The Elephants in the (Post)Colonial Room: Decolonial Thought and Praxis From Latin America

• In Event: Inter-Epistemic Dialogues With Decolonial Studies From Latin America

Abstract

Purpose
This paper challenges Spivak’s assertion that ‘Latin America has not participated in decolonization’ (Retamar, 1998, p. 159), which forecloses the possibility of Latin American subjects from articulating decolonial discourses and practices. The subaltern may speak insofar as the locus of enunciation is not LA, the place from which modern/colonial discourses, practices, and modes of production first emerged in the long 16th century. This paper aims to bring forth historically silenced geographies of reason from LA (Gordon, 2011) to critique the recentering tendencies and abyssal thinking (Santos, 2007) in anglophone contexts. We point to the way the multiplicity of critiques of colonialism emerging from distinct geographies may complement each other, including decolonial, anticolonial, and postcolonial theories, rather than being subsumed by one of these affine schools of thought.

Perspectives
Decolonial thought from LA advances three interrelated concepts to understand the social totality conceptualized as the modern/colonial capitalist world-system. The primary concept is the coloniality of power, defined by Quijano (1992/2007) as a matrix of domination constituted by the systematic control of labor, sex, subjectivity, and authority. The coloniality of power also consists of “a cognitive model, a new perspective of knowledge within which non-Europe was the past, and because of that inferior, if not always primitive” (Quijano, 2000, p. 552). This cognitive model refers to the coloniality of knowledge (Mignolo, 2000), the epistemic dimension of colonization always already interconnected to material domination and exploitation, as well as the systematic invalidation and destruction of Indigenous knowledges and histories. The notion of racial superiority and inferiority is conceptualized as the coloniality of being, expressed through the phenomenological, psycho-existential, and racial dimensions of colonial and neocolonial life (Maldonado-Torres, 2007).

Methods
We use transgressive decolonial hermeneutics (Author One, 2021; Maldonado-Torres, 2002) to analyze and interpret decolonial texts articulated from LA (e.g., Bautista, 2011; 2019, 2020; Coronil 2008; Curiel; Espinoza-Minoso; Leyva et al., 2015; Retamar, 1998). Transgressive decolonial hermeneutics (TDH) is a theoretical and methodological modification of Maldonado-Torres’s (2002) “transgresstopic critical hermeneutics” (p. 293). It gestures toward the ethico-political and curricular/pedagogical transgressions enabled by interpreting collective action and its concomitant discourses and practices.

Results/Conclusion/Significance
Undoubtedly, there are tensions between decolonial, anticolonial, and postcolonial thought and praxis. The critiques against decolonial thought have tended to reduce it to the decolonization of the mind, an invalid critique ignoring the material and praxeological dimensions articulated by decolonial scholars/activists committed to social/territorial movements in LA. It is evident that there are colonizing tendencies in the anglophone scholarship to present itself as the “most evolved critique of colonialism” which, as a result, “invalidate[s] or diminish[es] the significance of reflections on colonialism developed from other locations and perspectives” while positioning itself as the apotheosis of critique of colonial discourses and practices (Coronil, 2008, p. 413). As Andreotti (2011) also asserts, “Non-European epistemologies and ontologies are translated into universalised European epistemological parameters as inferior, less evolved, primitive, erroneous or eccentric ‘culturally tainted’ derivatives (2011, p. 385). This paper hence refuses this hegemonic tendency by engaging in dialogue with decolonial theory and praxis from LA.

Authors

• Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores, Texas Tech University

• Ana Carolina Diaz Beltran, University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley