Books, that subtle dominion that has taken the place of the colonialism of the past

ROMA – Friday 11 October at 6pm, la GRIOT library – via Santa Cecilia 1/aa Rome Trastevere – hosts the presentation of “Decoloniality. Concepts, analysis and practices” by Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, published by Castelvecchi Publisher. Together with Walter D. Mignolo, the editor of the volume Tommaso Visone, Andrea Caroselli, L’Orientale University and Claudia De Martino, Sapienza University of Rome, participate in the discussion.

Subtle domination instead of colonialism. Decolonization has failed – we read in the note accompanying the announcement of the presentation – therefore one decoloniality it is more necessary and urgent than ever. Colonial power and coloniality they survive in economic, racial and gender hierarchies, in a system that wants to make itself invisible and which the whole world has now introjected as natural”. The subtle dominion of coloniality it has therefore taken the place of colonialism as a political order: the matrix of a thought and a civilization – the so-called Western “modernity”. – which are not conceived as particular, historically given, but as universal and superior.

That “duty” to civilize the barbarians. A civilization that claims the moral duty to civilize the barbarians; therefore to deny at the cost of violence alternative “knowledge, subjectivity, perceptions of the world and visions of life” wherever they arise, in the former colonies as in the West itself. For thirty years, decolonial studies and practices have been building a different future. Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, leading exponents of decoloniality at an international level, work on the liberation of the imagination, rediscovering the “revolutionary unpredictability” of the Other and cultivating a “border thought” that goes beyond the conceptual horizon of modernity: «The master’s tools will never destroy the master’s house».

Our “peripheral” West. Decoloniality it is a decisive text for accessing one of the most heated debates of contemporary times – we read again in the note – to reflect on the sense of inferiority that even our “peripheral” West has internalized in decades of cultural subordination; to adopt social models as distant from the nation-state as from consumer globalism, following the path of the communities that have already brought life to life decoloniality «as an option, a perspective, an analytic, a project, a practice».