Yuri Gómez

Thesis title: Shifting Political Horizons: Aníbal Quijano, Socialism and the Coloniality of Power

This project reconstructs the political and intellectual trajectory through which the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano developed the Coloniality of Power during the second half of the twentieth century. Rather than approaching it as an abstract body of concepts, the research situates this explanatory framework within the historical conditions, political practices and intellectual debates from which it emerged.

The project examines Quijano’s trajectory as a field in which political militancy and intellectual work intersected across different historical conjunctures. It explores his engagement with social struggles and Marxist debates, the production and circulation of political knowledge through print culture, and the transnational networks connecting Latin America and Europe. In doing so, the research asks how the problems that would later inform the Coloniality of Power became historically thinkable.

Methodologically, the project combines archival research and oral history to reconstruct a trajectory whose traces are dispersed across personal papers, correspondence, periodicals, pamphlets and other political materials, as well as testimonies and institutional archives in several countries. By bringing these heterogeneous and sometimes fragmentary traces into relation, the research approaches the constitution of its own archive as part of the historical inquiry. Ultimately, the project seeks to recover the historical and political dimensions of Quijano’s work that tend to disappear when the Coloniality of Power is detached from the struggles and practices through which it emerged.

Supervisory team

• Nick Morgan, School of Modern Languages, Newcastle University
• Giuliana Borea, School of Modern Languages, Newcastle University

Publications

• Book:
  • Yuri Gómez (Ed.), El encuentro. Aricó y Mariátegui en el marxismo latinoamericano (Santiago de Chile: LOM, 2025)
• Book Chapter:
  • Yuri Gómez, ‘La sinuosa línea recta de la extrema derecha en el Perú', in Pensar las derechas II. Ideologías, proyectos políticos y narrativas reaccionarias, ed. Jorge Moya Carvajal et al. (Valparaíso: Centro de Estudios del Pensamiento Iberoamericano (CEPIB-UV), 2026), 305–334.
  • Yuri Gómez, ‘The shape of a magazine: on Quijano’s Sociedad y Política experience', in Aníbal Quijano, Dissidences and Crossroads of Latin American Critical Theory, ed. Deni Alfaro Rubbo (London: Routledge, 2025), 38–51.

Conferences

• 'Quijano’s Correspondence: Transnational Intellectual Formation and Self-Representation in Postwar Latin America,' Crossing Borders: Transnational Perspectives on Life-Writing and Ego-Documents, University of Southampton, 2026

Academic Background

• MA Latin American Cultural Studies, Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar – Ecuador
• BA Social Science, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú