Enrique Dussel's Liberation Thought in the Decolonial Turn

Liberation philosophy, as a Latin American project for critical thought, is one among many expressions of a shift in global power dynamics and in epistemic perspective that has taken place since the Second World War.* The European crisis, or more than a crisis, its own internal devastation after the war, opened at least three paths for the train of history and thought. On the one hand, the United States -which had proven itself as an international power through the expansion from the thirteen colonies, the war with Mexico, and the Spanish-American War -became after the Second World War a hegemonic force that would both assist and displace Northwestern Europe as the power-axis of the modern world-system. With this, Americanism -the triumphalist and assimilationist ideology of the United States which had already burst onto the scene with Theodore Roosevelt in the late nineteenth century -was decisively introduced to the rest of the world. This Americanist discourse would dictate the terms for the assimilation of non-Catholic European immigrants, some of which were seen as belonging to darker races. 1 This ideology has taken various turns with McCarthyism and Reagan in the context of the Cold War, and today it takes on a new spirit in formulations like that offered by Samuel P. Huntington, who has forcefully rearticulated Americanism with respect to immigrants and ethnic minorities in the United States. 2 But today, after the Cold War and the attacks of 11 September, it is no longer European immigrants that allegedly pose a "challenge" to U.S.-American identity, but rather Latin American (im)migrants, particularly Spanish-speaking Mexicans and Chicana/os. 3 There is, accordingly, a particular importance today for exploring the decolonial potential of those cultural forms originating in Latin America, Mexico, and in the borderlands between Mexico and the United States, among other "frontier" territories both to the north and south of this border. e second path that opened with the decline of Europe was, clearly, that of the Cold War rival of Americanism: Soviet communism. Soviet communism, or at least socialism (which is a different but related political system/ideology), would become for many a viable option for a different future, beyond both fascist and liberal Europe.