Gabriela Segura-Ballar
Department of Latin American and Latino Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz

The coloniality of power refers to a new model of global power which started with the Conquest of the Americas in 1492. This new model of power has two fundamental axes: the idea of race and a new structural control of labor. On the one hand, race and racial identity were established as instruments of social classification and domination of “inferior” or non-European races. Consequently, the idea of race granted legitimacy to the relations of domination imposed by the conquest. The idea of race helped to “naturalize” colonial relations between Europeans and non-Europeans. On the other hand, the new global model of labor, global capitalism, implied the domination/exploitation of race/labor. Additionally, the racist form of controlling labor under world capitalism entailed the articulation of all forms of labor control around capital. 

Eurocentrism refers to a specific rationality or perspective of knowledge associated with Western Europe which became universal (Quijano 2000, 549). This new hegemonic representation and mode of knowing claims universality for itself and relies on “a confusion between abstract universality and the concrete world hegemony derived from Europe’s position as center” (Dussel 2000, 471). Thus, Eurocentrism denotes the new intersubjective universe of the global model of power in which Western Europeans are the only producers and protagonists of modernity. Through the coloniality of power theory, the concept of modernity refers to a new space/time that was constituted materially with America. For Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano, modernity, as experience and as an idea, is colonial from its origin. In sum, coloniality of power refers to the colonial/modern, capitalist, and Eurocentered axis of the global model of power that started with the invention of America. As Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez (2008) argues,

the coloniality of power is a category of analysis that makes reference to the specific structure of domination imposed on the American colonies since 1492. According to Quijano, Spanish colonizers established a relationship of power with the colonized based on ethnic and epistemic superiority of the former over the latter. (281)

The concept of coloniality, introduced by Aníbal Quijano in 1989, refers to the epistemic strategy of domination. While colonialism refers to particular political relations, coloniality refers rather to relations of power, and to conceptions of being and knowing that produce a world divided between legitimate human subjects and others who are fundamentally dispensable, denoting only negative or exotic meaning (Maldonado-Torres 2008, 119). Coloniality is the invisible and constitutive side of modernity. That the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of coloniality are two sides of the same coin is an idea developed by Argentine philosopher and semiotician Walter D. Mignolo. Mignolo builds on the work of Anibal Quijano and argues specifically for the necessity of epistemic decolonization.

The geopolitics of knowledge, a pertinent category broadly utilized by Mignolo, refers to the local historical grounding of knowledge. For Mignolo (2005),

knowledge is always geo-historically and geo-politically located across the epistemic colonial difference. For that reason, the geo-politics of knowledge is the necessary perspective to dispel the Eurocentric assumption that valid and legitimate knowledge shall be sanctioned by Western standards. (43)

Geopolitics of knowledge refers to the process of converting local histories into a unique and universal point of enunciation and production of knowledge. According to Mignolo (2000), the geopolitics of knowledge is organized around the diversification, through history, of the colonial and the imperial differences (59). The irreductible colonial difference refers to “the difference between center and periphery, between the Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism and knowledge production by those who participated in building the modern/colonial world and those who have been left out of the discussion” (Mignolo 2000, 63). Referring to Mignolo’s geopolitics of knowledge, Castro-Gómez (2008) argues that “knowledge that is not produced in the centers of power or in the circuits controlled by them is declared irrelevant and ‘prescientific’…Asia, Africa, and Latin America…are not viewed as producers but rather as consumers of knowledge generated by the centers” (279-280).

For Argentinian philosopher María Lugones, the colonial/modern gender system is constitutive of the coloniality of power. Like race, gender was also an instrument of classification and domination. This process entailed the imposition of the heterosexual understanding of gender relations among the colonized. According to Lugones (2008), “Women racialized as inferior were turned from animals into various modified versions of ‘women’ as it fit the processes of Eurocentered global capitalism” (13). Therefore, we have to add the effects of the coloniality of gender to the material and subjective implications of the coloniality of power, capitalism, and Eurocentrism. Lugones (2008) also specifies that “the gender system is heterosexualist, as heterosexuality permeates racialized patriarchal control over production, including knowledge production, and over collective authority” (15). The gender system constitutes the modern/colonial meaning of “men” and “women.” This gender system has been functional to the capitalist economic system not only because it reproduces domination and the reproduction of labor but also because it makes labor racialized and gendered. For Lugones, Quijano’s idea of the coloniality of power is limited in revealing these gender dynamics. Therefore, Lugones approaches the logic of race and gender and the intersection of these two “structural axes” of global capitalism as necessarily based on oppression, exclusion, and violence.

Puerto Rican sociologist Ramón Grosfoguel also elaborates on the coloniality of power in his analysis of the capitalist world-system. He calls attention to the risks of using a hierarchical theory of power when thinking about the modern/colonial world-system. For Grosfoguel (2011), the colonial power that “arrived in the Americas was a broader and wider entangled power structure that an economic reductionist perspective of the word-system is unable to account for” (8). Therefore, for Grosfoguel, we need to move towards what the Greek sociologist Kyriakos Kontopoulos (1993) called heterarchical thinking. Heterarchical thinking is an attempt to conceptualize structures with a new language that goes beyond the paradigm of Eurocentric social science inherited from the nineteenth century. The old language is for closed systems because it has a unique logic that determines everything else from a single hierarchy of power (Castro-Gómez 2007, 18). When the logic of power is understood in hierarchical terms, global market relations determine the functioning of all other power relations, even at local levels. In contrast, the genealogical analysis thinks of power as a multiple net that functions as a heterarchy where there is no  “basic logic” of power that determines the logic of all other relations.

Grosfoguel conceptualizes the coloniality of power as an entanglement of multiple and heterogeneous global hierarchies (“heterarchies”) of sexual, political, epistemic, economic, spiritual, linguistic, and racial forms of domination and exploitation where the racial/ethnic hierarchy of the European/non-European divide reconfigures all of the other global power structures. For Grosfoguel (2011), what is new in the “coloniality of power” perspective is how the idea of race and racism becomes the organizing principle that structures all of the multiple hierarchies of the world-system (11). The analysis of these entangled heterarchies led Grosfoguel to propose an alternative decolonial conceptualization of the world-system. For the author (2011), 

Given the hegemonic Eurocentric “common sense,” the moment we use the word “capitalism,” people immediately think that we are talking about the “economy”. However, “capitalism” is only one of the multiple entangled constellations of colonial power matrix of what I called, at the risk of sounding ridiculous, “Capitalist/Patriarchal Western-centric/Christian-centric Modern/Colonial World-System.” (13. See also Grosfoguel and Cervantes 2002)

We are living then in the era of the capitalist/patriarchal Western-centric/Christian-centric modern/colonial world-system.

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