The politics of positionality: the difference between post-, anti-, and de-colonial methods

ABSTRACT

This essay works at the intersection of two trends, one longstanding and one relatively more recent. First, it takes place against the background of the overwhelming influence that the category of ‘identity’ exercises on both contemporary knowledge production and political practice. Second, it responds to what has been called the ‘decolonial turn’ in theory. We compare the work of Gayatri Spivak, Aijaz Ahmad, and Walter Mignolo in terms of the following question: What kind of reflexive method do they deploy in response to their recognition of the politics of knowledge production, that is, the existence of a relationship between social position and epistemic position? We then develop a novel distinction between post-colonial, anti-colonial, and de-colonial perspectives, one based not on backward-looking intellectual genealogies but on forward-looking political practices.

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Notes

1 An exhaustive history of the influence of decolonial theory, or of the linguistic trope ‘decolonizing x’ more broadly, is beyond our scope here, and would have to account for the differential impact of ‘decolonial theory’ at different times, in different disciplines and fields, and in sites of popular discourse, such as social media. In accepting the premise that there has been something like a ‘decolonial turn’ within the last decade or two, we follow Nelson Maldonado-Torres. See Maldonado-Torres 2011.

2 Each of these ways of making the distinction could and probably would be objected to from all camps; such objections reinforce the fact that there is a need for clarification of the issues at stake. For a recent contribution that draws the distinctions in these and other ways, see Bhambra 2014.

3 Consider how Mark Sanders frames his review of Critique of Postcolonial Reason: ‘Critique has given its reader to work out more than an agenda, an itinerary of agency in complicity. It has also blazed an intricate trajectory on reading. The latter is what my essay endeavors to work out’; and Sanders concludes the review: ‘Postcoloniality urges a training of the agent as reader in the literary’ (See Sanders 1999).

4 Namita Goswami concludes a nuanced reading of Spivak’s Critique by raising questions of the academy and epistemology (and not, say, of politics directly): ‘Can a postcolonial pedagogy be developed within the humanities in the US? If we read Spivak carefully, she seems to prefigure a contemporary global epistemology’ (Goswami 2014: 73).

5 For Ahmad, deconstruction is itself a specialist’s procedure: at the expense of the political potential of the radical student movements of 1968, ‘deconstructionist close reading became a fully fledged technology requiring specialist training’ (Ahmad 1992: 55).

6 Leela Gandhi, writing about Foucault (via Said) and Derrida (via Spivak), notes why we can read Ahmad’s critique of ‘postmodernism’ as a critique of postcolonial theory, even if in this passage Ahmad doesn’t name Said or Spivak: ‘[I]t is through poststructuralism and postmodernism—and their deeply fraught and ambivalent relationship with Marxism’, Gandhi writes, ‘that postcolonialism starts to distill its particular provenance’ (Gandhi 2019: 25).

7 In her defense, Spivak acknowledges Ahmad’s critique and aligns with it to some extent. ‘[A]lthough both Aijaz Ahmad and I criticize metropolitan postcolonialism, I hope my position is less locationist, more nuanced with a productive acknowledgment of complicity’ (Spivak 1999: xii). We understand these points of separation between Spivak and Ahmad – 'less locationist’ and ‘more nuanced’ as follows: with the former, Spivak is challenging Ahmad’s claim to ‘objective determination’, the way in which the geographical and institutional location of the post-colonial intellectual often belies their commitments to radical political praxis. Her jab about nuance suggests both (1) her practices of extremely ‘close reading’, staying with the texts themselves and the original languages much more closely than Ahmad and (2) a focus on the complications that underlie any claim to grand narratives, such as the progress of societies.

8 In The Darker Side of the Renaissance, Mignolo does not yet articulate his work as de-colonial, exactly; rather, he notes on the very first page that he is participating in ‘postcolonial theorizing’ (Mignolo 1995: vii).

9 Thus, Mignolo’s early articulation of the locus of enunciation to some extent prefigures his later presentation of the ‘decolonial option’ – not a mission but a choice to conduct scholarship in certain ways.

10 More specifically, there is an ‘indirect’ relationship between the locus of enunciation and Foucault. Given the importance of this early articulation to the evolution of the concept, and given the importance of tracing conceptual provenance, we quote at length from the 1995 Darker Side of the Renaissance: ‘For Foucault, the locus enuntiationis (mode d’enonciation in his terminology) was one of the four components of the discursive formations he conceived in terms of social roles and institutional functions … It was not in his horizon to raise questions about the locus of enunciation in colonial situations. Thus, from the perspective of the locus of enunciation, understanding the past cannot be detached from speaking the present, just as the disciplinary (or epistemological) subject cannot be detached from the nondisciplinary (or hermeneutical) one. It follows, then, that the need to speak the present originates at the same time from a research program that needs to debunk, refurbish, or celebrate previous disciplinary findings, and from the subject’s nondisciplinary (gender, class, race, nation) confrontation with social urgencies’ (Mignolo 1995: 5–6). The modifier ‘his’ on horizon is important. In emphasizing the inherent connection of the personal and the disciplinary, Mignolo teaches us that there is not simply a, much less the, horizon of thought – as some would hold in regard to an objective or neutral discipline. Discipline, we might say given the invocation of Foucault, entails punishment, or exclusion; traditionally, what is excluded is precisely the non-disciplinary confrontation, which in fact informs one’s horizon. Mignolo’s attention to the individual struggles of the theorist strengthens his concept of ‘locus of enunciation’ insofar as it attends to theory as it is actually lived – precisely in ‘confrontation with social urgencies’, the pulls and pressures one faces while thinking.

11 See also Maldonado-Torres et al 2018.

12 In Mignolo’s writings in Spanish on this concept, the term he uses is ‘lugar de enunciacion’. While ‘locus’ is an esoteric word in English, ‘lugar’ is an exoteric word in Spanish. It is helpful to think the translations together to gain both the abstract sense of positionality and the quotidian sense of place – the subject position and the seminar room, we could say. Some have criticized Mignolo’s lugar de enunciación for positing ‘an intrinsic link between thought and place’ and thus falling into an ‘epistemological determinism that is not in a position to consider the political and mediated character of the production of knowledge, and that ends up circumscribing all thought to its respective place [lugar] of origin’ (Pimmer 2017: 199, 200, translation ours). We would disagree with this claim: it misses the second, more abstract sense of ‘locus’, which depends less on place than on style, form, method (Foucault’s mode d’enonciation). Our claim is more in line, then, with those who claim that the locus of enunciation, even in its Spanish lugar de enunciación, allows for possibilities more than constrains into determinism. This is seen, for instance, in Silvia Tieffemberg’s claim that ‘[a]ddressing the ideas of the “mestizo” from its lugar de enunciación permits restoring the implied social, political, and cultural context as well as to apprehend it [the idea] not as a fact of the past but rather as an unfinished process that begins with the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese to America, and that until the present demonstrates a notable activity’ (Tieffemberg 2013–2014: 273, translation ours).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Benjamin P. Davis

Benjamin P. Davis is the Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethics at the University of Toronto, Centre for Ethics. His research focuses on Édouard Glissant, human rights, and an ethics of responsibility. His writing can be found on his website https://benjaminpdavis.com.

Jason Walsh

Jason Walsh is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Emory University. His research draws on multiple traditions of social and political philosophy in order to investigate questions in the history and logic of capitalism.