The interdisciplinary field known as Postcolonial Studies has advanced a severe critique of traditional Eurocentric explanatory models of peripheral and postcolonial societies' historical development. In a dialogue with this literature, this paper shows how a Marxist scholarship developed in São Paulo during the 1960s and 1970s ("Marxismo Paulista") attempted to deconstruct Eurocentric categories and to propose critical analytical models from a "peripheral standpoint" - since the critique of Brazilian modernity was elaborated as a moment of a critique of global modernity. This paper also highlights how that groundbreaking work of epistemic decolonization - by means of a very local reading of Marx - provides elements for a renewed postcolonial social science and cultural critique.
Postcolonial studies; Marxismo paulista; Episteme decolonization; Peripheral modernity; Coloniality