Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality

Maldonado-Torres
“<strong>Outline</strong> <strong>of</strong> <strong>Ten</strong> <strong>Theses</strong>”
together help create the basic infrastructure <strong>of</strong> the modern/colonial world. Now, Fanon does not
focus on just any subject or on the subject in total abstraction. In Black Skin, White Masks Fanon
focuses on the colonized black subject. Later, in The Wretched <strong>of</strong> the Earth [Les damnés de la
terre], he refers to subject in a similar structural and subjective position as the damnés, a word
that had circulated before to refer mainly to the world proletariat. In Fanon, the concept <strong>of</strong>
damnés acquires new meanings. To start, from a Fanonian point <strong>of</strong> view, the damné is the
subject who appears at the crux <strong>of</strong> the coloniality <strong>of</strong> power, the coloniality <strong>of</strong> knowledge, and the
coloniality <strong>of</strong> being. The coloniality <strong>of</strong> power, knowledge, and being refer to how power,
knowledge, and being, along with its constituent element, function in the zone <strong>of</strong> sub-humanity.
The coloniality <strong>of</strong> power, knowledge, and being is also, generally and abstractly speaking, what
creates the line between the human and non-human, between the world where perpetual peace is
considered a possibility and the world that is defined as perpetual or endless war. The coloniality
<strong>of</strong> power, knowledge, and being also refers to how time, space, culture, structure, method and
conceptions <strong>of</strong> subjectivity and objectivity transform through metaphysical catastrophe.
Modernity/coloniality is, in fact, the catastrophic transformation <strong>of</strong> whatever we can consider as
human space, time, structure, culture, subjectivity, objectivity, and methodology, into
dehumanizing coordinates or foundations that serve to perpetuate the inferiority <strong>of</strong> some and the
superiority <strong>of</strong> others. It is an epochal instantiation <strong>of</strong> the master/slave dialectic, with the
exception that the structure is meant not to be dialectical. That is, in the modern/colonial world,
the colonized are meant to perpetually be condemned to the zone <strong>of</strong> damnation or hell. And so,
following Fanon, the subject that is constituted by the coloniality <strong>of</strong> knowledge, power, and
being as the subject against other forms <strong>of</strong> subjectivity will be defined, can be described as the
damné or condemned. This is an embodied subject who is pinned down in hell in various ways
including by virtue <strong>of</strong> how it appears. The very surface <strong>of</strong> this body, the skin, can serve as an
immediate identifier. The more a subject can be thus identified, the more difficult it is for that
subject to live other than in a constant hell. Black Skin, White Masks focuses on the black
subject, an embodied subject who simultaneously lives in various layers <strong>of</strong> hell.
Here is a possible way to conceive <strong>of</strong> this basic analytic <strong>of</strong> modernity/coloniality:
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