RACE, CAPITALISM, AND EUROCENTRISM IN THE THOUGHT OF ANÍBAL QUIJANO

Resumen

This paper discusses the thought of Aníbal Quijano, with emphasis on the coloniality of power, the racial genesis of modernity, and the constitution of the global pattern of power articulated with capitalism and Eurocentrism. It is grounded in the understanding that modernity, far from representing merely a period of historical advancement, was constituted within the conquest of the Americas and produced social classifications founded on the idea of race, thereby reorganizing labor, power, knowledge, and relations among peoples on a global scale (Quijano, 2005; Dussel, 2005). The text examines how the social identities produced in the colonial process, including Indigenous peoples, Black people, mestizos, and Europeans, came to compose enduring hierarchies linked to economic exploitation, epistemic violence, and the inferiorization of non-European cultures and forms of knowledge (Quijano, 2005; Oliveira; Candau, 2013). It further analyzes the myth of modernity as a narrative that positioned Europe at the center of world history and relegated colonized peoples to the past, to irrationality, and to primitivization, thereby legitimizing material and symbolic domination and exploitation (Dussel, 2005; Quijano, 2005). It then discusses the formation of global capitalism in the Americas, with emphasis on slavery, servitude, and commodity production oriented toward the global market, a process that consolidated European centrality within the world-system (Quijano, 2005; Wallerstein, 1999; Ribeiro, 1995). Finally, the paper argues that a decolonial reading offers a path for rethinking Latin America from the standpoint of its memories, its subjects, and its silenced histories, bringing the decolonization of power, knowledge, and being back into debate (Quijano, 2005a; Clímaco, 2014).