On the coloniality of thought and ancestral materiality

This talk, On the Coloniality of Thought and Ancestral Materiality, opens with the “Age of Discovery” as a way to problematize how this celebrated movement of expansion also meant the loss of worlds and the loss of Earth. We reflect on how the movement and orientation of Western thought correspond to the expansion of colonialism. The coloniality of thought refers to how Western thinking displaces other worlds of meaning out of the domain of the thinkable. In our present, this mode of expansion has reached its finitude vis-à-vis the geology and temporality of Earth. Decoloniality brings forward the task of re-orienting thought: turning away from thinking as expansion and abstraction, and toward the time of earth and the time of matter—toward ancestral materiality and telluric thought.