• DOI:10.1080/09502380601164353
• Corpus ID: 144975976

COLONIALITY AND MODERNITY/RATIONALITY

@article{Quijano2007COLONIALITYAM,
  title={COLONIALITY AND MODERNITY/RATIONALITY},
  author={An{\'i}bal Quijano},
  journal={Cultural Studies},
  year={2007},
  volume={21},
  pages={168 - 178}
}

• A. Quijano
• Published 1 March 2007
• Political Science, History
• Cultural Studies

With the conquest of the societies and the cultures which inhabit what today is called Latin America, began the constitution of a new world order, culminating, five hundred years later, in a global power covering the whole planet. This process implied a violent concentration of the world’s resources under the control and for the benefit of a small European minority and above all, of its ruling classes. Although occasionally moderated when faced with the revolt of the dominated, this process has continued ever since. But, now during the current crisis, such concentration is being realized with a new impetus, in a way perhaps even more violent and on a much larger, global scale. The ‘Western’ European dominators and their Euro-North American descendants are still the principal beneficiaries, together with the nonEuropean part of the world not quite former European colonies, Japan mainly, and mainly their ruling classes. The exploited and the dominated of Latin America and Africa are the main victims. A relation of direct, political, social and cultural domination was established by the Europeans over the conquered of all continents. This domination is known as a specific Eurocentered colonialism. In its political, above all the formal and explicit aspect, this colonial domination has been defeated in the large majority of the cases. America was the first stage of that defeat, and afterwards, since the Second World War, Asia and Africa. Thus the Eurocentered colonialism, in the sense of a formal system of political domination by Western European societies over others seems a question of the past. Its successor, Western imperialism, is an association of social interests between the dominant groups (‘social classes’ and/or ‘ethnies’) of countries with unequally articulated power, rather than an imposition from the outside. However, that specific colonial structure of power produced the specific social discriminations which later were codified as ‘racial’, ‘ethnic’, ‘anthropological’ or ‘national’, according to the times, agents, and populations involved. These intersubjective constructions, product of Eurocentered colonial domination were even assumed to be ‘objective’, ‘scientific’, categories, then of a historical significance. That is, as natural phenomena, not referring to the history of power. This power structure was, and still is, the framework within which operate the other social relations of classes or estates. In fact, if we observe the main lines of exploitation and social domination on a global scale, the main lines of world power today, and the distribution of