Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America

by Aníbal Quijano

The globalization of the world is, in the first place, the culmination of a process that began with the constitution of America and world capitalism as a Euro-centered colonial/modern world power. One of the foundations of that pattern of power was the social classification of the world population upon the base of the idea of race, a mental construct that expresses colonial experience and that pervades the most important dimensions of world power, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism. This article discusses some implications of that coloniality of power in Latin American history.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, History, Sociology, Theory

48 pages, Unknown Binding

Published January 1, 2000

About the author

Sociologist. Director of the Centro de Investigaciones Sociales (CIE) in Lima, directs the 'Anuario Mariateguiano "and is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University Binghmanton. He also taught at Columbia University, at UCLA in Berkeley, at Hanover and at the Universidad Autónoma de México.

Specialist in the work of Jose Carlos Mariategui, has mostly studied theories on dependence, imperialism and has developed original research on Latin American culture and identity. Author of numerous essays on the transformation of agriculture, the peasant movements, and the process of urbanization in Latin America, has recently proposed the category of "coloniality of power" as key to understanding the modern world and system.

Reviews

[Phoenix Fawkes · Rating 4 out of 5]

with finally finishing my paper about the coloniality of power, i am also finally done with this book.

i am only rating the first half of the book because i didn‘t really understand the second half. i find quijanos thesis very important as it gives a non-eurocentric perspective on colonialism and its effects which are still on going today. i highly recommend reading it, to cleanse your mind from the eurocentric myths and worldviews and read some worldviews from latin america and with that get into latin american philosophy.

i learned so much about latin american philosophy through him and lugones, which makes me a better philosopher. let’s decolonize philosophy and knowledge!

[Julian Blanco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uno de los textos fundacionales del pensamiento decolonial, obligatorio para cualquier estudiante de ciencias sociales / humanidades, asi como lectura altamente recomendada para cualquier latinoamericano.

[Fernando · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anibal Quijano debunks the global power structure from the other side of the Atlantic. In his socioeconomical analysis “racism” plays a turning key point. The coexistence with the Amerindians and the black slaves; in the Americas did serve to invent the white race. First, perhaps the idea of “whiteness” appeared among the British possessions in the Americas to differentiate them with the Indians. Since, as far as research has come to date, there was not such definition in the early Iberian imperial world. These phenotypical traces marked the differences between the colonizer and the colonized-dispossessed, heightening the superiority of the white race. These others “not whites”, that later included the black slave, became the inferior. Not just because they lacked the European’ social complexity, in fact as the white man started to accumulate enormous wealth due to human exploitation and free land, the others and their culture became “natural inferior”.

[Rain Mood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Las teorías de coloniales definitivamente son una joya. Estos textos te hacen darte cuenta de cosas que parecían tan obvias pero en realidad son dinámicas heredadas del proceso de colonización que no nos han permitido salir de estos ciclos de opresión y subordinación.

[Barbs · Rating 5 out of 5]

isso aqui é um dos melhores artigos que eu já li na minha vida

[Norton Reyes-Vargas · Rating 5 out of 5]

“En consecuencia, es tiempo de aprender a liberarnos del espejo eurocéntrico donde nuestra imagen es siempre, necesariamente, distorsionada. Es tiempo, en fin, de dejar de ser lo que no somos.”

[Komal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent paper on how ‘race became the fundamental criterion for the distribution of the world population into ranks.’