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GLOBAL COLONIALITY OF POWER IN GUATEMALA: RACISM, GENOCIDE, CITIZENSHIP Egla Martínez Salazar Lanham, md: Lexington Books, 2012
reviewed by caren weisbart
The legacies of colonialism continue today as marginalized women, men, and children throughout the world are subject to displacement, violence, and dis-crimination at the hands of an elite minority who seek increased power and profit. Egla Martínez Salazar's Global Coloniality of Power in Guatemala: Racism, Genocide, Citizenship provides an in-depth look into the roots of power, and how it has been wielded to suppress any form of resistance to it. Martínez Salazar's work offers a comprehensive interlocking analysis of oppression and resistance that will serve scholars and activists as they endeavour to 'decolonize' their own work. It also provides a timely analytical approach to understanding the geopolitics of knowledge and to debunking Euro-North American-centric epistemeologies of development, progress, and democracy.
In the preliminary chapters, the author introduces the key arguments of her book and provides a fascinating genealogy of power struggles. She asserts that power struggles, such as the war on terror, share common 'patterns' as they are the result of modern, colonial, and global processes. Political agendas, pursued not only by corrupt governments in the Global South but also by powers in the Global North, have violently disrupted the lives of millions of people through the 'thingification' and 'Othering' of those who challenge the hetero-patriarchal nationalist agenda. Martínez...