On Decoloniality
Walter Mignolo, Coordinator
Introduction
This dossier offers a highlight on the work of an ongoing project focusing on the epistemic, the economic, the political and the ethical. Epistemically, the project was founded on the premise that Eurocentrism is basically a question of imperial knowledge in which the rhetoric of modernity (a rhetoric of salvation and progress, and salvation as progress) hides and disguises the logic of coloniality (a logic that justifies oppression, exploitation, and violence in the name of salvation and progress). “De-coloniality” is conceived as a process of epistemic de-linking from Eurocentrism. If—the argument goes—the rhetoric of modernity embedded in imperial reason legitimized coloniality (e.g., imperialism with and without colonies, but modernity always entangled with coloniality), then what is needed is not just a change of content within the limits of imperial reason, but a change in the terms of the conversation. Anibal Quijano conceived this move as epistemic de-linking.
A fuller picture of the accomplishment of the project in the past ten years could be found in three recent publications. Globalization and the De-colonial Option, edited by Walter Mignolo in collaboration with Arturo Escobar (a special issue of Cultural Studies 21/2-3, 2007) is the first collection in English that provides a good introduction to the overall project. It contains the foundation article by Anibal Quijano in which the triad modernity/coloniality/de-coloniality is laid out and an overview by Arturo Escobar. In the same issue Nelson Maldonado-Torres explores the concept of (de) coloniality of being and José Saldívar makes the link between coloniality and borderland, between South American colonial histories and Chicanas colonial histories. A couple of articles on the consequences of thinking de-colonially about and around ex-Soviet colonies as Rumania, Azerbaijan and Tajikistan (Manuela Boatca and Madina Tlostanova).(1) In El Giro Decolonial. Relfexiones par una diversidad epistémica más allá del capitalismo global, co-edited by Santiago Cástro-Gómez and Ramón Grosfoguel (Bogota, 2007), you can find a short history of the constitution and unfolding of the project and a wide array of essays including de-colonizing the university in which he lays out his influential notion of “hybris del punto cero”; (Castro-Gómez), de-colonizing Western universals (Ramon Grosfóguel), on interculturality and coloniality of power (Catherine Walsh), on anthropology and coloniality (Eduardo Restrepo). In Bolivia, José Luis Saavedra compiled a collection of essays (published by PIEB, Proyecto Investigación Experimental de Bolivia) in 2007, titled Educación superior, interculturalidad y descolonización. This collection responds to current debates, in Bolivia, on de-colonizing higher education and it includes an article by Aymara intellectual Mamani Condori on the “road and de-colonization” and a collaboration on Afro Caribbean Franz Fanon and Fausto Reynaga (Aymara intellectual and activist).
In this dossier, you will find an article by Zulma Palermo (Cultural Critique, based at the Universidad Nacional de Salta, Argentine), on de-colonizing the university. Her article joins forces, within the project, with Castro-Gómez on de-colonizing the university, the hybris of the zero-point and the dialogues of knowledges.(2) Edgardo Lander (Sociologist, based in Caracas and deeply involved in the World Social Forum), offers here one version of his ongoing, and dramatic, reflection on time and global warming: unlike the situation one hundred years ago, long-range planning is cut-off by the growing possibility of the death of life in the planet.
The contributions by José de Souza Silva and Eduardo Ibarra Colado place us beyond the social sciences and humanities, which is the original site of the project modernity/colonialilty/de-coloniality. José de Souza Silva is Researcher of Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária (EMBRAPA) and Director of Red Nuevo Paradigma para la innovación institucional en América Latina. From his training and experience, he offers (in two short pieces) a condensed version of an intense work in which research, epistemology and ethics interacts with activism. Eduardo Ibarra Colado is Director of the Department of Insitutional Studies at the Universidad Autónoma de México-Unidad Cuajimalpa. Ibarra-Colado makes here a signal contribution as he unveils the logic of coloniality underneath current celebration of management; management as the key that opens all the doors toward a bright neo-liberal future. He sees, correctly in my view, “management” as the new face of the logic of coloniality. In sum, the four contributions suggest what the concept of “coloniality” can do for us and which are the paths that the de-colonial option (and the diversity of de-colonial options within the singularity of the de-colonial paradigmatic shift) open up for us in our task of imagining and creating a world in which many worlds can co-exist.
Notes
1. Maria Lugones’s ground breaking article on coloniality and gender, couldn’t be included in this collection because it was published, simultaneously, in another journal. See Heterosexualism and the Colonial / Modern Gender System Hypatia - Volume 22, Number 1, Winter 2007, pp. 186-209. We would like to have included Enrique Dussel’s World-System and "Trans"-Modernity Nepantla: Views from South - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2002, pp. 221-244. Since it is also available in the web, it presented editorial conflicts of interests. We encounter a similar situation with Edgardo Lander’s Eurocentrism, Modern Knowledges, and the "Natural" Order of Global Capital Nepantla: Views from South - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2002, pp. 245-268.
2. Issues around de-colonizing the university abound. The contributions you can find within the conceptual framework of the project modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, join forces with similar concerns particularly among Indigenous scholars and intellectuals in the South American Andes, among Native Americans intellectuals and activists in the US and in New Zealand and Australia. With respect to the Andes region, see José Luis Saavedra collection mentioned above. Of special interest is the project Amawtay Wasi, in Ecuador (http://www.amawtaywasi.edu.ec/english/antecedentes.htm). For current debates among Native Americans see Indegenizing the Academy. Transforming Scholarship and Empowering Commuties, edited by Devon Abbott Mihesuah and Angela Cavender Wilson (Lincoln, Nebraska, 2004). The influential book by Maori anthropologist, Linda Tuwhai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies. Research and Indigenous People. London and New York, 1999. A debate about Smith’s argument in the US could be found in American Indian Quarterly, 29/1-2, 2005. See also my own The Role of the Humanities in the Corporate University Walter D. Mignolo, PMLA, Vol. 115, No. 5 (Oct., 2000), pp. 1238-1245. Last but not least, it is important to mention the PhD in Cultural Studies at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolivar, in Quito, Ecuador, conceived and directed by Catherine Walsh. The field of the program (Cultural Studies) has nothing to do with cultural studies in England or the US. In the Third World, because of coloniality of knowledge, higher education administrator needs the comfort of legitimacy. Cultural Studies provided that institutional security blanket. The intellectual (epistemic and political) goes in a different direction: it builds on the project of modernity/coloniality/decoloniality and join forces with Indigenous and Afro-Andean de-colonial projects grounded in their own sensibility and conceptual framework.