Procesos interculturales y decolonialidad. En memoria de Leyda Oquendo “una trayectoria por el derecho humano al conocimiento de la verdad histórica”...

Abstract

Starting from the idea – expressed by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Tzvetan Todorov – that cultures do not evolve if it is not through contacts and that intercultural is constitutive of culture, the paper analyzes the specificity of intercultural relations after the Renaissance and the European expansion in the world, marked by colonialism, which coincided with the development of a modern capitalist system and the ideology of the race. The second part of the paper analyzes the development of post-colonial studies, which focused the critical analysis of colonial discourse and the valorisation of the struggles of the dominated populations in the process of decolonization. In Latin America, in the last few years, de-colonial thought has defined the colonization of being, together with the colonization of power and knowledge, opening the way to a radical critique of Eurocentrism and its identification abusive with the universal. All the work of Leyda Oquendo that this special issue of Comparative Cultural Studies, remembers ten years after his death, was oriented in that direction.