Their impact claims oversimplify. Colonial epistemologies lack causal force.

The emergence of Decolonial theory can be traced back to its seminal publication, Aníbal Quijano’s Citation(1991) 2010 essay, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.” As a theoretical movement, Decolonial theory was constituted by a group of South American diasporic thinkers located within elite North American Universities. Originally, Decolonial theory addressed a colonial or racialised global political economy from within “world systems theory, development and underdevelopment theory and the Frankfurt school critical theory tradition” (Bhambra Citation2014, 115). In the last thirty years, the concerns articulated by the “Latin American Subaltern studies” group, which are rooted in the conceptual relationship between coloniality/modernity and rationality, have become transnational. As Decolonial theory has travelled, its focus as a global theoretical movement has been transformed. Prominent scholars such as Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Walter Mignolo, Catherine Walsh and Ramón Grosfoguel have refashioned Decolonial theory as primarily an epistemological form of criticism (Hull Citation2021, 67). What is distinctive about contemporary decolonial criticism is the proposal that colonisation should be reconceptualised as primarily epistemic violence, and that epistemic violence is equivalent to the institutional dominance of Western secular knowledge over other epistemologies, which Decolonial theory has falsely conceptualised as cosmological modes of knowing and being. The latter are then disqualified as folklore, witchcraft and mysticism. The core of this argument is that the secular modern West has presented itself as the only epistemic tradition capable of attaining truth or objective/universal knowledge. Decolonial theorists argue that all Western knowledge is reducible to the ego conquiro, which signifies the certainty of the European in his role as conqueror over the colonised. In this framework, Western secular knowledge is defined by a singular conspiratorial will or intention to dominate all other forms of being by excluding them from contributing to or being part of, hegemonic discourses on humans. Reconfiguring colonialism as an epistemological problem has enabled Decolonial theory to differentiate itself and claim superiority over political economy (Marxism) and postcolonialism – paradigms to which its scholars were, at one point, beholden (Grosfoguel Citation2011). The consequences of this shift are two-fold. First, decolonial thinkers located within the Humanities and the Social Sciences claim that Universities are colonial institutions, necessitating a call for the decolonialisation of institutional structures and curriculum. Second, Decolonial theory claims that the coloniality of modern Western epistemology embodied in the curriculum is both 1) a symptom of our inability to solve the contemporary crises and 2) the cause of our civilisational crises. This controversial notion, articulated in the work of the most ambitious and influential decolonial thinker in Sub-Saharan Africa, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, goes as far as to argue that: The current environmental/ecological crises rocking the modern world are another indicator of the epistemic crisis as well as the systemic crises that remind us of the catastrophic failures and vulnerabilities of the modern world system that has been caught off guard. What the world is facing is a broad “civilizational crisis” which loudly proclaims that modernity has produced many modern problems for which it has no modern solutions. Consequently, it would be naïve for peoples of the Global South in general, and Africa in particular, to continue looking to Europe and North America for usable knowledge, relevant ideas, critical theories and solutions to modern problems. (Ndlovu-Gatsheni Citation2018, 38)

Blaming the modern “West” for being solely responsible for planetary crises that illumine the mortality and immorality of our species is, of course, not novel. I am not suggesting the crises mentioned above and elaborated upon by Ndlovu-Gatsheni are illusory. On the contrary, I argue that the ecological, economic, gender-based violence and racial crises of our time are factually indisputable, but Decolonial theory’s anti-Western theoretical reductionism is inadequate for addressing the problems faced by the contemporary precariat. Today, in the age of the Anthropocene, precarity is no longer reducible to racial inequality or the effects of “coloniality.” Reconceptualised as a geological force or biomass, Achille Mbembe (Citation2017) has argued, the human species exceeds the demand and capacity of the labour market, engendering surplus populations that have begun to replicate the precarity and object-like character of the racialised slaves and colonised in early modernity. However, the matter is not as straightforward as the binaries of class and race struggles that defined modes of resistance against exploitation and oppression until the mid-twentieth century. The tragedy of our times is that the global precariat signifies an abandoned excess, superfluous subalterns who are not required for capital to function (Mbembe Citation2017, 9). More importantly, Mbembe argues the human population as a geological force has the capacity to not only alter but destroy the ecological conditions (or eco-systems) on planet earth that make human habitation possible. In the context of an emergent and all-encompassing planetary extinction, the precarity once reserved for the enslaved and colonised black subject becomes a global condition (Mbembe Citation2017, 1–9; Reyes and Chirindo Citation2020, 7–8).

This article is not a defence of colonialism, exploitation or inhumane, naturalistic hierarchies. On the contrary, I am arguing that Decolonial theory’s stereotypical reduction of the complex political relations that constitute our contemporary milieu is ineffectual for engaging with the reality of contemporary precarity. Despite its supposed constructivism, I demonstrate in this article that the geo-political rendering of standpoint theory and the locus of enunciation amounts to a simple inversion of colonial stereotypes, meaning that its practitioners are beholden to an essentialist conception of racialised morality. Furthermore, this inversion of a racialised colonial morality, in terms of a binary distinction between indigenous subaltern epistemology as morally good and all secular Western epistemology as morally evil, signified by the notion of ego conquiro, unwittingly continues to adopt the moral and epistemological norms of colonial discourse. I will demonstrate that Decolonial theory’s thesis on the geo-politics of knowledge, expressed through two concepts, epistemic violence and the colonial difference, is equivalent to an an ethno-essentialist claim about how knowledge is produced with an uncritical moralising impulse (Hull Citation2022).