Coloniality and Latiniwhat?: Decolonization in Multiple Voices

Details

Date: Feb. 20, 2008
Time: 6:00 pm to 8:30 pm
Location: Duke University — The John Hope Franklin Center, room 240

Overview

Dr. Maldonado-Torres will present “Coloniality and Latiniwhat?: Decolonization in Multiple Voices”. This is a short introduction to four different projects (local, national, and international) in which questions of identity, liberation, and decolonization are central: 1) Rethinking U.S. Ethnic Studies in its Fortieth Birthday, 2) the Latino/a Academy of Arts and Sciences, 3) Reparation, Affirmative Action, and the Decolonization of Knowledge in Brazil, and 4) the Caribbean Philosophical Association.

Dr. Maldonado-Torres earned his B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Puerto Rico in 1994, and his Ph.D. (2002) in Religious Studies from Brown University. He specializes in phenomenology, critical theory, postcolonial studies, and modern religious thought. He is interested in theories of decolonization as they emerge in different contexts and from different subjective positions in the Americas. Dr. Maldonado has done a considerable amount of work on Africana, Jewish, and Latin American intellectual productions. He is currently working on a theory of epistemic and material decolonization based on Fanon’s work and on the theoretical production of U.S. feminists of color. This work encompasses reflections on religion, philosophical anthropology, social and cultural formations in the Americas, and the role of critical intellectual activity in the context of global coloniality. Dr. Maldonado’s publications include, among others, “La antropología filosófica de Emmanuel Lévinas” [Emmanuel Levinas’s Philosophical Anthropology], Intersticios (Mexico) 5.10 (1999); “The Cry of the Self as a Call from the Other: The Paradoxical Loving Subjectivity of Frantz Fanon,” Listening: Journal of Religion and Culture (Winter 2001); and “Postimperial Reflections on Crisis, Knowledge, and Utopia: Transgresstopic Critical Hermeneutics and the ‘Death of European Man.'” Review 25.3 (2002).

Materials