Decolonial Thought and its Discontents

Instead of building alliances with affine schools of thought, some scholars are busy building their careers on critiquing those who should otherwise be potential allies in an effort to dismantle the modern/colonial world. Carving more space for one’s field seems to be the goal of these careerist critics. They target and critique individual authors that form part of the so-called decolonial turn in social theory to dismiss a body of work they likely know little about. Special issues, articles, and even books are written to dismiss what is likely to be known only partially and superficially given the authors’ known citation practices. As a philosopher in the United States wrote, they are unimpressed by decolonial thought from Latin America and the Caribbean. The hubris is evident, especially since authors from the region aren’t cited, nor are they seriously engaged. This philosopher’s citation practices in other publications also reveal that they have hardly read scholarship published in Spanish or Portuguese. Even translated work from the region aren’t cited. That’s precisely why I’m refusing to cite them in an effort to engage in the politics of citation from below. Why give them visibility? 

Decolonial thought has become, for some, including postcolonial scholars, something that should be attacked, even if that means invalidating the work of thinkers whose writing has not been translated. I can list hundreds if not thousands of names from various regions, but that still would not suffice to convince these critics, since the point of their critiques is to invalidate the leading voices, and in doing so, invalidate everything else. Walter Mignolo happens to be one of the authors who are frequently critiqued. I also critique his work, not to dismiss everything he’s published, but to highlight certain shortcomings and potential dangers. I draw on Quijano’s work frequently to complement what Mignolo has translated conceptually within the fields to which he contributes. However, the critiques of Mignolo’s work hardly ever pay attention to Quijano, Dussel, Wynter, Maldonado-Torres, and Grosfoguel. And these names are just commonly cited scholar. I haven’t found a critique of decolonial thought that seriously engaged the work of Yuderkys Espinoza-Miñoso, Ochy Curiel, Aura Cumes, Sylvia Tamale, Mara Vigoya, Betty Ruth Lozano, Flavia Rios, and many others, who have offered critiques of decolonial thought in their aims to advance it rather than to dismiss it. Decolonial thought was not meant to be an established or coherent theoretical whole, with fixed concepts, but critics seem to believe that certain concepts have a fixed meaning when in reality they are being worked on by activists and intellectuals situated in sites of struggle.

Even the academic version of decolonial thought begins as a transdisciplinary project. However, critics choose to ignore the historical and geopolitical conditions that made it possible for decolonial thought to become more organized. They choose to focus on individuals (perhaps because some of them are white Argentineans) who should not write about colonial/imperial domination. These reactionary responses ignore the fact that even white Argentineans, including Jews, have experienced the iron fist of US imperialism and neocolonialism. This is not to say that white Argentinians are the ultimate victims. Nonetheless, many have experienced atrocities during the US-imposed dictatorship in the region that led to the disappearance of thousands. Of course, impoverished white Argentineans do not experience oppression in the same as Afro-Argentinians, Indigenous communities, and African immigrants. 

However, it is easier to deny certain scholars’ perspective of domination than to admit that perhaps they have something to say, even if it doesn’t perfectly align with one’s perspective. Certain critics working in the Global North, including immigrant scholars of color who form part of the elite in their home countries, also don’t always mention their social position and historical role in maintaining colonial domination and capitalist exploitation. Their complicity is omitted to give themselves more credibility in the neoliberal academic market.

This all reminds me of “race traitors” (including Mestizos) in Latin America who have sacrificed everything during times of war and incalculable violence. Specifically, I’m thinking about liberation theologians, such as Camilo Torres Restrepo (who advanced the notion of cultural colonialism in the early 1960s) in Colombia or the priests who were massacred in El Salvador, including Archbishop Romero and the Jesuit priests and academics Ignacio Ellacuría Beascoechea (philosophy and theology of liberation), Ignacio Martín Baró (psychology and theology of liberation), Segundo Montes Mozo, Amando López Quintana, Juan Ramón Moreno Pardo and Joaquín López López. 

Ignacio Ellacuría was born in Basque country Spain and studied his doctorate in philosophy under Xavier Zubiri, who formed part of the Madrid School of which José Ortega y Gasset and José Gaos also formed part. Intellectual giants greatly influenced Ignacio’s thinking, the latter of whom could be considered to surpass his teachers. He situated his work in colonial contexts and dedicated his studies to writing about the existing relations of colonial domination and capitalist exploitation in El Salvador and in Latin America. Knowing about the potential consequences, he continued to write and speak back to power. He was killed at the Central American University in El Salvador alongside the other Jesuit priests mentioned above.

I’m not mentioning this massacre to somehow equate Mignolo or Dussel to philosophers and theologians of liberation who sacrificed their lives for liberation struggles. I mention it because Mignolo or Dussel, whose work certainly contain shortcomings, can easily be writing about things that justify domination or invalidate liberation struggles (e.g., Zizek and Habermas), but they have dedicated their lives to seriously interrogating systems of domination, however imperfect these interrogations may be. Their interrogations of domination must count for something, even if we can recognize certain epistemological, ontological, and political limitations. Reactionary critics won’t easily admit this, however. They’d rather continue carving more space for themselves to position themselves and their fields of study above all others, thereby dismissing what they know little of in actuality. But why not pretend to be the all-knowing subject? Is this not the way to benefit from and receive the rewards the neoliberal academic market promises? Is it not true that the modern Cartesian subject is the seeker of truth and must question everything, including what may possibly be close to one’s ostensible political project of liberation?

Critics seem to be selective in who they critique. They would rather choose an affine school of thought to create theoretical feuds that will ultimately decide which camp apprehends colonial social reality more accurately. Knowingly or not, critics reproduce the hubris of Eurocentrism’s zero point epistemology, which renders everything outside of its frameworks as philosophically insignificant. Without closely studying the sociohistorical and geopolitical contexts that create the conditions of possibility to interpret or theorize the world differently, critics hastily dismiss concepts advanced from other regions to position themselves on top of the epistemic hierarchy. Terms such as “decolonial” or “coloniality” are often reduced to co-optations of decolonization or anticolonial thought, or worse yet, they are rendered as essentialist perspectives that divide the world between good and evil—that former being the poor, destitute, oppressed, dominated, dispossessed, and exploited who are given epistemic priority (which critics misconstrue as an essentialized version of epistemic privilege). Although I don’t want elaborate further, it seems like critics are more aligned to Nietzsche’s¹ aristocratic and nihilist philosophy than they would like to admit (see footnote).

Moving beyond superficial readings and misplaced critiques, there have been important critiques emerging within the Latin America, however. Cusicanqui’s work stands out in this case. She refers to the political economy of ideas that tend to dilute the radical intentions of critiquing colonialism, racism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. The imperial reach of US academia, for instance, can have negative consequences for scholars in Latin America since what is produced in the US may be decontextualized from sites of struggle. In my ethnographic study on student movement in Honduras, I drew on Cusicanqui’s valuable insights to critique the academic tendency of decolonial studies and the risk it poses in the region in terms of seriously thinking from and with social movements. 

Notwithstanding these critiques, it is important to note that Cusicanqui’s work down not only target certain individuals but the pyramidal academic structure from which they benefit. She doesn’t necessarily dismiss or invalidate certain concepts but rather suggests that they are not new and are likely reconceptualizations of previously articulated concepts in the region. Cusicanqui refers to the advancement of internal colonialism decades prior, but she doesn’t mention that Quijano contributed to discussions on internal colonialism, neo-colonialism, neo-imperialism, and dependency theory in the 1960s. She doesn’t mention that Quijano’s work in the 60s advanced the idea of coloniality without having conceptualized it as such, preferring to conceptualize the modern/colonial world through the notion of historical-structural heterogeneity and historical-structural dependency (Mariátegui contributed to this conceptualization as well in the 1920s). Another point to consider about Cusicanqui’s work is that she doesn’t mention the emerging decolonial feminist scholarship advanced by Black and Indigenous women in other communities (e.g. GLEFAS). Cusicanqui’s critique nonetheless has served as a cautionary tale. It has made me wary of scholarship that consumes and critiques decolonial thought without having a deep understanding of the region, especially the discourses and practices emerging from distinct sites of struggles. Unfortunately, for many, Cusicanqui’s critiques have only served one purpose—to invalidate decolonial thought entirely. 

To minimize the tendency to ignore the erasure of the Global South’s knowledge production, I decided to co-edit a special issue to create inter-epistemic dialogues between regions. The impetus for this editorial project was due to my observations of some of the Global North publications that tended to amplify certain voices at the expense of many others. In this special issue, we reformulated Fernando Coronil’s questions concerning postcolonial studies: How, then, do we identify, examine, as well as engage in serious dialogue with a body of work that in reality does not appear to exist? How to define it without arbitrarily inventing or confining it? How to treat it as “decolonial” without framing it in terms of what is becoming a decolonial canon and thus inevitably colonizing it? This editorial project explores these questions among others and situates thought within distinct sites of struggle in Abya Yala. We began the editorial introduction as follows:

Imagine yourself trapped in a large empty white room surrounded by numerous doors. You carefully examine the four walls and notice only one door is conveniently left slightly open. Apparently, this is the one true path toward seeing and interpreting the world for what it “really” is. You are convinced it is your ticket to salvation. Seduced by the possibility of acquiring real knowledge, you do not consider opening the other doors. You refuse to ask what lies behind them. 

Another image or visual metaphor that comes to mind is illustrated by Lucía Sarmiento Verano’s (2021) felicitous phrase: Eurocentrism is a cage. In more philosophical terms, this image can be conceptualized as the epistemological-existential prison of coloniality (Sibai, 2021). To begin to find a way out of this cage or prison of coloniality, it is imperative to refuse modernity’s “door” of salvation, endless progress, and capitalist development founded upon Indigenous dispossession and enslavement. It is our responsibility to try to open the other doors not only to point to the colonial and racial foundations of modernity but also to make resistance and re-existence more visible. It is thus our responsibility to try to find ways out of coloniality by thinking from and working with political projects seeking to dismantle these violent foundations, which Sylvia Tamale (2020) illustrates so well: “No situation, concept or person can ever be fully understood without probing their histories. Hence decolonization and decolonial projects demand an in-depth appreciation of the history of colonization and all its supporting discourses” (Tamale, 2020, p. 1). She teaches us that colonialism is not a “distant receding history” (p. 14) or a legacy we are gradually moving away from. Colonialism is a living reality.

The images painted by the metaphors above can, unfortunately, be extended beyond Eurocentrism and coloniality. They can be applied to decolonial and postcolonial thought when canons start to be established and when monologues speak louder than dialogues. This special issue hence takes as its theoretical point of departure the geopolitically attuned perspectives that avoid reproducing what we critique by thinking from other geographies and thinking with activist intellectuals who do not limit their work to academia. 

Adopting an inter-epistemic position is not always easy. Yet critics of decolonial thought perhaps may learn a thing or two if they stopped foreclosing dialogues in their efforts to center themselves at the expense of others. 

1. As Nietzsche wrote: It was the Jews who, with awe inspiring consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value-equation (good=noble=powerful=happy=beloved of God) and to hang on to this inversion with their teeth, the teeth of the most abysmal hatred (the hatred of impotence), saying “the wretched alone are the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good . . . , and you, the powerful and noble are on the contrary the evil, the cruel, the lustful. . . . One knows who inherited this Jewish revaluation. . . . With the Jews there begins the slave revolt in morality: that revolt which has a history of two thousand years behind it and which we no longer see because it—has been victorious.