This work aims to problematize the concepts through which academics and intellectuals have tried to clarify how and why premodern traditions, expectations of modernity and the effects of the postmodern condition are indiscernible when describing Latin American societies. The result is a border text in which multiple rationalities inserted in complex and contradictory forms of life that define the different eras and social formations from the Conquest of America are inscribed.
In the first part of the book the question is posed about the presence of the pre-Hispanic past in the present of colonial modernity and that of coloniality in the Republic; and in the second cousin the paradoxical, the multiple and the heterogeneous that characterize contemporary peripheries. With the current philosophical discussion as a background, this book is a work of conceptual archive attracted by the project of a theory that accounts for peripheral societies in the evolution of their own modernity.