Modernity-Coloniality School
from 1998
Colonialism ended and coloniality did not: the hierarchies of race, knowledge and labour it installed still organise the world.
- Active
- from 1998
- Where
- Peru, Argentina, Puerto Rico and the United States
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- Latin American
The claim
Coloniality is the underside of modernity, not its lag. Race was invented to organise labour in the Americas, and the resulting hierarchy outlived the empires that created it.
What it held
Quijano's concept of the coloniality of power is the school's foundation. Race, he argues, is not an older category that colonialism exploited but one produced by it: a classification of populations invented in the sixteenth-century Americas to allocate who does which work, and then naturalised as biology.
Mignolo added the epistemic dimension. Knowledge produced in Europe presents itself as coming from nowhere — the zero point, a view without a location — while all other knowledge is marked as local. His response is border thinking: theorising deliberately from the position colonial difference assigns you.
Lugones brought gender in, arguing that the colonial system imposed a gender binary that did not exist in the same form in the societies it reached, so that the coloniality of gender is not a separate topic but part of the same operation.
The school's most contested claim is delinking — that the answer is not inclusion in the existing framework of knowledge but the building of another. Critics ask what that would look like in practice, and the answers are so far more programmatic than worked out.
How it argued
Historical and structural analysis of the world system from 1492, combined with epistemology of location and critique of the disciplines.
What it was arguing against
Eurocentric accounts of modernity, developmentalism, and the assumption that decolonisation was completed when the flags changed.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether delinking is possible or coherent. Whether the framework applies outside the Americas. Whether it reproduces the essentialism it criticises.
Common misconceptions
That it is only about the past. Coloniality is defined precisely as what persists after colonial administration ends, and the claim is about present arrangements.
How it began
A working group formed in the late 1990s across several universities, drawing on dependency theory, world-systems analysis and liberation philosophy.
What became of it
Living and expanding, with substantial presence in anthropology, literary study and area studies as well as philosophy.
Lasting influence
Decolonial approaches across the humanities and social sciences. The vocabulary — coloniality, epistemicide, border thinking — is now widely used.
Why it still matters
Arguments about whose knowledge counts, in universities, in development policy and in global health, are conducted in largely these terms.
Put another way
A building whose scaffolding was removed and whose structure it had already become.
Where to start
Quijano's essay. It is thirty pages and the concept is stated fully in it.
The surprising bit
Quijano's argument is that race was invented rather than discovered — that the category was produced in the sixteenth-century Americas to organise labour, and only afterwards given a biological story.
In their own words
Coloniality of power is the most general form of domination in the world today.
There is no modernity without coloniality.
Connections
- Opposed by
- Latin American Positivism
The verdict
A framework built from Latin American materials that has reorganised how a good deal of the world's scholarship describes itself.