Crossing Racial Borders: The Epistemic Empowerment of the Subaltern explores critically the racial, socioeconomic, historical, and political contemporary conditions of the lived experiences of the subaltern, the oppressed. Through the lens of the decolonial school of thought developed by Latin American thinkers and scholars, this text focuses on the identification and analysis of the subalterns' praxis of living, thinking, knowing, and doing. The contributors delve into the subalterns' agency at work and how their [inter]subjective/reflective actions, gestures, and thoughts are deep-seated in subverting and resisting the material and symbolic coloniality of power's exploitation, categorization, and oppression. Drawing from sociological, anthropological, literary, and historical approaches, a new set of ideas and rationalities uncovers and challenges the complicities of modernity/coloniality (power-pattern-matrix) through new narratives and discursive epistemic-frames of empowerment and agency.

Latin America has been a place of radical political inspiration providing an alternative to the neoliberal model. Religion without Redemption looks at the sociology of religion, political philosophy and the history of ideas of the continent, in an attempt to show how Western understanding fails to come close to a correct analysis of how and why political and economic characteristics work as they do. It focuses on how the centrality of religion for the people of Latin America has influenced how they interact with the changes in the modern economic system. Capitalism has taken on religious characteristics: it has sacred places of worship, such as the shopping mall, as well as its own prophets. This book explains how this form of 'cultural religion' accompanies many aspects of life in a contradictory manner: not only does it fulfil the role of legitimating oppression, it also can be a powerful source of rebellion, unveiling thus a subversive side to the status quo. Religion Without Redemption advances the ideas of liberation theory into the 21st century, and challenges the provincialism to which many Latin American thinkers are usually consigned.