Questioning the role of Anti-Blackness in Quijano’s theory of Coloniality of Power

Rosa O’Connor Acevedo discusses her paper "Questioning the role of Anti-Blackness in Quijano’s theory of Coloniality of Power." She argues that Quijano’s conceptualization of race within the theory of coloniality of power is limited and theoretically insufficient given its lack of elaboration regarding the role of anti-Blackness in Spanish colonization. This article contrasts the idea of coloniality of power with Cedric Robinson’s elaboration of racial capitalism to demonstrates how Robinson has a more complex and historically rich analysis of race that centers the expansion of racial capitalism with the invention of the Negro subject. The article closes with an attempt to bridge the history of anti-Blackness and the idea of coloniality using Sylvia Wynter’s adaptation of the idea of coloniality, which is attentive to the Portuguese expeditions prior to Columbus and how coloniality disproportionally affected people of African descent in the Américas.

Bio
Rosa O’Connor Acevedo is a Philosophy Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Oregon. She earned a BA. in Political Science with a concentration on Political Theory and a MA in Philosophy from the University of Puerto Rico. Rosa worked two years as a Spanish Teaching Associate in the Center for Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Williams
College. Her primary research interests are Afro-Caribbean philosophy, Iberian Racism, the Caribbean Black Radical Tradition, Decolonial Feminism, Genealogy, and Philosophy of Race. She is currently writing her dissertation on the long durée of anti-Blackness from the Iberian colonial experience.