Theorizing coloniality as epistemological defuses anticolonial struggles by downplaying material factors.

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.

5 MIGNOLO'S EPISTEMIC POLITICS

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.