Gênese e missão social do pensamento decolonial

Abstract

This dissertation aims to explain the genesis of decolonial thought, that is, the emergence of this thought from a specific historical context, in which objective and subjective conditions acted as enablers. Regarding the objective factors, we highlight how the events of the 20th century triggered transformations in the mode of knowledge production at various levels. The successive crises of capitalism, the emergence of anti-colonial struggle, the rise and fall of the socialist alternative, and the reconfiguration of the institutional models of scientific endeavor during the Cold War formed the material basis that raised the questions that decolonial thought and its predecessors sought to answer. As for subjective factors, we seek to reconstruct a particular trajectory amid the long process of crisis in “Western rationalism,” in which structuralism played a fundamental role. Transformed into poststructuralism in American universities, it gave rise to the postcolonial perspectives from which decolonial thought emerged and needed to differentiate itself in order to consolidate its own identity. Finally, based on an analysis of the texts and the trajectory of the three main decolonial theorists at the moment of genesis (Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, and Enrique Dussel), we extracted the ultimate consequences of the object in question in order to understand the role it can play in historical development, that is, its social mission.