Western thought isn’t uniformly dualistic and theorizing colonization as epistemic only inverts colonial hierarchies.

Interestingly, in its formative phase, postcolonialism similarly homogenised the West as a stereotype – to the extent, as Aijaz Ahmad (Citation2000) reminds us, that its leading scholars took no responsibility for any offences committed (whether contemporaneously or historically) by non-Western societies, either in the form of the religious nationalism of the massacre during the partitioning of India and Pakistan, or when it came to caste-driven communalism as a racist social construct and even, as I shall demonstrate, conspiratorial readings of the transatlantic slave trade. Homogenising the West enabled the erasure of class or political responsibility from the new Left’s critical lexicon, but it invited a host of critical responses. Following the reception of Edward Said’s Orientalism in the 1980s, postcolonialism went through a process of theoretical contestation and revision, which climaxed with the infamous Salman Rushdie affair. At that point, Ahmad documents, a change of perspective commenced because it became untenable to hold onto the necessary anticolonial, strategic fiction of an essentially good black subject (Citation2000, 198–202). Faced with the call for Rushdie’s death and witnessing the burning of the books in Bradford, uncannily reminiscent of Nazi book burning half a century earlier, signified that the contemporary Wretched of the Earth may not be inherently ethical after all (Hall Citation1996, 144–145; Said Citation1994). Within this malaise, colonial discourse analysts problematised the values of the anticolonial societies, as well as their historical trajectories. Colonial discourse analysts argued that Africa, the East and the West do not signify natural or metaphysical entities. Instead, they designate discursively constructed stereotypes, “essentialising representations,” that operate as complex and partial points of identification, producing racial subjects (Goldberg Citation1993, 45–51). Deconstructing and diagnosing pathological racial subjects from postcolonial societies, characterised by exclusionary nativism, violent patriarchy and a predatory cult of venality necessitated drawing on the theoretical resources of poststructuralism, psychoanalysis and other radical intellectual sources. I will demonstrate that – at their most radical – these traditions bequeathed a constructivism and nominalism to postcolonialism which enabled it to demonstrate how the strategic essentialism of the anticolonial struggle often devolved into the stereotypical, regressive nationalism of the Postcolony.

Similarly, Decolonial theory’s conceptualisation of colonisation as epistemic violence as a metaphysical rendering of colonialisation performs the same homogenising function. One of the contentious claims made by Decolonial theory is that because the practice of decolonisation was not epistemological in its liberation of indigenous knowledge, it ought to be considered a failure. This reading, I argue, ignores that the “ambiguities and richness of the moment of decolonisation were never exhausted by antinomies set up” between global culture as either subjugation or liberation (Chakrabarty Citation2009, 280). It is important to remember that anticolonial modernisers did not differentiate between the pursuit of science and technology to develop their countries to catch up with the economic position of the West (secular, universal knowledge), and the restructuring of local education and cultural systems around indigenous values (particular traditions) in the way contemporary decolonial thinkers do. As highly educated elites trained in the colonial metropolis, they were very aware (there were exceptions of course) that there is an unbridgeable epistemological gap between the idea of formal scientific knowledge of an immanent post-Copernican world and Western religious traditions, that is, the dualistic Christian theological metaphysics that decolonial criticism has identified as characteristic of modernity. Consequently, the contemporary decolonial critique of anticolonial secular epistemology collapses the foundational epistemological distinction between faith and knowledge. What is interesting, and worth interrogating, is how contemporary decolonial thinkers have collapsed this distinction, come to endorse an incoherent relativistic epistemology in the process undergirded by an uncritical moralising impulse, reducing Western epistemology to a singular intention (the ego conquiro), thereby conflating religious faith with scientific knowledge, which was not a mistake made by their forebears. Ultimately, the discourse of decolonisation was conditioned by two concerns: Development (of the universal) and dialogue (of particular cultures) in constituting a cosmopolitan world.

This article is separated into three sections. In the first section, my argument in this paper is that the colonial difference is what truly separates Decolonial theory and postcolonialism. Decolonial theorists argue that in the making of the modern world, the colonial difference describes a structural dynamic, according to which Europeans are the subjects of knowledge, and the colonised are objects to be known. I exhibit that Decolonial theory rejects postcolonialism’s appropriation of poststructuralism on account of it being on the wrong side of the colonial difference. Thereafter, my argument is that the rejection of poststructuralism leads Decolonial theory into an essentialist thesis about geo-political knowledge production. The geo-politics of knowledge amounts to ethno-essentialist claim about how knowledge is produced: an Afrocentric epistemology, Islam-centric and Christian-centric in which an epistemology is reducible to a geo-political tradition of cosmological meaning.

In the second section of this article, I provide a brief introduction to French historical epistemology and show that epistemology in the contemporary West is no longer beholden to Cartesian foundationalism. French historical epistemology is a philosophy of science associated with the work of French scholars Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault. In contrast to the decolonial thesis that philosophy and science designate foundational pillars of Western epistemology in the form of Cartesian and transcendental theories of the subject, I exhibit that historical epistemologists have already shown that science has become autonomous from philosophy, which no longer has any role in legitimating scientific concepts or, indeed, articulating their conditions of possibility. This allows for the invalidation of Decolonial theory’s claim that Western epistemology is still grounded in subjectivism or a subject-object dualism.

In the third and final section of this article, I argue that Decolonial theory’s geo-political relativism ends up being self-undermining because its simple inversion of colonial stereotypes perpetuates the moral and epistemological norms of colonial discourse. After explaining how this inversion of colonial discourse features in Decolonial theory’s anti-Westernism and critique of postcolonialism, I expand on the other Western metaphysical problems in Decolonial theory that are self-defeating: the unconditioned agent, the problem of relativism and truth, secularism, religion and morality. I conclude this section by demonstrating how Decolonial theory’s conceptions of subaltern epistemology and particularly de-linking convey a simplistic identity politics which is closer to elements of the isolationist rhetoric of the far Right than the postcolonial idea of creating a common world.