Ethnic Studies as Decolonial Transdisciplinarity*

Dr. Nelson Maldonado-Torres is a Professor at the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and the Comparative Literature Program at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is also Director of the Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies, and member of the Executive Board of the Frantz Fanon Foundation. He is the author of Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (2008) and La descolonización y el giro de(s)colonial [Decolonization and the Decolonial Turn] (2011). He is also coeditor of Latin@s in the World-System: Decolonization Struggles in the 21st Century U.S. Empire, and guest editor of two special issues entitled “Thinking through the Decolonial Turn: Post-continental Interventions in Theory, Philosophy, and Critique” in the journal Transmodernity. He is currently working on a book-length project entitled “Fanonian Meditations,” which aims to spell out the epistemological basis of Ethnic Studies and related areas, as well as examine the relevance of decolonization at the epistemological, ethical, and political levels.