Coloniality, Capital, and Critical Education

Abstract

As the US empire continues its slow decline and as popular and leftist movements (unevenly) assert themselves globally, a concomitant movement has pressed forward a challenge to the colonial roots of intellectual work inside and outside the global university. Building from yet also departing from the legacy of postcolonial scholarship, scholars of coloniality and decolonial thought have interrogated the taken-for-granted epistemological foundations that undergird not only conservative scholarship but much progressive and critical work as well. In particular, in dialogue with others investigating these issues globally, a distinct collective project has emerged among a group of thinkers situated in and/or concerned with Latin America. This work acquires a special urgency in the context of contemporary experiments in socialist, indigenous, and community-based political projects at various scales in Venezuela, Mexico, Bolivia, Ecuador, and elsewhere in Latin America. Challenging the narrow and violent determination of the philosophy and science that has been coextensive with imperialism—and thus Western modernity—from the Renaissance to the present, this project seeks to open intellectual and cultural work to other possibilities by shifting the “geopolitics of knowledge” (Mignolo, 2011) that anchor and shape it.