COLONIALITY AND MODERNITY/RATIONALITY

• Published in: Cultural studies (London, England) Vol. 21; no. 2-3; pp. 168 - 178
• Main Author: Quijano, Aníbal
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Taylor & Francis Group 01.03.2007
• Subjects: Colonialism; Cultural factors; Decolonization; Epistemology; Intersubjectivity; Knowledge; Modernity; Oppression; Rationality; Reductionism; Repression; Western Society
• ISSN: 0950-2386; 1466-4348
• DOI: 10.1080/09502380601164353

The strategies of the repression & mystification of knowledge & meaning imposed by the "Western" European dominators whose descendents now exploit mainly Latin America & Africa are argued to be a relationship of colonial domination of the imagination. The initial use of systematic repression, mystification, & extermination is still the main colonialist framework, despite the destruction of 500 years of colonialism. The various strategies of domination through the constitution of race through biologically structuralist & inferior relationships, the development of the cultural complex known as European modernity/rationality, the denial of intersubjectivity in the presupposition of the subject, & the notion of the totality in knowledge elaborated an image of society as a closed structure are asserted to be articulated in a hierarchy with functional relations between its parts. Although the idea of totality in general is denied in Europe, the effects of reductionism to the metaphysics of the macrohistorical subject are distinguished from non-"Western" concepts of social totality that requires the idea of an "other". The critique of the European paradigm of rationality/modernity is indispensable not as an indication of categories, but as the destruction of the colonialist world power in the process of social liberation from all power organized as inequality, discrimination, exploitation, & domination. References. J. Harwell