Temporality and colonialism : Goa and Latin America

moments when it seemed possible for Latin American and Indian anti-colonial and subaltern theoretical writing to generate a mutually fruitful dialogue. This dialogue was directed towards the possibility of identifying the terrain on which the epistemological hegemony of Western Europe could be countered. Unlike the essay ‘Coloniality of Power and Subalternity’ that deals directly with the South Asian trajectories of this question, Mignolo’s ‘The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference’, has more to do with laying out the political need for working on a critique positioned on the exteriority of western philosophy, capitalism, and the social sciences. For from the fifteenth century on, he asserts, coloniality, (a term suggested by Anibal Quijano, encompassing and stretching beyond the moment of political decolonization) has been the darker side of each of these closed but apparently universal systems. The task of former colonies that were still, in Quijano’s terms, enmeshed in the coloniality of power, if not colonial rule, was to find grounds on which alternate and counter epistemologies could be built. Enrique Dussel’s argument for ‘Liberating reason’ according to him provides one such possibility. Mignolo highlights Dussel’s difference with Gianni Vattimo’s critique of western modernity which suggests ‘dispersion as final destiny of being’, to ask instead of what use such a philosophical stance could have, to one located on the brutal underside of global capital and colonial modernity.