Coloniality and globalization: a decolonial take

ABSTRACT

I will address here the Special Forum leading question: ‘Is an integrated theory of globalization possible (and desirable)?’ I will add: is it necessary? If it is, what for and for whom is it necessary and beneficial? I have no illusion of providing a convincing answer to the Special Forum’s leading questions and my own additions. But I am writing this essay with another question in mind, asked in the introduction to Globalization Matters, the book that prompted this Special Forum: What is happening to globalization? I hope to provide some entrypoint into those questions, starting from the receiving ends because there are many, of globalization. What I mean by this is that while modern/colonial world order was constituted by actors, institutions and languages located in the mutation of Western Christendom to continental Europe and its extension to the US, thus forming the North Atlantic, all the remaining regions and people in the planet became, by default, receptors (by will or in spite of) of Western global designs. Chief among them is global linear thinking that contributed greatly to mapping the contours of the Westernization of the World and set up the foundations of what, in neo-liberal vocabulary since the 1980s, has been termed ‘globalization’.

KEYWORDS:

• Coloniality
• globalization
• decolonial
• western global designs
• westernization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 On civilizational states see, and see the respective grounds of the enunciation, Zhang Weiwei’ disobedient argument (Zhang, 2012). On the other hand, see the controlling argument (Coker, 2019). In support of Coker (see Rachman, 2019). On Weiwie’s side see Pabst (2019).

2 Williams (1944). William's arguments, more so than his ‘facts,’ are relevant for my argument. For the reader interested in historic information about the slave trade, the following studies – which are not as relevant to my argument as Wiliams’s book’s argument is – could consult Thomas (1999), and Blackburn (2011).

3 A briefing of Aníbal Quijano’s conceptual frame-work could be found in Quijano (2008, pp. 181–224).

4 The launchpad of neo-liberal globalization was Chile, 1973: the military coup that stopped democracy in the name of democracy. That is how the rhetoric of modernity works disguising the logic of coloniality (see, among many analyses, ‘The “Chicago Boys” in Chile’, 2016). See previous note on Hayek and Friedman.

5 Globalization was called into question early on. In 2000 Aníbal Quijano published a key essay framing globalization in the unfolding of the colonial matrix of power (patrón colonial de poder), hence framing globalization decolonially. See Lima:The Róbinson Rojas Archives, 2000, https://rrojasdatabank.info/pfpc/quijan02.pdf. For Quijano it was not a new phenomenon. It was an unfolding of ‘structural depency’ that was explored in detail in South America in the sixties (Faletto, Cardoso, Marini, etc.). Gunther Frank provided the Eurocentered view in English for a US audience (see Cardoso, 1977). For Quijano, and for us following him, globalization (e.g. neoliberal globalism) was another chapter in the unfolding of the colonial matrix of power, the last chapter of the second nomos of the earth. My argument is indebted to this legacy. In that context, an earlier decolonial critique when development was the concept that globalism refurbished, Walter Rodney’s argument remains a signpost when globalizalism is felt in South and Central America and the Caribbean (see Rodney, 2002). The previous chapters in this unfolding were modernization and development, from 1950 to 1970, when the US assumed global leadership. For an early critical North Atlantic perspective, the reader could consult (Amoore et al., 2000, pp. 12–28).

6 For more detail see Mignolo and Walsh (2018) and Mignolo (2021). This argument is built on the premises and arguments from this book.

7 The issue is extremely relevant but to elaborate on it would take me away from the argument I am unfolding. But I would like to provide the following information. Patriarchy in the conceptual and political decolonial frame is not a question of gender but it is systemic. In Aníbal Quijano’s concept of ‘patrón colonial de poder’, ‘patrón’ means both patrón and pattern. Julieta Paredes, Aymara intellectual, activist and ‘feminista comunitaria’ reconceptualizes patriarchy from an Indigenous perspective: ‘We say: patriarchy is the system of all oppressions, of all exploitations, of all violence and discrimination experienced by humanity (women, men and intersex people) and by nature, historically built on the sexed bodies of women’ https://journals.openedition.org/corpusarchivos/1835#tocto1n5. This Argentinian feminist, activist and intellectual leader is revising the notion of patriarcado from a decolonial perspective, following Quijano’s legacies (Segato, 2016). The Zapatistas are very well known for rebuilding the communal and disengaging (delinking) from the the social and the State. Zapatistas’ women and men are confronting patriarchy as a system of multiple oppressions. https://nacla.org/news/2019/01/18/spark-hope-ongoing-lessons-zapatista-revolution-25-years. For the European readers, a more familiar take on patriarchy could be Öcalan (2020).

8 These signs have been obviously felt in the experience and perspective of de-Westernisation (see Khanna, 2019a, pp. 1–24; 2019b, pp. 327–356; Mahbubani, 2008, pp. 127–174).

9 Confront the Western desire to maintain its privileges and awareness that social, economic and cultural forces are moving in different directions (see Kissinger, 2014; Brzezinski, 2012).

10 World Economic Forum. Influential missionaries in the twenty-first century are driving technology and business conversations (see Schwab, 2017).

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Notes on contributors

Walter D. Mignolo

Walter Mignolo is the William H Wannamaker Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University, USA, and has joint appointments in Cultural Anthropology and Romance Studies. He has worked and published extensively on different aspects of the modern and colonial world, exploring concepts such as global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge, transmodernity, Border-Thinking, and pluriversality.