For best experience please turn on javascript and use a modern browser!
You are using a browser that is no longer supported by Microsoft. Please upgrade your browser. The site may not present itself correctly if you continue browsing.
In his inaugural lecture, Rolando Vázquez Melken addresses decoloniality and the limits of western thought.
Event details of On the Coloniality of Thought
Date
27 June 2024
Time
16:30
Rolando Vázquez Melken (photo: Kirsten van Santen)
Rolando Vázquez Melken (photo: Kirsten van Santen)

The so-called ‘Age of Discovery’ coincides with the gestation of western modernity and the onset of the modern/colonial order. The notion of discovery has certainly functioned as a euphemism for the mass conquest of peoples and territories. Yet, Vázquez Melken interrogates the ‘Age of Discovery’ as an index of the impetus of expansion of western thought. Decoloniality brings modern thought face to face with its own finitude, disorientation and forgetfulness. To the loss of Earth and the loss of worlds, earthlessness and worldlessness, corresponds a loss of thought, argues Vázquez Melken.

In his inaugural lecture, he will address the question of the coloniality of modern thought and the task of decolonial thinking. What is the task of thinking, beyond the metaphysics of modernity? What is the task of thinking in the awareness of the precedence and finitude of Earth? What is the task of thinking in relation to what has been unthought, to what is under erasure?

Prof. dr. R.D. Vázquez Melken, Professor of Post/Decolonial Theories and Literatures, with a focus on the Global South: On the Coloniality of Thought.

You can watch this inaugural lecture here.

Aula - Oude Lutherse kerk

Singel 411
1012 WN Amsterdam