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Post-colonial theory involves discussion about experience of various kinds: migration, slavery,
suppression, resistance, representation, difference, race, gender, place, and responses to the
influential master discourses of imperial Europe such as history, philosophy and linguistics, and the
fundamental experiences of speaking and writing by which all these come into being. None of these
is ‘essentially’post-colonial, but together they form the complex fabric of the field. ( Ashcroft el al,
1995: 2)
However we would argue that post-colonial studies are based in the ‘historical fact’of European
colonialism, and the diverse material effects to which this phenomenon gave rise. ( Ashcroft el al,
1995: 2)
‘post-colonial theory’ may itself mask and even perpetuate unequal economic and cultural relations.
This happens when the bulk of the literary theory is seen to come out of the metropolitan centres,
‘adding value ‘to the literary ‘raw material’ imported from the post-colonial societies (Mitchell 1992).
Such a situation simply reproduces the inequalities of imperial power relations. ( Ashcroft el al, 1995:
2)
the hyphenated form of the word ‘post-colonial’ has come to stand for both the material effects of
colonisation and the huge diversity of everyday and sometimes hidden responses to it throughout
the world. We use the term ‘post-colonial’ to represent the continuing process of imperial
suppressions and exchanges throughout this diverse range of societies, in their institutions and their
discursive practices. ( Ashcroft el al, 1995: 3)
‘post-colonial’theory rejects the egregious classification of ‘First’ and ‘Third’ World and contests the
lingering fallacy that the post-colonial is somehow synonymous with the economically
‘underdeveloped’. ( Ashcroft el al, 1995: 3)
In the past three or four years, the work and conversations among the members of the
modernity/coloniality research project’, de-coloniality became the common expression paired with
the concept of coloniality and the extension of coloniality of power (economic and political) to
coloniality of knowledge and of being (gender, sexuality, subjectivity and knowledge), were
incorporated into the basic vocabulary among members of the research project. (Mignolo 2007:
451)
Coloniality and de-coloniality introduces a fracture with both, the Eurocentered project of post-
modernity and a project of post-coloniality heavily dependent on post-structuralism as far as Michel
Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida have been acknowledged as the grounding of the post-
colonial canon: Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Hommi Bhabha. De-coloniality starts from other
sources. From the de-colonial shift already implicit in Nueva corońica and buen gobierno by Waman
Puma de Ayala; in the de-colonial critique and activism of Mahatma Gandhi; in the fracture of
Marxism in its encounter with colonial legacies in the Andes, articulated by Jose ´ Carlos Maria ´tegui;
in the radical political and epistemological shifts enacted by Amilcar Cabral, AimeĆe´saire, Frantz
Fanon, Rigoberta Menchu ´, Gloria Anzalduá, among others. The de-colonial shift, in other words, is
a project of de-linking while post-colonial criticism and theory is a project of scholarly transformation
within the academy. (Mignolo 2007: 452)
De-coloniality was clearly formulated, in the sixties and seventies, by radical Arabo-Islamic thinkers
(Sayyid Qutb, Ali Shariati, Ayatollah Komeini); by philosophy of liberation in Latin America and by
Indigenous intellectuals and activist in Laitn America, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. (Mignolo
2007: 457)
De-coloniality, then, means working toward a vision of human life that is not dependent upon or
structured by the forced imposition of one ideal of society over those that differ, which is what
modernity/coloniality does and, hence, where decolonization of the mind should begin. The struggle
is for changing the terms in addition to the content of the conversation. (Mignolo 2007: 459)

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Post-colonial theory involves discussion about experience of various kinds: migration, slavery,

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