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Sabine Heiss, Benno Herzog
RIMCIS - International and Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Sciences Vol. 10 No. 1
Publication year: 2021

In the social sciences and humanities, an effort has recently been made to apprehend social phenomena through the metaphor of invisibility. Decolonial theory shares with the concept of invisibilization the idea that coloniality takes place in a space of social construction that we can perfectly understand as a space of the visible and invisible. The aim of this article is to illuminate the potential of invisibility theories for decolonial theory. Different approaches on the concept of invisibility are presented that allow us to understand colonialities as a game of visibilization and invisibilization. In the second part we focus on the three dimensions of the triangle of coloniality: being, knowledge and power. The combination of the perspectives of invisibility and coloniality offers conceptual tools for a better understanding of the functioning of processes of discrimination and the imperception of these processes by the social actors involved.