Decoloniality

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Decoloniality is term used principally by an emerging Latin American movement which
focuses on understanding modernity in the context of a form of critical theory applied to
ethnic studies. It has been described as consisting of analytic and practical options
confronting and delinking from [...] the colonial matrix of power (Mignolo 2011: xxvii).
As such it can be contrasted with coloniality which is the underlying logic of the
foundation and unfolding of Western civilization from the Renaissance to today, a logic
that was the basis of historical colonialisms, although this foundational interconnectedness
is often downplayed (Mignolo 2011:2). This logic is commonly referred to as the colonial
matrix of power or coloniality of power.
Although formal and explicit colonization ended with the decolonization of the Americas
during the nineteenth century and the decolonization of much of the global south in the late
twentieth century, its successors, Western imperialism and globalization perpetuate those
inequalities. The colonial matrix of power produced social discrimination eventually
codified as racial, ethnic, anthropological or national according to specific historic,
social, and geographic contexts (Quijano 2007: 168). Decoloniality emerged at the moment
when the colonial matrix of power was put into place during the sixteenth century. It is, in
effect, a continuing confrontation of, and delinking from, Eurocentrism : the idea that the
history of human civilization has been a trajectory that departed from nature and
culminated in Europe, also that differences between Europe and non-Europe are due to
biological differen