Globalization and the Decolonial Option

Walter D. Mignolo, Arturo Escobar, Walter D. Mignolo, Arturo Escobar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317966708
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

This is the first book in English profiling the work of a research collective that evolved around the notion of "coloniality", understood as the hidden agenda and the darker side of modernity and whose members are based in South America and the United States. The project called for an understanding of modernity not from modernity itself but from its darker side, coloniality, and proposes the de-colonization of knowledge as an epistemological restitution with political and ethical implications.

Epistemic decolonization, or de-coloniality, becomes the horizon to imagine and act toward global futures in which the notion of a political enemy is replaced by intercultural communication and towards an-other rationality that puts life first and that places institutions at its service, rather than the other way around.

The volume is profoundly inter- and trans-disciplinary, with authors writing from many intellectual, transdisciplinary, and institutional spaces.

This book was published as a special issue of Cultural Studies.

Walter D. Mignolo

Introduction: Coloniality of power and de-colonial thinking

I About the Book

This book the reader has in her/his hands is the outcome of one of the workshops of the project modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, held at Duke-UNC in May of 2004, and organized by the volume editors. The workshop stressed the shift that the project was taking, by moving from the analytic of modernity/coloniality to the emphasis places in de-coloniality, as Aníbal Quijano mapped in the opening article.

The workshop focused on the following question: what are the differences between existing critical projects and de-colonization of knowledge and other contemporary critical projects (an outline of this scenario in section III, below). We decided to focus on Max Horkheimer's formulation of ‘critical theory’ for several reasons. The first was that the project of the Frankfurt School and the early works of Horkheimer in particular were meaningful for some of the participants in the project modernity/coloniality (chiefly Enrique Dussel and Santiago Castro-Gómez, both philosophers from Argentina and Colombia, respectively).¹ Secondly, because the Frankfurt School condensed a tradition of Jewish critical thinkers in Germany during the early years of Hitler's regime that although Marxist in spirit was entangled with racism and coloniality in the body. As Aimé Césaire noted, half a century ago, the Holocaust was a racial crime perpetrated against racialized whites in Europe, applying the same logic that the colonizer had applied to people of color outside of Europe (Césaire 2000). While de-coloniality names critical thoughts emerging in the colonies and ex-colonies, Jewish critical traditions in Europe, since the nineteenth century, materialized as the internal responses to European formation of imperial nation-states.²

This volume intends to be a contribution to the advancement of de-colonial thinking as a particular kind of critical theory and to the de-colonial option as a specific orientation of doing.³ We assume that critical theory in the Marxist genealogy of thought, as articulated by Max Horkheimer, is also a particular kind of critical theory and not the norm or the master paradigm against which all other projects should be compared, measured, evaluated and judged.⁴ Master paradigms are just but options dressed with universal clothes. One of the consequences of de-colonial options is to make clear precisely that master paradigms and abstract universals (left, right and center) are still caught in imperial desires. We also assume that ‘history’ is not only linear; and that ‘historical awards’ are only endowed to those who get there first, in the uni-linear chronology of events. There are several histories, all simultaneous histories, inter-connected by imperial and colonial powers, by imperial and colonial differences. The volume is also intended as a contribution to the de-colonial option in epistemology and politics. The de-colonial option requires a different type of thinking (Catherine Walsh theorizes it as an-other-thinking), a non-linear and chronological (but spatial) epistemological break; it requires border epistemology (e.g., epistemic disobedience), a non-capitalist political economy, and a pluri-national (that is, non-mono-national) concept of the state. The de-colonial option opens up as de-linking and negativity from the perspective of the spaces that have been silenced, repressed, demonized, devaluated by the triumphant chant of self-promoting modern epistemology, politics and economy and its internal dissensions (honest liberals, theologians of liberation, post-moderns and post-structuralists, Marxists of different brands).

Section I features the seminal article by Peruvian sociologist, Aníbal Quijano, published at the beginning of the 90s, when the dust of a crumbling Soviet Union was still in everybody's eyes.⁵ At the beginning of this century, Arturo Escobar (an anthropologist from Colombia currently residing in the US) wrote a critical review of what he called ‘the modernity/coloniality research program’. This article is included here, following the one by Quijano. The rest of the articles reflect part of the research and publications of many of us participating in the project, who continue to meet yearly and exchange views, articles, opinions and information. Ramón Grosfoguel (a sociologist and activist, from Puerto Rico residing in the US) reviews world-system analysis from the perspective of coloniality. A former student of Immanuel Wallerstein, Grosfoguel's contribution to the epistemic shift opened up, in the social sciences, by modernity/coloniality research program starts and departs from dependency theory and world-system analysis. His contribution in this volume is part of his larger argument to transcend the basic economic model in which dependency theory and world-system analysis rest. Catherine Walsh (scholar, activist and resident of Ecuador), has in the past eight years, developed a critical discourse based on her political work with Indigenous and Afro-intellectuals and communities, in Ecuador; as well as in her role as founder and director of the program in cultural studies at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar. Here Walsh strongly argues for an ‘other thought’ to avoid the modern trap of putting everything in one temporal line, in one highway that is already being patrolled and guarded by gate-keepers making sure that ‘other thoughts’ do not cross the borders.

In section II Nelson Maldonado-Torres and Freya Schiwy engage in explorations that each have been pursuing in the past five or so years and that expand the modernity/coloniality/decolonialilty project to the sphere of philosophy and cultural critique. Maldonado-Torres (a Puerto Rican philosopher and historian of religions), has been exploring the concept of ‘coloniality of being’, that was implied but not clearly stated in all its consequences, in Quijano's notion of ‘subjectivity and knowledge’. In Quijano's germinal article the colonial matrix of power has been described in four interrelated domains: control of economy (land appropriation, exploitation of labor, control of natural resources); control of authority (institution, army); control of gender and sexuality (family, education) and control of subjectivity and knowledge (epistemology, education and formation of subjectivity). Furthermore, implanting the colonial matrix of power (either in sixteenth century Anahuak [Valley of Mexico] or in today's Iraq) implies to dismantle, simultaneously, existing forms of social organization and ways of life. ‘Coloniality of being’ as unfolded by Maldonado-Torres brings forward what has been silenced beyond Heideger and Levinas: the ‘being’ of Frantz Fanon's ‘damnés de la terre’. Freya Schiwy (a cultural critic from Germany residing in the US) has distinguished herself within the research program, for her original investigation of Indigenous video making and her interrogation of the roles of gender in the colonial matrix of power. While Maldonado-Torres explores the intersection of coloniality and subjectivity in the domain of philosophy and in the tradition of the concept of ‘being’, Schiwy explores coloniality and subjectivity in the domain of cultural studies and in the debate on gender issues. In Quijano's colonial matrix of power, gender and sexuality is one sphere in which coloniality of power is articulated. Quijano's has concentrated himself in the spheres of the control of economy (mainly exploitation of labor) and authority articulated with the coloniality of knowledge. Maldonado-Torres and Schiwy are contributing to unfold the question of being and gender entangled with the coloniality of knowledge.

In section III, ethnicity, nation-state and racism come into prominent focus. Where do these issues fit in the colonial matrix of power? Where is the nation-state in the colonial matrix of power?; in the sphere of control of authority, for sure. The emergence of ‘modern nation-states’ in Europe, means two things: that the state became the new central authority of imperial/colonial domination and that the ‘nation’ in Europe was mainly constituted of one ethnicity, articulated as ‘whiteness’. Chronologically, South America and the Caribbean were the first cases of ‘colonial nation-states’ and in the process of their appearance and materialization, the colonial matrix of power was re-articulated in what has been described as ‘internal colonialism’: a Creole elite (e.g., white elite from European descent), took the power from the hands of Spanish and Portuguese monarchies, and re-enacted it in their own hands. In the case of Haiti, it was the Black Creole and ex-Slaves who took power. However, and as history demonstrated, a Black colonial state was not allowed to occupy the same position in the modern/colonial world, than the White colonial state. The co-existence of the modern nation-state with colonial nation-states is one of the key points in the transformation of racism and the colonial matrix of power since the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Javier Sanjinés (a Bolivian cultural critic and former political theorist, who splits his time between Bolivia and the US) takes Brazilian essayist and intellectual Euclides da Cunha, Os Sertões (1902) in order to explore the tensions and conflicts between race and nation in the formation of the colonial state. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Brazil was no longer a direct colony of Portugal. But it was, like the rest of Latin America, an indirect colony of the French civilizing mission and of the British Empire economy. Brazilian critical intellectuals (as it became the case all around the colonial world), torn between the exemplarity of European modern states and the miseries of mentally, economically, and politically dependent colonial states, were the visible cases of a new subjectivity, the subjectivity of the colonial citizens of the colonial nation-states. Sanjinés describes the particular form that the colonial state took in South America as the ‘oligarchic-liberal States’ and contrasts those who trumpeted the European model (like Argentinean Domingo Faustino Sarmiento), with those critical of it (as Sarmiento's counterpart in Brazil, Euclides De Cunha).

In the same vein, Agustin Lao-Montes (a sociologist from Puerto Rico, residing in the US) explores the past (in)visibility of Afro-Latino's and their growing demographic and political presence. What does it mean to be Afro-Latinos and Afro-Latinas? Where are they coming from? They are entangled, woven, trapped in the colonial matrix of power of the modern/colonial world? The situation today is directly linked with, on the one hand, the formation of colonial nation states, in the nineteenth century and, on the other hand, with the imperial/colonial differences that unfolded between the colonial nation state in the US and the colonial nation states in South America and the Caribbean. The modern/colonial imaginary and increasing US imperial prominence during Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement, produced the impression that Afros in the Americas were mainly located in the US and in the Caribbean former colonies of France (Guadalupe, Martinique) and England (Jamaica, Barbados). That is, Afro-Americans are people who speak English or French but not Spanish or Portuguese! Afro-Latinos as are becoming visible not only in the US but also in South America—in the ex-colonies of Spain and Portugal—those places where Spanish and Portuguese were relegated to second class Latin languages, after French. Lao-Montes explores Afro-Latinidad in the US which is both a consequence of migration from the South, and of the US pushing the Southern frontiers farther South, in 1848, and leaving thousands of Mexicans inside US expanded territory.

At this junction, José Saldívar intervenes in an effort to link a strand of Latino/a critical and theoretical reflection, in dialogue with the modernity/coloniality research program. The strength of Saldívar's reflection is to make clear that Latinos and Latinas are not just a social phenomenon that shall be studied from the perspective of the social sciences modeled from the perspective of White Europeans and US scholars. It means that Latinos and Latinas are finding a locus of enunciation from where White Europeans and US social phenomenon shall be studied. This is a process in which a radical epistemic shift is taking place and the hubris of the zero point (see Castro-Gómez in this volume) that anchors the social sciences became under siege and denounced for the universal pretension of an epistemology that is founded, as Quijano observes in his contribution, on the experience of one particular ethnicity, White Euro-Americans. Saldívar's contribution helps us (the readers) in looking at the coloniality of power from the perspective of experiences similar to those that brought the concept of ‘coloniality’ into existence; experiences that generate the need of border thinking and de-colonial projects; experiences that disengage from the ‘obligation’ to see the world according to the ethnical experiences hidden behind the epistemic universality of the hubris of the zero point. Going back to the moment in which, in the US, Deleuze and Guatari's concept of ‘minor literature’ (Kafka) was translated into ‘minority discourse’ in the US (that is, the discourse emerging from the colonial wound — both racial and patriarchal — of people of color in the US, Saldívar casts a wide net and connects theoretical and political intellectual production with Afro-US, South America (coloniality of power) and South Asia (subaltern studies; connectors is a fundamental concept to link de-colonial projects coming from different colonial experiences). His essays continue to show that de-colonial thinking is the pluri-versal epistemology of the future; an epistemology that de-links from the tyranny of abstract universals (Christians, Liberals or Marxists).

Section IV takes up where section III left off: the inter-connections between the peripheries and the geo-political and body-political location of border thinking and de-colonial projects. Coloniality of power, in other words, it is not just a question of the Americas for people living in the Americas, but it is the darker side of modernity and the global reach of imperial capitalism. While Saldivar connected the interior periphery of Latinos, Latinas and Afro-Americans in the US with activists in British India, Manuela Boatcă (a Romanian trained as sociologist in the US and currently residing in Germany) looks at the effects and consequences of the Western colonial matrix of power in a place like Romania, ex-colony of non-Western empires (the Ottomans and the Soviets and now becoming a colony — as many others — of the European Union). Building on the metaphor center/periphery introduced by Argentinean economist Raul Prebisch in the early 50s and developed by US sociologist, Immanuel Wallerstein in the 70s, Boatcă reflects on the borders of Romanian principalities of Transylvania, Wallachia and Moldavia surrounded by the Habsburg, the Ottoman and the Tsarist empires. Boatcă focuses on the nineteenth century when Romania entered European modernity through the back door. She suggests an epistemic de-colonial shift by looking at the empires from the perspective of Romania rather than looking at Romania from the perspective of the empires. Centers and peripheries do not exist any more, progressive intellectuals would argue today. That is a traditional distinction of the seventies. Neo-liberalism shuffled all the cards, no more center and periphery, no more left and right. And yet, there are equally progressive intellectuals who dwell in the borders (not just of the US and Mexico!!); in the imperial/colonial borders of the modern/colonial world. These pluri-versal borders are the consequences of pluri-versal histories (e.g., India or Bolivia, Algeria or Romania, Russia or China) dealing with the global designs of Euro-American local histories.

Zilkia Janer (a cultural critic from Puerto Rico residing in the US) returns to the New World while joining the global reach of coloniality revealed by Boatcă and Madina Tlostanova: the question here is not so much the New World, as it is the question of the commercialization of nature and of food and the assault to human health in the name of science for the purpose of capital accumulation. The colonial difference here is articulated in between the ‘superiority of modern transgenic seeds’ and the ‘sophistication of modern French cuisine’ and traditional ways of harvesting (having to deal with weeds and insects) and the inferiority of world-cuisine compared with French culinary history and global image. In between, food chains like McDonald's points toward the commercialization of food disregarding human health. Janer uncovers a very important dimension of the colonial matrix of power: the variegated spectrum of food, from basic nourishment, to its transformation into the commodity of high cuisine and also as a locus of inhuman profit invocating the advances in science in the production transgenic seeds. Janer looks at food, and explains in a way the coloniality of Nature (that Escobar points out as lacking consideration within the modernity/coloniality project). Although Janer doesn't make an explicit connection, it is obvious that the direction of her argument joins the direction that Native Americans are following (Mishehuah) and the struggle for the democratization of food that Vandana Shiva argued at the end of her book on ‘stolen harvests’. The fight that is currently being fought by transnational organizations such as the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements and Via Campesina, are a case in point.⁶ The control of food supply is one of the most terrifying aspects of today's uncontrolled capitalism (e.g., Monsanto) and as such one of the most salient aspect of the reproduction of coloniality of power. De-linking, civil des-obedience and a reversal of the way production and distribution of food is conceived are all aspect of de...