Toward decolonial globalisation studies

ABSTRACT

This article draws on the epistemologies of the South, namely decolonial theory, to point to the analytical and interpretive limitations of northern theories of globalisation. It gestures toward decolonial globalisation studies to provide an alternative reading of global justice movements, including university student movements in Latin America. Moreover, it maintains that situating university student movements geopolitically provides a valuable way out of the theoretical limitations of critical globalisation studies informed by northern perspectives. By adopting a geopolitical perspective, decolonial globalisation studies unsettles and provincialises the central myth of modernity, which portrays the emergence of modern institutions and globalisation as endogenous European and Anglo-American phenomena subsequently diffused to the Global South. Finally, this article addresses the need for decolonial globalisation studies to ground its theorisation in alternative sites of knowledge production.

KEYWORDS:

• Geopolitics of knowledge
• decolonial theory
• epistemologies of the south
• neoliberal globalisation
• coloniality
• student movements

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 As I explicate elsewhere (Fúnez-Flores 2022a), the interdisciplinary Latin American decolonial research program aims to counter Eurocentric interpretive frameworks and historiographies by thinking from and with other genealogies of thought and practice (Escobar 2007; Tlostanova and Mignolo 2012), in particular, dependency theory, anti-colonial thought, theology and philosophy of liberation, and world-systems theory (Casanova 1965; Césaire 2000; Dussel 1980; Fals-Borda 1970; Fanon 1963; Frank 1970; Prebisch and Cabañas 1949; Restrepo 2001; Wallerstein 1974). In many ways, decolonial thought is more in line with the social sciences, while postcolonial studies builds upon postmodern and post-structural thought, and typically directs it’s historiographic reinterpretation and literary criticism against the English and French colonial experience beginning with the enlightenment (Andreotti 2011; Bhambra 2014). Decolonial theory conceives of the modern/colonial capitalist world system as a social totality, or better yet, a heterogeneously configured matrix of domination that initiated its global articulation in 1492 during the renaissance (Tlostanova and Mignolo 2012). Although both discourses articulate important critiques of colonialism, they vary in temporal depth and geographic scope. Decolonial theory extends its critique to other histories and geographies constitutive of modernity and coloniality—the latter being the darker side of the former—which have been left undertheorized by postcolonial studies’ Anglocentric and Francocentric perspectives and critiques of colonialism (Coronil 2008; Hulme 2008). Decolonial thought, moreover, emphasizes the discourses, institutions, and social practices that enabled the construction of Western Europe’s geo-cultural identity and hegemonic geopolitical position (Coronil 1996; Dussel 1996; Quijano 2000b).

Decolonial modes of theorising, as Mignolo (2007) expresses, intend to delink from Eurocentric interpretations of modernity, history, knowledge, power, and being. Delinking must not be interpreted as an essentialist move blindly opposed to the knowledge production of Europe or the United States. Indeed, sociohistorical, and geopolitical identities are not singular but plural. Europe, for instance, also has and continues to experience the narrowing epistemological effects caused by instrumental rationality’s hegemonic imposition against the historical and liberationist reason characteristic of southern Europe (Anibal Quijano 1989). Europe’s canonical history, which has aligned itself with material and symbolic systems of domination, reveals that it has silenced its most radical thinkers who have articulated non-Occidentalist, anti-Capitalist, and anti-imperialist modes of reasoning (Sousa Santos 2009). Emerging discourses critiquing colonialism, racism, capitalism, and patriarchy also reveal the epistemicidal effects against racialized and colonized subjects—that is, Indigenous, Black, Chicanx, Latinx, and Asian subjects situated in the Global North.

Delinking from Eurocentric knowledge, moreover, does not mean that the Global South has a privileged epistemic vantage point. As Grosfoguel (2007) suggests, it is imperative to differentiate epistemic location from social location. The former refers to systematically excluded geographies of reason while the latter refers to the social position of those who do the enunciating. Being ‘socially located in the oppressed side of power relations does not automatically mean that he/she is epistemically thinking from a subaltern epistemic location’ (Grosfoguel 2007, 213). Indeed, the modern/colonial capitalist world-system’s hegemonic position is contingent upon the geopolitics of knowledge and the political economy of ideas (Cusicanqui 2012). The latter two terms conceptualize the way knowledge produced in the Global North is reproduced in the Global South through a pyramidal global university system that has, since the 16th century, helped maintain Western Europe’s and subsequently the United States’ hegemonic geopolitical position (Grosfoguel 2013). Eurocentric knowledge hence becomes a geopolitically entangled imperial/colonial instrument of control justifying exploitation and domination that is also contingent upon the selective participation of colonized subjects who are in collusion with the forces of imperialism, colonialism, racism, and patriarchy.

Drawing on the work of dependency theory, world-systems theory, and philosophy of liberation, Latin American decolonial theory advances three interrelated concepts to understand the social totality reconceptualized as the modern/colonial capitalist world-system. The primary concept is the coloniality of power, defined by Quijano (2007) as a matrix of domination constituted by the systematic control of labor, sex, subjectivity, and authority. These interconnected structures of domination are expressed globally in Eurocentric political, economic, social, and cultural institutions (e.g., racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, Eurocentric rationality, and liberal democracy). Although political-economic institutions are indispensable in the understanding of the coloniality of power, it is the hegemonic control of social and cultural institutions that produce the subjectivities necessitated to reproduce the former institutions (Rama 1996). All other modes of organising social life and producing culture are hence rendered primitive institutions in need of development. The coloniality of power may thus be understood as “a cognitive model, a new perspective of knowledge within which non-Europe was the past, and because of that inferior, if not always primitive” (Quijano 2000, 552). This cognitive model refers to the coloniality of knowledge (Mignolo 2000), the symbolic/epistemic dimension of colonisation always already interconnected to material domination and exploitation, and the systematic invalidation and destruction of Indigenous knowledges, histories, and collective subjectivities.

The notion of racial superiority and inferiority is conceptualized as the coloniality of being. While the coloniality of power emphasizes colonial domination and capitalist exploitation through a racialized division of labor and the coloniality of knowledge underscores the epistemic dimension justifying the former, the coloniality of being pays closer attention to the phenomenological, psycho-existential, and racial dimensions of colonial, neocolonial, and postcolonial lived experiences (Maldonado-Torres 2007). The coloniality of being also contains a historiographical and analectical hermeneutic dimension centred on the reinterpretation of historical narratives and philosophical discourses that naturalize Europe’s rise to power and inferiorize the non-European world Dussel (1994) refers to as exteriority. It is the preoccupation with Europe’s exteriority and its ontological and epistemological alterity that makes it possible to apply this theoretical lens to better understand social movements within the context of neoliberal globalisation.