TURNS THE K. Focusing on the epistemic consequences of the plan over the material ones weakens anticolonial struggle.

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 [it] 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