Geopolitics of sensing and knowing: on (de)coloniality, border thinking and epistemic disobedience

Abstract

This essay offers an introduction to the ‘decolonial option’. The author begins by setting his project apart from its European contemporaries such as biopolitics and by tracing the historical origins of his project to the Bandung Conference of 1955 that asserted decolonization as the ‘third way’, beyond Soviet communism and liberal capitalism. Decoloniality needs to emphasize itself once again as a ‘third way’. This time it has to break the tandem formed by ‘rewesternization’ (championed by Obama's administration and the EU) and ‘dewesternization’ (represented by so-called emergent countries). The decolonial option embraces epistemic disobedience and border thinking in order to question the behaviour of world powers. Ultimately what is at stake is advancing what the author calls global political society.

Notes

1. For a critique on the shortcomings of Giorgio Agamben's argument seen from the experiences, memories and sensibilities of colonial histories and decolonial reasoning see Alejandro de Oto and Marta María Quintana, ‘Biopolítica y colonialidad’, Tabula Rasa 12, 2010, pp 47–72.

2. The Bandung Conference was a meeting of Asian and African states—organized by Indonesia, Myanmar (Burma), Ceylon (Sri Lanka), India, and Pakistan—which took place on 18–24 April 1955, in Bandung, Indonesia. In all, 29 countries representing more than half the world's population sent delegates. The conference reflected the five sponsors’ dissatisfaction with what they regarded as a reluctance by the Western powers to consult with them on decisions affecting Asia; their concern over tension between the People's Republic of China and the United States; their desire to lay firmer foundations for China's peaceful relations with themselves and the West; their opposition to colonialism, especially French influence in North Africa; and Indonesia's desire to promote its case in the dispute with the Netherlands over western New Guinea (Irian Jaya). Major debate centred upon the question of whether Soviet policies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia should be censured along with Western colonialism. A consensus was reached in which ‘colonialism in all of its manifestations’ was condemned, implicitly censuring the Soviet Union, as well as the West. Encyclopedia Britannica Online, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/155242/decolonization.

3. On the decolonial option as described by Simon Yampara and endorsed by many Aymara and Quechua intellectuals and activists, see Jaime E Flore Pinto, ‘Sociologia del Ayllu’, http://rcci.net/globalizacion/2009/fg919.htm. See also my article ‘The Communal and the Decolonial’, http://turbulence.org.uk/turbulence-5/decolonial/

4. Les indigènes de la république, in France, is an outstanding case of border thinking and immigrant consciousness. See ‘The Decolonizing Struggle in France: An Interview with Houria Bouteldja’, Monthly Review, 2 November 2009. www.indigenes-republique.fr/article.php3?id_article=763

5. It is not just a question of the Indians, as I often hear after my lectures. Around the world, critical intellectuals are aware of the limits of Western archives, from the left and from the right. In the case of China, see Wang Hui's four volumes, The Rise of Modern Chinese Thoughts. For an analysis, see Zhang Yongle, ‘The Future of the Past: Wang Hui's Rise of Modern Chinese Thought’, New Left Review, March/April, 2010, pp 47–83. For the Muslim world see Mohammed al-Jabri, Introduction à la Critique de la Raison Arabe, Paris: Edition La Découverte, 1995. Written in a similar spirit is my The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. See also the work being done at and by the Caribbean Philosophical Association, www.caribbeanphilosophicalassociation.org/. There is no intention here to become post-post and be attentive to the last missive of the European left, but to move also South of the North Atlantic.

6. See my ‘Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of Decoloniality’, in Walter Mignolo and Arturo Escobar (eds), Globalization and the Decolonial Option, London: Routledge, 2010, pp 423–470 (currently being translated into German by Jens Kastner and Tom Weibel).

7. Nelson Maldonado-Torres, ‘The Coloniality of Being’, Cultural Studies 21(2), 2007, p 240.

8. Partha Chatterjee, ‘Modernity in Two Languages’, in A Possible India: Essays in Political Criticism, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997, pp 185–205. See my ‘Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom’, Theory, Culture and Society 26(7–8), 2009, pp 159–181.

9. Arif Dirlik, ‘The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism›, Critical Inquiry 20(2), 1994, pp 328–356.

10. Lately China and Japan have been joining forces to confront Western competition on several fronts (http://the-diplomat.com/2010/03/11/japan-embracing-china/). This same journal published last year an article by Koichi Iwabuchi, ‘De-Westernization and the Governance of Global Cultural Connectivity: A Dialogic Approach to East Asian Media Cultures›, Postcolonial Studies 13(4), 2010, pp 403–419.

11. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, ‘North Atlantic Universals: Analytical Fictions, 1492–1945’, South Atlantic Quarterly 101(4), 2002, p 849.

12. Les indigènes de la république: see note 4.