Through subaltern frames: Postcolonial and decolonial knowledges

‘Coloniality of power’ has been used widely by sociologists and intellectuals of Latin America from the mid 1990s, in order to designate processes – much wider than empire – that transformed modern colonialism into global colonialism both in an epistemological and a historical frame. It follows that decolonization did not bring an end to ‘coloniality’, an integral feature of modernity. This is to say that decoloniality is a project of struggle that seeks to delink coloniality and modernity on two planes. First, a relocation of thought in order to unmask the limited and situated nature of modern knowledge(s) ever linked to coloniality; and second, ‘an-other thinking that connects real experiences with intellectual and intercultural dialogue, particularly within the South’. Such focus on experiences of decolonization and anti-colonial struggles all over the world has intimate links with strands of postcolonial thought and subaltern theory, in particular their recent insistence on the significance not only of experience but also of affect. My paper will explore these links in order to bring postcolonial thought and decoloniality into a critical dialogue and creative tension, teasing out the possibilities of both for future work entailing epistemological, ethnographic, and historical understandings.