Join world-renowned Puerto Rican decolonial thinker and activist as he unpicks the Eurocentric lie of linear time, and shares anti-colonial temporalities that arise out of, and in light of the life ways, suffering, dignity, and creative drive of oppressed communities around the world.

Overview

The Eurocentric construction of time emerged from racial hierarchies around the world. By enforcing a universal, linear, neoliberal and rationalist temporality, Western Modernity excludes ways of embodying time that inhabit, practice or imagine different possibilities for humanity; ones that arise out of, and in light of, the suffering, dignity, and creative drive of oppressed communities around the world.

Ramón is an internationally renowned Puerto Rican intellectual, whose thinking is considered a cornerstone of decoloniality. His important work speaks to the historical context and contemporary manifestations of coloniality, white supremacy, capitalism and cis-heteronormative patriarchy. Through his writing and teaching, he argues that there is a structural link between modernity and colonialism. He makes an important distinction between the ostensibly state based processes of decolonization and national independence of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the ways in which coloniality persists in culture and as ways of thinking. This persistence requires processes of epistemological decolonisation: decolonising the ways we think, so as to correct the universalist and ahistorical deformations of Eurocentrism and modernity.

Context

Ramón is deeply entangled within decolonial movements and liberation theology. He was one of the closest collaborators of Enrique Dussel and is currently editing a series of books to be published posthumously. Dussel was the great philosopher of liberation theology, and his Ethics of Liberation a milestone in ethical discourse that we’ve found incredibly helpful. By thoroughly breaking down the world history of ethics, Dussel rethinks it entirely, to reveal how obscured and ignored origins of a common ethical paradigm lie outside the Western tradition. Ramón’s work builds on this through a vast body of work on racism in different areas of the world-system, on international migration, the decolonisation of knowledge and power, the decolonisation of the world-system’s political economy, anti-imperialism, and geopolitics. He coined the concepts of “colonial/racial subjects of empire” and of the “modern/colonial Christian-centric/Western-centric capitalist/patriarchal world-system”.

Produced in association with The Centre for Human Ecology.