Decoloniality

“[…] decoloniality is an orientation and a practice that doesn’t want to be included in modernity. We don’t want to be modern, because for us modernity is the Western project of civilization that is coeval to and inseparable from coloniality. Decolonial thought does not fight for the recognition of being modern, neither for the recognition of contemporaneity. […]

[…] Decolonial delinking and the rejection of modernity as the horizon of expectations is not to be confused with a backward or traditional perspective, it is rather a strong stand for autonomy and dignity, and a radical departure of the historical horizon of Eurocentrism and the dominant West. Decoloniality, as the overcoming of the modern/colonial order, is not just oppositional resistance, it is driven by the struggle for re-existence (Albán Achinte 2009), for dignity and justice. If we look at social movements across the global South (including the South in the North, such as diaspora communities or first nations in Europe, North America, and Oceania) in their different struggles for land, against feminicide, against ecocide, against violence, the common denominator is that they are demanding and fighting for dignity.

Decoloniality is about enabling other worlds to become world. What modernity has done is to suppress the possibility of other worlds to become world (worldlessness). Decoloniality means to reclaim the possibility of naming and inhabiting the world; it is to be able to embody and experience those other worlds. Decoloniality has to do with the question of the vernacular and of verbality; not with having or taking; not with the object but with the verb, with being others and being able to make worlds, recovering the autonomy of naming and worlding our worlds.”