Towards Hemispheric Conversations in the Americas: Internal Colonialism and Efforts to Decolonise the Self in Abya Yala

Abstract

We bring the concept of internal colonialism—developed by Indigenous and racialised activist-scholars in Abya Yala—into conversation with settler colonialism, white supremacy, white privilege, and Indigenous fleshed or embodied politics. Our goal is to incite fraught hemispheric conversations about the internalisation of coloniality by subaltern peoples, anticolonial struggles, and the relevance of internal colonial structures of dispossession in the making of Latin American nation-states. We believe in the power of establishing dialogue/cooperation between grassroots Black, Indigenous, and racialised thought against colonialism in Abya Yala and Turtle Island. A reading of these contributions suggests that binary classifications—oppressor/victim, dominator/dominated—trap our imagination, destabilising commitments to decolonisation. We focus on the construction of the environmental state in Chile, conservation discourse in the Riviera Maya, the rise of corporatist rule in southern Mexico City, and cuerpo-territorio mapping in the Ecuadorian Amazonia. We propose that a relational reading of colonial power dynamics enables opportunities for liberation.