The Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano is widely considered to be a foundational figure of the decolonial perspective grounded in three basic concepts: coloniality, coloniality of power, and the colonial matrix of power. His decolonial theorizations of these three concepts have transformed the principles and assumptions of the very idea of knowledge, impacted the social sciences and humanities, and questioned the myth of rationality in natural sciences. The essays in this volume encompass nearly thirty years of Quijano’s work, bringing them to an English-reading audience for the first time. This volume is not simply an introduction to Quijano’s work; it achieves one of his unfulfilled goals: to write a book that contains his main hypotheses, concepts, and arguments. In this regard, the collection encourages a fuller understanding and broader implementation of the analyses and concepts that he developed over the course of his long career. Moreover, it demonstrates that the tools for reading and dismantling coloniality originated outside the academy in Latin America and the former Third World.

One of the prominent thinkers in the Social Sciences, Aníbal Quijano (1930–2018), has a fundamental work for the compression of contemporary dilemmas since his main theoretical and political concerns have always been linked to the mutations of world capitalism and its reverse paths. This book aims to contribute with analyses of his voluminous and diversified production distributed practically over 60 years of intellectual trajectory. In the first decades, the Peruvian author produced essential works on peasant movements, the urbanization process, and the class structure in Peru and Latin America by mobilizing sociological categories such as marginality, dependency and structural heterogeneity. He devoted himself to investigating imperialist domination in Peru and its implications for social classes and created the journal Sociedad y Política. In the 1990s and 2000s, the Peruvian sociologist published a set of texts on the coloniality and decoloniality of power, which represents a theoretical construction inseparable from the processes and experiences that were occurring in Peru, Latin America and the world, from the “globalization” of “neoliberalism” to global and local resistances. Thus, this book is addressed to all those, with or without specialized training in social sciences, interested in knowing not only the history of social sciences in Latin America but mainly in understanding the historical roots and the political dilemmas of peripheral capitalist societies.

A state-of-the-art anthology of postcolonial theory and practice in the Latin American context.

This translation of Rita Segato’s seminal book La crítica de la colonialidad en ocho ensayos offers an anthropological and critical perspective on the coloniality of power as theorized by the Peruvian thinker Aníbal Quijano. Segato begins with an overview of Quijano’s conceptual framework, emphasizing the power and richness of his theory and its relevance to a range of fields. Each of the seven subsequent chapters presents a scenario in which a persistent colonial structure or form of subjectivity can be identified. These essays address urgent issues of gender, sexuality, race and racism, and indigenous forms of life. They set the decolonial perspective to work, and are connected by two central preoccupations: the critical analysis of coloniality and the effort to reimagine anthropology as "responsive anthropology," a practice at once answerable and useful to the communities previously regarded as the "objects" of ethnographic thought. The Critique of the Coloniality makes important and original contributions to our understanding of colonial and decolonial processes, drawing on the author’s experience of feminist and antiracist movements and struggles for indigenous and human rights. This book will appeal to students and scholars working in anthropology, Latin American studies, political theory, feminist and gender studies, indigenous studies, and anticolonial, post-colonial, and decolonial thought.

Bread and Beauty is a study of the works and life of José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930), the autodidact Peruvian scholar and revolutionary activist frequently considered the most important Latin American Marxist.

In this book the author critiques the work of various writers within the framework of a globalized study of the Americas.