Decoloniality

Decoloniality or colonialism is a term used principally by an emerging Latin American movement which focuses on understanding modernity in the context of a form of critical theory applied to ethnic studies and, increasingly, gender and area studies as well. It has been described as consisting of analytic and practical “options confronting and delinking from the colonial matrix of power” (Mignolo 2011: xxvii) or from a 'matrix of modernity' in which coloniality and colonialism constitute the 'generative order' of a four-fold matrix of forces comprising colonialism/imperialism, capitalism, nationalism and modernity as a set of processes and discourses (LeVine 2005a and 2005b). It has also been referred to as a kind of 'thinking in radical exteriority' (Vallega 2015: x). As such it can be contrasted with coloniality which is “the underlying logic of the foundation and unfolding of Western civilization from the Renaissance to today,” a logic that was the basis of historical colonialisms, although this foundational interconnectedness is often downplayed (Mignolo 2011:2). This logic is commonly referred to as the colonial matrix of power or coloniality of power. Some have built upon decolonial theories by proposing Critical Indigenous Methodologies for research. Decoloniality or colonialism is a term used principally by an emerging Latin American movement which focuses on understanding modernity in the context of a form of critical theory applied to ethnic studies and, increasingly, gender and area studies as well. It has been described as consisting of analytic and practical “options confronting and delinking from the colonial matrix of power” (Mignolo 2011: xxvii) or from a 'matrix of modernity' in which coloniality and colonialism constitute the 'generative order' of a four-fold matrix of forces comprising colonialism/imperialism, capitalism, nationalism and modernity as a set of processes and discourses (LeVine 2005a and 2005b). It has also been referred to as a kind of 'thinking in radical exteriority' (Vallega 2015: x). As such it can be contrasted with coloniality which is “the underlying logic of the foundation and unfolding of Western civilization from the Renaissance to today,” a logic that was the basis of historical colonialisms, although this foundational interconnectedness is often downplayed (Mignolo 2011:2). This logic is commonly referred to as the colonial matrix of power or coloniality of power. Some have built upon decolonial theories by proposing Critical Indigenous Methodologies for research. Although formal and explicit colonization ended with the Decolonization of the Americas during the nineteenth century and the decolonization of much of the global south in the late twentieth century, its successors, Western imperialism and globalization perpetuate those inequalities. The colonial matrix of power produced social discrimination eventually codified as “racial”, “ethnic”, “anthropological” or “national” according to specific historic, social, and geographic contexts (Quijano 2007: 168). Decoloniality emerged at the moment when the colonial matrix of power was put into place during the sixteenth century. It is, in effect, a continuing confrontation of, and delinking from, Eurocentrism : the idea that the history of human civilization has been a trajectory that departed from nature and culminated in Europe, also that differences between Europe and non-Europe are due to biological differences between races, not to histories of power (Quijano 2000: 542). Decoloniality is synonymous with decolonial “thinking and doing,” (Mignolo 2011:xxiv) and it questions or problematizes the histories of power emerging from Europe. These histories underlie the logic of Western civilization. Decoloniality is a response to the relation of direct, political, social and cultural domination established by Europeans (Quijano 2007: 168). This means that decoloniality refers to analytic approaches and socioeconomic and political practices opposed to pillars of Western civilization: coloniality and modernity. This makes decoloniality both a political and epistemic project (Mignolo 2011: xxiv-xxiv). Decoloniality has been called a form of “epistemic disobedience” (Mignolo 2011: 122-123), “epistemic de-linking” (Mignolo 2007: 450), and “epistemic reconstruction” (Quijano 2007: 176). In this sense, decolonial thinking is the recognition and implementation of a border gnosis or subaltern reason (Mignolo 2000: 88), a means of eliminating the provincial tendency to pretend that Western European modes of thinking are in fact universal ones (Quijano 2000: 544). In its less theoretical, and more practical applications—such as movements for Indigenous autonomy, like Zapatista self-government—decoloniality is called a “programmatic” of de-linking from contemporary legacies of coloniality (Mignolo 2007: 452), a response to needs unmet by the modern Rightist or Leftist governments, (Mignolo 2011: 217), or, most broadly, social movements in search of a “new humanity” (Mignolo 2011: 52) or the search for “social liberation from all power organized as inequality, discrimination, exploitation, and domination” (Quijano 2007: 178). Decoloniality is often mixed up with postcolonialism, decolonization, and postmodernism. However, Decolonial theorists have made the distinctions clear. Postcolonialism is often mainstreamed into general oppositional practices by “people of color,” “Third World intellectuals,” or “ethnic groups” (Mignolo 2000: 87). Decoloniality—as both an analytic and a programmatic—is said to move “away and beyond the post-colonial” because “post-colonialism criticism and theory is a project of scholarly transformation within the academy” (Mignolo 2007: 452). This final point is debatable, as some postcolonial scholars consider postcolonial criticism and theory to be both an analytic (a scholarly, theoretical, and epistemic) project and a programmatic (a practical, political) stance (Said 1981: 8). This disagreement is a single example of the ambiguity—“sometimes dangerous, sometimes confusing, and generally limited and unconsciously employed”—of the term “postcolonialism,” which has been applied to analysis of colonial expansion and decolonization, applied to Algeria, to the nineteenth-century United States, and nineteenth-century Brazil (Mignolo 2007: 87). However, decoloniality does precede post-colonialism historically. Decoloniality arose at the same time as colonialism of the Americas: during the sixteenth century. Decolonial scholars consider the colonization of the Americas a precondition for postcolonial analysis. The seminal text of postcolonial studies, Orientalism by Edward Said, describes the nineteenth-century European invention of the Orient as a geographic region considered racially and culturally distinct from, and inferior to, Europe. However, without the European invention of the Americas in the sixteenth century—occasionally referred to as Occidentalism—the later invention of the Orient would have been impossible (Mignolo 2011: 56). This means that postcolonialism becomes problematic when applied to post-nineteenth-century Latin America (Mignolo 2007: 88).