Decentralization, criticism and transformation

a history of modernity from African decolonization and Brazilian Indigenous thinking

Abstract

We will argue on two points. First: the use of the anthropological dualism – modernity and pre-modernity, post-tradicional and traditional, reason and myth – by European philosophies as basis to the constitution of the philosophical-sociological-anthropological discourse of Western modernity-modernization implies in the consolidation of an exclusivist comprehension of Western modernity as Europeization, streamlined by the idea that it is a process basically autonomous, independent, endogenous, self-referential, self-subsisting and self-sufficient, as well as in the anullment and delegitimation of the other of modernity as anthropological past and deficit of modernization or rationalization, with the consequent understanding of European modernity as self-conscious present, substantive actuality and oppeness to the future. Second: African decolonization and Brazilian Indigenous thinking, by deconstructing this anthropological dualism and the delegitimation of the others of modernity as pre-modern condition and evolutionary past, break with the modernity’s epistemological-political monopoly of the tematization of the human and of justification of the post-traditional universalism, correlating modernity to colonalism and structural racism. As an originary power of/by difference, African decolonization and Brazilian Indigenous thinking decentralize and pluralize epistemologies, stories, political-normative alternatives and, therefore, perform a criticism of Western modernity from the place of speak of the political-cultural minorities.