Charles Hatfield, University of Texas at Dallas

For roughly the past twenty years, few concepts have held more sway among scholars in Latin American, Latina/o, and postcolonial studies than "the coloniality of power." The concept, which was first deployed by the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano in the early 1990s, has been widely embraced for its capacity to account for the intersectionality between capitalist exploitation and identitarian domination throughout the Americas and beyond. A critical reevaluation of the concept, however, is long overdue, and this talk explores the hidden ways in which the coloniality of power ultimately impedes, rather than facilitates, historical understanding and justifies, rather than critiques, inequality today.