A Critique of Coloniality: Eight Essays

This translation of Rita Segato’s seminal book La crítica de la colonialidad en ocho ensayos offers an anthropological and critical perspective on the coloniality of power as theorized by the Peruvian thinker Aníbal Quijano.

Segato begins with an overview of Quijano’s conceptual framework, emphasizing the power and richness of his theory and its relevance to a range of fields. Each of the seven subsequent chapters presents a scenario in which a persistent colonial structure or form of subjectivity can be identified. These essays address urgent issues of gender, sexuality, race and racism, and indigenous forms of life. They set the decolonial perspective to work, and are connected by two central preoccupations: the critical analysis of coloniality and the effort to reimagine anthropology as "responsive anthropology," a practice at once answerable and useful to the communities previously regarded as the "objects" of ethnographic thought.

The Critique of the Coloniality makes important and original contributions to our understanding of colonial and decolonial processes, drawing on the author’s experience of feminist and antiracist movements and struggles for indigenous and human rights. This book will appeal to students and scholars working in anthropology, Latin American studies, political theory, feminist and gender studies, indigenous studies, and anticolonial, post-colonial, and decolonial thought.

Rita Segato is Professor Emerita at the University of Brasilia and an anthropologist and feminist who has written extensively on gender, violence, the gender system in the Yoruba tradition, race, and coloniality. She is a major figure in Latin American decolonial feminism, and currently holds the Rita Segato Chair of Uneasy Thinking at the National University of San Martín in the Province of Buenos Aires and the Aníbal Quijano Chair at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. She has received the Latin American and Caribbean Award of Social Sciences awarded by CLACSO (2018), the Daniel Cossio Villegas Award for Social Sciences awarded by the College of Mexico (2020), and the Frantz Fanon Award from the Caribbean Association of Philosophers (2021).

Ramsey McGlazer is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Old Schools: Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress (2020).