Relativism, Universalism and the Limits of the Pluriversal Model of Decolonization

The paper examines pluriversality as a model of decolonization and its implications for the decoloniality scholars. In the past few decades, the concepts such as colonization, post-colonization and decolonization have formed important vocabularies in the works of many decoloniality scholars who championed the emancipation of the knowledge production from Eurocentric episteme. For obvious reason, this is not unconnected to the colonial legacies and past experiences of the (ex-)colonized people. One of the major problems with the Eurocentric model of epistemic practice is that it mainly represents the view of the West going by its ideological roots hence, subjective and relativistic even though often packaged as objective and universal. Thus, for the decoloniality scholars, pursuing pluriversal agenda in the decolonization of knowledge in African academy and other non-western societies is often considered to be an alternative model. However, arising from the above decoloniality philosophy, the central question in this paper is that, how objective and universal is the suggested pluriversal model of decolonization? The paper contends that answer to this question is not as straight forward as the decoloniality scholars assumed due to the complexity of the model. The paper concludes by examining the implications of the complexity and the limits of the pluriversal epistemic model.