Una America compuesta: The coloniality of language in the Americas and decolonial alternatives

This is a trans-disciplinary study that offers a framework to analyze linguistic domination in which modernity and coloniality are thought as constitutive axes of the capitalist model of power.;"The coloniality of language" is the name I give to the linguistic aspects of the process of dehumanization through racialization that is constitutive of capitalist relations of power.;I organize the argument in three parts: Chapter one depicts the concept of coloniality of language as a linguistic hierarchization that is seen as the equivalent of the colonial classification of race. Chapter two investigates the long term production of this hierarchization beginning in the early modernity and continuing until today. The cases examined, where colonized people and their means of expressivity were made to fit the racial linguistic definition, are not generalizations but instances of linguistic coloniality. While I do not examine these instances in every detail, I aimed to give the reader enough so that the coloniality is not just an idea, but a process of transformation that can be seen in the introduction of colonial/modern institutions geared towards the production of "monolanguaging" practices oriented towards racialization. Chapter three interrogates how the reality of linguistic coloniality affects the possibility of decolonial alternatives, understanding these as a set of projects that have in common the effects experienced by all those upon which coloniality has been exercised. My aim here is not to formulate "decoloniality" but to prove a theoretical understanding of what has to be taken into consideration in respect to the matter of language and communication. Given the communicative conditions created by linguistic coloniality, it cannot be assumed that people at the colonial difference are able to understand one another and enter a conversation as if there were not coloniality.;The argument's architectonics follows the framework of decolonial studies, in particular the understanding that race is both fictional and made real by power. This interplay is at the heart of the "decolonial paradigmatic turn" because it allows seeing more than one reality and thus that coloniality is never complete, which, in turn, makes epistemic and ontological room for decolonial alternatives.