This work contains a critical analysis of the so-called decolonial option, taking into account its theoretical, epistemological, political and institutional dimensions. Sharing the aim of questioning and overcoming the asymmetries in the intellectual field, which undoubtedly exist and are the product of a long history of colonisation, the text tries to show the shortcomings of the decolonial option as a critique of epistemic colonialism but, above all, as a proposal for overcoming it. The perspective from which this criticism is developed is that of a heterodox Marxism.
“The reader must be prepared to notice, without surprise, that the problems studied here overflow on all sides the concrete limits of the American theme, ending up offering an idea of the march and progress of the Culture of the West, which thus reveals itself as the only vital project in history with true promise by virtue of the internal dialectic that enlivens it.”
Edmundo O’Gorman, La invención de América, 1958.
Such statements are a clear example of the fascination with the European (Western) that is so characteristic of perhaps most of the intelligentsia of formerly colonised countries and peoples. Once political colonialism is broken, a cultural and intellectual colonialism survives (let us leave aside for now the thorny question of the economy). Although it would be strange to read statements like the one quoted above in academic texts today, attenuated versions, expressed in somewhat more “politically correct” terms, remain present and influential. The explicit or implicit prejudice that everything that comes from Europe or North America is better, the tendency to reproduce uncritically discourses and practices that come from there, the feeling of inferiority, the emphasis on repeating received truths rather than on developing original thought, the blindness to the various manifestations of “internal colonialism”, the contempt for (and incomprehension of) the feeling and thinking of the popular classes and indigenous peoples, and open or concealed “racism”, all these are certainly very common among academics and intellectuals. There also undoubtedly exist startling epistemic privileges. A work written in English has far more chance of being known and recognised than one written in Spanish (let alone if it is in Quechua or Mapuzugun!) regardless of its intrinsic qualities. In the same way, a common and widespread prejudice will presuppose that what someone with a university education says must be correct, without evaluating their arguments; or will assume that the statements of someone with white skin and light eyes are more credible than those of someone with dark skin and eyes. The reaction of intellectuals and activists against such gross prejudices is therefore understandable.
In recent decades a theoretical current prepared to combat what it considers “epistemic coloniality” has been gaining ground and visibility in the academic world. This is the so-called decolonial option. [Translator’s note: the original adds “or, under its more recent name, descolonial”, a Spanish spelling variant that has no equivalent in English, where “decolonial” is the usual form.]
Although those who make up what its members call the modernity/coloniality project (Catherine Walsh, Walter Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano and Boaventura de Sousa Santos are perhaps the best-known figures) have significant differences among themselves, they share some premises, a certain intellectual style and certain common spaces and practices, enough for it to be reasonable to consider them an intellectual current.
A good summary of the shared premises is provided by Mignolo:
- There is no modernity without coloniality, since the latter is an indispensable part of modernity.
- The modern/colonial world (and the colonial matrix of power) originates in the sixteenth century, and the discovery/invention of America is the colonial component of modernity, whose visible face is the European Renaissance.
- The Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution are derived historical moments that consist in the transformation of the colonial matrix of power.
- Modernity is the name of the historical process in which Europe set out on the road to hegemony. Its dark side is coloniality.
- Capitalism, as we know it, is at the essence of the notion of modernity and of its dark side, coloniality.
- Capitalism and modernity/coloniality had a second historical moment of transformation after the Second World War, when the United States appropriated the imperial leadership previously enjoyed, in different epochs, by Spain and England. [1]
All these premises are certainly debatable, although at this (extreme) level of generality they can be accepted, perhaps with a change of emphasis. [2] However, two much more controversial conclusions are drawn from them. The first is that the key to Western domination is epistemic (rather than economic, technological, political or military). The second, derived from the first, is that to put an end to coloniality a rupture with “Western” epistemic frameworks is indispensable: to practise an “epistemic delinking” (desprendimiento epistémico; in Mignolo’s English-language writing, “delinking”), to put it in their own terms. [3]
Ethnicity and coloniality
There is no doubt that there are vast differences of power, one dimension of which is ethnic. This does not mean, however, that different ethnic groups necessarily possess clearly differentiated cultures. Although certain more or less distinctive cultural traits may be preconditions of ethnicity, ethnicity has to do with identity; and one can have different identities without any observable difference in culture or way of life. If I may put it somewhat provocatively, today it is not clear that there exists a Mapuche culture, any more than an Argentine, Chilean or European culture. What there are, without doubt, are Mapuche, Argentine, Chilean, US, Spanish identities, etc. And also, of course, manifest differences of power, wealth and status between these different ethnic groups, without their ways of life necessarily differing very much.
Cultural frontiers are increasingly blurred: the world is increasingly mestizo (although, and this is not minor, the relative influences of each cultural tradition are very asymmetrical). The Mapuche poet Erwin Quintupil perfectly captured the tendency towards cultural mixing joined to the survival and even strengthening of identities, amid the enormous asymmetry between the different states or cultures in creating cultural goods that are imposed on others or accepted by them more or less voluntarily. In the poem entitled “Sin nombre” (1995), as quoted by José Marimán (Autodeterminación, Santiago de Chile, LOM, 2012, p. 34), he wrote:
There are Chileans who say
that if I am indigenous
why then do I wear jeans.
I feel like
telling him
that neither he nor I are made in USA.
Interculturality implies mutual respect between the different identities, whether or not they are grounded in important cultural differences. Identities are symbolic realities that do not refer back to any non-symbolic essentiality. Cultural goods may originate or be more developed within certain cultures or identity groups, but they do not belong exclusively to them. Jeans originated in the United States, but they do not belong intrinsically to Americans. When we speak of things such as “English literature”, “Maya art” or “Chinese technology”, we should bear in mind that these are ways of referring to the literature, art or technology produced in a given geographical space or in a specific language, and not to a literature, an art or a technology that possesses essential, absolutely proper and unmodifiable inherent characteristics.
Thus, there is no intrinsically Western episteme. And it would be absurd and disrespectful to ask someone to abandon their Western identity, if they had one, just as it was absurd in its day (and in some cases still is) to demand that indigenous populations abandon their language and beliefs. What would be appropriate, in any case, would be to ask whoever it may be to abandon the unjustifiable aspects of their beliefs. We do not need religious conversions or generic “delinking”. What we need is to develop critical thinking. How does the decolonial option fare under critical inspection? Let us see.
Let us begin with the concept of coloniality, which is in a way the mother concept. According to Aníbal Quijano:
Coloniality is a necessary neologism. It stands, with respect to the term colonialism, in the same position as modernity with respect to modernism. It refers, above all, to power relations in which the categories of “race”, “colour” and “ethnicity” are inherent and fundamental. [4]
These lines are much more problematic than they might seem at first sight. In the first place, the parallel drawn between modernity/modernism and coloniality/colonialism does not seem valid, in Quijano’s own terms. Conventionally, modernism is understood as an artistic or intellectual style, and modernity as a historical period in which that style would be dominant. Consequently, coloniality should refer to a historical period in which colonialism dominates. But this is not the case:
Coloniality is a different concept, although linked to the concept of colonialism. The latter refers strictly to a structure of domination and exploitation, in which the control of political authority, of the resources of production and of the labour of a given population is held by another of a different identity, and whose headquarters are, moreover, in another territorial jurisdiction. But it does not always, nor necessarily, imply racist power relations. Colonialism is, obviously, older, whereas coloniality has proved, over the last five hundred years, to be deeper and more lasting than colonialism. But it was undoubtedly engendered within the latter and, what is more, without the latter it could not have been imposed on the intersubjectivity of the world in such a deeply rooted and long-lasting way. [5]
Defined in such terms (which are, moreover, the conventional ones), colonialism is age-old and transcultural: there was Persian, Roman, Islamic or Inca colonialism, among very many others. Whether or not it is prior to coloniality (understood as power relations in which the categories of “race”, “colour” and “ethnicity” are inherent and fundamental) is something that would have to be demonstrated, but it seems highly probable that there existed forms of coloniality (that is, some form of oppression by one ethnic group over others) prior to colonialism in the strict sense. Now, if colonialism is prior to the (modern/colonial) world-economy that took shape around the sixteenth century, and coloniality is a phenomenon capable of surviving colonialism (and perhaps prior to it), then one may ask what exactly that “colonial pattern” of power of which Quijano speaks consists in. Because if it is defined generically (“power relations in which race, colour or ethnicity are fundamental”), that matrix is much older than the sixteenth century. Neither colonialism nor coloniality is a novelty of the times of Columbus and Moctezuma. In any case, what happens in the sixteenth century is that colonialism and coloniality take on specific forms (on which Quijano does not dwell), on the one hand, and a magnitude incomparable with the past, on the other. But, obviously, neither that specificity nor that magnitude can be explained by coloniality itself: the Europeans did not manage to come close to dominating the world by having invented colonialism and coloniality (which already existed). What they fundamentally did was to take colonialism and coloniality to an unprecedented scale. How was this possible? The debates on this are enormous. Some will insist on the development of capitalist relations of production, others on the Industrial Revolution, others on scientific thought, etc. Without need of a detailed critique of all those perspectives, decolonial authors insist that the key is epistemic. Mignolo, for example, states:
The problem, for Marxism, is capitalism; whereas for the decolonial option it is the colonial matrix of power (“pattern” in Aníbal Quijano’s vocabulary), of which the economy is a sphere. Marxism is anchored in the form that the colonial matrix takes in the eighteenth century (and focuses on the economic aspect). The decolonial option is anchored in the historical formation of the colonial matrix of power in the sixteenth century (and focuses on the management of the economy, of authority, of gender and sexuality; of subjectivity and knowledge), and makes the control of knowledge the fundamental instrument of domination and control of all the other spheres. [6]
However, his perspective has nothing to do with other epistemic or cognitive explanations of the kind provided, for example, by Ernest Gellner, for whom it was the development of scientific knowledge, with all its complex specificity, that allowed those who were able to master its techniques (some countries of Europe first, the United States afterwards) to develop economic, naval and military capacities unattainable for the rest. [7] It would not be, then, the cognitive efficacy of science and its technological applications that was the key to Western domination. The key would be colonialism and coloniality imposed by means of what Mignolo calls the “rhetoric of modernity”. But this in truth explains nothing, and if it does, it does not leave the colonised peoples looking good. Let us dwell, then, on this alleged explanation. According to Mignolo:
from 1500, Ottomans, Incas, Russians, Chinese, etcetera, began to confront a process of inversion of recognition: they began to recognise that Western languages and categories of thought and, therefore, political philosophy and political economy were expanding without recognising them as equals in the game. [8]
This is true in general, of course. But why would the Ottomans, the Chinese or the Incas care about things like political philosophy, without which they had lived until then so placidly? And what gave the European minority the power to decide who was recognised, and how? Why was European recognition so important? Why could that particular ethnic group (or conglomerate of ethnic groups) exert such influence and power of attraction? The answer is that the Europeans had developed an abrupt, colossal leap in the productivity of labour and in war technologies, which gave them an incomparable power. The sources of this power are under debate: was it capitalism, manufacture/industry, science, the world-economy, Christendom? [9] The decolonial answer (on this there is full agreement among those who claim to be decolonial, whatever their differences on other levels) insists that the foundation is “epistemic”, but conceiving the epistemic not as a cognitive capacity translatable into technical domination, but in a rather rhetorical sense: the rhetoric of modernity would have exalted everything Western, classified human groups racially or ethnically and inferiorised the other cultures. This is like saying that for centuries we have been deceived, and that the power of the dominators resides in their capacity to inculcate in us thoughts that harm us. Moreover, to say or imply that, fundamentally, Euro-North American domination is due to its capacity to inculcate, through rhetoric, conceptions that benefit the dominators, rather than to its military and economic might, does not seem a very convincing answer in explanatory terms, nor one that leaves oppressed peoples intellectually well placed.
Of course ideology forms part of domination, but it seems obvious that domination has other bases. A painstaking critique of the other available explanations remains absent from decolonial intellectual production, despite its already having a couple of decades of development. It is acceptable (though not unavoidable) for an incipient conception to make itself known by means of general and little-developed criticisms of its intellectual rivals. But at some point rigorous critique ought to appear. If this does not happen, it is difficult to take that conception seriously theoretically, however important it may be in rhetorical terms. It may have social and political effects, but that is not equivalent to theoretical soundness.
Epistemic privilege and asymmetry
None of this implies denying either the existence or the importance of the phenomenon of coloniality, understood as forms of power in which ethnicity is constitutive and fundamental. In the cognitive domain, putting an end to all forms of epistemic privilege is ethically and politically indispensable. But we should bear in mind that epistemic privilege is not the same as epistemic asymmetry. Epistemic privilege is when the conceptions of the members of a given group or community tend to be accepted or validated without prior examination and, conversely, the conceptions of the members of other groups or communities tend to be devalued without examination or flatly ignored. Asymmetry is something else: it refers to the purely factual circumstance that certain individuals possess greater knowledge (in certain matters or fields, and only in them) than others. But asymmetry should not confer privilege: that my knowledge of the theory of history is greater than that of my students does not mean that my views on certain problems in the field are necessarily better. That, in any case, should be demonstrated or at least argued for. In matters of knowledge, as in football, there are asymmetries but, as the saying goes, matches have to be played and are won on the pitch.
The decolonial option fiercely attacks epistemic privileges and on this point we agree. But its rejection of the phantasmagorical “Western episteme”, “rhetoric of modernity” or “logic of coloniality” is a veritable conceptual salad, a jumble in which, what is more, as in the dark, all cats are grey. If the decolonial approach were to lay bare the ethnocentric contents implicit in any theoretical or epistemic framework, to criticise the cognitive errors that such ethnocentrism might produce and to denounce the subtle, and not so subtle, social and academic practices that perpetuate privileges, we could only agree. [10] But why would that entail delinking from an entire epistemic framework? And what are we to understand by epistemic framework? Why should we leave the rhetoric of modernity rather than radicalise it? What is the “logic of coloniality” they talk about so much? From what exactly should we delink? As we shall see below, the decolonial answers to these questions oscillate between a radical but theoretically inconsistent and implausible answer, on the one hand, and a sensible but barely radical one, on the other.
Moreover, the rhetoric of “epistemic delinking” may perpetuate and even increase epistemic asymmetries. It is worth remembering that in class-divided societies knowledge is very unequally distributed. On the symbolic, technical and cognitive planes, the rule of the dominant classes is founded on their capacity to bring under their orbit, and set to work for them, scientists, technicians and intellectuals. This does not mean, for instance, that all Germans or Yankees (of Anglo-Saxon origin) master those techniques and knowledges. For a Yankee worker, psychoanalysis, neoclassical economics, quantum physics or set theory tend to be conceptions as alien as they might be for a Mapuche (and there are Mapuche who master them). Rejecting the double epistemic privilege, according to which it is prejudicially assumed that what a scientist says must be correct not only in his or her specific field of study but in any matter whatsoever, is an unavoidable task. But the obscurantist calls to delink from a Western episteme – obscurantist because they shed not the slightest light on the enormous theoretical differences existing within what is lumped together as “Western” – put obstacles in the way of the meticulous study of such diverse fields of knowledge, generating a false security: those who feel “delinked” believe they can refute in four sentences, and after a few superficial readings, works and theses of great complexity. An effect similar to the one produced in the Marxist tradition by the mythology of a dialectical methodology that, it is supposed, bourgeois thinkers cannot understand. [11] In the one case it is never specified what exactly that dialectical methodology consists in that the class enemy is incapable of grasping (beyond puerile generalisations such as “the whole is more than the sum of its parts” or that there exist “leaps from quantity into quality”); in the other it is never specified what exactly that “Western” episteme consists in that is held to cause coloniality.
Perhaps there is a rhetoric of modernity (in fact there are several); but it seems evident that modernity has not been only rhetoric, and that if European modernity/coloniality had the capacity it had to colonise directly almost the whole world and to force decisive changes in the regions not directly colonised, this was surely due to its not being mere rhetoric. European hegemony may have been reinforced rhetorically, but it had economic, political and military foundations irreducible to rhetoric. It also had cognitive components (which is not the same as rhetorical ones). Without modern science the technologies capable of subjugating the non-European world economically or militarily would not have developed. But if modern science has had the capacity to produce such undeniable transformations, it is because, although its political use may have both oppressive and liberating contents, it is epistemologically powerful. In the unmissable lecture “Reflexión sobre una política socialista de la ciencia” (“Reflection on a socialist politics of science”), of May 1979, Manuel Sacristán told his audience with keen accuracy:
I think it appropriate to remind you of that phrase of Ortega’s, in one of his last writings, a posthumous piece, in which, after examining the scientism of some philosophers and even scientists of the first half of the century, principally physicists, he concludes by saying that a thousand things have failed in Physics, namely physicalism, namely physicalist metaphysics, etc., and then, full stop, he says, with his generally witty rhetoric (in this case I think it is): “The only thing in Physics that has not failed is Physics”, and not speculating by extending it, not making generalisations on the basis of physical knowledge.
Well then, I too believe that is true, but it happens that at this end of the century we are finally perceiving that what is dangerous, disquieting, problematic about science is precisely its epistemological goodness. To put it by twisting Ortega’s phrase: the bad thing about Physics is that it is good, in a somewhat provocative sense that I use now. What makes what physicists do today problematic is the epistemological quality of what they do. If atomic physicists had all been mistaken, if they were perverted ideologues who did not know how to think properly, we would not today have the worry we have with nuclear energy. If geneticists had been flailing blindly, if they had been clouded by ideological prejudices, they would not today be committing the atrocities of genetic engineering. And so on. [12]
Sacristán was a philosopher who knew what it is to do rigorous science. He had a critical view of science as a cultural product (science is a set of theories, but as a phenomenon it is not exhausted by them: it also includes institutions and practices); but without denying its epistemological power and accepting the limited field of validity of science as knowledge (besides its relative, not absolute, character). Sacristán knew that science does not have answers for everything, that its answers are always tentative, and that there are questions that science can neither answer nor is it wise to expect to find a scientific answer to (for example the question of the meaning of life, which it is more sensible to approach philosophically or religiously). His is an excellent perspective, philosophically broad, scientifically rigorous, respectful of cultural diversities, of revolutionary intent and uncompromisingly critical. Should we delink from it? Why?
If – as Frantz Fanon put it – racist thought has sustained the “obscene idea” that “Negroes” and “Indians” are congenitally incapable of developing logic and science, the risk implicit in perspectives such as the decolonial one lies in urging members of oppressed ethnic groups to ignore or reject the cognitive qualities of logic and science, seeing them (mistakenly) as purely colonial forms. [13] And it should be remembered that logic, rationalism and various scientific enterprises have been developed outside Europe, in many cases completely independently. As Federico Mare put it in a personal communication analysing these questions:
The conflict between reason and tradition, between rational thought and a thought still immersed in atavistic collective beliefs (logos vs. mythopoiesis) is far from reducible to an antagonism between the West and the other civilisations. In ancient India and China, as in Sasanian Persia and medieval Islam, we find notable examples of free thought, of thoroughly non-Western intellectuals who investigate and reflect while leaving more or less in suspense commonly accepted opinions, the precepts of orthodox faith and the ideas consecrated by state power, that is to say, rationally. In the India of the Mahajanapadas, the nastika schools depart from Vedic revelation and refuse to recognise the authority of the Brahmins. In China, during the Spring and Autumn period and the subsequent age of the Warring States, Mohism openly questions Confucianism, then the official doctrine. In Sasanian Persia, the academies of Nisibis and Gundishapur absorb and spread Greek knowledge, arousing discontent in the ranks of the old Zoroastrian clergy; in the Arab world of the Golden Age, and at the hands of countless eminent sages (Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes, Ibn Khaldun, etc.), falsafa (science and philosophy) develops with extraordinary vigour to the alarm and indignation of the most conservative sectors, which sought to reduce intellectual activity to the traditional kalam (Qur’anic exegesis and revealed theology). Although Arab philosophy and science have – like their Byzantine and Western counterparts – a Greek origin, the extraordinary development they attained shows that rationality is far from being an exclusive trait of Western civilisation. [14]
Genealogy
Mignolo has been concerned to establish a genealogy of decolonial thinkers avant la lettre, and to claim certain political or intellectual projects as decolonial. He has claimed Zapatismo and the Bolivian MAS as decolonial projects, although both experiences are profoundly different and although, as far as we know, neither Zapatismo nor the MAS has recognised itself as decolonial. The reasons why the “Andean-Amazonian capitalist” Indianism advocated by the MAS could be claimed as decolonial, but not the anti-capitalist Indianism of Felipe Quispe, are not clear. But I prefer to dwell on the proposed genealogy.
One of the figures claimed is the Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman, who showed historiographically how the idea of America was constructed or invented. In Mignolo’s opinion, “O’Gorman’s thesis is situated in the genealogy of Creole decolonial thought”. [15] Now, it may come as a surprise to learn that the quotation from the epigraph with which we began this paper (the one saying that the Culture of the West is the only vital project in history) belongs precisely to O’Gorman, and is to be found no more and no less than in the preface to La invención de América (The Invention of America; the book that Mignolo claims as a precursor of decolonial thought). [16] Of course O’Gorman’s thesis is powerful and, to my knowledge, correct: America was not discovered, it was invented. But he reached this conclusion using criteria, methods and concepts that do not differ from those that any European thinker might have employed, and despite a marked Occidentalism. Certainly the unfortunate and patently false claim with which he ends his preface should not stop us appreciating the power of his specific theses. But if O’Gorman or his thesis can be considered decolonial, the claim that an epistemic “delinking” is necessary no longer holds.
Waman Poma (or Guamán Poma, depending on whether we choose the Quechua or the Castilian spelling) would be, in Mignolo’s judgement, the first decolonial. In his opinion, for the political theory of the colonial world Waman would be as important as Machiavelli for Europe. However, the decolonial claim on Waman is certainly problematic. Mignolo himself relates an objection that was made to it, and then elaborates a justification. The paragraph is somewhat lengthy, but I think it goes to the heart of the matter and deserves to be quoted and discussed with care. Mignolo writes:
Waman’s political theory is articulated in two principles: first, the critique of all the human groups identifiable in the Colony, according to the classificatory categories of the time. But what is the criterion Waman uses for his critique? Christianity. “How so?” a student asked in one of my classes on Waman Poma: how can this be a decolonial thought if he embraced Christianity? Nevertheless, so it is. Let us reflect. At the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth there was no Diderot, no Rousseau, no Kant, no Spinoza, no Marx, no Freud. That is, secular Enlightenment critique did not yet exist. Waman Poma takes on Christendom historically and ethically, insofar as he argues for the Christianity of the Andeans before the arrival of the Castilians. Historically Waman Poma would be a liar, since there is no Christianity before the arrival of the Castilians. But on a logical-epistemic level, Christianity in Europe would be nothing but the regional version of certain principles that affect human conduct and that establish criteria for coexistence, for “living well” (“buen vivir”). Waman Poma’s argument must be read at this second level and not the first. The reading at the first level is Eurocentric and grants to Western European Christendom (the one that expands towards America) the possession of universal principles under the name of Christianity. “Christianity”, in Waman Poma’s argument, is equivalent to “democracy” in the pen and word of the Zapatistas: democracy is not the private property of Western political thought and theory, but a principle of coexistence, of living well, that has no owner. Waman Poma took possession of Christian principles despite and against the bad Spanish Christians, just as the Zapatistas take possession of democratic principles despite and against the Mexican government in collusion with the commercialisation of democracy in the Washington market. [17]
Is this plea convincing? Let us see. For anyone who reads Waman Poma’s work, it is evident that what he proposes is something like a mitigated colonialism. A coloniality somewhat more respectful of differences. That, on the one hand. But, on the other, it has to be said that, contemporaries of Waman, different indigenous movements flatly rejected Christianity and set out or dreamed of the expulsion of the Spaniards. The Taki Onqoy movement, for example, urged its members to abandon every Hispanic element, from religion to dress, including language and technology (was this not a radical “delinking”?), awaiting the return of the huacas, who would defeat the Spanish gods and restore a new Andean order of equality and goodness, just as they believed things had been even before the Inca empire. [18] The leaders of the Neo-Inca state, for their part, although they did not reject outright everything of European origin (they employed quite effectively some of its weapons and technology), set out to expel the Spaniards (not to live together with them) and to rebuild the Inca state. In the eyes of both, someone like Waman must have seemed something like a traitor or a collaborator. In any case, Waman’s option was not, and never was, the only possible one in its historical moment, for whoever wished to resist colonisation.
The fact that between 1594 and 1600 Waman served as an interpreter in the campaigns against Andean religions undertaken by the religious inspector Cristóbal de Albornoz, that his work was addressed to the king of Spain and that he justified its usefulness by saying that “the said chronicle is very useful and profitable and is good for the amendment of life for Christians and infidels and for the said Indians to confess themselves, and for the amendment of their lives and error, idolaters” [Translator’s note: the original is in sixteenth-century Spanish spelling], would not affect, according to Mignolo, its decolonial content. [19] Moreover, in his view, “the ‘new chronicle’ is not a correction of Spanish errors within the same Hispanic epistemological logic (as in a certain way are the ‘commentaries’ of the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega)”, and for that reason, for being critical of the Spaniards, Waman would have come:
into conflict with the Spanish authorities and paid the price of being passed over in silence for four centuries. Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, by contrast, quickly enjoyed fame because he stays within the system. [20]
Let us note that however critical Waman may have been, and however conciliatory Garcilaso, this would not show that they were producing necessarily within different epistemic logics: that would have to be demonstrated. But moreover the relevant historical facts are ambiguous. It is true that Garcilaso enjoyed great fame in his lifetime, but his masterpiece Comentarios reales sobre los incas (Royal Commentaries of the Incas), published in Lisbon in 1609, was banned by the Spanish Crown in the American colonies after the uprising of Tupac Amaru II. The reasons why Waman Poma’s work did not reach its addressee are not at all clear; but it does not seem that it would have been easy for a manuscript sent by an unknown person to reach the King, whatever its content. In any case, the claim that Waman would not operate within the Hispanic epistemological logic (whereas Garcilaso would) would require a justification that Mignolo neither provides nor attempts to provide.
Now, to defend his position Mignolo introduces an element that, properly considered, actually undermines the pillars of the whole decolonial edifice as a proposal of radical delinking. It is the following. According to Mignolo, “Christianity” for Waman, like “democracy” for the Zapatistas, is not the private property of the West but a principle of coexistence, a principle of “living well”, that has no owner. And indeed we can accept that this is so. But the same applies to any principle: monarchy, theocracy, castes, Islam, socialism, science, reason, totality, relativism, etc. None is the private property either of the West or of the East. No matter where it began or where and when it developed, any culture or group can make free use of them.
But once this premise is accepted, it becomes impossible to accept or reject a principle because it does or does not form part of my tradition (the conservative criterion par excellence); and the same yardstick must be applied to all principles: they are not accepted or rejected for their origin or provenance, but for the substantive reasons we may have for or against their truth/falsity, goodness/badness, usefulness/uselessness, justice/injustice, etc. There is no doubt that really existing Christianity and democracy have served to oppress and exploit people. There would certainly be very good reasons to reject them. But very good reasons can also be advanced for embracing their principles. And that an ethically deplorable use has been made of them does not mean that this is the ineluctable consequence of Christianity or democracy as abstract principles. The same goes for science, Marxism, Islam, the idea of totality or whatever you like. What is called for is a careful examination at multiple levels. A detailed and meticulous inquiry. Precisely what is never found in decolonial writings.
It may be that for Waman Christianity was a simple criterion of coexistence, and that for the Zapatistas democracy is. But the takiongos did not think like Waman, nor do, for example, the Mapuche leaders who claim traditional forms of leadership (some of them hereditary) and see in democracy a purely wingka (non-Mapuche) form. I know for a fact that for some Mapuche activists to say that Christianity and democracy are “mere forms of coexistence that have no owner” is no more than reproducing the Western worldview. [21]
In relation to Waman Poma, Mignolo writes in the same text:
Guamán Poma, in a surprisingly brilliant move, takes on the Christianity of the Indians and, in doing so, rejects conversion. In that gesture he delinks from Las Casas, whose criticism of the Castilians Guamán Poma endorses. But let them not come to convert him to Christianity since the inhabitants of Tawantinsuyu are already Christians. Delinking therefore does not mean denying and ignoring what cannot be denied, but knowing how to use imperial techniques or strategies for decolonial purposes. [22]
The problem, of course, is who determines what can be denied and what cannot. We may sympathise more or less with the paths chosen by the takiongos, by Waman or by the Neo-Incas (all equally failed in their explicit objectives), but the existence of such paths clearly shows how ambiguous and complex is the idea that delinking “does not mean denying and ignoring what cannot be denied, but knowing how to use imperial techniques or strategies for decolonial purposes”. Because, except for the acceptance of the most absolute assimilationism, any belief or action of an oppressed ethnic group could be considered decolonial in the name of understanding that certain things can no longer be denied (“Marranism” would be a clear historical example). I should add that I am not rejecting certain evidence; on a purely empirical plane it would be foolish to deny it. But social, cultural and political projects are not sustained solely by evidence about what exists. They are also sustained on principles or values (which can be discussed, but almost never refuted as empirical data are refuted), and on expectations of the future that may seem to us more or less realistic, but about which one cannot have the same degree of certainty as about facts that have already occurred.
In any case, the decolonial option oscillates between a call for a radical delinking from the Eurocentred episteme and a much more moderate call to seek different ways of combating ethnic oppressions. However, it seems that these two faces have a different temporal orientation. Towards the past the moderate variant is adopted: any form of resistance is considered decolonial in order to build a genealogy. In the present, by contrast, the radical version is adopted with a view to drawing clear boundaries with other emancipatory currents or traditions. The reasons for this difference are political rather than theoretical.
In his decolonial genealogy Mignolo maintains:
Decoloniality was clearly formulated in the sixties and seventies by Arabo-Islamic thinkers (Sayyid Qutb, Ali Shariati, Ayatollah Khomeini); by Afro-Caribbean thinkers (Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon), by the philosophy of liberation in Latin America and by indigenous intellectuals and activists in Latin America, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. [23]
What would be uniformly decolonial in the authors Mignolo includes in his genealogy is not at all clear (apart from their being members of oppressed ethnic groups or of peripheral countries who develop some critique of colonialism): their analyses are very diverse and their proposals much more so. But here the criterion of appropriating the past in order to build a (mythological) genealogy is at work. Amartya Sen and Kwame Anthony Appiah, by contrast, would reproduce, according to Mignolo, Eurocentred thought. Here the need to differentiate oneself from contemporary authors or theoretical currents with an academic presence, critical of colonialism and of ethnic-racial oppression/discrimination, in order to erect a different theoretical option, the decolonial one, is at work. The frontier between those who are and those who are not considered genuinely decolonial lacks theoretical foundation. And although it is politically motivated, it also lacks a clear political foundation. Rather, at least in Mignolo’s case, who is considered decolonial and who is not depends on his own discretion.
Decoloniality at ground level
Let us translate the decolonial proposal into concrete and current terms. I live in wallmapu [Translator’s note: Mapuche territory, on both sides of the Andes] and, within the Mapuche people, both east and west of the Andes mountain range, different perspectives are developing that concern everything from the definition of who is Mapuche to tactical questions, by way of different long-term political-cultural objectives. [24] Some Mapuche intellectuals and activists, appealing among other arguments to a fact that cannot be denied – namely, that today most of the people who identify as Mapuche live in urban contexts, without constituting a majority of the population in any region – have developed proposals on the way to achieving regional autonomy in the regions of Chile where the most numerous contingents of Mapuche live, but conceiving autonomy for both Mapuche and Chileans from an intercultural perspective. Along this path they have given priority to political action (over the ethno-sectoral kind) and some have created a Mapuche political party: Wallmapuwen. But not everyone agrees. There are those who think that those who live in cities are not true Mapuche or not wholly Mapuche, and so concentrate on demands of a more economic kind for the peasant-Mapuche, and see in entry into the political arena a way for some Mapuche to improve their position, without really changing the situation of the majority. [25] Others think that the ethno-sectoral struggle of the Mapuche peasants is insufficient, but that building a Mapuche party is unviable or illusory: the intelligent thing is to use the spaces of the Chilean parties for the benefit of the Mapuche (and there is a wide range of options as to which party would be the right one). Others believe that the Mapuche must return to the purity of their culture, isolating themselves as far as possible from Chilean and Argentine societies in order to develop their own language, their own worldview, their own epistemology, etc. – and even more specific identities (nagche, wenteche, lafkenche) with exclusivist demands for them, which in the eyes of other currents of opinion fragment the movement and favour the colonisers, masters in the use of “divide and conquer”. I have not exhausted the spectrum of Mapuche political positions, but it is enough to give an idea of its diversity.
Well then: which of all these options would be decolonial? If we take seriously the idea that it would be valid to “use imperial techniques or strategies for decolonial purposes”, we would have to conclude that all of them are. If this is correct, then the conclusion that imposes itself is that decoloniality can be anything other than genuine assimilation: even feigned assimilation (such as those groups that pretend to the outside world to be like everyone else, although internally and in their consciousness they continue to consider themselves different) could be considered decolonial. However, Mignolo maintains that decoloniality implies breaking with Western epistemic frameworks, practising “delinking”. So much so that even the first projects of “delinking” (such as Samir Amin’s) strike him as insufficiently decolonial. [26]
It is not clear how the decolonial demand for “delinking” would fit with the acceptance of Christianity and democracy. But if we take Mignolo’s proposal into the field of the present discussions among the Mapuche, it is clear that his perspective aligns with the most ethnicist and traditionalist discourses, the least intercultural, the most inclined to seek autonomy by means of a strict separation from Chilean (or Argentine) society and refuge in small “pure” Mapuche communities (which today represent an infinitesimal proportion of those who consider themselves Mapuche). It is, in fact, within this strand of Mapuche thought that breaking with Western rationality is called for, restoring the Mapuche worldview is seen as a priority and democratic principles are distrusted. This is not the occasion to weigh the strengths and weaknesses of the different Mapuche proposals. But it seems evident that a perspective such as that of José Marimán (who, besides being an academic, has been an activist of Mapuche autonomism, in his case from an intercultural ethno-nationalist perspective) should be considered as still colonised, given that it is very far from wanting to break with the supposed “Western rationality” (Marimán would surely argue that no such thing exists). Marimán imperturbably upholds a genuinely critical thought and, as such, also self-critical. He has written, for example:
after 476 years of contact with colonialist Western society and particularly after 129 years of living under Chilean state-national domination [and Argentine, we could add, AP], it is pertinent to ask: do the Mapuche in the present have a different worldview? (rather it seems that within the Mapuche several worldviews proliferate, the one we could – not without discussion – call “Mapuche” being the one that seems to have the fewest adherents). And, did the Mapuche have a political and institutional tradition that is, moreover, worthy of being copied (that is, democratic, respectful of human rights, etc., according to present standards)? So far Mapuche traditionalism has proved productive in raising myths about an institutionality of its own superior to the Western one and the idea of the ecological Indian living in harmony with nature, but these are questions that, beyond the myth, have to be demonstrated. That is, it must be proved that they existed, that they are better than the “Chilean-Western” ones, and that they are functional in the present, promoting the participation of all Mapuche and not only of some chiefs by birth or other non-democratic circumstances. [27]
Perhaps within the academic world rhetorics like Mignolo’s serve to open up perspectives, to incorporate other voices and to endow subjects who are not recognised with epistemic legitimacy. But in the case of the Mapuche this kind of rhetoric strengthens isolationism, a retreat into the micro-community and the pichi identities [Translator’s note: pichi is Mapuzugun for “small”] and an acceptance of cultural practices solely on the grounds that they are supposedly ancestral – conservative legitimation par excellence. Rather than an intercultural dialogue, that rhetoric props up an ethnocentric perspective that is understandable, and in part justifiable, as the ethnocentrism of the oppressed, but in my judgement unacceptable as a genuine perspective of liberation.
Decoloniality as theory and as practice
But a theoretical proposal cannot be evaluated by the consequences it produces (because it may produce different consequences in different places and circumstances). It is therefore indispensable to evaluate its substantive proposals, with relative independence from the uses made or that can be made of them. And here is where one searches and searches in vain. None of the enormous themes and problems addressed by those who call themselves decolonial is developed by means of a detailed discussion with specific contemporary authors. In fact, their criticisms are directed at abstractions never well specified, such as epistemic frameworks, the rhetoric of modernity, the hubris of the zero point, theo-logy and ego-logy; and they are characterised by sharp and generic assertions, rather than by the patient discussion of specific theses put forward by specific authors. And this despite the long period of time that has elapsed since the decolonial option became publicly known. Why waste time on such trifles? One must go straight for the bone and demolish the theo-logical and ego-logical foundations of the Western epistemic framework: that seems to be the perspective. The problem is that the supposedly demolished foundations are no more than a caricature.
What exactly is the definition, the limits and the characteristics of the “Eurocentred episteme” that is the object of critique? The answer is a conceptual exercise that I have not been able to find in the abundant decolonial literature I have read (and I have been reading it since 2006). Given that it is a central idea, it does not seem likely to be an oversight or to be hidden away in some arcane text. What happens is that the decolonial perspective reproduces, consciously or unconsciously, the motifs of romantic pan-ideologism: reduction of all intellectual work to a common – essentially ideological – substance, a refusal to specify or define concepts and difficulties in recognising what cognitive activities have of knowledge as such (in favour of their real or supposed ideological implications). Lukács, to cite an author of my own tradition marked by this conception of intellectual work, was able to write hundreds of pages criticising irrationalism without providing even an elementary definition of what he understood by reason. [28] Decolonial thinkers can devote whole books to destroying an episteme they have never defined, but in whose bag any thinker of European origin can be put, no matter how different they may be: they will be considered different within the same. And full stop.
Decolonial thought insists as much on the critique of philosophical and scientific thought and practices as on the vindication of “other knowledges”. But it is evident that the European tradition has a long history of religious, aesthetic, magical, mythical and shamanic thought and practices (just as Eurocentred, for that matter, as the scientific or philosophical ones). Science and shamanism may be part of the same cultural tradition in a broad sense, but clearly they are not part of the same intellectual tradition (the decolonial notion of episteme oscillates imprecisely and eclectically between the one and the other pole). One of the greatest risks of the decolonial option lies in the tendential rejection of what may be the best intellectual fruits of a certain cultural tradition (such as science or critical philosophy), in order to embrace uncritically less nourishing fruits (such as magic or religion), out of mistakenly believing that these are authentic “other thinking”, as if they lacked anchorage in the cultural tradition of the coloniser or were incompatible with domination.
Rather than critical thought, decoloniality presents itself to us as a new dogmatism, riddled with sharp assertions never justified, manifest contradictions, use and abuse of the fallacy of ad hominem disqualification, generic criticisms instead of detailed discussions, emphasis on differentiating its conception from other emancipatory currents (rather than building bridges with them), proliferation of “novel” notions that rarely become precise concepts (an indispensable condition for assessing their theoretical pertinence), “appropriation” without acknowledgement of the ideas of others, etc. These words may sound somewhat harsh. But on occasion it is neither possible nor desirable to say things by halves. In any case, even within the modernity/coloniality network accusations have been made to the same effect and in the same tenor, using language as severe or more so. Ramón Grosfoguel, for example, has said in an interview that “Mignolo says one thing one day and another the next, depending on whom he is talking to. He is not consistent and has no theoretical coherence”. [29] And he used no kinder language about Aníbal Quijano:
Robinson’s concept of racial capitalism already contains the idea that Quijano expresses with the term coloniality some 20 years before him. Moreover, there are also indigenous thinkers who have observed this link. Why does Quijano never cite them? Why does he never cite a Black woman thinker or a critical thinker from Islam or from other coordinates? For me this is problematic, because if we are producing a decolonial thought we cannot reproduce universalism, where one defines for everyone. Now it turns out that Quijano is the beginning and end of the subject of coloniality! Quijano is a thinker who drew on all those sources. That he does not want to acknowledge them is another problem. I do not identify with that tendency not to recognise indigenous and Black thought. That thought precedes Quijano and has been as radical as what Quijano produced in the nineties of the last century. Quijano also drew on Mariátegui, but if you look at the works he did on Mariátegui in the seventies and eighties, he emphasises that Mariátegui is a thinker of the world capitalist system but does not talk so much about his contributions to the question of racism. Quijano never addresses the question of race as an organising principle of political economy until he coins the term “coloniality” in the nineties. [30]
To round off, Grosfoguel concludes:
What is pathetic is to see how the author of the “coloniality of power” has a colonial epistemology that recognises no woman or man thinker of the global South, nor recognises the earlier critical tradition that analysed the questions Quijano names with the word “coloniality” but that used different conceptual terms to name the same thing. Quijano’s colonial epistemology reproduces the solipsistic, self-referential Cartesian monologue. [31]
Grosfoguel’s critique points to what we might consider performative contradictions: the abyss between what is said and what is done. But it assumes without further ado the theoretical premises developed within the modernity/coloniality network, and this leads him to maintain dubious generalisations or to formulate assertions as arbitrary as that “the concept of novelty is totally modern and colonial”. [32] And it also leads him to blame all ills on a “Western” episteme not only essentialised, but also conceived as dominating even those who consider and declare themselves its radical opponents. With such a perspective he simplifies and uniformises in excess the thoughts developed in “Europe”. Moreover, he shows himself incapable of recognising the autonomy and specificity of some forms of thought developed outside the Euro-North American world (and in struggle with it), which in his eyes would be no more than inverted forms of Eurocentrism. Thus, for example, he has been able to declare:
So, what “third-worldist fundamentalism” does is to invert these categories and accept the premise of “Eurocentric fundamentalism” and say: it is true that democracy is Western, it does not apply to me, I defend monarchy (that is Bin Laden); equality does not belong to me, so I support inequality; women’s rights are Western, here we have women who must obey men, etc. This kind of reflection is nothing but an inverted caricature of the other, assuming itself to be superior: it takes the same premises of Eurocentric discourse, inverts them, leaves them intact, and affirms its otherness as superior to that of the West. That is fundamentalism today, and that is nothing other than inverted Eurocentrist fundamentalism, that is, different visions of the same Eurocentric problem. For me Bin Laden is as Eurocentric a fundamentalist as Habermas, because they are trapped in the same premises of Western thought. [33]
As is obvious, neither democracy nor monarchy are concepts purely and exclusively European (nor of any other particular ethnic group). If it were true that Bin Laden thought that democracy is European and monarchy is not, it is obvious that he was mistaken: monarchies have dominated in Europe for much longer than democracies, and European monarchies still survive. There is no such thing as “premises of Western thought” (or Eastern): there are many premises, very different and strongly contradictory among themselves, developed within each cultural tradition; and cultural traditions have been mixing throughout millennia. Grosfoguel rightly points out that Mignolo ends up attributing epistemic belonging by means of a crude geographical criterion, confusing social location with epistemic location. But it happens that once the existence of epistemic frameworks attributable intrinsically to an ethnic group, or definable fundamentally by their ethnic character, is assumed, there are not many other paths left than Mignolo’s geographical/ethnicist reductionism or inconsistency: that is, to claim the existence of epistemes intrinsically proper to an ethnic group, but to recognise that they can be assumed by other groups (which belies their intrinsic character), as Grosfoguel does in considering that Bin Laden is as Eurocentric as Habermas. [34] The way out of this predicament consists in evaluating theories and doctrines in their own terms – without defining them in social or geographical terms or, much less, invalidating or accepting them by the social origin of their defenders – but adding, as one analytical dimension among others, the possible links a theory may have with a social group or its possible political uses. This is what a good part of critical thought has been doing for decades throughout the whole world. [35] In this area, decolonial proposals, instead of adding clarity, have added confusion.
Perhaps among the new generations of intellectuals who take up the decolonial option the critical side will develop at the expense of the dogmatic one (as the Marxist tradition was able to develop a solid critical thought instead of exalted dogmas, despite the not few tendencies to the latter). But in the first two generations a naive dogmatics predominates, and the very bases of decolonial thought (grounded in the indistinction of analytical levels and intellectual operations, as well as in the implicit and sometimes explicit distrust of logic and epistemology) make critical thought very difficult, since its foundation is necessarily subtle differentiations, maximum logical rigour and demanding criteria of empirical evidence. Criticality, in this sense, has no a priori links in political or ideological terms: one can be critical on the right and dogmatic on the left, and vice versa. It is clear, moreover, that no one is absolutely critical or absolutely dogmatic; but one can be much more one than the other.
Although the specific properties and concrete limits of each epistemic framework are never established in decolonial writings, there is no doubt that such frameworks are conceived by Mignolo, de Sousa Santos, Grosfoguel or Quijano as closed units, in a manner similar to how Kuhn conceived scientific paradigms. Kuhn held that scientific paradigms (unlike theories within one and the same paradigm) are incommensurable, among other reasons because they employ different languages. From this (not without ambivalence, to be sure) he came to conceive scientific revolutions as a kind of “conversion”, more similar to religious conversions than to the relatively tranquil process of rational deliberation in which “normal” science unfolds in moments of non-critical development (in which the dispute is between different theories belonging to the same paradigm, and not between different paradigms). However, after the criticisms he received, Kuhn greatly moderated his initial approach, which had led him to a quasi-irrationalist position: from general incommensurability he moved to local or partial incommensurability; and from the absence of rational criteria for choosing between one paradigm and another, to maintaining that there were five ways of evaluating them, while insisting that these ways were less conclusive when evaluating paradigms against each other than when evaluating theories within one paradigm (something obviously very sensible). Moreover, the scope dealt with by Kuhn was relatively bounded: he did not deal with generic, inevitably imprecise epistemic frameworks, but with the frameworks of specific problem-fields or disciplines (such as physics), well bounded and delimited. And in the case of the social sciences Kuhn thought they were pre- or non-paradigmatic: in his judgement there is not in them consensus enough to speak of a common paradigm. [36] Now, in typical decolonial writings (perhaps there is some exception, but I have not found it) a closed conception of paradigms is assumed in a variant closer to the primitive Kuhnian formulation than to his more cautious later formulations, and it is transferred – from the very precise and bounded problem-fields of disciplines such as physics – to every kind of knowledge. Additionally, it is claimed that there exist clearly differentiable epistemic frameworks, each of which would act as an orienting force underlying not only the social sciences, but all the sciences, religion, common sense, political knowledges and any cognitive dimension of any social practice. Epistemes – like God – would be everywhere and would control everything. If such a thing exists, then it would have to be demonstrated. There is nothing wrong with generalisations in themselves. But the decolonial generalisation that claims to see a common pattern in each and every European doctrine, theory and philosophy is clearly abusive, at least for anyone who has some degree of familiarity with theoretical formalisation, and even with intellectual caution.
Perhaps the root of all our ills lies in the “Western epistemic framework” and in the “rhetoric of modernity”. But what is such a thing? Unfortunately, as I have already set out, in the extensive decolonial literature I have not been able to find any specification, any detailed conceptualisation. Only a series of vague notions whose appeal is more rhetorical than theoretical. What is found in it are ultra-generalisations, in the style of the following:
It is obvious that delinking cannot be carried out within the framework of the theo- and ego-logical politics of knowledge and understanding. Spinoza or St Paul do not help us to delink since they are part of the epistemology from which epistemic decolonisation seeks to disentangle itself, to disengage, to break the mirage of the single and varied thought within the same. Indeed, how could one carry out the exercise of delinking within the epistemic framework from which one wants to delink? [37]
Two thousand five hundred years of intellectual reflection, it seems, can be reduced to two mega-elements – theo-logy (centring on God) and ego-logy (centring on the individual self) – and a single epistemic framework. The Enlightenment would be no more than a variant of the same old intellectual combo, not a rupture with it as is usually believed. Greek philosophising (so different from medieval or modern theology) goes into the same package, as do Derrida, Foucault, Freud and even Samir Amin, although their approaches have little to do with the Cartesian subject that is supposed to found ego-logy. If what Mignolo says is true, we would have to warn Muslims and Hindus (at the very least) that if they want to get out of the situation of coloniality, they have to delink from their epistemic frameworks, which are so markedly theo-logical.
The decolonial proposal of “delinking” closely resembles a demand for conversion. It reproduces in inverted form the perspective of the sixteenth-century evangelisers: if for them the “Indians” had to stop being “Indians” in order to be fully human on earth and to attain salvation in heaven, for Mignolo at least there is no salvation or possibility of intercultural respect if we do not de-Westernise ourselves comprehensively. Of course, one may retort, as Mignolo did, that decoloniality takes itself to be one option among others, that it only claims the epistemic right to have an “other perspective” (to the dominant single thought), and its right to ally itself “with the proposals of Pacari, Patzi Paco or Williams, and not with those of Blackburn or Bourdieu”. [38] Put like this, it seems a pluralist claim of conceptual breadth and intellectual respect. However, a stance that accepts that its perspective is not the only valid one but, at the same time, maintains that without delinking as it is understood (something that, moreover, is never made fully clear) coloniality is reproduced, is not very pluralist. This would be like saying that Marxism takes itself to be one among many valid theoretical options, but all the rest remain prisoners of alienation. Or that Christianity is one among many legitimate religions, but the believers of others are condemned to hell. A genuine pluralist attitude consists in maintaining that one has good reasons to defend one’s political and theoretical options, but accepting that there are good reasons for making other choices, even while pursuing the same ends. And the reasons are not good if those perspectives bind us to coloniality, anchor us in alienation or condemn us for all eternity. But above all, a pluralist approach is one prepared to evaluate critically, in detail, the evidence and arguments in favour of the available options. This is what Mignolo and those who call themselves decolonial do not do. And they do not do it because, to begin with, they grotesquely simplify reality by fighting against a supposed “single thought”, when in reality (particularly in the contemporary academic world) there is an enormous and growing diversity of theoretical perspectives. Who would deny Mignolo today the right to ally himself with the proposals of Pacari, Patzi Paco or Williams, and not with those of Blackburn or Bourdieu? What perhaps is asked of him is that he present arguments in favour of that option. [39] But the only argument Mignolo presents to ground his preference is each person’s place of birth or skin colour. As an argument it is not only insufficient, but is founded on the fallacy of ad hominem disqualification. [40] According to Mignolo:
delinking is the starting point of practices and conceptions of the economy and politics, ethics and philosophy, technology and the organisation of society in which it will not be progress and economic growth, over and above people’s well-being, that motivate our endeavours. [41] The decolonial option proposes delinking from the logic of coloniality – from a horizon of life in which one lives to work instead of working to live… [42]
Personally, I consider that people’s well-being should be above progress and economic growth and that the horizon of life should not be living to work. But I do not see that this entails the need for any essential “delinking”. I can assume those perspectives starting from the Marxist tradition with which I identify. And I do not see why someone who starts from liberalism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism or anarchism could not come to agree.
Decolonial option and ideological implications
The strong point of the works produced so far within the framework of the decolonial option is not erudition, logical rigour or theoretical soundness. Its strength lies in its political-intellectual capacity to be attractive among social groups (though so far fundamentally intellectuals) who suffer different forms of ethnic-racial discrimination and who feel repulsion at the forms of exploitation and oppression of different kinds that characterise contemporary societies. Its field is denunciation rather than comprehension; ideological implications rather than explanatory hypotheses; rhetoric rather than theory. In those areas it has proved powerful. But since within the decolonial option these planes are not usually distinguished, considering all intellectual activity as something homogeneous, its criticisms and proposals appear in a confused jumble of analytical levels, intellectual operations and dimensions of reality. This makes any critical evaluation exceedingly difficult, and even separating the wheat from the chaff. Just as dogmatic Marxism won adherents (and certainly not few) by mixing willy-nilly planes and levels, spreading nonsense such as “dialectical logic” or “proletarian science” and protecting itself from criticism by accusing its critics of being bourgeois; supporters of the decolonial option fall into similar muddles and equivalent absurdities, but they shield themselves not in the name of the proletariat but in the name of the colonised: their critics will necessarily be people trapped in the Eurocentred paradigm. [43]
The decolonial option seems to be in great measure a consequence of disillusion at the failure of the anticolonial and socialist experiments of the twentieth century. Faced with a world whose iniquities prove more lasting than might have been expected and hoped, it is easy to fall into the temptation of finding simple answers to the complexities and ambiguities of any project of liberation. John Holloway believed he could explain all ills from state power, and believed he had found a political recipe capable of avoiding the dead end of twentieth-century socialisms: “to change the world without taking power”. [44] With similar oversimplification, the decolonial option believes that everything is explained by a colonial matrix of power that encompasses everything. These are answers too simple for problems too complex, although they are founded on some effectively observable facts: the failure to build socialism, the persistence of racism and ethnocentrism.
With a similar criterion and comparable oversimplification, given the undeniable fact of entrenched machismo and the durability of patriarchy in most known societies, a feminist could argue that there will be no liberation for women unless we break with the epistemic frameworks not only of the West, but also Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, Andean, Mapuche, etc. And a class-conscious worker, observing the evident fact of the omnipresence of class exploitation in the last five thousand years, could maintain that one must delink from all those epistemic frameworks and add to them the decolonial, the Marxist and the feminist, which have not ended exploitation and class oppression either (and have even served, consciously or unconsciously, to perpetuate them). Perhaps we should break with all epistemic frameworks: stop thinking. Why not? After all, only from a species-centred perspective is thinking so important: it does not seem to be an activity especially valued by lizards or butterflies. And given that our species threatens to destroy the planet… perhaps we should stop thinking.
But no, let us not renounce thinking. As the Mapuche intellectual José Marimán put it, “you do not fight fevers by breaking thermometers”. The world has horrible components, and certainly at times one feels like shouting: stop the world, I want to get off! But no one can stop the world and, without ceasing to feel indignation at the great injustices that surround us, we must assume the ethical-political-intellectual responsibility of reaching the greatest possible clarity about their causes. And this entails something much more complex than combating rhetorics or developing counter-rhetorics.
As I already had occasion to point out, finding clear specifications and delimitations of decolonial concepts is in general a fruitless search. Rather, what characterises them is an interminable proliferation of new terms, the frenetic search for a language of their own: coloniality, colonial matrix of power, colonial pattern, border thinking, transmodernity, heterarchical thinking, abyssal thinking, hubris of the zero point, transculturality, other epistemology, other rationality, epistemology of the South, epistemology of absences, delinking, ego-logy, corpo-politics, etc. However, behind these words there is rarely a clear and distinct concept (no Cartesian sin do decolonial theorists, men and women, wish to commit). In general, they are no more than a new word for an old concept, or a nuance claimed as total rupture, or an intuitively plausible notion that is not conceptually specified, or a metaphor. They are terms whose functionality lies more in generating identity (decolonial, in the one who speaks this way) than in clarifying some empirical or conceptual problem. Rather than concepts of a theory, they are the jargon of a group.
The lack of scholarly rigour is a constant in the works of Mignolo, de Sousa Santos and Quijano. And I insist: they are no longer an emerging current to which the benefit of the doubt can be given. For any person with a more or less intensive training in some specific field or problem area, decolonial statements about it will generally seem scarcely convincing. They show that there has been no will to study those problems and those subjects in their own terms. Of course, to do so would be to succumb to the Eurocentred episteme! However, an authentic inter-epistemic dialogue implies the effort to study meticulously the different theories and interpretations. And it presupposes the capacity to suspend one’s own premises and make the effort to understand the other’s arguments in their own terms (rather than invalidating them because they start from different premises). Once this is done (by both parties) it is possible to try to evaluate the pros and cons of the different perspectives, assuming that all parties must present evidence for their claims and arguments in their favour. [45] And indeed in decolonial texts the evidence is scarce, but above all, instead of arguments there are assertions whose justification is rarely provided. Decolonial texts address an infinity of themes and it is impossible to have a meticulous knowledge of all of them. In any case, every time they refer to questions I know in detail – such as Marxism, modernity or the Renaissance – their assertions are somewhere between one-sided and caricatured. But, on the other side, it is symptomatic and deeply significant that, despite their claims for “other” knowledges, one rarely finds in their writings a detailed exposition of the “other worldviews”. And the same happens with the works of the authors who are extolled (such as Waman Poma, Frantz Fanon or Gloria Anzaldúa): we are never offered a detailed critical examination of them.
Consequently, the superficiality with which the Western episteme or the rhetoric of modernity from which one would have to delink is rejected is equivalent to the superficiality with which the “other thinking” is embraced: very rarely is it studied in detail what the concrete members of concrete ethnic groups are actually thinking. An abstract Indian – reincarnation of the noble savage – replaces the real Mapuche, Qom or Tojolabal. On the very rare occasions when their voices are incorporated, they are incorporated without discussion: would discussing them be a sign of coloniality? More than inter-epistemic or intercultural dialogue, the decolonial option looks like a form (another?) of paternalism. According to the genealogical/mythological appropriation made by Mignolo:
[decolonial] critical theories emerge from the ruins of languages, categories of thoughts and subjectivities (Arab, Aymara, Hindi, French and English Creole in the Caribbean, Affrikaan [sic], etc.) that had been consistently negated by the rhetoric of modernity and in the imperial implementation of the logic of coloniality. [46]
But the fact is that the decolonial conception is the product of academics strongly implanted in the United States: more than half of the members of the modernity/coloniality group work in United States universities, wholly or partly. And although they present themselves as enfants terribles in academia, in truth they reproduce de facto all common academic practices, even many unjustifiable ones, for example: accepting the eternalisation of postgraduate studies and the commodification of education; mutually bestowing obsequious citations (or insults, when friendship breaks down); shirking criticism of contemporary authors in their own fields (a risk that is academically avoided so as not to make enemies who put spokes in the wheels of one’s career, although it is also a luxury that can be afforded by those who already have “the career made”); building links between members of different age groups marked by a logic of entourage; promoting the proliferation of writing short papers (as useful for making a “career” as useless for discussing a problem meticulously) to the detriment of extensive unitary works; falling into the eternal rewriting (rehash) of the same texts, etc.
Although it is surely more than that, to a considerable extent, paraphrasing the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, we could say that the decolonial option appears to be the inverted image (the “critical” or contestatory version) of the:
crude reductionism of what has been called the “clash of civilisations”, a simplification of reality originating in the North American university world that serves the purposes of United States domination as a superpower after 11 September, but that does not convey the truth of how civilisations and cultures overlap, converge and nourish one another. [47]
Unlike Marxism, which arose outside the university world but developed a tradition of enormous subtlety and intellectual richness, while shaping or helping to shape (not only intellectually but practically) the first modern social movement (the labour movement); and unlike thinkers such as Fanon, who committed not only their ideas but their bodies to the liberation movements of the twentieth century; the decolonial option arises from within the academic world itself, without great subtleties or intellectual riches and without much will to participate practically on a daily basis in contemporary social or political movements: its world is that of professorial chairs, seminars, congresses and journeys around the planet, whose comforts are only very occasionally abandoned.
The lack of intellectual subtlety, the scarcity of erudition, the overly sharp judgements, the historical blunders; all of this could be relativised if these were essentially political writings produced by militants strongly committed to some organisation, and whose purpose was to incite to action rather than to seek intellectual clarity; to perform rhetorically rather than to explain with theoretical richness. The problem is that the exponents of the decolonial option are neither militants at risk nor intellectuals who contribute clarity or sophistication to the debates. The decolonial option, then, has much of imposture about it.
Notes
[1] Walter Mignolo, La idea de América Latina, Barcelona, Gedisa, 2005, p. 18.
[2] Let us stress in passing, however, that even in so brief a text one observes significant inconsistencies in the treatment, something that seems to characterise the decolonial style produced up to now. For example, the first premise holds that the modern/colonial world originates in the sixteenth century, and that the discovery/invention of America is the colonial component of modernity whose visible face is the European Renaissance. However, the Renaissance began in 1300 or 1400 (there is no consensus on this), that is, one or two centuries before the beginning of the modern/colonial world. Moreover, the insistence on the rupture of the sixteenth century seems to have a “Hispanocentric” bias that obscures the great Portuguese expansion in Africa and the Far East, begun in 1415 (I must thank Federico Mare for drawing my attention to this Portuguese “precocity”). In the third premise it is pointed out that the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution are derived historical moments that consist in the transformation of the colonial matrix of power. But in the sixth we are told that capitalism and modernity/coloniality had “a second historical moment of transformation after the Second World War, when the United States appropriated the imperial leadership previously enjoyed, in different epochs, by Spain and England” (Dutch hegemony is forgotten). Would it not in any case be a third historical moment, if the Enlightenment and industrialisation were another? But above all, why choose as relevant moments precisely those, so Eurocentric or Occidentalocentric? Was the independence of the American colonies (north and south) not another equivalent historical moment? And the Russian Revolution, the Chinese, the independence of India, the decolonisation of Africa, etc., etc.?
[3] The conceptual content of “delinking” has not been specified. It implies that all supposedly Western epistemic guidelines should be abandoned, the content of which is no less vague: it is assumed, without foundation, that Plato and Derrida, Saint Thomas and Foucault, Marie Curie and Nietzsche, Marx and Walras, Einstein and Abelard, Eric Wolf and Ginés de Sepúlveda, Otto Bauer and Goebbels (and the list could go on indefinitely) share one and the same epistemic framework. Many times, supporters of the decolonial option argue that “delinking” is not a concept but a political proposal (as, for example, an anonymous reviewer of this paper did). The problem is that the second does not make the first unnecessary. “Socialism” is also a political proposal, and yet there are very clear conceptualisations of it, and very diverse ones (but because they are clear they can be properly evaluated and discussed).
[4] Aníbal Quijano, “América Latina en la economía mundial” [1993], Cuestiones y horizontes. Antología esencial, Buenos Aires, CLACSO / Lima, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 2020, p. 233, note 3.
[5] Aníbal Quijano, “Colonialidad del poder y clasificación social” [2000], op. cit., p. 325, footnote (emphasis in original). I take here Quijano’s own definition of colonialism. Obviously, the underlying historical phenomena are quite diverse and a more detailed treatment of this problematic would entail establishing distinctions between different undoubtedly related concepts, such as: colonialism, imperialism, naval colonialism, territorial imperialism, colonies of exploitation, settler colonies, imperialism of the ancient type, capitalist imperialism, etc. But Quijano deals with none of this.
[6] W. Mignolo, “La idea de América Latina (“la derecha, la izquierda y la opción decolonial”), in Crítica y Emancipación no. 2, first half of 2009, p. 254 (emphasis in original).
[7] Ernest Gellner, El arado, la espada y el libro. La estructura de la historia humana, Barcelona, Península, 1988.
[8] W. Mignolo, Desobediencia epistémica. Retórica de la modernidad, lógica de la colonialidad y gramática de la descolonialidad, Buenos Aires, Ediciones del Signo, 2010, p. 13 (emphasis in original).
[9] The literature on this is inexhaustible, but some classic works may be cited: Kirti N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660-1760, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1978; Immanuel Wallerstein, El moderno sistema-mundial, vol. I, México, Siglo XXI, 1981; Eric Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economies, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989; Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2000.
[10] It should be pointed out that just as no one can approach any reality outside some theoretical framework, neither can anyone delink from certain ethnic, gender or class characteristics. There is no God’s-eye view, no view from nowhere. But this does not mean that all views have the same degree of universality, even if only tendentially. The problem, then, is not so much ethnocentrism (which in absolute terms is ineliminable), but ethnocentrism that does not know itself as such (unconscious of itself) and the errors that ethnocentric views may entail. But like political views – which can have both negative consequences by entailing blindness or apologetic dogmatism and positive effects such as making visible problems that were undetected or insufficiently treated – ethnic perspectives cannot be eliminated nor is it desirable to try. For this reason, it is not sufficient as a critique of a theory to point out a certain ethnocentric character: one must show that this ethnocentrism has led to a poor grasp of certain processes or certain connections. Insensitive to the explanatory dimension of the texts of philosophy and social science that they criticise, supporters of the decolonial option have questioned above all certain aspects of the ideological implication of such texts, although almost always without adequately distinguishing between the two dimensions or tasks. Of course there is no ultimate court of appeal that determines the relative virtues of theories. But, in any case, it is worth remembering that detecting a certain ethnocentric content in an intellectual production does not in itself invalidate the hypotheses it contains.
[11] Assertions such as that Zapatismo would have produced a “theoretical revolution” (W. Mignolo, Desobediencia epistémica, op. cit., p. 38) demonstrate a politically motivated blindness (and I make clear that political motivation can also be luminous, if it does not give up its criticality) similar to that of the Marxists who saw in Lenin’s Materialismo y empiriocriticismo (Materialism and Empirio-Criticism) a fundamental philosophical work, who believed that Stalin had revolutionised linguistics or that the criticisms of formal logic deployed by Trotsky were rigorous. Whoever knows about philosophy, linguistics and logic and maintains critical judgement will see that these are poor criticisms. Just as to be a Marxist one need not buy such rubbish, one need not imagine a “theoretical revolution” in order to support the Zapatistas.
[12] Manuel Sacristán, Seis conferencias, Barcelona, El Viejo Topo, 2005, p. 62 (emphasis in original).
[13] Frantz Fanon, Los condenados de la tierra, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2009, p. 148. [Translator’s note: the closest passage in Constance Farrington’s English translation (chapter “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness”) reads: “…the loathsome idea derived from Western culture that the black man is impervious to logic and the sciences”. “Indians” does not appear in it.]
[14] Federico Mare, text sent by email to the author, 2019.
[15] W. Mignolo, La idea de América Latina, op. cit., p. 58.
[16] Edmundo O’Gorman, La invención de América, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995 [1958], p. 12.
[17] W. Mignolo, “El pensamiento decolonial: desprendimiento y apertura. Un manifiesto”, in Santiago Castro-Gómez and Ramón Grosfoguel, El giro decolonial. Reflexiones para una diversidad epistémica más allá del capitalismo global, Bogotá, Siglo del Hombre Editores, 2007, pp. 36-37.
[18] On the Taki Onqoy movement and on the Neo-Inca state it seems unavoidable to refer to the already classic work of Steve Stern, Los pueblos indígenas del Perú y el desafío de la conquista española, Madrid, Alianza, 1986.
[19] Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, Nueva Corónica y buen gobierno, vol. I, Caracas, Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1980, p. 4.
[20] W. Mignolo, Desobediencia epistémica, op. cit., p. 40.
[21] When I pointed out to a traditionalist Mapuche activist that democracy is not an exclusive principle of “the West”, but something claimed, for example, by the Mayan Zapatistas, he retorted that this was so because the Maya had been conquered in the sixteenth century, whereas the Mapuche, “we, who resisted until the end of the nineteenth century, are much less colonised”.
[22] W. Mignolo, Desobediencia epistémica, op. cit., p. 39.
[23] W. Mignolo, Desobediencia epistémica, op. cit., p. 26.
[24] In my condition as a katripache (a non-Mapuche who supports Mapuche demands) I have accompanied numerous activities (such as mobilisations or press conferences), I have spoken out in favour of Argentina becoming a plurinational state (a position that today is held by no force with parliamentary representation) and I have formulated in writing criticisms of colonial Argentine thought. See for example Ariel Petruccelli, Pablo Scatizza and Mauricio Suraci, “Roca, su monumento y las barbaries de Romero”, Viento del Sur, 2012, available at http://www.revistavientodelsur.com.ar/roca-su-monumento-y-las-barbaries-de-romero; Ariel Petruccelli and Pablo Scatizza, “Una posición frente a la resistencia a izar el wenufoye en San Martín de los Andes”, Izquierda Diario, 2014, available at https://www.laizquierdadiario.com/Una-posicion-frente-a-la-resistencia-por-izar-el-wenufoye-en-la-Plaza-San-Martin; Ariel Petruccelli, “Los mapuche y un discurso de terror”, Izquierda Diario, 2017, available at https://laizquierdadiario.com/Los-mapuche-y-un-discurso-de-terror, Andrea Barriga and Ariel Petruccelli, “Santiago Maldonado: crónica de una desaparición forzada”, Sin Permiso, 2017, available at http://www.sinpermiso.info/textos/santiago-maldonado-cronica-de-una-desaparicion-forzada; Andrea Barriga and Ariel Petruccelli, “Santiago Maldonado: entre la montaña de mentiras y la larga marcha hacia la verdad”, Sin Permiso, 2017, available at http://www.sinpermiso.info/textos/santiago-maldonado-entre-la-montana-de-mentiras-y-la-larga-marcha-hacia-la-verdad-en-la-argentina.
[25] Against the peasant essentialisation of the Mapuche, Marimán reminds us that “the construction of the Mapuche as a peasant in reservations (reducciones) and later in communities is ahistorical, because the result of the forced incorporation and territorial dispossession with the creation of land reservations produced in turn the Mapuche diaspora to the cities and the emergence of the urban Mapuche. So that intensive-peasant Mapuche and urban Mapuche are the result of the same process”. José Marimán, Awkan tañi müleam Mapu kimün. Mañke ñi pu Kintun, Santiago de Chile, Centro de Estudios Rümtun-Fundación Heinrich Böll Cono Sur, 2017, p. 12.
[26] According to Mignolo, “Amin remained in the bubble of the modern episteme, and his de-linking suggested a change of content, not of the terms of the conversation”. W. Mignolo, “El pensamiento decolonial: desprendimiento y apertura. Un manifiesto”, op. cit., p. 29, footnote. Note that Amin was alive when these lines were written: the decolonial project had to be differentiated from Amin’s, too Marxist. And there is nothing wrong with drawing differences; what seems intellectually unjustifiable is drawing them without further argument.
[27] José Marimán, Autodeterminación. Ideas políticas mapuche en el albor del siglo XXI, Santiago de Chile, LOM, 2012, p. 298.
[28] On this see the magnificent work by Manuel Sacristán, “Sobre el uso de las nociones de razón e irracionalismo por G. Lukács”, Sobre Marx y marxismo, Barcelona, Icaria, 1983.
[29] R. Grosfoguel, “Entrevista a Ramón Grosfoguel. Por Luis Martínez Andrade”, Analéctica, Year 0, no. 1, 2013, p. 7.
[30] Ibid., pp. 8-9.
[31] Ibid., p. 12.
[32] “Entrevista a Ramón Grosfoguel. Por Angélica Montes Montoya y Hugo Busso”, Polis. Revista Latinoamericana, no. 18, 2007, para. 30.
[33] Ibid., para. 26.
[34] Moreover, if both Habermas and Bin Laden can be considered Eurocentric, it seems evident that the notion of Eurocentrism in question is virtually empty. A floating signifier, rather than a minimally precise concept.
[35] It is well known that Marxist dogmatism believed it could discard entire theories because of the class origin of their authors, or because of the political uses made of them at a given moment. The aberrant idea of a “proletarian science” caused infinite harm in its day. But it seems there are lessons that are hard to learn. The decolonial option tends to reproduce the same fallacious conception, although now not in class terms, but ethnicist or geographical ones (like Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s “epistemology of the South”). Some feminist currents reproduce it in terms of gender. Just as critical Marxists fought in their day against the absurdities of “proletarian science”, today – those of us who sympathise with colonised peoples and with feminist demands – we must fight against the absurdities (no less serious for being newer) of ethnic or feminist epistemologies. This does not imply denying the existence of class, ethnic or gender biases in scientific production, but from there to postulating and defending proposals for class, gender or ethnic epistemologies there is an abyss: the one that separates science (with its never fully attainable aspiration to objectivity and universalism) from ideology (cheerfully subjectivist and patriotically particularising).
[36] An excellent treatment of the work of Thomas Kuhn and of the polemics it generated is found in W. H. Newton-Smith, La racionalidad de la ciencia, Barcelona, Paidós, 1987.
[37] W. Mignolo, Desobediencia epistémica, op. cit., p. 40.
[38] W. Mignolo, “La idea de América Latina (“la derecha, la izquierda y la opción decolonial”), op. cit., pp. 261-262.
[39] I say “perhaps” because in the academic world there is much plurality but little exchange. The usual thing is for the different “tribes” to develop side by side, ignoring each other.
[40] A belief within the academic world is that the best works are those that attain greater recognition within the community. Of course this is not strictly true: as everyone knows, certain ethnic or linguistic groups possess an undeniable privilege based on subtle and often unconscious forms of prejudice. We could say that there are forms of “cheating” by means of which members of these groups tend to be more recognised, with a certain independence from the qualities of their works. Faced with this situation, instead of demanding that the “cheating” stop, Mignolo seems to demand “let us cheat too”, let us extol “our own” for being “ours”, without much concern for the real richness of their contributions.
[41] W. Mignolo, Desobediencia epistémica, op. cit., p. 34.
[42] W. Mignolo, “La idea de América Latina…, op. cit., p. 267.
[43] Of course there are dogmatisms and nonsense in all political and intellectual traditions. I have given the example of Marxism because I am a Marxist, and I prefer to see the mote in my own eye rather than in someone else’s.
[44] John Holloway, Cambiar el mundo sin tomar el poder, Buenos Aires, Herramienta/Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 2002.
[45] An excellent treatment of the problematic, the difficulties and the possibility of an authentic inter-epistemic dialogue is found in León Olivé, “Racionalidad y relativismo: relativismo moderadamente radical”, in León Olivé (ed.), Racionalidad. Ensayos sobre la racionalidad en ética y política, ciencia y tecnología, México, Siglo XXI, 1988.
[46] W. Mignolo, Desobediencia epistémica, op. cit., p. 27. [Translator’s note: this quotation is given in Mignolo’s English original (“Delinking”, Cultural Studies 21:2-3, 2007, p. 457). The word “decolonial” in brackets is added to match the Spanish text quoted by the author.]
[47] Edward Said, Orientalismo, Barcelona, Debolsillo, 2004, p. 10. [Translator’s note: the author presents this as a paraphrase. The closest passage in Said’s own words, from the 2003 preface to Orientalism, reads: “Rather than the manufactured clash of civilizations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together in far more interesting ways than any abridged or inauthentic mode of understanding can allow.”]
Bibliography
Barriga, Andrea and Ariel Petruccelli, “Santiago Maldonado: crónica de una desaparición forzada”, Sin Permiso, 2017, available at http://www.sinpermiso.info/textos/santiago-maldonado-cronica-de-una-desaparicion-forzada.
— “Santiago Maldonado: entre la montaña de mentiras y la larga marcha hacia la verdad”, Sin Permiso, 2017, available at http://www.sinpermiso.info/textos/santiago-maldonado-entre-la-montana-de-mentiras-y-la-larga-marcha-hacia-la-verdad-en-la-argentina.
Castro-Gómez, Santiago and Ramón Grosfoguel, El giro decolonial. Reflexiones para una diversidad epistémica más allá del capitalismo global, Bogotá, Siglo del Hombre Editores, 2007.
Chaudhuri, Kirti N., The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660-1760, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1978.
De Sousa Santos, Boaventura, Una epistemología del sur, México, Siglo XXI, 2009.
Fanon, Frantz, Los condenados de la tierra, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2009.
Gellner, Ernest, El arado, la espada y el libro. La estructura de la historia humana, Barcelona, Península, 1988.
Grosfoguel, Ramón, “Entrevista a Ramón Grosfoguel”, Polis. Revista Latinoamericana, no. 18, 2007.
— “Entrevista a Ramón Grosfoguel”, Analéctica, Year 0, no. 1, 2013.
Guamán Poma de Ayala, Felipe, Nueva Corónica y buen gobierno, Caracas, Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1980.
Holloway, John, Cambiar el mundo sin tomar el poder, Buenos Aires, Herramienta/Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 2002.
Jones, Eric, The European Miracle: Environments, Economies, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Marimán, José, Autodeterminación. Ideas políticas mapuche en el albor del siglo XXI, Santiago de Chile, LOM, 2012.
— Awkan tañi müleam Mapu kimün. Mañke ñi pu Kintun, Santiago de Chile, Centro de Estudios Rümtun – Fundación Heinrich Böll Cono Sur, 2017.
Mignolo, Walter, La idea de América Latina, Barcelona, Gedisa, 2005.
— “La idea de América Latina (“la derecha, la izquierda y la opción decolonial”), Crítica y Emancipación, no. 2, 2009.
— Desobediencia epistémica. Retórica de la modernidad, lógica de la colonialidad y gramática de la descolonialidad, Buenos Aires, Ediciones del Signo, 2010.
Newton-Smith, William H., La racionalidad de la ciencia, Barcelona, Paidós, 1987.
O’Gorman, Edmundo, La invención de América, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995.
Olivé, León (ed.), Racionalidad. Ensayos sobre la racionalidad en ética y política, ciencia y tecnología, México, Siglo XXI, 1988.
Petruccelli, Ariel, Pablo Scatizza and Mauricio Suraci, “Roca, su monumento y las barbaries de Romero”, Viento del Sur, 2012, available at http://www.revistavientodelsur.com.ar/roca-su-monumento-y-las-barbaries-de-romero/.
Petruccelli, Ariel and Pablo Scatizza, “Una posición frente a la resistencia a izar el wenufoye en San Martín de los Andes”, Izquierda Diario, 2014, available at https://www.laizquierdadiario.com/Una-posicion-frente-a-la-resistencia-por-izar-el-wenufoye-en-la-Plaza-San-Martin.
Petruccelli, Ariel, “Los mapuche y un discurso de terror”, Izquierda Diario, 2017, available at https://laizquierdadiario.com/Los-mapuche-y-un-discurso-de-terror.
Pomeranz, Kenneth, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2000.
Quijano, Aníbal, Modernidad, identidad y utopía en América Latina, Lima, Sociedad y política Ediciones, 1988.
— (selection and preface by Danilo Assis Clímaco), Cuestiones y horizontes. De la dependencia histórico-estructural a la colonialidad/descolonialidad del poder, Buenos Aires, Clacso, 2014.
Sacristán, Manuel, Sobre Marx y marxismo, Barcelona, Icaria, 1983.
— Seis conferencias, Barcelona, El Viejo Topo, 2005.
Said, Edward, Orientalismo, Barcelona, Debolsillo, 2004.
Stern, Steve, Los pueblos indígenas del Perú y el desafío de la conquista española, Madrid, Alianza, 1986.
Wallerstein, Immanuel, El moderno sistema mundial, vol. I, México, Siglo XXI, 1981.
[Translator’s note: unless otherwise indicated, quotations from works that are not available in English, or that the author cites from a Spanish edition, have been translated from the Spanish.]
Ariel Petruccelli is a historian in the Department of History at the National University of Comahue, Argentina.
The Spanish original of this article first appeared in Políticas de la Memoria (no. 20, 2020, pp. 45-62). This English translation, by Daniel Mang and Natalie Högström, first appeared on the Left Renewal Blog.
More content from this blog
- Saudi Arabia Bets Everything on Restraint, by Théophile Simon – 13 August 2026
- How Free Market Ideas Mutated into the Far Right, by Peter Geoghegan – 16 April 2025
- Bangladesh’s Islamist Extremist Resurgence Has Feminists Raising the Alarm, by Nawshin Flora – 29 July 2026
- Syria’s Circassian Community Is Finding Its Voice, by Pauline Vacher and Charles Cuau – 7 January 2026
- Open Letter to Jeffrey Sachs on His Position Regarding Russian War on Ukraine – 20 March 2023
Except where noted otherwise, original writing and translations produced by the Left Renewal Blog Collective are published under a Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–ShareAlike 4.0 licence. Republished and translated material remains subject to the licence and terms of its original publication.