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I would like to begin by thanking Michele for this initiative and Morgan, Sarah, Julian, Katerina, and Ming Dong Gu for their generosity in sharing their views, concerns, doubts and support for the...

Decoloniality is, in the first place, a concept whose point of origination was the Third World. Better yet, it emerged at the very moment in which the three world division was collapsing and the celebration of the end of history and a new world order was emerging. The nature of its impact was similar to the impact produced by the introduction of the concept of "biopolitics", whose point of origination was Europe. Like its European counterpart, "coloniality" moved to the center of international debates in the non-European world as well as in "former Eastern Europe." While "biopolitics" moved to center stage in "former Western Europe" (cf., the European Union) and the United States, as well as among some intellectual minorities of the non-European followers of ideas that originated in Europe, but who adapt them to local circumstances, "coloniality" offers a needed sense of comfort to mainly people of color in developing countries, migrants and, in general, to a vast quantitative majority whose life experiences, long and short-term memories, languages and categories of thoughts are alienated to life experience, long and short-term memories, languages and categories of thought that brought about the concept of "biopolitics" to account for mechanisms of control and state regulations.

The volume the reader has in her/his hands (or perhaps on the screen), is the outcome of one of the workshops of the project modernity/colonialilty, held at Duke-UNC in May of 2004, and organized b...

To start with, I have never heard of a US or Latin American president (Juan Domingo Peron, for example), refer to the American or the Argentinean ‘subaltern’. They always say, consistently, the Ame...

There is no safe place and no single locus of enunciation from where the uni‐versal could be articulated for all and forever. Hindu nationalism and Western neo‐liberalism are entangled in a long history of the logic of coloniality (domination, oppression, exploitation) hidden under the rhetoric of modernity (salvation, civilization, progress, development, freedom and democracy). There are, however, needs and possibilities for Indians and Western progressive intellectuals working together to undermine and supersede the assumptions that liberal thinkers in the West are better placed to understand what is the common good better than Indian thinkers in post‐partition India. Science, in the last analysis, doesn’t carry in itself an ethics and politics. Therefore, it is doubtful to argue that science is beyond both, and only concerned with the advancement of the frontier of knowledge and understanding. Science could be (like Christianity, Hinduism, Liberalism or Marxism) both imperial and liberating. Knowledge ...

The end of the twentieth century has brought a new series of problems not only in the socio-historical and economic order of things but in the domain of knowledge as well. To say that we do not have models or concepts to understand new social configurations and forces, or to anticipate and project the future is not enough. The question seems to be deeper or wider than that and it touches upon the very presupposition of the disciplines or culture of scholarship that have been producing concepts and models. In the last twenty years, cultures of scholarship have been running through new models and concepts as we have been running to buy the last version of Nikes or a new car model. The problem is not to find new models within the current disciplinary configurations, or interdisciplinary if you wish, but that it is the very structure of knowledge production and cultures of scholarship that need to be reviewed. It is hardly a novelty today to say that the coming into being of the social sciences is pa...

(1999). I am where i think: Epistemology and the colonial difference. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 235-245.

(1998). Cultural studies questionnaire. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 111-119.

(1992). Putting the Americas on the map (geography and the colonization of space) Colonial Latin American Review: Vol. 1, No. 1-2, pp. 25-63.