Danielle Schwartz (SUNY Binghamton University)
According to Walter Mignolo (2013), coloniality is the logic of domination, exploitation, and oppression, which makes the triumphal narrative of modernity without coloniality insperable. While modernity built itself on a triumphal; narrative of civilization, progress, and development, it hid its darker side, “coloniality”. “Modernity/coloniality” shows that while modernity is presented as the rhetoric of salvation, it hides coloniality, which is the logic of oppression and exploitation (Mignolo 2007). Modernity, capitalism and coloniality are aspects of the same package of control of economy and authority. The first conceptualizations of modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, lauched by Quijano (2007), focused on economic-political dimensions, the question of knowledge and racism.. Later on, Quijano’s basic theses were extended to explore the coloniality of being and the coloniality of gender (Maldonaldo- Torres 2007; Lugones 2007). And more recently aesthetic (de)coloniality (Mignolo and Vasquez 2013). Decoloniality, in this sense, is concerned with the set of attitudes, projects, goals, and efforts to delink from the promises of modernity and the unhuman conditions created by coloniality. In order to do so it is necessary to delink from the basic theological and secular epistemological and hermeneutic foundations of Western modernity.