The article addresses the relationship between modernity and coloniality in the field of colonial theories, both postcolonial and decolonial, emphasizing the problems of representation and putting in the foreground the problem of not having a language suitable to express the tensions that the same relationship produces. For this, it discuss the crossroads of the coloniality and modernity, present in representative authors of these theories, and it assumes such a crossroads as a cultural and theoretical arena. From there, a reading exercise (...) is proposed, as an example, in texts by Joseph Conrad and Frantz Fanon. Finally, the article discusses some nuances of the problem of representation that could affect our understanding of the processes of subjectivity, their histories and the morphologies of our knowledge. (shrink)