Formation of the biocoloniality of power in Latin America

Abstract

The present work argues that the term "biocoloniality" is key to understanding in a new way the genealogy of political and juridical power relations imposed in Western history from the sixteenth century onwards. In this sense, we affirm that the historical process of conquest and colonization of the Americas plays a fundamental role, although usually overlooked, in the development of the "arts of government" over populations and bodies that characterize modernity, that is, in the course of Western governmentality and its complementary coloniality of power, an issue that is especially evident when analyzing some of the central topics that surrounded the discourses and strategies deployed to address the problems of legitimacy of Spanish imperial power, once it attempted to govern the "New World" during the first half of the sixteenth century. Thus, paying special attention to discursive practices and governmental strategies around the "condition of the Indian" and the causes of the "just war" that characterized early modernity, we propose to outline some general guidelines for new genealogies of a non-Eurocentric biopolitical perspective, which we refer to as the development of the notion of biocoloniality.