Introduction: On the Onto- epistemological Significance of Decolonial AestheSis #1011817

Il presente estratto è parte del volume Visual Narratives, Aesthetics and Decoloniality: Imagery and the Construction of the ‘Other’. Vol. 1 – Decolonial Aesthetics, Ontologies and Epistemologies, a cura di Tomás Cajueiro e Estevão Bosco pubblicato da Ventura Edizioni.

Colonialism is not to be confused with coloniality. As Quijano argues, colonialism refers to a system of control of political authority, natural resources and labor by a foreign political order. It is not, in the strict sense, a modern phenomenon. It arguably relates to coloniality historically, as its material structure. However, the latter highlights a more subtle dimension: power-laden symbolic forms that legitimize colonial domination and, as such, that are intersub- jectively pervasive. The modern ethnic-racial classification of humanity on an evolutionary scale, the global imposition of a mode of knowing characterized by segmentation, quantification, and objectification of social relationships and the relation to nature, all are conducive to coloniality. It is, therefore, a form of internalized ethnocentrism whereby the dominant imposes on the dominated their way of being. Eurocentrism, i.e., the claim to universality of European modernity, is the organized historical form coloniality takes (Quijano, 2000b)