Transmodern Liberation Philosophies

Abstract

Indian Dalit and Latin American liberation philosophies are among the most fertile discourses of emancipation the modern world has produced, despite their vastly different geographical, historical, political, and sociocultural coordinates. Yet little critical attention has been devoted to systematically connect or compare these two powerful ideological formations. This essay attempts to fill this gap by delinking the Indian Dalit thinker B. R. Ambedkar from the theoretical discourses of postcolonialism and postmodernism, and linking him to the decolonial framework of transmodernism developed by Latin American liberation philosopher Enrique Dussel. Framing the affiliation between Ambedkar and Dussel in terms of ideological similarity and political solidarity, I present Ambedkar as a transmodern thinker who precedes and exceeds Dussel, placing him at the head of a global vanguard fighting to lay the epistemological foundation for a critical universal enlightenment.