Voices from the South: Decolonial and postcolonial conversations

Abstract

Over the last ten years, although a certain amount of critical effort has gone into bringing the debates around Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies closer together, these two areas still remain on opposite or different sides of a debate that is often heated and irreconcilable. Particularly at the beginning of the current century, following the publication of Walter Mignolo's (2000) Local Histories/Global Designs, much of the postcolonial criticism found itself on a collision course with decolonial discourse. In the same way, the main authors of the Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality group became critics of Postcolonial Studies by formulating the bases of Decolonial thought under the concept of the “Decolonial Turn”, which demands a disconnection and break with the Western structures of thought, under which Postcolonialism built its responses to the literature of the former colonialist empires. In this sense, this text intends to investigate the theoretical path that culminates in the break between Decolonial and Postcolonial studies, and our aim is to open up questions that can favor dialogue between the two theoretical fields and also open up possibilities for a South-South dialogue based on a new understanding of the new and old epistemologies.