Nelson Maldonado-Torres is a Puerto Rican philosopher and professor in Latino and Caribbean Studies and the Comparative Literature Program at

Rutgers University Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's ...

. He received his PhD from

Brown University Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...

in Religious Studies. His work has been influential in contributing to ideas about

decoloniality Decoloniality ( es, decolonialidad) is a school of thought used principally by an emerging Latin American movement which focuses on untangling the production of knowledge from a primarily Eurocentric episteme. It critiques the perceived universali ...

decolonizing

epistemology Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics. Episte ...

, and in critiquing Western

liberalism Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality and equality before the law."political rationalism, hostility to autocracy, cultural distaste for c ...

and

Eurocentrism Eurocentrism (also Eurocentricity or Western-centrism) is a worldview that is centered on Western civilization or a biased view that favors it over non-Western civilizations. The exact scope of Eurocentrism varies from the entire Western worl ...

. He is influenced by the works of

Frantz Fanon Frantz Omar Fanon (, ; ; 20 July 1925 – 6 December 1961), also known as Ibrahim Frantz Fanon, was a French West Indian psychiatrist, and political philosopher from the French colony of Martinique (today a French department). His works have be ...

Emmanuel Levinas Emmanuel Levinas (; ; 12 January 1906 – 25 December 1995) was a French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry who is known for his work within Jewish philosophy, existentialism, and phenomenology, focusing on the relationship of ethics to me ...

, and

Enrique Dussel Enrique Domingo Dussel (born 24 December 1934) is an Argentine academic, philosopher, historian and theologian. He served as the interim rector of the Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México from 2013 to 2014. Life and career Enrique Duss ...

. He critiques the notion of representational politics as being enough to contribute to systemic change. His work has been described as "animated by an ethic of decolonial love". He is also noted for contributing to discourse on the ''decolonial turn''.

Career

He was the head of the

Caribbean Philosophical Association The Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA) is a philosophical organization founded in 2002 at the Center for Caribbean Thought at the University of the West Indies, in Mona, Jamaica. The founding members were George Belle, B. Anthony Bogues, Pa ...

from 2008 to 2013. He was one of the signatories to support the creation for a Latina/o Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States.

Publications

Books

* ''Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity'' (2008) * La descolonización y el giro de(s)colonial (2012)

Select articles

* "On the coloniality of being: Contributions to the development of a concept" (2007) * "Thinking through the decolonial turn: Post-continental interventions in theory, philosophy, and critique—An introduction" (2011) * "Outline of ten theses on coloniality and decoloniality" (2016)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Maldonado-Torres, Nelson Year of birth missing (living people) Puerto Rican academics Decolonial feminism University of Puerto Rico alumni Brown University alumni Postcolonial theorists Rutgers University faculty Living people