ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an epistemic dimension to our understanding and analysis of modernity. It does so by exploring the epistemic discourses of Anibal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Enrique Dussel, and Boaventura De Sousa Santos. These scholars have evolved into what may now be rightly called a “school” – the Modernity/Coloniality Collective – whose chief concern has been to theorize the epistemic implications of modernity. This chapter engages the concept of “coloniality,” a concept that allows us to see the underside of modernity. Coloniality ties modernity to racism, colonialist violence, and, above all, epistemic hegemony/injustice, that is, the subjugation of knowledges and knowledge-productions from the “Global South” by those of the “Global North.” Though the concept of coloniality was coined by Anibal Quijano, this chapter shows how it has been appropriated by Mignolo, Dussel, and Sousa Santos in their individual attempts to analyze the politics of knowledge in our modern world and how this has epistemically shortchanged certain parts of the world while privileging others. Finally, this chapter evaluates their key proposals for achieving decoloniality and a more epistemically balanced world.
