Coloniality and globalization: a decolonial take

Abstract

I will address here the Special Forum leading question: ‘Is an integrated theory of globalization possible (and desirable)?’ I will add: is it necessary? If it is, what for and for whom is it necessary and beneficial? I have no illusion of providing a convincing answer to the Special Forum’s leading questions and my own additions. But I am writing this essay with another question in mind, asked in the introduction to Globalization Matters, the book that prompted this Special Forum: What is happening to globalization? I hope to provide some entrypoint into those questions, starting from the receiving ends because there are many, of globalization. What I mean by this is that while modern/colonial world order was constituted by actors, institutions and languages located in the mutation of Western Christendom to continental Europe and its extension to the US, thus forming the North Atlantic, all the remaining regions and people in the planet became, by default, receptors (by will or in spite of) of Western global designs. Chief among them is global linear thinking that contributed greatly to mapping the contours of the Westernization of the World and set up the foundations of what, in neo-liberal vocabulary since the 1980s, has been termed ‘globalization’.

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