The need to connect with other movements
• The concept and importance of identity politics (as a means of fighting back).

Indigenous Dispossession

• Historical struggles in the context of settler colonization.
• Recursivity of dispossession.
• Reconceptualization of proprietary logic, desecration, non-human legal persons.

Indigenous Syncretism

• Recovering and reappropriating indigenous traditions.
• Political mobilization.
• Creating a new unified political-spiritual identity for resisting colonization.
• Indigenous syncretism involved reclaiming and redefining Indigenous identities and culture.
• Reconciling tensions and contradictions within these movements.
• Emphasis on shared experience of dispossession (instead of unifying based on sameness).
• Indigenous identity as a political field.

Global Abyssal Lines

• Modern Western thinking as a system of visible and invisible distinctions.
• Two levels of hierarchy.
• Separation of knowledge domains—scientific, religious, cultural, etc.
• Appropriation and violence take different forms
• Indigenous resistance against colonization.
• Colonization and its epistemological effect.
• Global cognitive injustice.

Intercultural Translation

• The need for intercultural translation and a rejection of universalism and relativism.
• Recognizing and understanding non-Western cultural knowledge.
• Reimagining social emancipation.
• Intercultural dialogue between different cultural and political perspectives.
• Different knowledges are interconnected, not separate.