A decolonial wrong turn: Walter Mignolo's epistemic politics

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 & Shershow, 2007; 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 & Guassens, 2020; 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 & Walsh, 2018, p. 135) (my emphasis). Articulating the foundational role of the epistemic in this theory even more directly, Mignolo writes: “The basic, most fundamental, de-colonial task is in the domain of knowledge, since it is knowledge that holds the CMP (colonial matrix of power) together and that con-form subjectivities” (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018, p. 177).^.Cheah (2006) is right to suggest that this framework is therefore built upon “intensely epistemic” philosophical commitments (see also, Morrow, 2013).

What motivates this capacious emphasis on the constitution of knowledge is, in part, a critical diagnosis of the limitations of dominant analyses of “colonialism” that emerged from anticolonial struggles—and their accompanying conceptions of what the content, normativity, and political goals of decolonization ought to be. As Mignolo puts it in one of his many formulations of this basic idea of moving beyond the Eurocentrism of critique derived from anticolonial movements, “decolonial thinking and decolonial option(s) work toward redressing not only a long history, but also the intractable logic on which modern imperial epistemology was founded and is maintained” (Mignolo, 2011, p. 88; Mignolo & Tslostanova, 2008, p. 120). “Imperial” and “epistemology” are conjoined here and claimed as foundational to a “logic of modernity.” This “logic” is constitutive of material practices of colonization. In this respect, such entrenched patterns cannot be redressed strictly through material forms of social and political–economic transformation carried out within secular “history.”

In this section, I will suggest that the above arguments take their motivation from a one-sided depiction of the insufficiencies of anticolonial thought and practice. Specifically, Mignolo (mis)identifies political decolonization exclusively with limited struggles for the political form of national independence. According to Mignolo, what resulted was the dominance of (in Walsh's summary) a “top-down conceptualization of decolonization constructed with the Cold War, a meaning primarily indicative of and associated with the state's political independence” (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018, p. 100). These elite projects of state-building and the political–economic engineering of postcolonial societies largely reproduced the social forms and institutions of Western modernity, especially the continued domination of a kind of colonial or neo-colonial state. In this respect, decolonization was “half-successful” and “half-failure,” with the “native elites…able to send the imperial officer, institutions and people home” but also doing “exactly what the colonizers were doing but in the name of national sovereignty” (Mignolo, 2017). Here, Mignolo attributes to anticolonial struggles for national liberation a very narrow theory of transformation that is primarily about seizing political power via the institutions of the state so as to replace colonial rule with native rule, that is, “decolonization as revolution in which the state will be taken and the project of the previous state replaced by the revolutionary one without a questioning of the theory of the state and the economic rules” (my emphasis) (Mignolo, 2011, p. 53).

Anticolonial developmentalism—that is, projects seeking to encourage the modernization and development of postcolonial societies believing themselves free of empire's shackles—is one of Mignolo's prime examples of this limited form of decolonization. Mignolo argues that the imposition of schemes of modernization by postcolonial developmental states ought to be seen as recapitulated versions of the anthropological racisms hierarchically marking civilized over savage in the 19th century (and, for him, dating back to even earlier theological frameworks of saving the infidel/pagan in the Renaissance) (Mignolo, 2010a, p. 327). In this respect, developmentalist ideologies merely reiterated a Western and stagist view of history that could only imagine the success of anticolonial struggles as a process of overcoming non-Western backwardness vis-à-vis Western modernity. At best, such a politics entails indigenizing Western political ideologies, a practice which helps bring an end to formal imperial hierarchies. In doing so, however, they also recapitulate the underlying thought-forms that generated those hierarchies in the first instance (Mignolo, 2010a, pp. 310−311). In short, this limited form of transformation basically reproduces the domination of Eurocentric patterns of thought and political–economic institutions.

To summarize Mignolo's position, anticolonial movements suffered from epistemic shortcomings by adapting ideologies such as national development that are still part-and-parcel of Western civilization. In this account, different lineages of anticolonialism(s) share in this adoption of falsely universalizing (therefore, falsely emancipatory) projects that continually subordinate non-modern “exteriorities.” In so doing, they fail to take seriously (or quash altogether) the possibility of “alternatives to modernity.”³ Mignolo casts decoloniality not only as an historical product of these shortcomings of anticolonialism, but also as a project responsive to an occluded underlying logic that needs to be excavated to better analyze the working of colonial power itself.

To be sure, there are moments of truth in this depiction of the limits of anticolonialism(s) as sources of critique and sociopolitical transformation. However, in light of the available histories of anticolonialism(s) composed especially over the past 10 years, Mignolo's effort to depict “decolonization” as a narrowly political, entirely top-down, uncritically Eurocentric, and modernization-oriented political telos needs to be scrutinized. I contend that his narrative flattens and even occludes crucial dimensions of the conceptual innovation and dynamism characteristic of anticolonial thinkers (see Getachew & Mantena, 2021). As a result, the supposed novelty of decoloniality as a more expansive project that compensates for the failures of anticolonial thought and decolonization is unpersuasive, if not an explicit way of misrepresenting and displacing the varieties of worldly anticolonial projects that took shape over the course of the 20th century.

Consider how recent historiographies have increasingly identified worldmaking beyond nation- or state-building in the variety of anticolonial practices dating back to the early years of anti-imperialist agitation of the inter-war period. As is now well documented, inter-war organizing within and across the geographies of the British empire, for example, arose from popular political mobilization (e.g., 1930s and 1940s worker strikes throughout the West Indies and Africa) aimed at securing robust popular and democratic voice for the colonized against prevailing modes of domination (Cooper, 2004; 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.

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 not be overgeneralized nor isolated from other axes of power (Vimalassery et al., 2016). Moreover, marking the end of formal colonial rule is crucial for some contexts in which the imperial power and/or colonizer society is forced out but creates intermediary structures of unequal relations mediated through bilateral and international institutions. The latter are properly the subject of an analysis akin to forms of “neo-colonialism,” dating back to Nkrumah's (1966) classic work. Note, however, that account would mischaracterize a significant aspect of the situation of Latin America. Indeed, Mignolo's claim that the “conditions have changed. Colonizers were no longer occupying countries” obscures the ongoing settler-colonial dynamics of the very geographies where Mignolo situates his own thinking (Ybarra, 2017).

To be sure, there is a complicated set of variation and converge in the racialization processes that hook up with dominant settler nation-building ideologies (e.g., an ideal of mestizaje/mixing vs. one-drop racial purity) (Hooker, 2017) and the variable colonial strategies of land dispossession and labor exploitation across the Americas, North and South (Gott, 2007; Speed, 2017).⁵ Nevertheless, Latin American states are—like their Anglo-settler counterparts—settler-colonial states (Dahl, 2023).⁶

Why underscore this (perhaps seemingly subtle) divergence? The differences between coloniality of power and ongoing colonization I am recounting here may at first blush appear too minor to be worth pursuing, given the shared emphases on the centrality of colonial power to political rule, subjectivity, and sociality. For example, scholars such as Singh (2019) and Mendoza (2016, 2020) have mobilized the MCD approach in quite productive dialogue with Indigenous and settler-colonial studies while carefully acknowledging potential divergences in geographic and conceptual reference points.

One response to my critique is to maintain that Mignolo is simply theorizing these same material relations through a different lens. I grant that Mignolo's concept of the colonial matrix of power attempts to encompass material practices, albeit in a rather amorphous way. He refers to four “specific historical-structural nodes” that include the material: knowledge and subjectivity; racism, gender, and sexuality, authority, and economy’’ (Mignolo, 2011, pp. 9, 35). Yet these four “heads” or “interrelated spheres of management and control” are supported by two “legs”—the “racial and patriarchal foundations of knowledge,” and it is the latter avowedly epistemic and ontological hierarchies built into the underlying logic of Western knowledge-forms that he primarily identifies as the “mechanism” of reproduction that decolonial thinking sets out to disrupt (Mignolo, 2011, pp. 8−9, 216−218). My argument is that even in formulations gesturing at just this connection to material power relations, it is still fair to observe that the relationship implausibly runs in a single direction: from a separate domain of epistemology to material practices.

Beyond settler colonialism, this inattention to the ideologically mediated character of political epistemology also tends to displace other valuable analytics by divorcing them from historically grounded accounts of material reproduction. To take only one example, Mignolo likewise treats capitalism as a form of knowledge that he labels as “economic coloniality,” rather than the material practices and forms of productive power that secure the process of “self-valorizing value” (i.e., profit-making and accumulation) in part through colonial conquest. In general, Mignolo's suggestion here is that racism and patriarchy ought to be apprehended as ontological-qua-epistemological hierarchies, as opposed to social practices of defining disposable and exploitable populations that vary (alongside and with class formation) with social formations or regimes. The tendency to posit these a priori meta-logics reduce what other thinkers have productively theorized as quite material structures of colonial and racial capitalism (Bhambra, 2021a; Burden-Stelly, 2020; Ulas Ince, 2018) to “economic coloniality” from which one has an “option” to escape the thought patterns thereof.

In this section, I further connect these theoretical disagreements to their political implications. One of the central questions underlying the MCD project has been an open-ended one about how to refashion critique in a less Eurocentric key: “What should ‘critical theory’ be when the damnés de la terre are brought into the picture” (Mignolo, 2010a, p. 303). I will argue, however, that Mignolo's version of decolonial thought does not really function as critique with respect to at least two desirable criteria for a specific critique of colonial power relations: (1) the capacity to account for the objective and subjective dimensions of the experiences of domination that colonized actors articulate through struggles over the terms of social and political relations and (2) the capacity to account for how beneficiaries of relative power disavow our/their location in such relations, which is fundamental to obscuring (and producing via “feedback loops” or recursive processes) those oppressive social and political structures. My claim is that the historical account and central analytic of power that is articulated in the framework of de/coloniality subtly undercuts both of these criteria. Instead, readers are left with a project that gives preference to “epistemology” over a thorough examination of structural and political settlements and social forces that constrain and shape the conditions for thought and action. I refer to Mignolo's tendency to privilege epistemology in this particular mode as an “epistemic politics.”

As to point (1), Indigenous studies scholars engaged in otherwise very different projects such as Simpson (2014), Byrd (2011), Speed (2017), Coulthard (2014), and Estes (2019) have nevertheless all theorized settler colonialism as an ongoing set of practices premised on an unyielding subjection to land dispossession and territorial occupation. They all underscore structural continuity across historically variable strategies of colonization. Indigenous scholars and activists also espouse an intergenerational political project of resurgence and resistance, which foregrounds the interpretive and material task of severing these structurally unbroken links between colonial past, present, and future. By contrast, Mignolo flatly rejects this conception of decolonization. He dismisses “any act or project of decolonization” that refers to an “indeterminate domain of ‘reality’” (Mignolo, 2011, p. 54). Such a claim redirects readers to a critique of colonial categories as cognitive illusions, that is, as pernicious epistemic inventions. Ultimately, the latter formulation misapprehends the crux of this relationship between the intergenerational experience of specific, material axes of colonial violence and the task of theorizing (de)colonization.

More broadly still, it is precisely attention to a (intersubjective but no less “real”) domain of reality—which includes the imaginary as a product of social life—that matters when considering the political stakes of decolonization. Critical social and political theory is about “resisting reality,” in the words of feminist philosopher Sally Haslanger (2012). Without this kind of orientation to material realities, the valuable project of remedying deep colonial epistemic injustice (see Bhambra, 2021b) becomes highly attenuated from the sociality and claims-making at issue in mobilization around anticolonial demands, such as enforcing Indigenous sovereignty and treaties and returning stolen land (“land back”).

My second criteria, point (2), focuses on the way that those who benefit from intergenerational projects of colonial erasure—“settlers”—are far more inclined to disavow those structures by denying the constitutive structural antagonisms in which we/they are situated. Mignolo aims to distance epistemological questions from what he casts as a more conventional sociological way of tracking the reproduction of power in and through discursively generated knowledge claims. To return as a case in point to a formulation I have already quoted: “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 & Walsh, 2018, p. 135) (my emphasis). Here, I take it that Mignolo is arguing that a central obstacle to remedying colonial epistemic injustice is an overfocus on patterned material practices to the point that they are reified as social reality. The issue with this claim is that it downplays the real dilemmas faced by differently situated constituencies, when they seek to undo their practical participation in and/or subjection to structures of colonial violence. Undoubtedly, unlearning certain epistemological biases comprises part of the latter project—say, for example, hierarchies that place formalized written histories over oral histories as valid evidence in juridical forums (Nichols, 2020). Yet, it is the partially interest-based constitution of differentiated, power-inflected perceptions of social phenomena that critical theorists assess in diagnosing why certain pathological knowledge-forms are so difficult to dislodge and why they are reproduced in time and space. More concretely stated, the turn to coloniality as a purely epistemic register of critique directs significant interpretive attention away from the crucial fact that settler epistemic and aesthetic disavowal of the grounds of Indigenous mobilization and critique are part-and-parcel of settlers’ long-term accumulation of material and intergenerational wealth through removal and displacement.

Indeed, one of the most powerful targets of critical thought sorely lacking here is the challenge to narratives, alibis, ideologies, and so on as practices that both enable distorted moral truth-bending and systemically function as legitimation devices for material hierarchies that the dominant beneficiaries of those systems refract through their seemingly unrelated (and, for them, benign) subjective, affective, cultural, and social investments. Tuck and Yang (2012) have aptly insisted that “decolonization is not a metaphor” so as to move away from the loose use of decolonization as an overly capacious analytic, because it is then deployed institutionally as a symbolic gesture that defuses demands for specific material follow-up (see Okoth, 2021), such as restitution (e.g., land back) and respect for Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. Likewise, an analysis that dismisses the expression of colonial thought-forms through specific material systems of domination will end up blurring beyond recognition the very emancipatory goals of the enterprise of social and political criticism. In short, the outsize work of the epistemic in Mignolo's thought tends to wrest these motivating horizons away and to place them instead far in the background. These are the unfortunate political effects of the “epistemic decolonization” that Mignolo foregrounds.

A key implication of my argument here is that the problem of settler disavowal—or settler attachment and constitution through violence (Kotef, 2020)—cannot exclusively or even primarily be attributed to the epistemic “arrogance” that Mignolo (2011, pp. 90−91, 2012) identifies with “the hubris of the zero point” epistemology, claims to “truth without parentheses,” or the universalizing of “local” European knowledge projects as “global designs” onto the local histories of the world. My claim here is not only that this is a misguided way of doing critical social theory, but also that it has negative implications for doing critical political theory. Specifically, it is not clear that claiming to—even genuinely seeking to—live this “decolonial” epistemological openness leads in any particularly liberating political direction, especially without sustained attention to the real-world constituencies in play. More bluntly stated, this prescription does little to directly analyze and/or unsettle epistemic or other attachments insofar as they function as enabling investments in institutionalized and structural forms of power and domination, such as those relating to sovereignty and land in settler-colonial contexts.

In conclusion, I briefly suggest an alternative to Mignolo's epistemic politics, which I refer to as worldly anticolonialism. What I call worldly anticolonialism addresses epistemic challenges to colonial categories such as dominant universalisms with an eye targeted to their identifiable historically situated political effects. Accordingly, an analysis based on worldly anticolonialism would ask how such categories of thought take material form, in relation to specific terrains of anticolonial political struggle that have been shaped by variable colonial relations of power. One analogous approach can be found in recent work by Mamdani (2020), who analyzes how continued investments in the category of the “nation” in settler and postcolonial societies alike have themselves been generated through the politically mediated fashioning of specific collective constituencies. The political identities and imaginaries of these constituencies are deeply bound to the colonial past not only as pure epistemology but through constitutive political and historical processes.⁷ To illustrate some more specific benefits of worldly anticolonialism as a point of departure, I turn to the complex relationship between organized labor struggles and Indigenous peoples’ struggles.

Consider that leadership of major trade unions throughout North America largely continues to believe that extracting more fossil fuels on Indigenous lands will furnish some of the few remaining good jobs in an environment of radical austerity and upward redistribution (Sanicola & Williams, 2021). This framing of worker interests makes it far easier for fossil fuel corporations to create a profoundly antagonized field of political contest pitting “workers’ interests” (jobs) against those of “Indigenous peoples” and environmental movements (keeping oil in the ground) (Walia, 2015).⁸

The goals of more radical union membership and anticolonial movements must be to present compelling political–economic alternatives based on massive decarbonization. This means reorienting non-Indigenous working people toward the ways that their freedom and well-being also depend—albeit differently than Indigenous peoples themselves—upon securing and enhancing Indigenous sovereignty (Klein, 2014, pp. 398−407). To be sure, such union leaders and some rank-and-file union members certainly do participate in the pervasive colonial epistemic erasure of Indigenous peoples and the perpetuation of intensely gendered forms of colonial violence when they seek to construct new pipeline infrastructures to secure their livelihoods. I want to suggest, however, that is not obvious at all that critical political theorists should primarily (let alone, only) foreground this colonial epistemic arrogance per se as the primary obstacle to an alternative anticolonial coalition praxis. Indeed, a key goal of worldly anticolonialism would be to reconfigure this framing of the political situation at hand, by imagining more robust and compelling affinities, if not convergences, between projects of decolonization and decarbonization that would enhance the well-being of people and the planet.⁹

This is so because politics requires persuasion and organizing that can reorient the interests and horizon-making capacities of political subjects. The obstacles to this are not simply epistemic in the sense of diagnosing and deconstructing colonial worldviews. Instead, they are rooted in real interests, fears, hopes, and so on that make decolonization unsettling and fraught—anxiety-provoking—for those with power and for those without it but who see no other path beyond current arrangements of power (Bosworth & Chua, 2021). Such investments are both more stubborn and more mediated by genuine political conflict than the epistemological mechanisms that Mignolo proposes to dislodge.

To be sure, I would agree with Mignolo were he to suggest in response that colonial epistemic logics are clearly at work in the political situation I have described here. No one has to look far to find the frequent racist representations of denigrated Indigenous “tradition” as an obstacle to “progress” taking the form of ever-more environmentally ruinous fossil fuel extraction (Mignolo, 2010a, p. 326). Nevertheless, there is no necessary relationship between the diagnosis of such colonial logics and the aspirations that drive many modalities of critique (including anticolonial critique) to grasp the possibilities of transformation inherent in struggles over possible futures. Put bluntly, forcing open those alternative possibilities will not come from epistemic disobedience. It will more likely unfold through impure, “unlikely alliances” that bind together interested constituencies who come to imagine an “otherwise” to carbon-intensive colonial capitalism from different entry points. This might happen by reconfiguring their constitutive identities and “interests” via mobilization and new forms of solidarity—that is, through politics.¹⁰

Altogether, I have sought to reflect on Mignolo's version of the decolonial turn by subjecting some of his key interventions to critical analysis in light of the historiography, intellectual history, and present-day political stakes of anticolonial thought and practice. As Rivera Cusicanqui (2020) and Nanibush (2018) both argue, the terminology of de/coloniality now takes up an immense amount of space in debates about colonialism and empire in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. My arguments suggest that scholars invested in anticolonial critique ought to turn to more worldly forms of anticolonialism. In this latter orientation, the role of epistemology in political struggles is studied both theoretically and as a question of political organizing and strategy. What is “decolonizing” here is the effort to transform those epistemologies as they feed into and naturalize colonial power relations.

This essay has aimed to probe whether de/coloniality delivers as an improved mode of critique that patches up the perceived failures of anticolonial thought to deal with the present-day dilemmas of ongoing colonization. I have contended that such investments in decoloniality as an improved analytic of colonial power are often premised on insufficiently grappling with the complexities of those very histories of anticolonialism and with the strengths of some existing material analyses of colonial power, such as scholarship and activism in Indigenous and settler-colonial studies. These latter investigations usefully foreground and diagnose what Nanibush (2018, p. 29) aptly characterizes as “the uneven political field of colonialism.”

Mignolo's de/coloniality is not just another “option.” Rather, it is a wrong turn altogether. Efforts to render the past of decolonization mainly through its pathologies and the present of decolonization through an epistemic politics undercuts serious critical-theoretic reflection on the contested meanings of actual struggles of and for decolonization today. Insisting on more worldly approaches to anticolonialism is a better—indeed, politically urgent—starting point.