Decolonizing Philosophy San Antonio.pdf

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.

APA Newsletter on Hispanic/Latino Issues in Philosophy, 2021

Meditation on decolonizing the discipline of philosophy, combating epistemic extractivism, and exploring the abolition of the canon. A defense of decolonizing philosophy as a counter-catastrophic task, and of decolonial philosophical thinking as a collective and intergenerational project, modeled on the movement-based theorizing of organizations such as Decolonize this Place and the International Imagination of Anti-National and Anti-Imperialist Feelings (IIAAF). Complete newsletter can be downloaded here: https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.apaonline.org/resource/collection/60044C96-F3E0-4049-BC5A-271C673FA1E5/HispanicV21n1.pdf?fbclid=IwAR3ASaqKEJzq9qhNxSrP1V1R_J2NYTTnvEAFk1dg2MKAqnZvX62Wa8mr3d8

The Pluralist , 2018

This essay offers an account of the philosophical significance of liberation and prescribes the special place the idea of liberation ought to hold in the context of inter-American philosophical dialogue. Drawing from Latin American liberation philosophy, as well as philosophical and theoretical discourses and debates that can be considered part of a larger liberatory tradition, my goal is to explore the idea of liberation as a process, or perhaps more appropriately a praxis, harboring both critical and creative potentialities.

Decolonizing Western Philosophy, 2023

Thanks to increased postcolonial awareness, Western philosophy today must question itself as to what extent it has contributed epistemologically and terminologically to the subjugation of the global South and to the discrimination or even enslavement of its population.

collaborated with an interdisciplinary committee of UT-LLILAS affiliated professors to invite a group of distinguished scholars and activists from Latin America and the Caribbean as well as the United States to have a three-day conversation on the contemporary challenges facing Afrodescendant and indigenous populations in Latin America. We asked presenters to comment on the differences and commonalities of the social claims of these two groups and if it was possible to talk about a "politics of solidarity" between them. This, in itself, was a challenging task since these groups historically have been subjected to different forms of structural racism, and as a consequence have been represented as antagonists and set against one another in Latin American, as well as U.S., colonial modernities. As we argued in our call for papers: We seek to explore and problematize this divide, without assuming that it should be eliminated, or that it should stay in place. Rather, our guiding premise is that rigorous historical, humanistic, and social analysis of the underlying question will both energize scholarly debates, and contribute to the bridge-building of commonality and difference, from which the struggles of both peoples stand to benefit.

Geography Compass, 2013

The Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality (MCD) research program is a collective project associated with Latin America. In addition to a critique of Eurocentric "colonial modernity," the project highlights non-Eurocentric forms of knowing and being in the world. It also aims to foster alternative or decolonial thinking emerging from the lived colonial experiences of those situated "outside" Europe. This last is what MCD proponents claim differentiates it from postcolonial critiques of modernity with their emphasis on deconstruction. This review provides a brief but critical overview of the MCD project's parameters and claims. It makes a cautionary call to those tempted by "alternatives to modernity," who might want to uncritically adopt alternative decolonial thinking. It concludes with a call for a closer and critical engagement with Latin American decolonial ideas and those they contest.

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

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