A decolonial wrong turn: Walter Mignolo's epistemic politics

"Lo decolonial es una moda, lo postcolonial un deseo y lo anticolonial es una lucha cotidiana y permanente." "The decolonial is a fad, the postcolonial a desire, and the anticolonial an everyday, permanent struggle." Proponents of a decolonial "option" or "turn" have developed the concepts of "coloniality of power/being/knowledge" and "decoloniality." In so doing, many advance the claim that these frameworks improve on, complete, or serve as an alternative "option" to earlier conceptions of decolonization, where the latter is understood as the emancipation of colonized subjects from structures of colonial and imperial domination. In this essay, I critically assess some of this theoretical architecture, by way of a critique of the very specific version of decolonial thought developed under this rubric by the Argentinian (US-based) semiotician and philosopher Walter Mignolo. My contention is that Mignolo's focus on the epistemic dimensions of decolonization often serves instead to distort or flatten the worthwhile inheritances of anticolonial material practices and analyses. Mignolo would likely respond that he is seeking to supplement and extend the latter projects of decolonization into a more epistemic register where they have not (sufficiently) gone before. By contrast, I aim to show how Mignolo frequently diminishes and/or displaces some of the more compelling dimensions of anticolonial thought and decolonization that have been traced in recent historiography and in fields such as Indigenous and settler-colonial studies. I call this tendency Mignolo's "epistemic politics." As a counterpoint, I briefly propose an alternative for political theorists of decolonization, what I call "worldly anticolonialism." The essay proceeds as follows. The first section briefly justifies my focus on Mignolo. The second section situates unfamiliar readers by summarizing the central propositions of Mignolo's version of the modernity/coloniality/decoloniality (MCD) research program. A key through-line in my interpretation is that Mignolo's account of "coloniality" and proposed "decolonial option" aims primarily at "epistemic decolonization," motivated by his account of the epistemic shortcomings of previous strands of anticolonial projects. The third section then shows how Mignolo misdescribes key historical trajectories and inheritances of anticolonialism. In effect, he flattens the structural and normative complexity and force of these various fields of thought and practice. The analysis of "decoloniality" as distinct from a more political conception of decolonization loses much of its underlying rationale in view of (what I hope to establish as) the exaggerated and distorted character of Mignolo's critiques of histories of anticolonial thought and practice. The fourth section then draws on work in Indigenous and settler-colonial studies to show how Mignolo's notion of coloniality also obscures central features of the power relations constitutive of settler colonialism in the Americas. In doing so, they undercut a more targeted and specific analysis of (1) the structural and social reproduction of settler colonialism and (2) how such an analysis allows differently situated actors to orient themselves in ways that contest existing colonial power relations. In conclusion, I commend alternative approaches to the politics of decolonization that instead seek to think alongside what I call "worldly anticolonialism(s)." These approaches give a much more humble and persuasively deflated role to the epistemic dimensions of decolonization. They refuse to conflate grand epistemic gestures towards de/coloniality with real politics and political theories of decolonization, as navigated by historically enmeshed actors and politically constructed constituencies. Despite the significant influence of Mignolo's writings in various disciplines, I am not aware of any conceptually systematic efforts to offer a sustained critique of his theoretical contributions as interventions into the critical–philosophical analysis of political practices and political theories of decolonization. Among all those writing today on decolonization, why single out Mignolo for sustained attention? Three reasons: First, Mignolo (who has an h-index of 103) has done much to diffuse the concepts of de/coloniality in interpretive and critical scholarship in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, especially among those working in Caribbean and Latin American studies work inflected by cultural and social theory. He is known as among the founders and key contributors to the MCD research program.1 On this basis, it is worth inquiring into the value of this specific theoretical edifice. Second, Mignolo (2010b, p. 515) claims the distinctive contributions of "taking" the decolonial option "as a particular kind of critical theory." As such, I propose to evaluate Mignolo's interventions in these terms, that is, as practices of critique that give readers concrete traction on how the "decolonial" in decolonial thought orients an analysis of colonial power relations (Asher, 2013, p. 833; Mignolo, 2012). Third, by turning to Mignolo more narrowly, I also seek to avoid the pitfalls involved in lumping together the variety of thinkers who are now frequently categorized as part of a "decolonial turn" (Davis, 2021). This kind of overly broad grouping of thinkers into a "turn" can obscure deep divergences among political projects, disciplinary embeddedness, and intellectual histories.2 So, my aim is to pursue a critique of the particular account of the decolonial that Mignolo proposes, without—as some acute critics have done (Táíwò, 2022)—seeking to interrogate the broader incoherence or indefensibility of the idea of decolonization as such. To the contrary, my goal is rather to assess how Mignolo's work contributes to theorizing decolonization in posing the following questions: In what respects does de/coloniality offer an improved analytic that diagnoses the power relations at issue in imperialism, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism? How, in turn, does such analysis help to encapsulate what decolonization struggles (past and present) have to offer as constructive projects with emancipatory normative and political horizons? (Mignolo, 2010b, 2018). I am not the first to offer sharp criticism of Mignolo's ideas, with the decolonial project gaining momentum more recently as an increasingly attractive complement to postcolonial studies (Bhambra, 2014; Gu, 2020). Several engagements with Mignolo's work are worth highlighting. One of the predominant criticisms is his tendency to romanticize or essentialize the non-Western or to lump various wide-ranging histories and struggles—of/in Latin America and elsewhere—to the point of obfuscating their specificity (Michaelsen Salvatore, 2010; Vázquez-Arroyo, 2018, p. 4). Others, including Bolivian/Aymara sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, accuse decolonial scholars more polemically of practicing intellectual imperialism vis-à-vis Indigenous communities, or decolonial feminist interventions, of the very sort they claim to critique (Makaran Ortega, 2017; Rivera Cusicanqui, 2020; Intersticio Visual, 2019). On the other hand, the philosopher Linda Martín Alcoff (2007; see also, Snyman, 2015) is among the sympathetic interlocutors who appreciate Mignolo's efforts to think outside global North lenses for insights into social and political epistemology. My own approach analyzes the limitations and politics of Mignolo's focus on the epistemic dimension of decolonization. I trace the concerning results of this epistemic turn by offering a critique stemming from more material understandings of decolonization. In this vein, I draw from the recent historiography of anticolonialism and scholarship in Indigenous and settler-colonial studies. In the following summary, I condense Mignolo's conception of "coloniality" and "decoloniality" into three central propositions: (1) Coloniality and modernity are co-constituted; (2) coloniality is distinct from colonialism, especially through the focus of the former on the epistemic; (3) decoloniality means epistemic detachment from coloniality and re-attachment to knowledges suppressed through coloniality. Altogether, Mignolo's aspiration is to generate alternatives to the knowledge practices that subtend what he calls, following the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano (2000, 2007) and Quijano and Wallerstein (1992), the "modern/colonial world system." I expand on each proposition in turn. First, coloniality and modernity are made together. They are co-constituted. Surveying the "modern/colonial world system," Mignolo gives an account of a 500-year Western-dominated history. Coloniality represents a kind of general form expressive of the underlying colonial constitution of modernity, which can take on different specific registers (e.g., epistemic, economic, etc.). "Modernity" here is examined as successive phases in the universalized imposition of Eurocentric knowledge practices (that disavow the particularity of the West) on subordinated, suppressed, and racialized/inferiorized non-Western "local histories." The key contrast made here is between Eurocentric knowledge practices that falsely universalize themselves by proclaiming the superiority of their modernity in service of colonization (and more diffusely as part of a globalized epistemic regime of coloniality) and oppressed "local" ways of knowing embedded in a highly pluralistic ecosystem of different social and political forms. Second, coloniality is different from colonialism because coloniality facilitates an analysis of practices with which the analytic of "colonialism" does not sufficiently reckon. Maldonado-Torres (2007, p. 243) captures the distinction between coloniality and colonialism succinctly: Coloniality is different from colonialism. Colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation, which makes such nation an empire. Coloniality, instead, refers to the long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production, well beyond the strict limits of colonial administration. This emphasis on coloniality represents a divergence from an analytic that more centrally focuses on the material practices implicated in the ruling strategies and constituency-building maneuvers of empires or colonial nation-states ("colonialism"). The latter would be more typically associated with the instrumentalities of thought necessary for military conquest, the extraction and exploitation of resources and labor, and racial, gender, and class hierarchies—in other words, by understanding all of these practices as legitimating ideologies for practices of colonial rule. In W. Mignolo's (2011, p. 2) specific formulation of this distinction, "historical colonialisms" are in this way downgraded in significance as only an important "dimension" of the "underlying logic" of a more encompassing "matrix" of "coloniality." The framework of coloniality both indicates a decisive break with, and originally modulates, the more material registers of formal political–economic colonization. The focus of this analysis of coloniality is much more specifically on those epistemic and subject-constituting practices that contribute to the making of colonial power relations. These specific practices are generally given causal primacy (or, at minimum, interpretive priority). They are the fundamental meta-historical patterns or "underlying logics" that constitute the more narrowly material governance practices of colonial rule. Third, decoloniality means epistemic detachment from coloniality, and re-attachment to knowledge(s) subordinated through coloniality. As a result of this focus on the underlying epistemic basis of colonial domination (Mignolo, 2011, p. 2), "liberation," understood as a program of "decoloniality," is part of a double movement. This double movement consists first of "de-linking"—meaning turning away from, separating from—dominant Western knowledge practices. Then, it requires engendering the "re-existence" or "epistemic reconstitution" of those subordinated knowledge practices—cosmologies, socialities, and so on—that have been "destituted" or otherwise subalternized through coloniality (Mignolo, 2017, 2021). In this respect, these knowledges are primarily represented as having been exteriorized by modernity, which means that they ultimately (re)compose themselves as practices that represent alternatives to modernity (rather than, say, alternative versions or trajectories of modernity). Decoloniality is required, then, because "coloniality is constitutive of modernity, and not derivative of it" (Mignolo, 2001, p. 26). That is, there is no non-colonial modernity. Here, the importance attributed to the epistemic dimensions of decolonization in service of detaching from or "unlearning" modern knowledge-forms is evident across many of the key concepts Mignolo has developed. These include the "geopolitics of knowledge," "loci of enunciation," (thinking from the other side of) "colonial and imperial difference," "epistemic disobedience," "epistemic reconstitution," "decolonial epistemic platform," and "border thinking." I submit that the through-line here is that epistemic decolonization becomes the most pressing task for those invested in projects of decolonization. For example, Mignolo has argued that "epistemic disobedience" as a practice of detaching from assimilation into dominant knowledge-forms is the central impetus and orientation of decolonial thought (Pillay, 2021). It is this kind of epistemic freedom from modern conceptions of knowledge that is the key starting point for social and political transformation. This claim is also directly articulated in the actual grammar of several key formulations, which suggest that epistemology and ontology are often best treated as first movers in political thought and political life: "de-colonization of knowledge and of being—and consequently of political theory and political economy" (my emphasis, Mignolo, 2010a, p. 346). His use of "and consequently" suggests that the decolonization of political theory and political economy follow the decolonization of more fundamental categories of epistemology and ontology. In an even more explicit statement of this largely unidirectional relationship, Mignolo contends: "What matters is not economics, or politics, or history, but knowledge. Better yet, what matters is history, politics, economics, race, gender, sexuality, but it is above all the knowledge that is intertwined in all these practical spheres that entangles us to the point of making us believe that it is not knowledge that matters but really history, economy, politics, etc." (Mignolo Mignolo Gopal, 2019). These struggles certainly featured the efforts of elite actors to justify state-building projects once it appeared inevitable that decolonization would take the form of the seizing the nation-state, but a bevy of historians have shown how these projects equally involved organizing in transnational forms outside of—or in conjunction with—state sovereignty (Fejzula, 2021; Temin, 2023). A world of nation-states was the outcome of decolonization but far from its self-evident telos (Cooper, 2005, 2014; Getachew, 2019; Goswami, 2012; Valdez, 2019; Wilder, 2015). So too were there many popular movements and intellectuals in struggles against empire who sought to challenge and rework frameworks such as developmentalism and progress that might at first glance seem too irreparably steeped in Eurocentric racism (Marwah, 2019; Temin, 2022). Still other scholars have also complicated a monolithic top-down picture of state–society relations even within the bounds of the new nation-states. As historian Lal (2015) has shown in great detail, such is the case even within states often said to typify the pathologies of top-down technocratic authoritarianism or the "high modernism" of the 1970s by critics like James Scott (1999), such as Julius Nyerere's Tanzania. Moreover, debates about whether modernization ought to entail the emulation of Eurocentric trajectories in the colonial context were widespread. At a more philosophical register, thinkers including Frantz Fanon (Bose, 2019), Amilcar Cabral (Okoth, 2021), and Walter Rodney (Temin, 2022) studied and actively engaged with popular culture, peasant and Indigenous modes of production, transnational solidarities beyond the nation-state, pre-colonial histories and their continuities, and questions of epistemic freedom from Eurocentrism in service of popular politics. Moreover, even constituencies who would come to articulate their claims as Indigenous peoples—arguably the primary example from which Mignolo draws—pursued a dynamic form of counter-globalization (Mar, 2016). In these movements, the terms of the "local" or the "communal" were themselves mediated through actors' practical reworking of "universals." Indigenous anticolonial thinker-activists in networks such as the World Council of Indigenous Peoples and the International Indian Treaty Council grappled deeply with the intellectual substance and political practices of anticolonial self-determination, internationalism, developmentalism, modernity, (anti-)statism, nationalism, worldmaking, and sovereignty (Coulthard, 2019; Crossen, 2017; Engle, 2010; Temin, 2023). Altogether, these bodies of scholarship in political theory and intellectual history reveal two essential points about both popular and elite-based practices of anticolonial politics. First, popular practices, including those we would now interpret as subaltern and/or Indigenous anticolonial practices, did not exclusively evade the state-form nor articulate their own histories as only "local" and counter to modernity per se (Robins, 2003). Second, elite-oriented iterations of anticolonialism did not all embrace a narrowly modernist vision of top-down anticolonial nationalism. Mignolo's portrayal of the narrow horizons of anticolonial movements disavows their complexity, conceptual innovation, and their popular, worldmaking, and critically attuned dimensions. Here, the very imperative to turn to "the epistemic" is itself only established by questionably cutting scholars and activists off from the task of seriously engaging the still-vital dilemmas posed by anticolonial thinkers and activists. This section will now juxtapose Mignolo's conception of colonial power and approach to decolonial critique with that of work in Indigenous and settler-colonial studies. I make two claims. First, Mignolo misinterprets practices of colonial domination that are better apprehended through the lenses of settler-colonization, settler colonialism, and indigeneity. Second, the failure to map a historically conditioned terrain of power relations in favor of the epistemic has concerning consequences. It disavows how "epistemology" is itself formed through differentiated modes of ideology-formation. The latter are inflected—if not sometimes constituted—by material power relations. what is "internal colonialism" if not the persistence of the coloniality of knowledge (and therefore the control of authority and economy) under nation-building processes after decolonization? This is why coloniality remains as the hidden side of modernity, and why there cannot be modernity without coloniality… Imperial narratives were entangled with national narratives after these events…(Mignolo, 2011, p. 162).4 Mignolo argues that it is the durability of "coloniality of knowledge" both before and after formal practices of colonization that explains why and in what forms colonial power persists "after decolonization." Mignolo (2011, p. 54) observes of postindependence Latin America, "Conditions have changed. Colonizers were no longer occupying countries." Here, he makes specific reference in this passage to the success of creole nationalists like Bolivar in achieving independence ("decolonization") from the Spanish Empire. Two central problems plague this analysis. First, a more sociologically compelling analysis would need to attend to the fact that the 18th and 19th century independence movements in the Americas were "anticolonial" only with respect to the freedom of colonists vis-à-vis the metropole. Indeed, they were explicitly "colonial" with respect to the freedom of Indigenous peoples vis-à-vis the settler-colonists. In this sense, racialized epistemologies built into these Janus-faced practices ought to be understood as part of ideological strategies that attempted to reconcile the animating ideal of republican freedom with the coercive practices of ongoing colonization and territorial occupation through which this freedom was materially actualized. In this respect, practitioners of these "creole revolutions" such as Simón Bolívar crafted a kind of "anti-imperial imperialism," as Joshua Simon (2017) calls it. Without metropolitan imperial supervision to strategically constrain settler expansionist aspirations with the goal of maintaining a semblance of order at the imperial periphery (Rana, 2014; Saler, 2014), settler-states undertook projects in the postindependence moment of even more intensive territorial expansion to consolidate the foundations of new settler nation-states. Such control of land and labor was itself core to the settler nation- and state-building projects in the Americas and only subsequently gave rise to the more systematic articulation of ideologies of racial and civilizational hierarchy. Simply put, projects of "nation-building" through ongoing colonization manifest as quite concrete and material forms of territorial occupation of Indigenous lands. On this basis, I think it is mistaken to imply that these intertwined material and ideological practices can profitably be subsumed into, or made a consequence of, "coloniality of knowledge." In short, Mignolo's account misapprehends the fact that it is these constitutive material practices—not simply the world of the colonial/modern "imaginary" that they birthed—that extend into the present (Mignolo, 2012, p. 6). The more compelling interpretation presented by scholars of Indigenous and settler-colonial studies is that there is in fact no clear "event" of rupture (see Wolfe, 2006) or sharp distinction in the Americas between the formal colonization and occupation of Indigenous societies' lands and a subsequently more informal, diffuse set of colonial practices to be labeled as coloniality. Mignolo is certainly right that imperial and national narratives are entangled. Yet, this intertwinement is only plausible if interpreted as a statement about the material structures through which these narratives help to constitute (and do ideological work in service of the reproduction of) hierarchically stratified collective subjectivities. To be sure, my own account of settler-colonial formations should