Decolonizing Struggles in Latin America Today

In spite of its dogmatic universalistic pretensions, hegemonic social science and liberal democracy should be understood as one of many possible historical options. These constitute distinct cultural alternatives that do not exhaust the possibilities of forms of knowledge or of the construction of plural and democratic coexistence between the human beings. They are the product of a specific historical experience and a particular mode of production, and specific ways or relating to so-called “nature”.

          As has been argued by Aníbal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo and others who have been working within the modernity/coloniality perspective, the experience of modernity has meant something radically different for the North and the South. What has been characterized as the luminous nature of modernity by the philosophers of the enlightenment is only the bright side of a worldwide historical process that has its dark underside in the existence of the colonies without which the bright side would not have been possible. In the North, modernity eventually lead to material abundance, citizenship, democracy, science and modern technology. For the majority of the planet’s population living in the colonized, subjugated South, modernity has been an experience of imperial and colonial domination, genocide and slavery. This dark underside is as modern, as essential a component of the modern experience as the experience of the North. Colonialism, genocide and slavery were not in any way pre-modern. They are constitutive of the global modern experience. Eurocentric social sciences have overall erased this history and attempted to interpret a self-centered European history as Universal History and to characterized its particular political system (liberal democracy) as the “normal”, “modern” universal template that the rest of the world has to replicate.