SITUATING DECOLONIAL THOUGHT IN SITES OF STRUGGLE

Keynote Panel: How to Think of Post-Capitalism Outside of Eurocentrism? For a Non-Aligned Utopia

Good evening everyone. First of all, I’d like to thank the coordinators for dedicating their time and labor to organize this event. I am truly honored for having been invited to present with Houria and Sabelo on the same panel.

The title of my talk is Situating Decolonial Thought in Sits of Struggle. I’d like to begin my talk by discussing the importance of theory and the role it can play in developing a planetary consciousness—or a planetary imagination.

I place great importance on the notion of a planetary imagination because it helps us envision why articulating our struggles across geographies is more urgent than ever today. The late Charles Mills wrote in The Racial Contract that we cannot interrogate the world without an image, concept, or horizon of said world. How we view the world reveals the frames of reference or paradigms we depend on to interpret and position ourselves existentially, ethically, and politically. Our “worldviews” establish particular vantage points to comprehend the social reality or social totality of which we form a part.

The concepts we construct of the world help us situate ourselves within a historically specific place, which means that all theories are situated contextually, despite claims suggesting otherwise. A theory’s particularity isn’t always made explicit, however, especially when considering Eurocentric perspectives and their universal aspirations. Eurocentric discourses, narratives, and myths can therefore make universal claims while hiding their complicity in maintaining power. We can view the world as naturally structured by capitalism or coloniality, a world where resistance is inconceivable, but this is far from the truth since wherever there has been domination and exploitation, there has always been resistance…We can refer to decolonial/anticolonial struggles in Palestine and Kashmir or we can also think about the ongoing Indigenous, decolonial, anti-capitalist, and anti-heteropatriarchal struggles in Canada, the US, Latin America, the Caribbean, Australia, and of course the continents of Africa and Asia.

Beyond resistance, there is what decolonial activist intellectuals refer to as re-existence. Re-existence is the affirmation of life against the global project of death and the incalculable violence of the modern/colonial, capitalist, racist, heteropatriarchal, Christian-centric world, which seems indestructible and renders our existence…disposable.

An important question to ask is why use this jargon—why use these terms—to describe the modern world? As bell hooks wrote, it’s through this jargon that one can make more visible entangled systems of domination and exploitation. It’s through this jargon that one can understand and critically interrogate how we are positioned in a hierarchically structured world. It helps us understand how systems of domination and exploitation revolve around the central axes of race, class, gender, and sexuality. These concepts give us a new vocabulary to examine capitalism as a heterogeneous structure and not one that is solely class-based but that’s constituted by multiple modes of domination.

With a new image of the world, one that is structured by interlocked systems and one that is resisted by various means and from multiple fronts—will allow us to build a planetary consciousness

A planetary consciousness will enable us to unsettle a world anchored in and structured by conquest, colonization, Indigenous dispossession, capitalist exploitation, and imperialism… A planetary consciousness will help articulate struggles by making visible how struggles in one region have broader planetary implications—how one’s struggle can find points of convergence with other struggles without flattening geopolitical differences. A planetary consciousness, therefore, underscores how the political is engaged in pluriversal ways, in ways that go beyond the nation-state yet simultaneously resist the state’s violent institutions.

As a concept, coloniality tries to get at the heterogeneous ways domination is expressed within specific contexts. It’s not a concept seeking universality. Instead, it makes more visible the darker side of modernity and the intimate linkages between knowledge and power; that is to say, between discourse and structure, and the multiple and entangled ways resistance and re-existence emerge in spite of the incredible odds to do so.

Racial capitalism has always been a heterogeneously constituted system in which relations of power also entail the systematic control of subjectivity (through the epistemologies and pedagogies of domination embedded in educational institutions and the curriculum—this is what Rita Segato refers to as the pedagogies of cruelty). It is more obvious to point to how the logic of coloniality informs dominant theories and epistemologies. However, it is less obvious how the logic of coloniality undergirds critical theories of liberation that fail to let go of some of the myths of modernity, such as development.

Capitalism’s heterogeneous structure also involves the systematic control of the family, nature, governance/authority, sexuality, and gender. Once again, as a concept, coloniality seeks to make more visible the intimate linkages between what would otherwise be left hidden, unsaid, and thus unimagined. And if left hidden, how do we engage in collective action when capitalism’s structure isn’t understood in heterogeneous terms, i.e., when it’s ontologically only one thing? How do we resist what has been systematically distorted by the Eurocentric lenses we use to interpret reality?

Although I recognize that concepts are not solutions to the dominant structures we’re trying to dismantle, they’re indispensable insofar as they correspond to the problematics we’re trying to address. Concepts make more visible what has been systematically made invisible through the myths of modernity, such as salvation, progress, development, globalization, and liberal democracy.

There is a caveat to this, however. When concepts are detached from the material conditions from which they were first articulated, their political content is emptied and thus stripped of their praxis orientation.

Thinking seriously about concepts does not only make more visible how capitalism restructures itself according to the logic of coloniality, but it carries the potential to inform our collective praxes. By thinking with social and territorial movements, for instance, our concepts regain the geopolitical and ethical content they were meant to have initially. This will assist in refusing the academic tendency to decontextualize radical thought from sites of struggle.

Epistemological critique or deconstruction is without a doubt necessary but insufficient when praxis is ignored. Critique is insufficient when we are incapable of learning from and committing to collective action and actually existing communities resisting domination.

As Linda Tuhiwai Smith states, deconstruction and critique is great and all, but it does…not stop people from dying….Or, as Freire taught us, praxis is indispensable whereby thought informs collective action and collective action dialectically informs thought and reflection. Important to consider is that we must also avoid the vanguard positions of the past where intellectuals prescribed the best paths forward for social movements. Today, social and territorial movements are teaching us that they’re not passively waiting for the intellegentisia to show them the path forward. They, too, are producing knowledges, theories, and concepts that unsettle the hierarchical vanguard position of the past. It’s perhaps best to take a rearguard theoretical position as we listen to, learn from, and work alongside those who are resisting domination while affirming another possible world.

The radical aim of decolonial thought is to reclaim the ability to create concepts from sites of struggle. As Frantz Fanon (1963) invited us at the end of The Wretched of the Earth, “we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man”…that is, a new human, and as I read this statement, we need to set afoot a new mode of knowing, being, and co-existing. The philosophical act of creating concepts is ethical and geopolitical as long as these concepts seek to show the complicity of discourses that uphold concrete structures of power---systems we are seeking to dismantle and transition from. After all, concepts are windows through which we can view and interrogate reality.

The task at hand demands interrogating dominant systems while also thinking the world anew alongside sites of struggle that are trying to build a world otherwise. This daunting task demands alternative knowledges and practices that make reciprocal social arrangements and relational modes of existing possible. In Spanish, the term that reflects these aspirations is convivencia—or conviviality or co-existence.

The value concepts attain are based on their ability to seriously interrogate the problems generated in the real world rather than some sort of speculative academic endeavor. Concepts enable the search for solutions. They open up alternatives to the present. Concepts enable the imagining of possibilities (Pratt, 2022). This argument resonates with Stuart Hall’s situated approach to theorizing political conjunctures whereby political moments create the conditions of possibility for theoretical movements to emerge—This means that anticolonial, decolonial, anti-capitalist, and anti-heteropatriarchal struggles create the conditions of possibility to imagine and build a world otherwise…a world where many worlds can fit, as the Zapatista’s dictum helps illustrate with so much clarity.

If we are to think about the possibilities of transitioning out of the modern/colonial world devastating the planet, we must also be ready to ask serious questions regarding the institutions in which we participate:

As Arturo Escobar asks and invites us to contemplate: What do we do if we arrive at the conclusion that everything that surrounds us—institutions, governments, religions, academies, even the innermost aspects of our beings—has been so thoroughly colonized by modernity as to make any counter-hegemonic use of modernist tools practically inoperative and counterproductive? If, confronted with the history of horrors visited on the pluriverse by the heteropatriarchal capitailst colonial/racist world system, one realizes that not much, perhaps nothing, of what the modern/colonial world has to offer is of value for the urgent task of reconstruction, repair, and resurgence of all, and partiuclarly subaltern, worlds? Would these growing realizations…not lead us to conclude that the time for a radical rupture and departure from those dominant worlds has arrived? These are some of the questions and tentative answers territorial, communal, autonomous, Indigenous, feminist, LGBTQ, student, and peasant struggles are asking and responding to in times of what is without a doubt a civilizational crisis of the modern/colonial world.

I want to end my talk by asking a question posed by a Black decolonial feminist activist intellectual from Colombia—Betty Ruth Lozano: If the master’s tools are not enough to dismantle, tear down, or demolish the master’s house [of modernity/coloniality], then what kind of tools do we need if our goal is this destruction, this transformation, this radical change that contributes to the unfinished project of decolonization? What conceptual, organizational, and collective tools must we articulate and design so that this civilizational crisis does not transition to something worse than what we have now?

I think about Lozano’s struggle situated in the Colombian Pacific, of the collective memories and practices that exist in maroon communities (Palenques or Quilombos). I am also thinking about the Lenca and Garifuna communities resisting neo-developmental and extractivist projects. Mapuche resistance in Chile. The Campesino/peasant communities I come from that are defending our territories, rivers, mountains, and forests from mining companies and hydroelectric projects (many of which are Canadian)—development projects of death that gained strength after the US-backed coup of 2009.

If our critiques are unable to amplify, learn from, and contribute to struggles across geographies, if we’re unable to build a planetary consciousness and imagination, if we uphold nation-state frameworks, is there a danger of potentially reproducing what we seek to dismantle?

To conclude, I want to say that a radical critique of the Eurocentered modern/colonial capitalist world must seek to dismantle the symbolic and material structures in place—that is to say, the dominant epistemologies, histories, narratives, subjectivities, as well as the institutions and structures of domination. In the end, our struggles are not only epistemic but rather are world-making projects moving toward a decolonial present and future. We must also recognize that there are never any guarantees when we choose the path of resistance and re-existence. In the words of the late Anibal Quijano, “it is time to learn to free ourselves from the Eurocentric mirror”, that is, we must shatter the theoretical lenses that have reflected a distorted image of ourselves for over five centuries. It is time to stop aspiring to become what we are not.

Thank you.