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| Walter Wignolo |
I
(De)Coloniality[1] is, in the first place, a concept whose point of origination was the Third World. Better yet, it emerged at the very moment in which the three world division was collapsing and the celebration of the end of history and a new world order was emerging. The nature of its impact was similar to the impact produced by the introduction of the concept of “biopolitics,” whose point of origination was Europe. Like its European counterpart, “coloniality” moved to the center of international debates in the non-European world as well as in “former Eastern Europe.” While “biopolitics” moved to center stage in “former Western Europe” (cfr., the European Union) and the United States, as well as among some intellectual minorities of the non-European followers of ideas that originated in Europe, but who adapt them to local circumstances, “coloniality” offers a needed sense of comfort to mainly people of color in developing countries, migrants and, in general, to a vast quantitative majority whose life experiences, long and short-term memories, languages and categories of thoughts are alienated to life experience, long and short-term memories, languages and categories of thought that brought about the concept of “biopolitics” to account for mechanisms of control and state regulations.[2]
Modernity, postmodernity and altermodernity have their historical grounding in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Decoloniality has its historical grounding in the Bandung Conference of 1955, in which 29 countries from Asia and Africa gathered. The main goal of the conference was to find a common ground and vision for the future that was neither capitalism nor communism. That way was “decolonization.” It was not “a third way” à la Giddens, but a delinking from the two major Western macro-narratives. The conference of the Non-Aligned countries followed suit in 1961, and took place in Belgrade. On that occasion, several Latin American countries joined forces with Asian and African countries. Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth was also published in 1961. Thus, the political and epistemic foundations of decoloniality had been established in fifty-five years. From then until now and from now to the future, it will be decoloniality all the way down – not as a new universal that presents itself as the right one that supersedes all the previous and existing ones, but as an option. By presenting itself as an option, the decolonial opens up a way of thinking that delinks from the chronologies of new epistemes or new paradigms (modern, postmodern, altermodern, Newtonian science, quantum theory, the theory of relativity, etc.). Epistemes and paradigms are not alien to decolonial thinking. They cannot be, but are no longer the point of reference and of epistemic legitimacy. While the Bandung Conference pronounced itself in the political terrain as neither capitalism nor communism but as decolonization, today, thinking decolonially is concerned with global equality and economic justice, but it also asserts that Western democracy and socialism are not the only two models to orient our thinking and our doing. Decolonial arguments promote the communal as another option next to capitalism and communism. In the spirit of Bandung, Aymara intellectual, Simon Yampara, makes clear that Aymaras are neither capitalist nor communist. They promote decolonial thinking and communal doing.[3]
Because decoloniality’s point of origination was the Third World, in its diversity of local histories and different times and Western imperial countries that first interfered with those local histories – be it in Tawantinsuyu in the sixteenth century, China in the nineteenth century or Iraq from the beginning of the twentieth (France and England) to the beginning of the twenty-first century (the US) – border thinking is the epistemic singularity of any decolonial project. Why? Because border epistemology is the epistemology of the anthropoi, who do not want to submit to humanitas, but at the same time cannot avoid it. Decoloniality and border thinking/sensing/doing are then strictly interconnected since decoloniality couldn’t be Cartesian or Marxian. In other words, decoloniality’s point of origination in the Third World connects to “immigrant consciousness” in Western Europe and the US today. “Immigrant consciousness” is located in the routes of dispersion of decolonial and border thinking.
This article was originally posted on the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies in September 2011.
