In Cuba, presentation by Puerto Rican expert Ramón Grosfoguel

 The Cuban cultural institution Casa de las Américas is hosting a conference today featuring the Puerto Rican sociologist Ramón Grosfoguel. The event will take place in the Che Guevara Room.

Grosfoguel  is a member of the Modernity/coloniality Group and works at the University of California, Berkeley. He identifies his work as part of the decolonial movement, going beyond the postcolonial perspective with which he is associated.

The sociologist argues that there is a structural connection between modernity and colonialism, and that the effects of European colonialism did not end with the processes of decolonization and national independence in the 19th and 20th centuries. These effects persist in culture and ways of thinking, including epistemology.

Grosfoguel proposes a decolonial turn to achieve an epistemological decolonization that corrects the universalist and ahistorical distortions of Eurocentrism and modernity, which he sees as being in a state of "terminal crisis."

As Casa de las Américas explains, this scholar focuses on critiquing racism and the binary division that colonial thought creates between the human and non-human.