by CIRA PASCUAL (VENEZUELA ANANLYSIS)
A distinguished author from the decolonial tradition discusses the relationship between colonialism and imperialism.
Ramón Grosfoguel is a Puertorican intellectual recognized for his work on the decolonization of knowledge and power. In this exclusive interview, Grosfoguel talks about the living links between the colonial and the neocolonial systems, the problematic legacy of the colonial past in Venezuela’s present, and US imperialism’s neocolonialism in relation to Venezuela.
As a country besieged by imperialism, one of the pending tasks in Venezuela is to understand what you call the “coloniality of power.” What is the coloniality of power and its relationship with Eurocentrism?
The European colonial project is about economic expansion, but it also has a civilizatory dimension. At one point, when the colonial epicenter was Europe, when it was expanding at a world scale, the colonialists not only extracted wealth from the colonies, but they also destroyed the civilizations they encountered and imposed their own. In other words, when we talk about colonial powers, we are talking about the multiple power structures that were put in place during European colonial expansion.
How did they do it? They imposed Christendom as a cosmology and as a religion by force. Racial domination was also applied wherever they went, and they brought structures of political authority through their colonial administration. This included top-down hierarchies, military domination, and Christian patriarchy.
The colonialists enforced the international division of labor that favors the center and divides the periphery. They did all this violently, imposing various forms of forced labor in the periphery, and exercising direct control over the market with economic, political, and military mechanisms.
In my work, I identify sixteen hierarchies of power that were exported by European colonialists. Wherever they arrived, Europeans brought colonial structures of domination that had an important epistemological component. And precisely that’s where Eurocentrism comes into the picture.
The colonial project imposed its own structures of knowledge that were centered in Europe and were undeniably Eurocentric.
What is the difference between being centered in Europe and Eurocentric?
All civilizations have their epistemic center in their local territories. For example, Chinese civilization has China as its center while Aztec civilization was Aztec-centric. The difference is that the European colonialist project considered that the knowledge produced in Europe was superior to the knowledge of the people – and civilizations – that they were colonizing.
In short, Eurocentrism is the belief that European knowledges are superior to other knowledges. That’s why, when I use the term “Eurocentrism,” I’m not talking about the fact that Europeans had (and have) a knowledge that is centered in Europe, but about the epistemic hierarchy that they establish. That’s what we call epistemic racism, it is linked to the coloniality of power, and it was exported around the world.
In short, European colonial expansion was not just about economic expansion and the formation of capitalism, but it was also a civilizational expansion. That’s why I argue that capitalism is the economic system of a civilization that we call modern and colonial.
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