Aníbal Quijano's decolonial perspective analyses how the current situation in the former colonies, especially in Latin America, is conditioned by colonisation and the resulting European domination that has persisted since the 15th century. The colonial relations that still exist between the West and the rest of the world were far from over when the colonies gained independence from their colonisers. For Quijano, European modernity, which emerged from the colonisation of the Americas and is inextricably linked to coloniality, is the foundation from which he derives relations of domination and control of Europe over the rest of the world. The maintenance of Western domination over the former colonies is made possible by the coloniality of power, which is exercised through the general classification of the world's population on the basis of race and through Eurocentrism as a perspective of knowledge that establishes European (or Western) experience as the standard. Quijano sees the liberation from Western domination, both material and epistemological, as primarily the establishment of Latin America's own identity and, through this, the emergence of a Latin American rationality.
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