Nelson Maldonado-Torres

On the coloniality of being : Contributions to the development of a concept

The concept of coloniality of Being emerged in discussions of a diverse group of scholars doing work on coloniality and decolonization. More particularly, we owe the idea to Walter D. Mignolo, who reflected on it in writing as early as 1995. I do not remember exactly when it was that I heard or read the term for the first time I believe that it was in 2000 in a talk given by Mignolo at Boston College but I do know that since I heard it, it caught my attention in an unusual way. The reason was that when I heard it I had already spent some time working on the thought of Martin Heidegger and some of his critics who engaged his work from the perspective of questions related to race and the colonial experience. Heidegger, who is considered by many one of the two most original European philosophers of the twentieth century (the other being Ludwig Wittgenstein), left an indelible mark in European philosophy by continuing Nietzsche’s frontal attack of modernity and epistemologicallycentered philosophy with an elaboration of what he referred to as fundamental ontology. Heidegger’s formulation of a new starting point for philosophy consisted in a rearticulation of the question of Being, which influenced many other intellectuals thereafter, the most notable perhaps being the FrenchAlgerian philosopher Jacques Derrida. I was introduced to Heidegger by Joan Stambaugh who spent some time working with him in Germany. She translated several of his works in English, including Heidegger’s magnus opus Being and Time . After I read Heidegger with her, I began to engage the phenomenological tradition and particularly the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Edmund Husserl, and eventually also Jacques Derrida. I gradually became aware, at least to the extent that a young scholar can be, of the varied accents, the original approaches, and the different questions that were at the center of these and other philosophers who drew ideas from phenomenology. But it was not until I read the work of the Lithuanian Jewish thinker Emmanuel Lévinas that I woke up from what I would call my ‘phenomenological and ontological slumber’. Lévinas’s work was not only a variation of European philosophy or the phenomenological theme. In Lévinas I found a more radical subversion of Western philosophy. He thought through not only Greek and European, but also Judaic sources. Jewish concepts and ideas replaced Greek and Christian concepts in key parts

La descolonización y el giro des-colonial

Resumen es: Este articulo delinea dos asuntos relativos a la descolonizacion del ser y del saber. El primero versa sobre la vigencia actual de la descolonizacion, y ...Este articulo delinea dos asuntos relativos a la descolonizacion del ser y del saber. El primero versa sobre la vigencia actual de la descolonizacion, y el segundo sobre la idea de un giro des-colonial. Este segundo tema conlleva la discusion acerca de la idea de descolonizacion, cuyo origen se encuentra en el horror ante el «mundo de la muerte» creado por la colonizacion. Ese escandalo u horror es tambien el fundamento central de lo que el autor denomina la actitud des-colonial. Esta actitud es la base principal para una postura etico-politica y teorica que plantea nuevas bases para el conocer, lo que se denomina como la razon des-colonial. Tanto la actitud como la razon des-coloniales son partes fundamentales de lo que se presenta aqui como el giro des-colonial, el que plantea la descolonizacion (y no la modernidad) como proyecto todavia inacabado a nivel global

Los latinos, los migrantes y la descolonización del Imperio estadounidense en el siglo XXI

Resumen es: Este articulo analiza las marchas multitudinarias de inmigrantes en los Estados Unidos durante los meses de marzo, abril y mayo de 2006 en los Estados Un...