Aníbal Quijano's Theoretical Contributions

And a few ideas about the coloniality of curriculum

Introduction

Although decolonisation is not a metaphor (Tuck & Yang, 2012), one should not underestimate the power of metaphors insofar as they simultaneously enable the interrogation of the world and serve as the impetus to act upon it to unsettle colonial structures. When imposed, however, metaphors prevent us from critically “reading” our modern/colonial reality. As I address throughout this essay, coloniality is implicated in knowledge production, including the underlying metaphors or concepts that justify material dispossession. Broadly speaking, I understand coloniality as the discourses and practices maintaining racial-colonial, hetero-patriarchal, and capitalist relations of power and institutions in place. This includes political (governance), economic (labour), symbolic and cultural (epistemological and curricular), and social institutions (intersubjective). Coloniality serves as a powerful analytic to interpret and critically interrogate how regimes of knowledge, theoretical perspectives, and categories continue to justify material colonial, racial, and patriarchal domination, as well as capitalist exploitation. Decolonial theory assists in examining the social practices sustaining colonial relations in all spheres of social existence, including education institutions and their Eurocentric curriculum and pedagogy undergirded by the logic of coloniality.

While the concept of coloniality currently informs many fields of research, a sustained dialogue with Aníbal Quijano’s untranslated works in education scholarship is missing. It is important to address that, initially, Quijano’s (1991/2007) concept of coloniality of power was hardly known or cited in anglophone contexts, with the exception of Latin American and Caribbean scholars working in the Global North (Grosfoguel, 2007; Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Mignolo, 2000; Wynter, 2003). In educational research, one of the first peer-reviewed articles to use the concept of coloniality was published in 2008 (Carter, 2008), although Quijano’s work was not cited. This means that seventeen years went by without any signs of education scholars in anglophone contexts referring to the concept of coloniality. It is not surprising that Nathalia Jaramillo (2010), Vanessa Andreotti (2011), and Noah de Lissovoy (2010) were one of the first to draw on decolonial theory in anglophone contexts, especially when we consider their sustained dialogue with critical scholars from the Global South. They did not only refer to coloniality symbolically or epistemically but, more importantly, addressed it as intimately linked to material relations of power.

Aníbal Quijano’s sociological contributions to the interrogation of colonial relations of power lie in his multidimensional conception of coloniality, which has greatly influenced a wide range of disciplines, including sociology (Bhambra, 2014; Grosfoguel, 2007; Patel, 2017), philosophy (Castro-Gómez & Grosfoguel, 2007; Gandarilla Salgado et al., 2021), anthropology (Bonilla, 2020; Restrepo & Escobar, 2005), history and historiography (Lowe, 2015), literary and cultural studies (Escobar, 2007; Pratt, 2022), geography and political ecology (Sultana, 2022), and education (see, e.g., Shahjahan et al., (2022)). The concept of coloniality of power entangles the material (political-economic, ontological, and existential) with the symbolic (social, cultural, and epistemic). Education scholarship drawing on and contributing to decolonial thought does not always make these connections explicit. Some education scholars place greater emphasis on the epistemological or cultural/symbolic (e.g., Carter, 2008), while others underscore social ontology and the material relations of power (e.g., Jaramillo, 2012; Stein, 2022). On the other hand, more geopolitically attuned perspectives informing comparative and international education (Andreotti et al., 2016; Shahjahan, 2016; Stein, 2021) emphasise both the material and symbolic more explicitly, utilising the geopolitics of knowledge as an analytic to address how the curriculum is instrumentalised through the internationalisation of higher education supported by international financial organisations and universities. Reconceptualising neoliberal globalisation as global coloniality, in this case, unveils the intimate linkages of power and global circuits of knowledge production, especially when considering how the curriculum is restructured to align with dominant interests hiding under seemingly harmless terms (e.g., global competence, global knowledge economy, and curriculum reform).

In curriculum studies, the emerging scholarship drawing on decolonial theory usually does not maintain a sustained dialogue with Quijano’s work, with the exception of those who adopt materialist perspectives (e.g., Díaz Beltrán, 2018; Jaramillo, 2015; Paraskeva, 2021). Despite having articulated decolonial theory’s primary analytical concept, which has informed the social sciences and humanities for the past three decades, Quijano’s work surprisingly remains marginal in the broad field of education. One can even observe how Global North scholars building upon his work in other disciplines tend to limit their attention to two of his publications (Quijano, 1991, 2000). Although the use of coloniality of power is being deployed by some scholars, Mignolo’s (2000, 2010) epistemological or symbolic emphasis on coloniality of knowledge tends to dominate the scholarship. The issue does not lie in Mignolo’s articulation of coloniality, since his work is greatly informed by Quijano, but rather in the way it has been consumed and adopted by education scholars interested more in epistemological or cultural concerns. The overemphasis on the epistemological, without a material base, tends to obfuscate the geopolitical implications and entanglements of colonialism, heteropatriarchy (Jivraj et al., 2020), racism, and capitalism.

Given the limited engagement with Quijano’s work, in the following section, I review his work to point to the distinct ways he conceptualised coloniality. I also sketch out his understanding of the modern/colonial world as a heterogeneously configured and always already contested social-historical totality, a conceptualisation worth seriously thinking about since it points to a dynamic social ontology in which conflict, resistance, and re-existence become constitutive parts of decoloniality. Despite the homogenizing and racializing logic of the modern/colonial state, everyday social practices point to alternatives. When alternative ways of knowing persist despite dominant discourses saturating the interpretation of the world, decoloniality becomes more visible in terms of its political and ethical implications. In some ways, Quijano’s conceptualisation of a heterogeneous totality parallels Glissant’s (1997) conception of totality as an ‘entanglement of world-wide relation’ of alterities pointing to the existing alternatives created within a modern/colonial world that appears naturally fixed and unchangeable. In the full essay (which will hopefully be published this year after being rejected), I sketch out the contours of the geopolitics and coloniality of curriculum. Although this article is primarily conceptual, I do offer a few empirical examples to illustrate how the geopolitics and coloniality of curriculum are expressed in various contexts. I focus on coloniality’s broader geographic scope and temporal depth, which I argue allows for a more complex interrogation, critique, and interpretation of curricular discourses and pedagogical practices within and beyond educational institutions. National and local discursive expressions of coloniality become the archi-textures constituting and rearticulating the geopolitical project of colonialism. The geopolitics and coloniality of curriculum, as I explicate in more detail in the full essay, departs from nation-state perspectives by advancing broader analytical frames and planetary perspectives to think about the intimate relationship between symbolic and material domination.

Review of Quijano’s Contribution to Social Theory

Quijano’s body of work contributed in original ways to dependency theory in the 1960s and 1970s; debates on historiography, modernity, culture, and identity in the 1980s; and decolonial theory with his conceptualisation of the coloniality of power from the early 1990s to 2018. His scholarship is perhaps best conceptualised in three phases (Gandarilla Salgado, 2020), all of which revolve around the broad concept of dependency. Quijano’s work shifted from political-economic considerations to more entangled materialist and symbolic analyses and interpretations of modernity and coloniality. The latter conceptualization informs the geopolitics and coloniality of curriculum when interrogating how knowledge and power are articulated across various scales to reproduce material and symbolic dependency.

Political-Economic Dependency

Quijano’s first intellectual phase and contribution to critical social theory in Latin America and the Caribbean is situated in the tumultuous years of the 1960s, a historical context in which the Cuban Revolution and decolonization/liberation movements became the main points of reference. Quijano’s earlier contributions to dependency theory and internal colonialism reveals his strong materialist analyses that took as its theoretical point of departure a broader social totality than that of the nation-state. By using broader analytical frames, he disrupts the methodological nationalism informing research in the social sciences and humanities. Drawing on the work of José Carlos Mariátegui (1928/2007), who situated his sociological analyses of Peruvian reality within the materiality of imperial and colonial conditions of Latin America, Quijano (1966/2014) also unsettles the dichotomous political-economic analyses of center and periphery. It was no longer a powerful center simply imposing itself on weaker countries in the periphery. The heterogeneous colonial structure, for instance, depends on the white Criollo elite settlers and its complicit elite Mestizo and Indigenous population. Imperial/colonial domination and capitalist exploitation, in other words, were always already heterogeneously configured and intimately intertwined, whereby the periphery was not simply a passive recipient of colonialism but was rather actively involved in maintaining these entangled systems of domination and exploitation through the systematic control of racialised labour, subjectivity, knowledge, education, family, and governance. This colonial structure or matrix points to the longue durée of the coloniality of curriculum, particularly as it re-produced the subjectivities needed to the maintain material relations of power in place.

Quijano (1966/2014) challenged the sharp dichotomy between center and periphery by examining to the role the white-mestizo ethno-class played in perpetuating colonial relations of power, intellectual (symbolic) dependency, and political economic (material) underdevelopment. His work made more visible what he referred to as the historical-structural heterogeneity of Latin America and the Caribbean, a key concept that would be reformulated much later to examine how the modern capitalist world system is constituted by the coloniality of power. The latter analytics helps examine the racialization of all spheres of social existence, including the production of knowledge and subjectivity. For Quijano (1990), historical-structural heterogeneity is constituted by a complex fabric of social relations articulated by power differentials. Social totality is configured heterogeneously since relations of power are historically specific and expressed distinctly in each sphere of social existence (e.g., labour, subjectivity, education, authority, family, sex/gender/sexuality, and nature). Historical-structural heterogeneity, though not cited frequently in the literature in anglophone contexts, is highly relevant since it enables one to conceive of ‘social existence as a multidimensional totality’ that is constantly contested (Quijano, 2014, p. 29). This without a doubt includes education as a central institution responsible for reproducing coloniality in other spheres. In education research, historical-structural heterogeneity, as a planetary analytic and frame of reference, may allow one to rethink of curriculum as geopolitically entangled across settler-neo-colonial contexts. This multidimensional conceptualisation of totality that resonates with Glissant’s poetics of relation insofar as it allows for a more complex understanding of (settler)colonial domination, alternative modes of resistance and existence, and transcultural processes revealing the agentic and reconstituting forces that refuse to be silenced.

Historical-structural heterogeneity of power refers to a social totality of intersubjective relations and institutions constantly reconfigured through conflict, both within and between societies. The contestation of educational institutions, in particular, is always already implicated in resisting dominant regimes of knowledge and the material relations of power justified at the epistemic level. Hegemony within this heterogeneous and fluid modern/colonial social totality is maintained when successful groups in the dispute for power set the terms (governance/power) and content (curriculum/knowledge) of the conversation. Important to note is that dominant groups do not unilaterally determine the terms and contents of the conversation without the emergence of resistance (e.g, ayllus in Bolivia, San Basilio de Palenque in Colombia, Zapatistas in Chiapas, student movements, Landless Workers Movement in Brazil, Vía Campesina, Palestinian resistance, and Indigenous territorial struggles in the Americas, Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the US).

Quijano’s (1981) conceptual advancements also enable the historicisation of social thought, namely ‘the search for historical specificity and the explanation of the limits of the categories used by Eurocentric thought’ (p. 235, my translation). When the concept of dependency was transformed into yet another category to theorise social reality in fixed structural terms (à la Althusser), Quijano argued that it disregarded the sociology of dependency and liberation that would point to the historical-structural heterogeneity and dependency of the Global South. In other words, it ignored the historical particularities of colonial domination and resistance. It is imperative therefore to examine the colonial intimacies, interdependencies, and reciprocal determinations of political-economic (material) and sociocultural (symbolic) realities educational institutions, curriculum, and pedagogy help constitute. Cultural dependency in relation to modernity (e.g., intellectual colonialism) becomes much more explicit in Quijano’s second intellectual phase.

Modernity, Colonialism, and Materialist Theory of History (1980s)

As early as the 1980s, Quijano (1981, 1988, 1989a, 1989b) entered his second intellectual phase, shifting his materialist political-economic analyses and interpretations of dependency to more symbolic, cultural, and epistemic issues related to modernity, colonialism, and knowledge production. Although Quijano had an emerging critique of Eurocentric thought between the 1960s and 1970s, it became more explicit in the 1980s, namely with the publication of Sociedad and Sociology [Society and Sociology]. In this piece, he described the paradoxical consequences of French structural thought in defeating and invalidating the original advances made by dependency theory. While dependency theory successfully countered modernisation theory in the first couple of decades after World War II, it paradoxically failed with the advancements of structural Marxism. Endogenous knowledge production from Latin America and the Caribbean, including ‘Third World’ Marxist perspectives, was substituted for more Eurocentric Marxist perspectives. Eurocentric categories thus re-established themselves as the most valid approaches to interpreting the periphery’s political-economic and socio-cultural reality.

Structural analyses tended to place little value on investigations centered on concrete social change. The quotidian or everyday sociocultural existence and resistance were also systematically ignored, which prevented the analysis of the historical-structural heterogeneity of Latin America and the Caribbean. This region’s heterogeneity, as Segato (2011) observes, does not consist of the coexistence of “diverse temporalities, histories and cosmologies” (p. 25) but also multiple social relations of production, including non-capitalist modes of production (reciprocity and Indigenous communalism). Ignoring the existence of heterogeneity, therefore, disavowed the endogenous knowledge production rooted in the socio-cultural and political-economic realities, histories, and struggles of the region.

Quijano (1981) questions whether dominant schools of thought building on historical materialism had to necessarily inform radical thought in Latin America and the Caribbean or if the latter was always a situated materialist social theory and praxis embodied by intellectuals and communities of resistance. When the former was applied dogmatically, he believed it hindered social transformation since it displaced historically situated thought and praxis. Dominant understandings of historical materialism led to univocal analyses and interpretations. When adopted mimetically, historical materialism ‘was really a catastrophe…for the formation of theoretical and political thought. This rampant ideology, which was absolutely useless…emptied the categories, proposals, and questions of real content’ (Quijano, 1981, p. 165). In the late 1980s, Quijano’s analyses of modernity and Eurocentric rationality approximated what he would conceptualise as coloniality in 1991.

Quijano (1988) gestures toward the categorical imperative to advance new problematics, questions, concepts, and paradigms that would enable one to critically read, interpret, and comprehend the neoliberal transformation of the modern/colonial world. His prescient thought critiqued Eurocentric assumptions and pointed to alternatives: “Perhaps one of the interesting things in Latin America is that of the possible emergence of a new problematic. In a way, culture begins to be de-Europeanised; all the myths of Eurocentric origin begin to disintegrate. And everything that this mythology built at the level of paradigm, of the theory of social classes and its form of knowledge, is disintegrating. What remains of it will be the founding nucleus of the problematic that emerges from now on” (Quijano, 1988, p. 169, my translation).

Quijano invites us to challenge Eurocentric thought paradigmatically, including its theoretical and methodological commitments. This categorical imperative is a call to advance concepts that would enable one to unsettle Eurocentric social theory and respond to and act upon the shifting modern/colonial reality of Latin America and the Caribbean. Metaphors, in other words, can be politically situated.

Symbolic and Material Entanglement of Coloniality of Power

To understand Quijano’s third intellectual phase, it is important to refer to a paper presentation he gave at the International Colloquium on Interdisciplinarity organised by UNESCO in Paris (April 1991). Quijano addressed the crisis of modernity in epistemological/symbolic and ontological/material terms. In particular, he counters ‘the foundations of the universalist aim of Western rationality’ (p. 354, my translation), arguing that modernity’s crisis is a result of its cognitive model, which is linked to capitalist relations of power and ontological or metaphysical ambitions to reach universality. These critiques resonated with Dussel’s (1973) earlier geopolitical and ethical concerns with modernity’s exteriority, that is, the systematically excluded, dominated, and exploited geographies and peoples. Universalist ambitions have resulted in the ontological/existential and epistemological/symbolic negation of those on the receiving end of capitalist modernity and colonialism. Seriously thinking with those who have been systematically excluded and rendered inferior by modern/colonial discourses and practices thus becomes an ethical imperative. Similarly, Quijano argued for the decolonisation of social, cultural, and political-economic relations and the epistemological reconstitution founded upon intercultural communication and exchange. Here, decolonial theory’s curricular and educational implications are made more explicit as he pointed to the bankruptcy of what can be referred to as the coloniser’s curriculum model of the world. These conceptualizations, therefore, anticipated what he would later refer to as the coloniality of power.           

Coloniality of Power. Quijano (2000b) provides one of the most complex descriptions of coloniality in an untranslated text. Coloniality is understood as “one of the constitutive and specific elements of the global matrix of capitalist power. It is founded on the imposition of a racial/ethnic classification of the world’s population, serving as the cornerstone of such power. It operates on every material and subjective plane, sphere, and dimension of everyday social existence” (my translation, p. 342). As one can observe, coloniality is conceptualized in heterogeneous terms, that is, it illustrates its multidimensional and planetary scope. The category of race also becomes a modern/colonial technology of control and management, an axis around which other structures of domination and exploitation revolve, including the racialization of knowledge production for which education institutions are responsible. This heterogeneous colonial-racial-capitalist matrix of domination is constituted by the systematic control of labour, sex, gender, sexuality, subjectivity, education, authority, and nature. Interconnected, interdependent, and co-constitutive structures of domination and exploitation are not only nationally configured but are always entangled processes and frictions (Lowe, 2015) articulated globally by Eurocentric political, economic, social, and cultural institutions (e.g., racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, Eurocentric rationality, education systems, and liberal democracy). The geopolitics and coloniality of curriculum, as analytics, seek to demonstrate how knowledge is used as yet another geopolitical instrument deployed to justify and maintain the coloniality of power.

Pedagogically, it is perhaps best to conceive of coloniality in relational terms, always already entangled materially and symbolically. It is conceptually and analytically useful to refer to the coloniality of power relations, coloniality of knowledge relations, coloniality of gendered/sexual relations, coloniality of nature relations, coloniality of political-economic relations, and the coloniality of intersubjective relations. Referring to these analytical concepts’ relational dimensions and varying subject positions situate them ethically and geopolitically, that is, in multiple fields of power and all spheres of social existence. This does not mean, however, that coloniality is expressed in the same way across space and time since this would ignore the historical specificity of colonialism in particular regions. Moreover, understanding the coloniality of power as intersubjective and relational enables one to examine how colonial relations of power are contested by the irreducible heterogeneous realities, histories, knowledges, struggles, experiences, and modes of coexistence. The preoccupation with the irreducibility of historical-structural heterogeneity and its epistemological and geopolitical possibilities allows for the articulation of decolonial thought and praxis in distinct contexts, particularly in rethinking, resisting, and transcending the longue durée of coloniality. Quijano’s contribution to conceiving the world in heterogeneous terms enabled him to shift his attention toward decoloniality. This latter concept amplifies the multiplicity of ways of thinking, being, co-existing, sensing, doing, and relating that resist coloniality in its multiple expressions and simultaneously create the conditions of possibility to escape the existential-epistemological prison of modernity/coloniality (Sibai, 2016)

In the full essay I discuss in more detail the coloniality and geopolitics of curriculum.

Some references

Quijano, A. (1981). Sociedad y Sociologia en América Latina. Revista De Ciencias Sociales, 1(2), 223–249.

Quijano, A. (1988). El estado actual de la investigación social en América Latina. Revista De Ciencias Sociales, 3(4), 155–169.

Quijano, A. (1989a). La nueva heterogeneidad estructural de América Latina. In H. Sonntag (Ed.), Nuevos temas nuevos contenidos? Las ciencias sociales de América latina y el Caribe en el nuevo siglo (pp. 8–33). UNESCO.

Quijano, A. (1989b). Paradoxes of Modernity in Latin America. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 3(2), 147–177.

Quijano, A., Clímaco, D. A., & Quijano, A. (2014). Cuestiones y horizontes: De la dependencia histórico-estructural a la colonialidad/descolonialidad del poder: antología esencial (Primera edición). CLACSO.

Quijano, A. (1992). Americanity as a concept, or the Americas in the modern world-system. International Social Science Journal, 44, 549–558.

Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of power and eurocentrism in Latin America. International Sociology, 15(2), 215–232. https://doi.org/10.1177/0268580900015002005

Quijano, A. (2007). Coloniality and modernity/rationality. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 168–178. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601164353