The first part of the session was dedicated to Prof. Medina’s lecture. In the form of foundational material required to understand decolonial thinking, he organized his lecture in four parts. In the first section he discussed the connections between decolonial thinking and other social movements. He believed that the decolonial thinkers build on the insights of previous discourses and social movements, even while further developing them.
In the second section he showed how decolonial thinking includes a radical theoretical reframing of our understanding of modernity, its emergence, and its connection to the Western European colonial project. For decolonial thinkers, modernity is predicated on domination and colonization and cannot be understood unless viewed from the perspective of its underside.
He devoted the third section to demonstrating that the adoption of a decolonial theoretical frame means an epistemological reconfiguration and challenging of Western European and Anglo North Atlantic forms of knowledge as the most developed expression of human ‘‘advance’’. Instead, he maintained, they engage in the act of reclaiming the forms of knowledge of the other peoples and cultures of the world.
In the fourth section he linked decolonization with theology and suggested the Latina/o theological notion of mestizaje as a concrete example of how in different contexts decolonizing impetuses are emerging. Originally, mestizaje was used to describe the phenomena of biological and cultural intermixture/miscegenation resulting from the encounter between Indigenous peoples and Europeans post 1492 in Latin America. Mestizaje subsequently came to include intermixture with the African population in its multiple expressions as well He believed mestizaje serves a fourfold function for Latina/o theologians: first, it is a cipher bringing to mind the violence of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism, the memory of the Indigenous victims, and the experience of rejection of mixed children. Second, it embodies a reclamation of Indigenous and African ancestral faiths, cultural traditions, and knowledges and reconfigures notions of spirituality as encompassing community. Third, it is an epistemological counterpoint that challenges pervasive notions of ethnocultural identities as self-contained finished products. And fourth, it is a strategic methodological frame that unmasks the inadequacy of pervasive Eurocentric expressions of theology and the exclusive character of its intellectual baggage.
He concluded his lecture that by providing a global frame for rereading the place of colonialism in history in relation to modernity, decolonial thinking uncovers the intellectual/epistemological apparatus upon which modernity/coloniality is built. It also highlights how colonialism and the resulting systems of domination include a cross-section of interconnected social markers—including ethnoracial, gender, class, and sexuality, among others—what scholars in critical race theory and LatCrit have identified as intersectionalities. He believed that much more can be said concerning the potential insights, contributions, and advances of decolonial thinking for critical analyses, including theology. It provides a new optic identifying the ways in which the colonial power matrix continues to impact, regulate, and order our forms of viewing the world. It also illuminates how narrowly we construct or value knowledge, and helps us orient ourselves toward historically marginalized or discriminated peoples and knowledges. In his view, its incisiveness for understanding how different social structures and markers connect and work together to exclude entire sectors of society far exceeds any individual social movement or critical theoretical frame articulated thus far.
