On Decolonial Thinking
How should we understand decoloniality given that it is a “buzzword” within disciplines, aswell as for political projects? In this paper, I attempt to clarify several aspects about decoloniality— history, aims, examples, challenges and relationship to childhood studies — by primarilydrawing on the ideas shared by Mignolo and Walsh in On decoloniality: concepts, analytics, praxis.For a large part of this paper, I focus on the Zapatista movement, as a way to understanddecoloniality as ‘epistemic reconstitution,’ i.e moving from epistemic universality to epistemicpluriversality, and the idea of decoloniality as vincularidad.
History of decoloniality
Decolonial thinking originates mainly with Latin American scholars such as RamonGrosfoguel, Walter Mignolo, Enrique Dussel, Arturo Escobar, Maria Lugones and Gloria Anzalduaand is a praxis that is older than 500 years (Mignolo 16).
Decoloniality, moreover, arose from the shortcomings of decolonisation (Mignolo 124).Decolonisation was marked by the struggles of the native or indigenous populations to expel thesettler from their colonies and to form their own sovereign nation-state (Mignolo 228). However,what was lacking and that which was taken up by decoloniality is an analytical project tounderstand “the colonial matrix of power” that was left behind.
What is Decoloniality?
In the Introduction of On Decoloniality, Walsh tells us that, “decolonality is not a newparadigm or mode of critical thought. It is a way, option, standpoint, analytic, project, practice andpraxis” (Mignolo 5). In my mind, the immediate question was, why did the author refrain from referring to decoloniality as “a paradigm or critical mode of thought”? After reading severalsections of the book closely, my hunch is that the answer to this question lies in the fact the authors of the book refuse to frame decoloniality as an “abstract universal” response to coloniality andinstead ask us to focus on, “who is doing it, where, and how?” In other words, “there is no decolonial master plan. Each trajectory will be molded and modelled in the praxis of living of those who engage in doing it” (Mignolo 228). Given that there is no single model or paradigm to traverse then, what do we look for in trying to understand decoloniality and those who are doing it? What common features do the different ways of decoloniality share?
Mignolo makes clear that “decoloniality aims to delink from the colonial matrix of power in order to imagine and engage in becoming decolonial subjects. But delinking is only the first step. What follows is living decolonially: that is, assuming and engaging decolonial options” (Mignolo125). Thus, it becomes crucial to grapple with the “colonial matrix of power” first before understanding decoloniality. The “colonial matrix of power” was born out of theoretical-political struggles in South America, at the intersection between the academic and the public spheres (Mignolo 142) and the concept-term coloniality was theorised by Quijano to explain the patterns of power that was foundational to modernity and capitalism (Mignolo 23). He says, “coloniality is constitutive, not derivative of modernity” (Mignolo 4). From this, we come to see the ways inwhich patterns of power that emerge from the era of colonialism, does not end with colonialism but in fact determines the patterns of power in the era after, i.e the era modernity. The first axis that Quijano referred to was the “codification of the difference between conquerers and the conquered inthe idea of ‘race’” and the second axis was “the constitution of a new structure of control of labour and its resources and products” (Mignolo 23). But, what are the other aspects of the “colonial matrix of power”?
In the next section, I will highlight some of the features of decoloniality by showing how it emerges as a response to specific axes of the “colonial matrix of power.” To do so while also doing justice to the work of Mignolo and Walsh, I will look at concrete examples of “who is doing it, where and how?” to look at particular features of coloniality/decoloniality emerging.
Ways of Decoloniality?
The case of Zapatistas — Decoloniality as epistemic reconstitution and pluriversalepistemologies as opposed to epistemic universal (an axes of the colonial matrix of power)
An example cited by Mignolo and Walsh is of the Zapatistas. I will begin by providing avery brief understanding of the Zapatistas and then talk about the ways in which they embodyfeatures of decoloniality, as understood by the authors. I focus on the fact that movement is notstate-led, is comprised of epistemic reconstitution, and arose out of the codification of race andcontrol over land. I then draw on Maria Lugones’ critique of the colonial matrix of power andemphasis on the axes of gender in understanding coloniality. I end this section by brieflymentioning the importance of language to decolonial thinking.
Zapatista is an indigenous movement grounded in and based upon the customs of nativepeople of the Chiapas region of Southern Mexico (Shirzad 4). The Zapatistas have resisted andstopped development projects that displace indigenous people or that destroy the environment. Theyremoved Zapatista children from the national education system (Shirzad 4) and have enrolled themin their autonomous education project, True Education, due to the cultural and physical violencethey faced in official schools (Shirzad 19). In Mexico, the colonial power structure has beenpromoted by the state through the idea of mestizaje — an identity marker and political ideology thatseeks to unite all Mexicans under a single national identity (Shirzad 7). Although the idea wasinitially born out of U.S imperialism and Spanish colonialism, it was thereafter canonised by thestate to erase racial difference in Mexico by grouping everyone under a single racial identity(Shirzad 8). The Zapatista’s rebellion officially began in 1994, but the story of indigenous resistancein Chiapas began long before that day (Shirzad 9). In the 1880s and 1890s, nearly one third of theChiapas surface area was sold by the government to foreign investors from Europe (Shirzad 10).Eventually, the native communities land holdings was strategically reduced and eliminated till they4did not have any other choice but to work the plantation, which simultaneously solved the labourshortage faced by foreign investors (Shirzad 10). By destroying their ability to produce their ownfood, they had to rely on revenue from outside sources in order to survive and support themselves,which was not the case, prior to colonialism (Shirzad 11). The Zapatistas make clear that they arenot following any existing theory or paradigm and do not intend to overthrow the government either(Shirzad 16). However, they have delinked from the colonial matrix of power to create a self-sufficient society (Shirzad 16). Nevertheless, the movement is still ongoing and is not to be seen ashaving reached an endpoint or solution to the question of decoloniality.
To begin with, the Zapatista’s rebellion did not involve the state. This aspect of decolonialityresonates with what the authors say — “decoloniality is not, cannot be, state-led projects” (Mignolo115). Alternatively, “they are projects by people organising themselves in their local histories”(Mignolo 115).
Second, the Zapatistas delink from the national education system and affirm their educationand other ways of thinking about economics, politics and society. This, for the authors, is the crucialaim of “epistemic reconstitution”. Learning from Quijano, the authors delineate two aspects of“epistemic reconstitution” — “to open up the richness of knowledges and praxis that the rhetoric ofmodernity demonized and reduced to tradition, barbarism, folklore, underdevelopment, deniedspirituality in the name of reason, and built knowledges to control sexuality and all kind ofbarbarians” and to simultaneously “reduce North Atlantic universals to size” (Mignolo 228). Suchan endeavour, moreover, will promote pluriversality as a universal option — which means that what“should be” universal is in fact pluriversal, and not a single totality. Here, although the authorsacknowledge that Western thought is part of the pluriversal, and not to be rejected and negated(Mignolo 3), they also argue that the end of modernity would imply the end of coloniality, andtherefore, decoloniality would no longer be an issue. This is the ultimate decolonial horizon(Mignolo 4). At this point, I found myself doubting how “the ultimate decolonial horizon” can take5place without the rejection of many aspects of Western thought. This can also be observed in howthe Zapatistas had to completely separate from the State and their practices. Moreover, whathappens when there are conflicts between different knowledges within the pluriversal?
Third, the Zapatistas’ rebellion was motivated by the two factors that the authors highlightas central to coloniality/modernity. The first is the way in which race is created and utilised as amarker of difference and then assimilation. And, the second is in how land and labour is controlled.Moreover, another crucial aspect of the Zapatistas’ rebellion is the role played by the women in thecommunity. However, the axes of gender within the colonial matrix of power was under-theorisedby Quijnao, Walsh and Mignolo, and subsequently taken up by Maria Lugones.
In “The coloniality of Gender,” Lugones asks us to pay attention to two aspects related togender and coloniality. First, she asks us to understand the place of gender in pre-colonial societiesin order to understand the nature and scope of structural changes that took place through coloniality/modernity and to also understand the extent and importance of the gender system in disintegrating“communal relations, egalitarian relations, ritual thinking, collective decision making , collectiveauthority, and economies” (Lugones 12). Second, she tells us to consider how race and gendermutually constituted one another through coloniality/modernity (Lugones 12). To support herargument, she draws heavily from The Invention of Women by Oyéronké Oyewùmí, from whom welearn about several aspects of the Yoruba society, prior to the colonisation by the West. There wasno gender system i.e gender as an organising principle (Lugones 8). The Yoruba categories ofobinrin and okunrin as “female/woman” and male/man,” respectively, is a mistranslation and theyare neither binary nor hierarchical (Lugones 8). Post colonisation, anafemales were inferioritizedand excluded from leadership roles, lost land and other economic domains (Lugones 9).For themany gynecratic tribes, replacing spiritual plurality with one supreme male as Christianity did,subdued the tribes (Lugones 10). With respect to the mutual constitution of race and gender, I amreminded of how the criteria for gender categories, and especially that of a ‘woman’ is determined6through racial categories. In other words, who is a ‘woman’ is most often determined by standardsof Whiteness. An example of the same is in how athletes are discounted from the category of‘women’ because they do not have the testosterone level that characterises ‘woman,’ that is, a ‘whitewoman.’ Consequently, many people from Asia and Africa are considered to be non-woman. In thismanner, Lugones furthers Anibal’s “colonial matrix of power” by highlighting how “gender” wasconstructed as an axes of power, alongside race.
Lastly, Mignolo and Castro pay attention to how languages, given their unique vocabulariesand logics, are central to epistemic reconstitution. They highlight how Greek and Latin languages,together, disqualified frames of knowledge and understanding in non-European languages(Mandarin, Hindi, Urdu, Persian, Arabic, Russian, etc) (Mignolo 113). In addition to such adisqualification, Castro pinpoints how the dominance of English language worldwide has furtherpushed Southern researchers to assimilate English while allowing Northern scholars to be complicitin learning other languages (Castro 55).
Decoloniality as vincularidad as opposed to
dislocation (an axes of the colonial
matrix of power)
In this section, I use a piece in “Cosmic Anarchy” as an example of colonial logics thatMignolo and Walsh critique in their work. Next, I explain what the authors mean by decoloniality asvincularidad and share a potential example of the same, from the context of educational pedagogy.
In one of her recent pieces in “Cosmic Anarchy,” Ayesha Khan speaks about “Decolonizing 1our understanding of extraterrestrial life.” In her article, she begins by talking about spaceexplorations and the search for extraterrestrial life and makes a case for how they are “colonialprojects riddled with the same imperialistic fantasies, operating under the same flawed of settlercolonial logic” as they are led by billionaire-funded Nation states efforts to abandon Earth once it is fully extracted from. Moreover, she also pinpoints how Alien movies often resemble orientalistmovies that depict certain communities as mysterious, dangerous, unpredictable and as violent“others”. In the end, she urges us to approach the unknown, the unfamiliar and the different withmore care, rather than fear, which is the emotion that is often evoked when thinking aboutnarratives around aliens.
By focussing on projects and narratives that portray extra-terrestrial as “other”, unfamiliarand something to be fearful of and extracted from, this piece reminded me of the colonial logic ofhuman/nature and human/culture that Mignolo and Walsh also warn us about. The authors refer tothe work of “Beyond Nature and Culture” by Philippe Descola, wherein it was established that,“nature and culture are two Western fictions. In the Meesoamerican and Andean civilization, thebinary opposition nature/culture had no equivalent words” (Mignolo 160). They also critique thefoundations of Western ontology and epistemology — “Most of culture and civilizations on theplanet see relations while in the West we are taught to see entities, things. Relations could not becalled ontological. If the vocabulary wants to be preserved then one needs to talk aboutrelationalogy (discourses on/about relationality of the living universe). What there is depends onhow we have been programmed to name what we know. Hence, the coloniality of knowledgeimplies the coloniality of being; they move in two simultaneous directions” (Mignolo 148). Thisline reminded me of the premises in western metaphysics, wherein there is a demarcation betweeninherent and relational properties. The inherent property of any thing or substance is that it isdetermined in and of itself and not by virtue of anything else and the relational property of asubstance is that which is determined in reference to something else. However, the ontologicalstatus of inherent properties is assumed to be non-relational by definition and although there ismuch debate about which properties are considered to be inherent and not, there is lesserengagement with the assumption that there is such a thing as “inherent” and that the “inherent” isnot relationally determined.
In contrast to such a metaphysics then, the authors are interested in Vincularidad, or“awareness of the integral relation and interdependence amongst all living organisms (in whichhumans are only a part) with territory or land and the cosmos” (Mignolo 1). This would imply aresistance of the culture/nature divide that the authors note as “making no sense beyond Westerncivilisation” (Mignolo 160). It would also imply denying particular ways of seeing that invisibaliserelations over objects and to enable ways of seeing relations even in that which seems “inherent.”Such a practice reminded me of the shift in educational pedagogy from object-perception toprocess-perception that the nature educator, Yuvan Aves, references in his work. He says,“In her essay “Perceiving how we perceive”, educator Seetha Ananthasivan speaks about two different kinds of perception – objectperception and process perception. She says, “a major preoccupation in nursery and primary education is on learning the names ofobjects.” Little is done to allow the child to discover the connected and hidden realities of these isolated objects. For instance, is achild encouraged to think, ask a question of a water bottle – where it came from, how it was made, where it will go after its use? Thisis process perception. In the materials we use, food we eat, clothes we wear, do we perceive beyond their separate forms?We couldsay that the culture of consumerism, even the politics of capitalism thrives on object perception. Violence, deeply hidden andstructural, is distanced from the products on their sanitized shelves. They dote on anaesthetized eyes which don’t and won’t seebeyond them.”2
Decoloniality and Childhood Studies
In “southern theories and decolonial childhood studies,” the authors are keen on contestingthe fact that most of the world’s children have their experiences and contexts interpreted throughtheoretical canons, vernaculars, and institutions of northern academia (abebe 257). For this reason,they press on childhood studies scholars to also recognise multiple ways of knowing by includingpractices such as “multilingualism, musical performance, and ways of storing and sharing collectivememories like rituals, oral history, folklore, dance, art, handicrafts, proverbs, poetry, drama as wellas architectures and technology that reflect the histories, cultures, and identities of pre-colonialsocieties” (abebe 264) in their considerations of valid knowledge. Moreover, the authors emphasisethat it must not be left to scholars of the south alone to struggle for such “epistemic plurality.”
When thinking about how Decolonial studies and Childhood studies can engage and learnfrom each other, I am wondering how “age” can be viewed as another axes of the “colonial matrixof power.” How can scholars of childhood read children, who are not yet socialised into coloniality, as examples of how it looks potentially to “live as decolonial subjects,” rather than merely readingthem as being “underdeveloped,” “under-socialised” and “deviant.”
Concluding Thoughts
I would like to return to the ways in which decoloniality has become a “buzzword.” Afterreading Mignolo and Walsh, I am not absolutely clear about when and how disciplines andmovements come to be labelled as ‘decolonial.’ To understand decoloniality, do we often rely onIndigenous movements and does that run the risk of relying on the Indigenous to “save the world”?As an educator, I am more weary of whether individuals can do the work of decolonizing or must italways be a collective effort? When does a curriculum or pedagogy indeed become ‘decolonial’?”
My own view is that there ought to be a deeper understanding of the ways in which the“West” can delink from the “colonial matrix of power” and live as “decolonial subjects” rather thanmerely seeing Decoloniality as the work of post-colonies. Furthermore, what would it look like toreconstitute epistemologies in the “West” in a more ethical manner, rather than merely cherry-picking the knowledges that ought to resurface as valuable? Here, I am reminded of the ways inwhich yoga has been taken up in the world as an epistemically valuable practice, without therebeing curious and critical engagement with the other aspects of yoga’s history and contemporary.
