ABSTRACT
Decolonising Political Concepts joins a growing inter-disciplinary line of enquiry into the constitutive role of colonialism and empire in the making of the modern world. The onto-political concepts that compose the architecture of political modernity – sovereignty, democracy, freedom, the notion of the subject, and agency, among others – come under scrutiny here for the occlusion of the hidden transcripts of imperial and colonial violence that underpin modern liberal and heterodox political imaginaries. Calling attention to sexual violence as pre-eminently political, given the “locality of violence”, Cienfuegos Martínez’s argument helps re-locate the problem of sexual violence from its normalised registers of inter-personal relations, or as a technology of war in conflict zones. Post-colonial aspirations and roadmaps, as Arjun Appadurai once put it, unfold within a dialectic of desire for and resistance against “modernity” in all its symbolic and material complexity.
