Breny Mendoza on Walter Mignolo’s *The Politics of Decolonial Investigations*

Westerners seldom get to see the world from the perspective of “Latin”[1] America and the Caribbean, let alone from the perspective of the native peoples of the Anahuac territories, of the Tawantinsuyo or those of the land in-between, Abya Yala.[2] The mention of “Latin” America is indeed sparse in conversations led by Western academics and media personalities that are deeply worried about the rise of China and the current transformation of the Western world order. But they do it at their own peril as Walter Mignolo demonstrates in his groundbreaking book The Politics of Decolonial Investigations, as it is precisely here where a new world is being reborn, and the Westernization of the planet might be coming to an end.

In this lengthy book of over seven hundred pages, Mignolo lays out in detail his project of the decolonial option. The decolonial option is not a new discipline nor a new political ideology of the Left. Both entities -academic disciplines and the idea of the Left- in fact are part of the problem of modernity, coloniality and Eurocentrism. The decolonial option is an option among options of ways of knowing, sensing, emoting and emotioning, and living life on planet earth that emerges from the world that the West has tried to destroy since the colonial revolution of the sixteenth century, but that never fully accomplished. The restitution of the worlds made destitute by Western colonialism and its mutation into coloniality after formal decolonization is not only occurring in what is known today as “Latin” America. “Colonial wounds” were inflicted all over the non-West, such that if we look closely, we see how attempts to delink from the West are everywhere through the recreation of different “praxis/es of living,” modes of thought and alternative forms of organizing society.

But according to Mignolo, the process of reconstitution of all that was destituted by the West is not uniform. China and other parts of Asia as well as Russia are seeking de-westernization by disputing the West’s control of the colonial matrix of power. By turning economic coloniality or capitalism in their favor, China has become a serious contender with the West, but does not represent decoloniality. Decoloniality is a very different type of delinking, one that transcends Western quasi-religious beliefs in the infallibility of modernity, science and technology, development, progress, infinite growth, in short capitalism. The response of the West is counterreformation or re-Westernization, especially against Chinese attempts to outmaneuver capitalism away from Western hegemonic control. In Mignolo’s view, the contest between China and the West is strictly about the prospect of building a multipolar world, one that is composed of several centers of power versus another that seeks to preserve a unipolar modern-colonial capitalist world exclusively for the benefit of the West and therefore, only under the purview of Western powers.

Decoloniality as described by Mignolo flies under the radar of Western powers because it comes from down below, from the peoples that were humiliated and dehumanized by the violent Westernization of the planet. The vanquished who never gave up their own ways of being in the world have sought pluriversality or the co-existence of diverse worlds from the moment of conquest. Pluriversality already in the mind of Guamán Poma de Ayala, a Quechua nobleman and “amauta” (scholar) strives for “a world where many worlds fit “as the Zapatistas would say today.  It runs against the arrogant universalism of the West and limits Western cosmologies to their geographical size.  An important point that Mignolo makes, however, is that pluriversality cannot be a state project. Instead, it is the restitution of “spheres of knowing, sensing, understanding, believing, and being in the world” or what he calls aesthesis by the emerging political society of the non-West or by “the advent of the third nomos of the world” (Here Mignolo ironically borrows from the Nazi jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt’s concept of the second nomos or the Westernization of the planet since the 1500s). This third nomos is marked by the restitution of the dignity of the vanquished and the living world or as the current Afro-Colombian vice-president Francia Marquez refers to it, “until dignity becomes a habit.”  Because pluriversality and decoloniality are not a contest for the control of the colonial matrix of power, nor something that can emanate from the nation-state or from state policy, which is another modern/colonial invention as Mignolo explains in Chapter Four “Decolonizing the Nation-State,” it is potentially more upending of Westernization and the colonial matrix of power than the efforts of dewesternization and multipolarity led by China, Russia and Iran.

It is a change of epoch as Mignolo repeatedly says–a change of epoch that can best be understood with the politics of decolonial investigation and/or decolonial border thinking that he presents in the fourteen chapters and the epilogue of the book. Mignolo leaves very little out in his critique of the West’s attempt to regulate knowledge and subjectivity in its quest for perpetual domination of the world. He makes connections in the most unexpected places, using the history of racism to link the slave trade, the plantation, the Holocaust, Zionism and the birth of the state of Israel. He puts in conversation thinkers that are never brought together in one sentence such as the Peruvian philosopher, Jose Carlos Mariategui and Antonio Gramsci although they were contemporary Marxists, or Anibal Quijano and Edmund Husserl; he shines a light on the distemporal readings of Gramsci in different eras and places such as India and “Latin” America; unveils the racism hiding beneath Kantian cosmopolitanism and the notion of human rights; points out the extension of racism onto the history of cartography, changing geographic coordinates, and the conceptualization of the Western hemisphere, including the nomenclature of terms such as the Third World and the Global South, areas of the world that are constantly being retrofitted by the classifiers to encompass the overall ranking of bodies and geographies according to their notions of race and the Human.

But in my opinion as a political scientist, Mignolo is at his best in his analysis of the nation-state and the limitations of Western political theories. The organization of the world into an interstate system he tells us has been one of the West’s strongest weapons for expansion and has only brought misery to the rest of the world. The figure of the nation-state has not only facilitated Western expansionism, but it has also strengthened internal colonialism. Its formulaic conception of one state, one nation has served to exclude not only non-nationals and immigrants today, but internally it has legitimated the dispossession of land, the exploitation of labor, and political suppression of indigenous peoples and afro-descendants political imaginaries.  It is no coincidence that it is Bolivia where indigenous majorities are present that the figure of the plurinational state has emerged.

Mignolo’s magnum opus The Politics of Decolonial Investigations is a sober description of the history of the world of the last five hundred years, its atrocities, and injustices, but it also gives us hope by describing the world that is emerging from underneath the ruins of Western civilization. Mignolo occasionally also shows a side of himself that was not so apparent in his past writings, which is a self-reflection about his own positionality as a “Latin” American of European descent or the way coloniality reaches him as a member of a colonized society.  Still missing is a proper discussion of the role of the coloniality of gender in the process of destitution-restitution, although Mignolo mentions it from time to time. The restitution of the communal which supposes communality with all the living world (humans and non-humans) or planet conviviality that indigenous peoples are proposing, will not be if the bond between men and women is broken as it is still today.

[1] Mignolo uses quotation marks on the word Latin to signal that it does not represent all peoples from the region.

[2] Anahuac corresponds to the ancient core of Mexico, Tawantinsuyo to the Incanate in the Andean region, and Abya Yala refers to the area near Panama and Colombia, more recently it refers to the whole subcontinent of Latin America.