SONIAKH digest publishes articles in translation that provide key insight into the creative and intellectual discussions going on in Ukraine. This article was first published in Polish translation: Tamara Hundorova, "W jaki sposób peryferie rozmawiają między sobą albo teoria postkolonialna pozbawiona 'Centrum'", DOI: 10.14746/p.2014.15.10879, Porównania, 2014/15, s. 33–44. It is also available in Ukrainian in Krytyka (часопис «Критика», №7–8, 2022, c. 20–26).

The nature and the supposed usefulness of postcolonial studies has been widely discussed in academic circles starting already from the end of the 20th century, and it has grown particularly intense after September 11, 2001, when the critique of orientalism gained a new radical sense, and the West has once again been put in opposition to an “Islamic East”. One can also hear criticism from within the circle of postcolonial researchers, as in the 2006 discussion organized at Michigan University which refers to the “potential exhaustion of postcolonialism as a paradigm”. The very existence of postcolonial theory is ultimately being questioned. Patrizia Eger, the editor of the Publications of the Modern Language Association (PMLA) journal, summarized the debate in the title of the resulting article: “the End of Postcolonial Theory?”[1] 

Leading representatives of postcolonial studies—Sunil Agnani, Fernando Coronil, Gaurav Desai, Mamadou Diouf, Simon Gikandi, Susie Tharu, and Jennifer Wenzel—took part in the discussion. The talk was centered around the “status of postcolonial studies within the current geopolitical situation”. Three important ideas were voiced during the discussion. Firstly, the need to expand the epistemological frames of colonialism itself, when not only the question of anti-colonial resistance has come into focus, but also the identification of differences between various imperialisms, for example, the difference between colonial Nigeria and Nigeria under Governor General Lord Lugard. Secondly, the diffusion of postcolonial theory itself has become evident, owing to the expansion of its historical and geographical boundaries. Relatively speaking, this is when medieval proto-modern formations are brought into the sphere of postcolonialism, and the Americas and Asia—the space where much of the work of postcolonial studies was initially focused—are joined by Africa. Another similar line of argument has to do with the drift of postcolonial studies towards post-Soviet Eastern Europe, that “adapt[s] the explanatory rubric for the emergent (emigrant?) Third World to interpret the imploded Second World.”[2]

When reviewing the situation in the field in their introduction to a special edition of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2008) entitled “New Directions in Postcolonial Studies”, Alec G. Hargreaves and David Murphy note that today, on the one hand, we look at the attempts to reform postcolonial research and draw out its regional variations, such as, for example, a French-speaking version of postcolonialism,[3] and, on the other hand, we hear about some sort of “end of the postcolonial theory”. It is obvious, however, that this intellectual trend itself goes beyond the scope of the English literature departments where it originally emerged.[4]

A search for alternative types of postcolonialism can be observed, in contrast to the Anglo-Saxon variant. These days, we might speak about Latin American, Portuguese, and other types of postcolonialism. Moreover, their specificity is being explained by a double displacement, since they, on one side, have to do with the discourse of a postcolonialism that was developed by the Anglo-Saxon Global North, and yet, on the other side, they are simultaneously entrenched in the discourse of resistance, growing in the Global South.[5] All in all, active discussions taking place around postcolonialism record some changes in the contemporary geopolitical situation, as phenomena related to other empires, migration, modernization, the development of popular culture, gender studies, and theory of trauma become the object of analysis. In this way some prerequisites appear that are necessary to speak about other specifically “decentered postcolonialisms”.

The Theory of Transmodernity

In a contemporary world we can witness a tendency to revise the entirety of postcolonial theory from the position of the Other—in particular, the non-European. Moreover, a new critical vision, which takes on the point of view of so-called peripheral postcolonial cultures first associated with the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, not only helps to voice the position of a subaltern, but also projects a different concept of European culture as a whole. 

In this respect it is important to analyze alternative visions of postcolonialism, in particular those developed by philosophers and critics of the non-Western origin. The concept of transmodernity and the theory of decolonization are of special interest here. Both theories are being formed within the framework of a type of postcolonialism that differs from the Anglo-American version in the tradition of Edward Said. The theories of transmodernity and decolonization have been created by American philosophers of Latin American origin. The concept of transmodernity was developed by Enrique Dussel, the famous philosopher of Argentine origin, and the principles of his theory are based on a reconceptualization of Eurocentrism and the European idea of modernity. “Modernity is not a phenomenon of Europe as an independent system, but that of Europe as a center”,[6] the philosopher states, stressing the importance of the “incorporation of the Amerindia” to the formation of Eurocentrism and the role of “a centralized rule” by Europe for the establishment of the entire concept of modernity. In his opinion, the very existence of peripheries on the Latin American continent—which are the result of the Age of Discovery and the expansion of the periphery—is what enables Europe’s “centrality” and transforms it into some sort of a “reflexive identity” of world history. Dussel sees a periphery that expands its boundaries during modernity into Amerindia, Brazil, coastal Africa and Poland in the 16th century, united Latin Amerindia, North America, the Caribbean islands, and Eastern Europe in the 17th century, and the Ottoman Empire, Russia, some Indian states, the Asian subcontinent and continental Africa in the first half of the 19th century.[7]

On the whole, Dussel considers the emergence of a gap between the so-called Western metropolitan Eurocentric culture and its postcolonial cultures of peripheries, as well as the gap between elites with Western-style education and the popular culture of the popular majority, to be the result of Eurocentric modernity. His own theory of transmodernity, in contrast, is based on the idea of using the potential of the so-called periphery and its so-called popular (folk) cultures, which symbolize exteriority (external aspect), against a universal Western culture. Rather than seeing opposition between “universal civilization” and “national culture”, as formulated by Paul Ricœur from the position of a Eurocentric essentialism characterized by hierarchical system of relations, Dussel attributes a special role to culture as something constituting a central mythic-value essence of the nation. He highlights the fact that Latin America’s cultural history, with its hybrid nature and instability, is often perceived as marginal in relation to European culture. However, “such a culture exists”, the philosopher affirms, and popular (folk) culture, in particular, is its productive constituent element. 

Latin American culture, the researcher admits, holds in itself mature traces of imperial invasion. Moreover, “imperial” culture opposes “peripheral” folk cultures that are usually marginalized, exploited, and destroyed—and this goes for Latin America, Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe.[8] This presupposes the formation of an asymmetric cultural field, where Western metropolitan Eurocentric culture is associated with civilization and erases peripheral cultures, while postcolonial cultures are being deconstructed into the culture of an educated elite that rejects its regional roots and the folk culture of the majority, the same majority that must safeguard the regional traditions, often in a fundamental way. 

The essence of the philosophy of liberation formulated by Dussel lies in the notion that peripheral culture should be taken as a starting point for opposition to imperial culture. This peripheral culture means a popular culture that embraces “folklore, music, food, clothes, festivals, memory of the heroes, their wars of independence, their social and political organizations”.[9] Notably, Dussel doesn’t equate either “mass culture”, or “national culture” with “popular culture” and links the promise of alternative modernization (or, in his terminology, transmodernity) to the culture of ethnic groups, artists and marginals. 

Instead of the theory of postmodernity, which, in the opinion of the Argentine philosopher, constitutes merely a correction to modern Western culture, Dussel proposes the notion of transmodernity, the principal feature of which is that this position is decidedly external, formed, as such, by difference, since it comes from “another place, another locality”.[10] A perspective like this, from the point of view of the periphery, is global. Dussel calls European culture provincial instead. This claim is not about locating a center or subverting it, and not about “localizing” Latin America, but rather about “trying to “situate” all of the cultures that today inevitably confront each other in all levels of everyday life, from communication, education and research, to the politics of expansion, and cultural or even military resistance”.[11]

It is not really about “the conjunction of the consensus” which would ensure a partial acceptance of Western values by all the members of the world community, including the periphery. It is more about the solidarity of everyone who has been relegated to the periphery by Western modernity. In a strict sense, the transmodern, according to Dussel’s conception, radically changes perspective from the point of view of a modernity external to European modernity, seen as a challenge to it, and directs it at the search for something different, i.e. an answer from another place, another locality.

Other cultures respond from the perspective of their cultural experiences, different from those of Europe and North America. On the whole, transmodern culture: a) appropriates positive moments of modernity, in particular the knowledge and the experience of the educated neo-colonial elite; b) is diverse and is a product of authentic intercultural dialogue; c) acknowledges an existing asymmetry (of “the center” and “the peripheries”) and tries to fight it. “Postcolonial cultures require effective decolonization, but they must start with self-valorization”,[12] Dussel notes—and by such means, affirmation as a method of self-validation, should be considered first and foremost.

In this way, transmodernity exists on the basis of intercultural dialogue and unites all the aspects that exist “outside” of those structures that are valued in modern European/North American culture, such as intelligence, progress, classics. To the contrary, transmodernity is positively rooted in traditions, different from modernity. However, it is not about a uniform and colorless unity as much as it is about a multiplicity (a dialogue) of cultural othernesses, created by postcolonial communities horizontally—from one periphery to another. Such horizontal connections unite ecological and feminist movements, anti-racist and anti-communist resistance, animal protection and a volunteer spirit. Additionally, the “differences” that communicate between one another become involved in dialogue explicitly as those discarded by the powerful “center”, and yet they are not in the least aimed at capturing or turning such a center upside down. The growth of culture rather presupposes the growth of cultural resistance—not only towards the elites in other cultures, but to the Eurocentrism of the elites in the so-called peripheral, colonial cultures as well. 

Granted, while one can see such transmodern, intercultural dialogue as a utopia of multiplicity, it is still important that all the marginal and peripheral cultural practices, national, social, those based on class, race and gender are included in the orbit of such dialogue on the basis of equality. The Third and Second Worlds, postcolonial African states, Asia, Latin America, post-totalitarian, and post-Soviet Eastern Europe all take part in this dialogue on equal terms.

Theory of decolonization

Dussel’s theory echoes the theory of decolonization created by Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vazquez. Decolonization is a direction in contemporary postcolonial studies, established back in 1998 as a project of a group of scientists and intellectuals from South America and the Caribbean basin, along with some South American researchers who were working in the United States. Mignolo and Vazquez explain that in their understanding, decoloniality brings three concepts—modernity, coloniality and decoloniality—under one umbrella word—modernity/(de)coloniality—and marks these notions as one concept. It describes a position of synchronous, simultaneous existence in the state of modernity and coloniality, and resistance to them—decolonization.

This concept denotes a situation of conflict: on the one hand, the rhetoric of modernity with its promise of salvation, on the other, the logic of coloniality that presupposes hidden processes of appropriation, exploitation and corruption, which undermine the very narrative of a modernity achieved with the help of institutions, corporations, and industrialized nation-states. Decoloniality appears in the gap between modernity and coloniality as an open possibility for the transformation of their contradictions. At the same time, decoloniality appeals to the global-local histories of the South American region, interwoven with the imperial history of Euro-American modernity and postmodernity.

The decolonial project is most accurately represented by the “Manifesto of Decolonial Aesthetics” created by the Coloniality/Decoloniality/Modernity group. Just like the project of decolonization itself, decolonial aesthetics is directed at the “liberation of sensing and sensibilities trapped by modernity and its darker side: coloniality.”[14] In essence, such decolonial aesthetics is intercultural (as opposed to the multiculturality of North America), inter-epistemological, inter-political, inter-aesthetic and inter-spiritual. It is especially important to underline that in the expansion of the sphere of decolonization, both China and post-Socialist Eastern Europe (Romania, Russia) fall into its orbit. The ideologists of decolonization consequently stress that all the critique of the Western project of modernity and Eurocentrism occurs “from the perspective of the Global South and the former Eastern Europe”.[15]

The ideology of decolonization is directed at the reinstatement of identities that have been discredited by a modernity, which, according to the theorists of decolonization, has created racial, sexual, national, linguistic, religious and economic hierarchy. The task of this kind of aesthetics is to reveal transnational identities and retell the hidden narratives of colonialism in a new way. Appealing to the the margins is characteristic to such an aesthetics, while, as the authors of the decolonial aesthetics manifesto proclaim, such marginalized identities are the engines of decolonial transmodern thinking—they exist along the border, translate the feelings and states on the margins, and act in the zones of transitivity.

Thus, starting in 2009, a special decolonial aesthetics, termed aesthesis by Mignolo and  Vazquez, was formed in contrast to the notion of aesthetics produced by Western consciousness. Aesthesis is being interpreted as a movement that names and articulates cultural and sensual practices that possess challenging and subversive character and are directed against the hegemony of modern (colonial) Western aesthetics, which, as the theorists of decolonization state, impose universal models of beauty based on rationalism, on all the cultures of the world. In this sense, aesthesis means the revealing of the hidden, something that has been devalued by the aesthetics of modernity, which is in itself a mode of colonization. One mode of resistance for aesthesis is over-existentializing, which is reaffirmed on the basis of sense, taste, everyday aesthetics and bodily practices, i.e. aesthesis means, first and foremost, the decolonization of sense and sensuality.

Popular among South American artists, the theory of decolonization is gaining supporters in the East of Europe as well. Madina Tlostanova, a Russian philosopher and cultural researcher who is an active promoter of decolonial aesthetics, states explicitly that decolonial aesthesis is a sphere of sensual perception of the world, while decolonization itself is a theory of the liberation of knowledge and being from the constraints of Western aesthetics. By opposing the Western theory of post-modernism, it points to the possibilities of new rhetorical optics: “instead of creating a hybrid of Lacan, Indian colonial history and subjectivity and creating rich poly-semantic notions in the style of Homi Bhabha, one can start the conversation not with Lacan but with Chicana queer feminist Gloria Anzaldúa or Mexican Zapatistas, Caucasian cosmology or Sufism.”[16]

And even though the vocabulary of decolonial aesthesis has already been formed, it is still lacking in specific analytical practice. Meanwhile, for us another aspect is important—decolonial critique is born in the periphery, and: a) is formed in opposition to Western theories of modernity and post-modernity; b) signifies intercultural dialogue that suggests the concept of Dussel’s transmodernity; c) presupposes a movement from one periphery to another (the Caribbean region, South Asia, Eastern Europe); d) means the shift of optics from rationality to sense and sensuality; e) works, similar to transmodernity, with practices of borderline consciousness. 

In all honesty one should note that neither Dussel’s theory of transmodernity, nor the theory of decolonization of Mignolo and Vazquez defy the achievements of Western modernity as such—they are rather directed at amending it. In a certain sense they can be also viewed as localized theories of post-modernism itself. 

Ukraine as a European province

As we can see, the orbit of both theories, proposed by these Latin American philosophers, also includes post-totalitarian Eastern Europe. Can they be helpful, for instance, for Ukraine? And, if yes, in what way? First, let us try to place Ukrainian identity on the European map.

The roots of European identity are traditionally associated with a Mediterranean heritage—Greek and Roman culture, as well as Christianity, the Renaissance, and protestant ethics (drawing on Max Weber). The idea of Europeanism itself is based on an axis of Greece-Rome-Europe that is grounded and explained in the framework of the German Enlightenment and Romanticism at the end of the 18th century in the works of Schiller, Winkelman, Humboldt, Hegel and Herder, who were basically establishing a primary role for Europe in World History. However, as contemporary researchers of ancient history state, not only did Ancient Greece and Rome harbor not have an idea of a joint Europe, there was also no geographic notion of “Europe” as such. There was an opposition to the lands of the Roman Empire, which included lands of both Northern Africa, where Latin was the lingua franca, and the Eastern Empire, encompassing Greece and part of Asia (Anatolia), where Greek was the lingua franca. 

According to scholars, the Ancient world was generally post-cultural and multilingual. Even in the Middle Ages linguistically Latin-derivative Europe was a different, peripheral culture neighboring the culture of the Muslim world. As Dussel underlined, the Roman Empire never became the center of the history of Euro-African-Asian continent.[17] Besides, Greco-Roman culture was itself in no way uniform. Martin Heidegger analyzed the role that Rome (or the Roman interpretation of classical Greek philosophy, culture, and politics) played in the codification of the European cultural identity[18] and, turning to primary sources, debunked the perception of Greco-Roman tradition as something whole, a perception which laid the groundwork for European identity. He stressed that the thinking and culture of Ancient Greece and Rome were radically different from each other: “…one was a culture focused on difference, the other on the principle of identity; one was true to the agonistic polis, the other (even during its republican stage) devoted to the Imperial state.”[19]

How does one think of the Slavic world in the frame of the European romantic concept of Occidentalism, which was elaborated, for instance, by Johann Gottfried Herder (1744 – 1803)? Herder develops an interest in national cultures and folk poetry against the backdrop of foreign examples, widely introduced by the aesthetics of Enlightenment in Germany and across Europe. In a time of imperial conquests and colonization, he either equated himself with the European cultural center, or took the side of the provincial colonized peoples—for example, the Slavs, when Herder proclaimed his sympathy for the patriarchal Slavdom and predicted its future renaissance. Moreover, the foundation of his theory is an attachment to home, the homogeneity of culture entrenched in land, tradition, and language, as well as the identification of a “natural” (organic) state, in which people have their own national form and language. According to Herder’s vision, colonial movement leads to the hybridization of people, the mixing of races and the weakening of the state, and it also leads to degeneration of the colonizers themselves, who are not accustomed to foreign climates. On the contrary, according to Herder, cultural development occurs in an organic way—through the grafting, immersion, and combination of cultures.

Herder’s ideas had an immense influence on Slavic—including Ukrainian—Romanticism, in particular when it came to an appreciation of ethno-national distinctiveness. Granted, Ukrainian Romantics overlooked the fact that Herder did not refer to the renaissance of the Slavs as much as he referred to the Europe of the 18th century, “immersed in a dream”. In his famous 1769 travel diary Herder noted that he saw a new power, one able to deliver a spiritual renaissance to Europe as a center of world history, not in the North or West, but rather in the East and South. Thus, in his “political dreaming, inspired by the sea”, Herder pointed to a special role for the European peoples that would be cultured in the future, including Ukraine. “Ukraine will become the new Greece”, he dreamt. “The beautiful sky that stretches above these people, their good-natured character, musicality, fertile lands, etc., will one day wake from sleep”.[20]

Such a vision is in essence a colonial civilizational utopia. It refers to a future “civilized nation” that will be born in the midst of “small peoples, as the Greeks once were”. The borders of such a nation “will stretch to the Black Sea and from there all across the world. Hungary, all of these nations, and a strip of Poland and Russia will be engaged in this new culture”.[21]

Such an ideal Ukrainian state resembles Greece as a modern nation, newly discovered by the romantics. As William Spanos notes, modern Greece was really nothing but a “monumentalist depiction of classical Greece”, invented by the representatives of the Enlightenment, which is to say, it was really a “romanticized Greece” and was only marginally connected to the real Greece of the 18th and 19th centuries. What Herder has in mind is exactly this kind of an “ideal” Greece of the future—a Ukraine that would grow to replace the “small wild peoples, such as the Greeks once were”.

Herder’s reflections mirrored the drafting of the joint Western-European historiography and the philosophy of culture in the age of the late Enlightenment, where peripheral margins of European civilization were clearly defined. The foundation of such a civilization that would one day, according to Herder, include the Slavic world as well, would be the “spirit of culture”, i.e. education. The spirit of culture must be brought from the outside. After all, the future of the new civilized cultures is seen not from the inside, from the perspective of their autonomous independence, but rather, “when you look at them from the North and West”, which is to say, from the perspective of the European states that have already been civilized. By naming the countries he had seen, Herder defined the borders of this Europe: “I sailed past Courland [located today on the territory of Latvia], Prussia, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Jutland, Holland, Scotland, England, the Netherlands to France herself.”[22] Granted, while one can specify the level of civilization for each of the mentioned countries, it is still first and foremost the perspective that is significant here, and this perspective is directed from the North and West to the European East and South. Another conspicuous aspect is the fact that Herder diminished the history and culture of the peoples that have not tasted the abundant spirit of civilization. “All of it is yet to come, all must come true one day—but how, when, owing to what? What kind of seed is there in the spirit of the peoples that can give them a mythology, a poetry, a living culture? [emphasis mine, T. H.]”[23] Evaluating the creative force of the Slavic peoples in particular, Herder was apparently convinced that they had not yet attained any mythology, poetry, or culture. 

Hegel later expands this opposition and unambiguously formulates the notion of Europe as the West. “In the way that Europe on the whole is the center and the end of the ancient world, Asia is absolutely the East,”[24] he states, and goes on to define Europe in three parts. The first is Southern Europe, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, in particular Italy and Greece, where “the arena of world history has for a long time been located, and, as the central and northern parts of Europe were uncultured, the world spirit found there its homeland”.[25] The second part is the “heart of Europe” which Hegel attributes to France, Germany, and England. The third part he sees in the North-Eastern states of Europe: Poland and Russia. “It is only later that they were added to the number of historical states and maintained continuous contacts with Asia,” he concludes.[26] Eastern Asia and the Balkans are the furthest borders of European culture which, according to Hegel, is framed around the Mediterranean as “the beginning and the end of World History, its rise and fall”.[27]

As we can see, modernity is based on the vision of the Enlightenment formed around a rational spirit and with Europe as the center of world history, while Ukraine has been allocated a peripheral role. This opposition, between the center and the peripheries of European civilization, has given rise to a constant tension, and, up until today, the notion that playing catch up with Europe and Europeanization has been a continuous motive for all the historical-philosophical and cultural projects of modernity in Ukraine.

Thus, one can find numerous parallels between the peripheries of world history that are cast aside by Eurocentric modernity—in Asia, Africa, Latin America and in the peripheries of Eurocentrism itself, such as, for instance, the eastern margins of Europe. When it comes to common ground, it can be found in the first place in opposition to Europeanized national elites and the marginalization of the folk (popular, in Dussel’s understanding) cultures, as well as the constant desire of the peripheries to come closer to the center, or to realize their Eurocentric claims. Meanwhile, another solution is also possible. One can probably go beyond the limits of the constant pursuit of European modernity by discarding, or, more accurately, adjusting the vector of one’s attraction to the center, and becoming involved in the processes of intercultural dialogues proposed by the peripheries. Notable, in fact, is that the theories of transmodernity and decolonization, elaborated by the South American philosophers discussed in this article, include Eastern Europe in the orbit of their dialogue. Identifying themselves with the processes of self-realization unfolding in the peripheral outskirts of the Western (Euro-American) world, which includes the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, Eastern Europe becomes a subject of discussions that take place in the postcolonial world, and in which the voices of the Third and the Second worlds come together. 

Translated by Viktoria Grivina

Tamara Hundorova is a Ukrainian literary critic, culturologist and writer. She is a professor and head of the Theory of Literature Department at the Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and a professor and dean at the Ukrainian Free University. Hundorova has written books on modern Ukrainian literature, specifically interpreting works through postmodern, postcolonial, gender, and psychoanalytic theories. Her works focus on the transitions in Ukraine during the early twentieth and twenty-first century.

Published 23 December 2022

1. Editor’s Column: “The End of Postcolonial Theory? A Roundtable with Sunil Agnani, Fernando Coronil, Gaurav Desai, Mamadou Diouf, Simon Gikandi, Susie Tharu, and Jennifer Wenzel”, PMLA, 2007, vol. 122, № 3, p. 633–651. 
2. ibidem, p. 30. 
3. Bonnie Thomas, “Francophone postcolonial studies: past, present and future”, Postcolonial Studies, 2010, vol. 13, № 2, p. 223–227.
4. Alec G. Hargreaves, David Murphy, “Introduction: New Directions in Postcolonial Studies”, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2008, vol. 44, № 3, p. 221–225. 
5. Ana Margarita Dias Martins, “Gender and the ‘postcolonial exotic'”, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2013, vol. 48, № 1, p. 153. 
6. Энрике Дюссель, «По ту сторону европоцентризма: Миросистема и пределы модерности», Перекрестки. Журнал исследований восточноевропейского пограничья, 2008, № 1, с. 151.
7. ibidem, с. 151.
8. Enrique Dussel, “Transmodernity and Interculturality: An Interpretation from the Perspective of Philosophy of Liberation”, Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 2012, vol. 1, № 3, p. 33. 
9. ibidem, p. 36. 
10. ibidem, p. 42.
11. ibidem, p. 37. 
12. ibidem, p. 44.
13. Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vázquez, “Decolonial AestheSis Colonial Wounds Decolonial Healings”, Social Text.htm, http://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/decolonial-aesthesis-colonial-woundsdecolonial-healings/.
14. Decolonial Aesthetics (I), http://transnationaldecolonialinstitute.wordpress.com/decolonial-aesthetics/ 
15. ibidem.
16. Мадина Тлостанова, «Постколониальная теория, деколониальный выбор и освобождение эстезиса», http://e-notabene.ru/ca/article_141.html
17. Enrique Dussel, “Europe, Modernity, and Eurocentrism”, Nepantla: Views from South, 2000, vol. 1, Issue 3, p. 466. 
18. Willam V. Spanos, “Heidegger’s Parmenides: Greek Modernity and Classical Legacy”, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 2001, vol. 9, p. 91.
19. ibidem, p. 92.
20. Иоганн Готфрид Гердер, «Дневник моего путешествия в 1769 году», Иоганн Готфрид Гердер, Избранные сочинения, Москва–Ленинград, ГИХЛ, 1959, с. 324. 
21. ibidem, с. 324. 
22. ibidem.
23. ibidem.
24. Г. В. Ф. Гегель, «Философия истории», Сочинения, т. 8, Москва–Ленинград, 1935, с. 94. 
25. ibidem, с. 96.
26. ibidem, с. 97.
27. ibidem, с. 84.