Decolonial Woes and Practices of Un-knowing

ABSTRACT Decolonial philosophy aims at destabilizing and critiquing what Walter Mignolo has called Eurocentric macronarratives of coloniality. However, the very practices of decolonial thinkers in the U.S. academy can themselves replicate colonial impulses and erasures. In this article I discuss “decolonial woes,” or a certain affliction that arises when even resistant practices are connected to what I term “practices of un-knowing,” which distort and negate epistemic practices that have been deployed against ignorance about marginalized selves. Importantly, one of the decolonial woes I point to is connected to the work on decoloniality of scholars of color that undermines and makes invisible the decolonial work of Chicanas such as Emma Pérez and Gloria Anzaldúa. Scholars of color are thus also enacting practices of un-knowing.