Decoloniality, an Intellectual Colonialism? Decolonizing Decolonial Studies from Latin America

This article offers a critical presentation of Latin American decolonial studies at a moment when decoloniality has become a global label circulating across academic and activist spaces. It argues that understanding and problematizing what is today referred to as ‘decolonial’ or ‘decoloniality’ requires returning to its Latin American and Caribbean origins, where a specific philosophy of history positions the conquest of the Americas as the foundational event of modernity, racism and capitalism. Drawing on Latin American debates and a collective volume originally published in Mexico, the article reconstructs this genealogy to raise several critiques. First, it highlights the conceptual ambiguity of a notion that blurs the boundary between scholarly analysis and activism, making it difficult to distinguish academic inquiry from political usage. Second, it questions the identity‐based worldview decolonial discourse often uses to contrast an idealized colonized world with a Eurocentric modernity. Third, it identifies the internal contradictions, such as cultural essentialism, historical revisionism and reversed ethnocentrism, that cause the decolonial approach to replicate the very issues it denounces. Ultimately, the article argues that while decolonial thought has renewed debates on colonialism and racial inequality, the need for critical reflexivity also requires ‘the decolonization of decoloniality’.