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Embers of the past: the coloniality of time

In recent decades a critical turn has taken place in Latin American studies, with the emergence of, first, the Latin American Subaltern Studies group, and then, the Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality project. This has constituted a radical shift in ways of talking about Latin America, identity, subalternity and modernity. Most recently, this has resulted in an epistemological shift in the approach to the conquest, the colonial period, and the examination of modernity/coloniality. Decolonial scholarship links the conquest of the Americas to today’s global structures of power through a racialized logic that has ranked humanity and legitimized the subjugation of Indigenous peoples—what the Peruvian Anibal Quijano has termed ‘the colonial matrix of power’. A defining feature of Western modernity—and of the imposition of Western culture, knowledge, values and institutions on a global scale—is the belief in the racial superiority of Western Europeans. In this way, modernity and coloniality constitute two sides of a single process. Coloniality is the persistence of this Western logic of power which today continues to organize the multiple heterogeneous global hierarchies and determine the dynamics of sexual, political, epistemic, economic, spiritual, linguistic and racial forms of domination and exploitation, even after colonialism has formally retreated from most of the world. To this list of domination and exploitation, Javier Sanjines argues in Embers of the Past: Essays in Times of Decolonization, we should add temporality. Javier Sanjines sets out to show how present debates and social conflicts throughout Latin America broadly, and in the Andean region in particular, are rooted in Western historicism which feeds and legitimizes the myth of modernity: the idea that progress and development are unilinear, a teleological unfolding towards a model of Western ‘progress’ and modernity. For Sanjines, however, the past is not something that is finished and relegated to obscurity, but rather it manifests in the ‘now’ and shapes our aspirations for the future. Latin America is positioned at the crossroads of two on-going crises: the crisis of neoliberalism of the last decades, and the crisis of the conquest since the fifteenth century. This double-crisis manifests, for example, in Bolivia with the conflict between productivist nationalism and indigenous decolonization. In such Postcolonial Studies, 2015, Vol. 18, No. 1, 88–91