Abstract

GARCIA FERNANDEZ, Javier. Decolonizing the Past. Critical Perspectives on Colonial Legacies in History and Historiography. Antipod. Rev. Antropol. Arqueol. [online]. 2023, n.51, pp.51-75.  Epub May 07, 2023. ISSN 1900-5407.  https://doi.org/10.7440/antipoda51.2023.03.

More than three decades of theories critical of cultural colonialism have given rise to many voices calling for a different way of interpreting, thinking, and expressing the world. In recent decades, the social sciences and humanities have played a central role in the debate on the epistemological and intellectual implications of Western colonial domination over territories in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The critique of Eurocentrism in the social sciences encompasses currents such as postcolonial critique, subaltern studies, decolonial theory, Afro-American Marxism, Chicano and border feminism, indigenous thought, and epistemologies of the South. The emergence of these theories that are critical of Eurocentrism has brought about a process of profound theoretical renewal in the social sciences that has called into question Eurocentric legacies, colonial projects, and the hegemony of Westernized universities. Historiographic production has remained, to a certain extent, on the margins of this theoretical renewal undergone by the humanities and social sciences. This article recapitulates the fundamental contributions of theories critical of Eurocentrism to the formation of a new historiography that overcomes the legacies of Eurocentric and colonial knowledge. We review the fundamental contributions of postcolonial studies, subaltern history, and decolonial theory to the interpretation of the past in order to think about the formulation of a new theory of history and a new non-Eurocentric historiography. We propose that this should critically examine the implications of the colonial legacy in how historiography itself and the rest of the social sciences and humanities conceive the past.

Keywords : Colonial legacies; decolonial theory; historical anthropology; historiography; postcolonial studies; subaltern studies..

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