Although he spent his year in France as a resident at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Paris, Pierre Gaussens worked as a sociologist at the College of Mexico in Mexico City, an establishment of higher education and research in the human sciences. It was from Latin America that he edited, together with his colleague Gaya Makaran, the work Critique of decolonial reason. On an intellectual counterrevolution (L’Echappée, 256 pages, 19 euros), which brings together anticolonial authors critical of decolonial studies and their “disruptive strategy”.
What exactly does decolonial studies, which has become a highly controversial movement, mean?
Decolonial studies were promoted by the Modernity/Coloniality group, an interdisciplinary network formed in the early 2000s by Latin American intellectuals, mainly based in the United States. It counted, among its best-known leaders, the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano (1928-2018), the Argentine semiologist Walter Mignolo, the American-Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar and the Mexican philosopher of Argentine origin Enrique Dussel (1934-2023). Decolonial studies are plural, but they revolve around a common denominator that makes 1492 a crucial date in history. The arrival of Christopher Columbus in America, inaugurating European colonization, would have marked the entry into a pattern of power that endures to this day. This pattern is reflected in the central concept of “coloniality”, an axis of racial domination that would have permeated all spheres: power, knowledge, gender, culture.
Its substance is defined by the other key concept of decolonial studies, Eurocentrism, which designates the destructive hegemony that Western thought would have exercised, annihilating the knowledge, culture and mythology of dominated peoples. The decolonial current is based on this intellectual diagnosis, but claiming from the beginning a political ambition: this group sought to position itself as a vanguard with a view to influencing Latin American social movements and leftist governments. It was thus born from the criticism of postcolonial studies, founded in the 1980s in India before spreading to the United States. Decolonialists will criticize them for limiting themselves to a “scholastic” criticism, focused on literary and philosophical studies and devoid of political objectives.
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