The Decolonial Turn in Theorizations of Inequality

Acknowledging the importance of analytical efforts to understand inequality through multidimensional approaches such as the human development index, analyzing inequality in the Global South requires focusing on the uneven relationship between hegemonic and nonhegemonic epistemologies and ontologies. Besides analyzing the unequal economic distributions produced by capitalism, to understand the complexity of inequality, it is necessary to question the inequalities produced by European logocentrism, scientific reductionism, and the unequal cultural distribution as an effect of the imposition of a particular vision of the world. Able to grasp the last types of inequalities, it is crucial to revisit their background in colonialism and the mechanisms that modernity has deployed worldwide to legitimize the multiple interventions it has deployed against the ontological and epistemic differences. With the notion of coloniality as the subjugation of common senses, imaginaries, expectations, and sensitivities of nonhegemonic collectivities, this chapter seeks to unveil the colonial discursive practices the European narrative has carried along to classify, dominate, and transform “other” collectivities to impose a single form of being in the world. Moreover, this chapter analyzes how the colonial power configuration is a dialectical interaction that manifests and reproduces in both the micro and the macro levels of power via specific mechanisms that hegemonic power has used to legitimize the control and transformation of every non-European form of social organization and its interaction with the inhabited space.