Descolonizando la academia

Abstract

[Editors’ note] This article, an edited transcript of the 25th Inaugural Lecture at the College of General Studies, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, offers a succinct genealogy of contemporary Latin America’s episteme and its pervasive logic of mestizaje which necessitates a disavowal of Blackness as its foundation. The author tracks this logic through the works of authors such as José de Vasconcelos, Ángel Rama, José Martí and others, emphasizing the urgent need to decolonize the academy and radically reconceptualize what has hitherto been worthy of the term “knowledge”.