SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This article focuses on the so-called «decolonial epistemic turn» which developed in the last two decades in Latin America and which has recently inspired works on Islamic issues in western Europe. I focus on the historical genealogies and concepts which underlie the decolonial approach, and I suggest an alternative framework whereby the (post)colonial is not conceived as a metropolitan creation exported to the colonies. I claim historicising and grounding (decolonial) theory in proposals related to the specific ways in which structures operate in the concrete historical and spatial coordinates of a world which, albeit globalised, is far from being homogeneous; and albeit conditioned by different power axes, is not predetermined by such oppression nor has it exhausted its agency, resistance, and creativity.