Sociologist and humanist thinker Aníbal Quijano developed the Coloniality of Power concept in the Peruvian Andes, South America. His body of work regarding coloniality began in 1994 with the publication of “Coloniality of Power and Democracy in Latin America”.
Coloniality explains the matrix of power that supports the imperial domination of European capitalists over most of the planet, which endures beyond the physical withdrawal of European imperialists from settler colonies and minimization of direct administrative control.
Coloniality is the dark underside of ‘modernity’, which originated with the Renaissance (15th and 16th centuries) and the Enlightenment (17th and 18th centuries) in Western Europe.
According to Quijano:
Two historical processes converged and established the fundamental axes of the new model of power:
The codification of the differences between conquerors and conquered in the idea of “race,” a supposedly different biological structure that placed some in a natural situation of inferiority to the others.
The control of labor, resources and products. This new structure was an articulation of all historically known previous structures of labor control, slavery, serfdom, small independent commodity production and reciprocity.
Definitions:
Coloniality of Power: The power matrix that operates through control or hegemony over authority, labor, sexuality, and subjectivity, that is, the practical domains of political administration, production, exploitation, personal life and reproduction, world-view and interpretive perspective.
Coloniality: refers to the 'colonial matrix of power' or the coloniality of power. It is the basis and justification for the exploitation of the world and its resources by European systems of domination, e.g. capitalism, imperialism and colonialism.
Decoloniality: to de-link (detach) from the overall colonial power structure in order to engage in reconstitution of ways of thinking, languages, ways of life and being in the world that the rhetoric of modernity disavowed and the logic of coloniality implements.
Colonization: the process of establishing foreign control over target territories or peoples for the purpose of exploitation and extraction of resources, often by establishing settler colonies, e.g. the colonization of the Americas by England, Portugal, France, Spain, et al.
Decolonization: process of colonies becoming independent of the colonial power; the process of freeing institutions, spheres of activity, etc. from the cultural or social effects of colonization.
Nelson Moldonado-Torres Created The 10 Theses On Coloniality/Decoloniality
1. Colonialism, decolonization and related concepts generate anxiety and fear.
2. Coloniality is different from colonialism and decoloniality is different from decolonization.
3. Modernity/coloniality is a form of metaphysical catastrophe that naturalizes war.
4. The immediate effects of modernity/coloniality include: the naturalization of extermination, expropriation, domination, exploitation, early death, and conditions that are worse than death, such as torture and rape.
5. Coloniality involves radical transformation of power, knowledge, and being leading to the coloniality of power, the coloniality of knowledge, and the coloniality of being,
6. Decoloniality is rooted in decolonial turn or turning away from modernity/coloniality.
7. Decoloniality involves decolonial epistemic turn whereby the damned emerges as questioner, thinker, theorist, writer, and communicator.
8. Decoloniality involves an aesthetic, erotic, and spiritual decolonial turn whereby the damned emerges as creator.
9. Decoloniality involves activist decolonial turn whereby the damned emerges as an agent of social change.
10. Decoloniality is a collective project.
Anibal Quijano Is Appreciated!
More than a few intellectuals in Central and South recognized that Quijano’s brilliant analysis explains the epistemic foundations of colonialism, terrain virtually untouched by other popular political analyses, e.g. Marxism.
The establishment of the Colonial Matrix of Power accompanied colonization and guided the destruction of the epistemology of conquered peoples in the Americas and Afrika.
Epistemology is the Theory of Knowledge and is concerned with the mind's relation to reality. Consequently, corruption and/or control of the knowledge of colonial subjects negatively effects the ability to discern reality from falsehood.
Once the epistemology of the conquered peoples lay in tatters, domination and control became much less demanding on the resources and manpower of imperial powers, thereby enabling wide ranging incorporation of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. The same holds true of Afrika.
Today, Afrikans and Indigenous Americans struggle within the aftermath of epistemic destruction and replacement with knowledge production suitable for dependent colonial subjects. Such knowledge production is redirected from serving the Self in the struggle to survive to serving the Imperial Other in order to facilitate the exploitation of labor and natural resources.
The Coloniality of Power theory is very welcome in the ongoing struggle to decolonize the planet, and restore the epistemology, land and resources of Afrikans and Indigenous Americans.