ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the decolonial authors complementary conceptualisation of Orientalism and Occidentalism and their articulations with global designs of the modern/colonial world-system in order to retrace the impact of strategies of racialisation, ethnicisation and gendering on Western discourses of difference since the European colonial expansion. The decolonial perspective thus differs from Western orthodox Marxism in that it locates the question of race, not of class, at the root of global capitalism, while at the same time replacing the unqualified postmodern notion of difference by the ones of imperial and colonial difference. The decolonial approach ultimately contends that colonial relations have not ended with the juridical and administrative decolonisation taking place at the end of World War II, but are still at work in processes of political intervention, economic exploitation and epistemological patronage exercised by the West on the Rest.