Rocío Zambrana
Rocío Zambrana’s work examines conceptions of critique in Hegel, Marx, Frankfurt School Critical Theory, Marxist feminism, decolonial thought and decolonial feminism, and Latinx, Latin American, and Caribbean feminisms. She is the author of Hegel’s Theory of Intelligibility (2015) as well as numerous articles. Her current work explores coloniality as the afterlife of colonialism, considering the articulation and deployment of race/gender as crucial to the development and resilience of capitalism. She considers the manifestations of coloniality in a colonial context, however, by examining fiscally distressed Puerto Rico. She recently completed a second book, Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico, which develops the notion of contemporary and historical “neoliberal coloniality” in a particular context: that of Puerto Rico’s debt crisis. In Zambrana‘s account, debt functions not only as an apparatus of capture and predation, (intensifying a neoliberalism reconfigured by the financial crisis); it also functions as a historical and contemporary form of coloniality, deepening race/gender/class hierarchies that mark populations as dispensable. Zambrana is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Emory University.