Department of English

Abraham I. Acosta, 

For more than twenty years now, the concepts of coloniality of power and settler colonialism have been pivotal in the formation and development of decolonial critiques of power.  Understood as names for a cultural-political modality for establishing and sustaining geopolitical subordination, the concept has become conventionalized and routinely deployed in order to assert that the epistemological and political terms of dominance over the Americas has a specific, exclusively European, provenance. A closer look at the theoretical writing on these concepts, however, reveals a more ambivalent reading.  Challenging the ways in which these concepts have been fashioned together as a critical foothold for decolonial thought, this talk will suggest that coloniality of power and settler colonialism are actually quite divergent theoretical propositions that have been hastily aligned, and which may instead effectively render into crisis the entire decolonial project itself.

Abraham Acosta is Associate Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies at the University of Arizona. He specializes in literary and cultural analysis, focusing on questions of subalternity, postcoloniality, biopolitics, and posthegmonic in the Americas.  His research traverses the critical realities of contemporary multilingual contexts, where assumptions of power, knowledge, and capital crosshatch with historical translations of cultural difference. Acosta’s work has been published in such journals as Dispositio/n, the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Social Text, and Critical Multilingualism Studies.  His book, Thresholds of Illiteracy: Theory, Latin America, and the Crisis of Resistance (2014) is published by Fordham University Press.