TO BE OR NOT TO BE "SUBTLY" PHILOSOPHICALLY COLONIZED* 1

Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 2020

Comparative and Continental Philosophy, 2015

This article proposes that the study of non-Western philosophical traditions ought to include a critical awareness of the experience, impact, and legacy of colonialism. In this regard, Latin American philosophy offers us a key concept, the coloniality of power. As I show, coloniality enriches and complicates our understanding of both the history of Western and non-Western philosophies. More specifically, coloniality helps to clarify and answer the following questions: firstly, how was it that the discipline of philosophy came to be centrally understood as Western? And secondly, to what degree did the modern distinction between West and non-West affect our understanding, and the formation of, non-Western thought? Ultimately, the methodological upshot of coloniality for the study of non-Western philosophical traditions is that it focuses our attention on the epistemic violence that was part and parcel of colonialism, and therefore frames the study non-Western philosophical thought within the practical project of decolonization.

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 2020

The theme of the 2018 Spindel Conference was “Decolonizing Philosophy.” In this introduction, I will elaborate on this theme as a way to set the stage for the essays in this volume. Beginning with the question of what it means to consider philosophy “colonized” in the first place, I will focus on the subfield of the history of philosophy as a way to draw out my account. After elaborating what I take the claim that philosophy is colonized/colonizing to mean, I will turn to ways one might approach its decolonization. Again, my principle focus will be on the history of philosophy, though I take my analysis to extend beyond this subfield. Finally, I will elaborate four key tasks that I take to be essential to the decolonization of philosophy.

Any sort of colonial mentality strives to subjugate the “other” and dictate its rule on it. In this respect, the logic of bipolarity, lying in the basis of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, is a point in question that can be understood as domination of oneself upon the other. This presentation, in which we will argue for the notion that “the colonial movement begins primarily within the mentalities”, will focus on the importance and the value that societies have to appreciate to the productivity and the creativity via Plato’s concept of “khora” (territory/space). In the Timaeus Plato presents a perspective that defies all bipolar structures including his previous theory of ideas. A third kind (territory/space) added into the logic of dichotomies displaces the structures which dictates its own rules (logos) upon the “other” in a sense. Yet, the impossibility of reaching an absolute and definite verdict about the objects appeared in the becoming world results from the uncertain and unattainable nature of territory/space (khora in Plato) enclosing the becoming as a whole. In other words, the contact between the binaries without a third kind will inevitably lead to the logic of domination in which one dictates its own law and will always get control of the other. In this presentation, ‘the unattainableness of territory’ will be ontologically emphasized and the possibility of philosophical decolonization will be discussed via the concepts of creativity, productivity and the awareness of the territory necessary for the elimination of the colonization. Keywords: decolonization, philosophical decolonization, territory, Plato, Timaeus, khora

2009

The point of departure of this special issue of Kult is Latin America, and this is so because Latin America has a long-but largely neglected tradition of problematising the west as the logical starting point of valid and relevant theory, and as a privileged site of knowledge production. The Latin American critical academic tradition has developed in close cooperation with social and ethnic movements, and in this way it has always had exclusion as its main concern. More specifically, this tradition addresses two interlocked problems; one regards the place of indigenous and black thought and practices within the Latin American context-that is, it is concerned with exclusion, genocide and epistemicide inside of Latin America. The other is concerned with these same problems, but looking into outside places and practices. From these concerns emerge alternative, innovative and transforming inputs to anthropology, history, philosophy, political economy and sociology, which aim at contributing not only to the production of knowledge within the academic realm, but

Philosophia, 2008

This article is the keynote address of the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, Barbados, philosophy symposium in celebration of the 200th Anniversary of the British outlawing the Atlantic Slave Trade. The paper explores questions of enslavement and freedom through challenges of philosophical anthropology, philosophy of social change, and metacritical reflections posed by African Diasporic or Africana philosophy. Such challenges include the relevance and legitimacy of philosophical reflection to the lives of racialized slaves and concludes with a discussion of the implications of the analysis for an understanding of the "face" of political life and the importance of the concept of "home" for a cogent theory of freedom.

Kult, 2009

The point of departure of this special issue of Kult is Latin America, and this is so because Latin America has a long -but largely neglected tradition of problematising the west as the logical starting point of valid and relevant theory, and as a privileged site of knowledge production. The Latin American critical academic tradition has developed in close cooperation with social and ethnic movements, and in this way it has always had exclusion as its main concern. More specifically, this tradition addresses two interlocked problems; one regards the place of indigenous and black thought and practices within the Latin American context -that is, it is concerned with exclusion, genocide and epistemicide inside of Latin America. The other is concerned with these same problems, but looking into outside places and practices.

TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 2011

This special issue of Transmodernity, "Thinking through the Decolonial Turn: Post-Continental Interventions in Theory, Philosophy, and Critique," stands on three fundamental premises that serve as the starting point for the dialogical encounters between intellectuals from Latin America, the Caribbean, and from minoritized sectors in the United States, particularly Latina/o and African American, who are featured here. The first one is that just as there has been a linguistic and a pragmatic turn, among other such turns in theory and philosophy, there has also being a decolonial turn with distinct features, some of which will be elucidated in these two issues. 1 Different from these other turns, however, the decolonial turn has long existed in different ways, opposing what could be called the colonizing turn in Western thought, by what I mean the paradigm of discovery and newness that also included the gradual propagation of capitalism, racism, the modern/gender system, and the naturalization of the death ethics of war. 2 The second premise or fundamental hypothesis is that the decolonial turn is anchored in specific forms of skepticism and epistemic attitudes out of which certain critical questions and the search for answers are generated. And the third is that this turn, its form of skepticism and attitude, are arguably most at home in spaces such as ethnic studies and gender and women's studies departments, units, and research centers in the Western academy, as well as in different institutions such as indigenous universities and among decolonial activists, independent scholars, and artists across the entire spectrum of the Global South, including the south in the north. 3 To be sure, that the decolonial turn is particularly at home in spaces such as ethnic, women, or gender studies does not mean that every scholar in such spaces is effectively thinking through and contributing to the decolonial turn, or that the decolonial turn can only be found in such spaces. Arguably, because of its emancipatory goals and its suspension of method, the decolonial turn cannot be fully contained in single units of study, or captured within the standard division of labor between disciplines or areas in the traditional arts and sciences. What is at stake is the larger task of the very decolonization of knowledge, power, and being, including institutions such as the university. 4 The Decolonial Turn I have provided an initial genealogy and a description of the decolonial turn elsewhere, and Walter Mignolo adds important considerations in his contribution to this issue, but a succinct introductory note is in place here. 5 Decolonial thinking has existed since the very inception of modern forms of colonization-that is, since at least the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries-, and, to that extent, a certain decolonial turn has existed as well, but the more massive

This essay probes the critical import of Latin American decolonial thought from the perspective of the dialectical legacy of Critical Theory in the works of Theodor W. Adorno and Roberto Schwarz. It critically interrogates the decolonizing motif as it relates to intellectual discourses and bodies of work. This argument is pursued through a critique of the rather indiscriminate critique of Eurocentricism, an elucidation of the ways in which decolonial thought thematize colonialism and constitutes a regression in terms of how colonialism has been conceptualized, and in terms of how decolonial accounts fundamentally misrecognize and distort the historicity of thought. It concludes with an original formulation of dialectical account of the historicity of thought that adequately accounts for historical sedimentations, genesis and validity, and formulates a dialectical account of originality. Published in Constellations 25 (March 2018): 54-70