Sociology

Epistemology

Philosophy

Political science

Manifesto

TRANSMODERNITY Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World

The ideas, many of which will unfold through years of engaged political work, need not be perfect, for in the end, it will be the hard, creative work of the communities that take them on.That work is the concrete manifestation of political imagination.Fanon described this goal as setting afoot a new humanity.He knew how terrifying such an effort is, for we do live in times where such a radical break appears as no less than the end of the world.In the meantime, the task of building infrastructures for something new must be planned, and where there is some room, attempted, as we all no doubt already know, because given the sociogenic dimension of the problem, we have no other option but to build the options on which the future of our species rest.(Lewis Gordon, "Fanon and Development.A Philosophical Look" 2004). 1 A Brief HistoryIn May of 2004, Arturo Escobar and I met with the collective from the modernity/coloniality project of Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.The theme of this meeting was "Critical Theory and Decolonization."The participants were invited to reflect upon the following topic in advance:How does Horkheimer's "critical theory" project look to us today, when global and pluri-versal "revolutions" are taking place, out of the diversity and pluri-versity of the many local histories that in the past 500 hundred years (some in the past 250 or perhaps only fifty years) couldn't avoid the contact, conflict, and complicity with the West (e.g., Western Christianity, its secularization and relation to/with capitalism and its obverse, Socialism/ Marxism)?What should "critical theory" aim to be when the damnés de la terre are brought into the picture, next to Horkheimer's proletarians or today's translation of the proletariat, such as the multitudes?What transformations are needed in the "critical theory" project if gender, race, and nature were to be fully incorporated into its conceptual and political framework?Finally, how can "critical theory" be subsumed into the project of modernity/coloniality and decolonization?Or would this subsumption perhaps suggest the need to abandon the twentieth-century formulations of a critical theory project?Or, would it suggest the exhaustion of the project of modernity? 2The themes and questions that were proposed were not new, but rather, they continued prior reflections, conversations, and previously published articles.Enrique Dussel and Santiago Castro-Gómez had already introduced the reflection regarding critical theory, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres that of the agency of the damnés de la terre (the wretched of the earth), a category that relocates and regionalizes categories framed by other historical experiences (e.g., on the one hand, the

Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option: A Manifesto