Coloniality of knowledge
Coloniality of knowledge is a concept that Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano developed and adapted to contemporary decolonial thinking.
Fregoso Bailón and De Lissovoy argue that Hatuey, a Taíno warrior from La Española (which contains Haiti and the Dominican Republic), was among the first to recognize "Western knowledge as a colonial discourse".
It lives on in literature, academic achievement standards, cultural trends, common sense, people's self-images, personal goals, and other aspects of modern life.
It works by constructing binary hierarchical relationships between "the categories of object" and symbolizes a specific secular, instrumental, and "technocratic rationality" that Quijano contextualizes in reference to the mid-seventeen century West European thought and the demands of nineteenth-century global capitalist expansion.
[8] For Quijano, it codifies relations between Western Europe and the rest of the world using categories such as "primitive-civilized", "irrational-rational", and "traditional-modern"; and creates distinctions and hierarchies between them so "non-Europe" is aligned with the past and is thus "inferior, if not always primitive".
[20]The subject-object dualism proposed by Quijano and other decolonial thinkers such as Enrique Dussel is based on a particular reading of René Descartes' idea of cogito.
[20][21] Before Lyotard, Vattimo and Derrida in Europe, the Argentine Enrique Dussel signalled the consequences of Heidegger's critique of Western metaphysics and drew attention to the intrinsic relation between the modern subject of the Enlightenment and European colonial power.
Behind the Cartesian ego cogito, which inaugurates modernity, there is a hidden logocentrism through which the enlightened subject divinizes itself and becomes a kind of demiurge capable of constituting and dominating the world of objects.
The modern ego cogito thus becomes the will to power: "I think" is equivalent to "I conquer", the epistemic foundation upon which European domination has been based since the 16th century.
Scholars in metropolitan institutions were eventually given precedence in the discipline's rank and hierarchy, while those in the global south were considered as "local enablers or collaborators on the ground".
[30] Although this has been defined as a historical situation, Shepherd said this practice continues, and forms the structural and logistical aspects of the coloniality of knowledge.
It entails comprehending how the conjoined settings of colonialism and modernity manifest themselves in the ways knowledge is conceptualized and formed in various disciplines.
[30] Similarly, Aram Ziai et al identified the "problem of coloniality" in three distinct but interconnected levels of knowledge production.
[36] An example of the latter is a 2012 chapter by Sarah Lucia Hoagland that cites Quijano and says that Cartesian methodology practices "the cognitive dismissal of all that lies outside of its bounds of sense ... resulting in a highly sophisticated Eurocentrism".
[38] Chambers recognized "the problematic political and sociological dimensions of knowledge production", which he said the decolonial thinkers also emphasized, but he objected to some of the underlying arguments of the thesis, which blamed Cartesian epistemology for "unjust structures of global knowledge production"; he argued that this thesis fails to explain how Cartesian epistemology has had the impact claimed by the decolonial thinkers.
Chambers said: Quijano's claims are based on a questionable connection between the Cartesian epistemological categories of subject and object and the ideological and racist belief that Europeans were naturally superior to Indians and other colonized peoples who were deemed – although not by all Europeans, e.g. Las Casas – to be inferior because incapable of rational thought and hence more akin to children and therefore effectively non-autonomous "objects".
