The end of the transparent empire? Communication, Interculturality and Decoloniality Juan Carlos Valencia, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana valencia.juan@javeriana.edu.co Paula Restrepo, Universidad de Antioquia paula.restrepo@udea.edu.co Paper presented at 2015 WFI Symposium Communication, Postcoloniality and Social Justice: Decolonizing Imaginations. Villanova University, 26-29 march 1. Bifurcation through media? This paper attempts to answer theoretically and through the analysis of a few significant examples the following questions: Does the widespread increase in communication practices by social movements, indigenous communities and other non-hegemonic actors in the so called Third World means that the five century long existence of the Western- dominated World-System is coming to an end and that a more diverse, pluriversal world is emerging? Or on the contrary, that explosion of communication means that post-fordist Western capitalism has found a new frontier of expansion and it is managing to co-opt difference? Is communication a tool for fostering the coming about of what Immanuel Wallerstein calls a bifurcation or a machine for the insertion of the last vestiges of diversity into global modernity? Let’s start by remembering what Gianni Vattimo (1992) asserted in his book The Transparent Society: the advent of what he called the society of generalized communication, one in which people and cultures from all over the world were finally able to make their voices heard, made evident that the European ideal of humanity was just one, a provincial one, among many. The expansion and diversification of media and other communicative practices developed from below and responding to other epistemologies and worldviews was finally liberating and empowering difference and was gradually bringing about the end of totalitarian, ethnocentric Western Modernity. Vattimo (1992)