Nelson Maldonado-Torres (born 1971, in San Juan, Puerto Rico) is a Puerto Rican philosopher and professor in Philosophy at University of Connecticut-Storrs. [1] He received his PhD from Brown University in Religious Studies. [2] His work has been influential in contributing to ideas about decoloniality [3] decolonizing epistemology, [4] and in critiquing Western liberalism and Eurocentrism. [5] [6] He is influenced by the works of Frantz Fanon, Emmanuel Levinas, and Enrique Dussel. [7]
He critiques the notion of representational politics as being enough to contribute to systemic change. [5] His work has been described as "animated by an ethic of decolonial love." [8] He is also noted for contributing to discourse on the decolonial turn. [9] [10] [11]
He was the head of the Caribbean Philosophical Association from 2008 to 2013. [12] He was one of the signatories to support the creation for a Latina/o Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States. [12]
Pedro Albizu Campos was a Puerto Rican attorney and politician, and a leading figure in the Puerto Rican independence movement. He was the president and spokesperson of the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico from 1930 until his death. He led the nationalist revolts of October 1950 against the United States government in Puerto Rico. Albizu Campos spent a total of twenty-six years in prison at various times for his Puerto Rican independence activities.
Morovis is a town and municipality of Puerto Rico located in the central region of the island, north of Orocovis, south of Manatí, Vega Baja and Vega Alta; east of Ciales, and west of Corozal. Morovis is spread over 13 barrios and Morovis Pueblo. It is part of the San Juan-Caguas-Guaynabo Metropolitan Statistical Area.
The Ponce massacre was an event that took place on Palm Sunday, March 21, 1937, in Ponce, Puerto Rico, when a peaceful civilian march turned into a police shooting in which 17 civilians and two policemen were killed, and more than 200 civilians wounded. None of the civilians were armed and most of the dead were reportedly shot in their backs. The march had been organized by the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party to commemorate the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico by the governing Spanish National Assembly in 1873, and to protest the U.S. government's imprisonment of the Party's leader, Pedro Albizu Campos, on sedition charges.
The Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico is a Puerto Rican political party founded on September 17, 1922, in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Its primary goal is to work for Puerto Rico's independence. The Party's selection in 1930 of Pedro Albizu Campos as its president brought a radical change to the organization and its tactics.
Puerto Rican literature is the body of literature produced by writers of Puerto Rican descent. It evolved from the art of oral storytelling. Written works by the indigenous inhabitants of Puerto Rico were originally prohibited and repressed by the Spanish colonial government.
Walter D. Mignolo is an Argentine semiotician and professor at Duke University who has published extensively on semiotics and literary theory, and worked on different aspects of the modern and colonial world, exploring concepts such as decoloniality, global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge, transmodernity, border thinking, and pluriversality. He is one of the founders of the modernity/coloniality critical school of thought.
Enrique Domingo Dussel Ambrosini was an Argentine-Mexican academic, philosopher, historian and theologian. He served as the interim rector of the Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México from 2013 to 2014.
The Utuado uprising, also known as the Utuado revolt or El Grito de Utuado, refers to the revolt against the United States government in Puerto Rico which occurred on October 30, 1950, in the town of Utuado. There were simultaneous revolts in various other towns in Puerto Rico, including the capital of San Juan and the cities of Mayaguez and Arecibo, plus major confrontations in the city of Ponce and the towns of Peñuelas and Jayuya.
José Maldonado, a.k.a. "Aguila Blanca", was a Puerto Rican revolutionary who fought with the Cuban Liberation Army and whose controversial exploits in Puerto Rico have contributed to making him part of Puerto Rican lore.
Aníbal Quijano was a Peruvian sociologist and humanist thinker, known for having developed the concepts of "coloniality of power" and "coloniality of knowledge". His body of work has been influential in the fields of decolonial studies and critical theory.
The coloniality of power is a concept interrelating the practices and legacies of European colonialism in social orders and forms of knowledge, advanced in postcolonial studies, decoloniality, and Latin American subaltern studies, most prominently by Anibal Quijano. It identifies and describes the living legacy of colonialism in contemporary societies in the form of social discrimination that outlived formal colonialism and became integrated in succeeding social orders. The concept identifies the racial, political and social hierarchical orders imposed by European colonialism in Latin America that prescribed value to certain peoples/societies while disenfranchising others.
María Cristina Lugones was an Argentine feminist philosopher, activist, and Professor of Comparative Literature and of women's studies at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota and at Binghamton University in New York State. She identified as a U.S-based woman of color and theorized this category as a political identity forged through feminist coalitional work.
Decoloniality is a school of thought that aims to delink from Eurocentric knowledge hierarchies and ways of being in the world in order to enable other forms of existence on Earth. It critiques the perceived universality of Western knowledge and the superiority of Western culture, including the systems and institutions that reinforce these perceptions. Decolonial perspectives understand colonialism as the basis for the everyday function of capitalist modernity and imperialism.
Coloniality of gender is a concept developed by Argentine philosopher Maria Lugones. Building off Aníbal Quijano's foundational concept of coloniality of power, coloniality of gender explores how European colonialism influenced and imposed European gender structures on Indigenous peoples of the Americas. This concept challenges the notion that gender can be isolated from the impacts of colonialism.
Santiago Castro-Gómez is a Colombian philosopher, a professor at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and the director of the Pensar Institute in Bogotá.
Ramón Grosfoguel is a Puerto Rican sociologist who belongs to the Modernity / Coloniality Group who is a professor emeritus of Chicano/Latino Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at University of California, Berkeley.
Decolonization of knowledge is a concept advanced in decolonial scholarship that critiques the perceived hegemony of Western knowledge systems. It seeks to construct and legitimize other knowledge systems by exploring alternative epistemologies, ontologies and methodologies. It is also an intellectual project that aims to "disinfect" academic activities that are believed to have little connection with the objective pursuit of knowledge and truth. The presumption is that if curricula, theories, and knowledge are colonized, it means they have been partly influenced by political, economic, social and cultural considerations. The decolonial knowledge perspective covers a wide variety of subjects including philosophy, science, history of science, and other fundamental categories in social science.
Philippe Corcuff is a French academic, full professor in political science at the Institut d'études politiques de Lyon since October 1992 and member of the CERLIS laboratory since October 2003. Politically committed to the left, with a trajectory that took him from social democracy to pragmatic anarchism, via the ecologists and the New Anti-Capitalist Party, he defines himself as an “anti-globalization and libertarian activist”. He was a columnist for the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo from 2001 to 2004.
Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni is a Professor and Chair of Epistemologies of the Global South at the University of Bayreuth, Germany.
Coloniality of knowledge is a concept that Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano developed and adapted to contemporary decolonial thinking. The concept critiques what proponents call the Eurocentric system of knowledge, arguing the legacy of colonialism survives within the domains of knowledge. For decolonial scholars, the coloniality of knowledge is central to the functioning of the coloniality of power and is responsible for turning colonial subjects into victims of the coloniality of being, a term that refers to the lived experiences of colonized peoples.