Comments and meditations on delinking, coloniality, and the Global North reception of decolonial thought

"Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye."Matthew 7:3–5

Decoloniality is not revenge, nor a renewed struggle for independence, but a strategy for transforming the narratives of domination that still endure. The term emerged in Latin America from the recognition that forms of colonialism persisted even after the formal relationship with Spain had ended. The key question is where decisions are made. In global health, that question is decisive [….] For this reason, decolonizing global health does not mean erasing the past, but changing the present. It means questioning exploitation, extraction, dispossession, and imposition when they are justified in the name of a supposed universal good. It also requires building an inclusive global architecture, one capable of placing affected populations at the center of decision-making (Rafael Vilasanjuan; italics mine, Decoloniality Against the Empire of Health)

I

What is at stake is the geopolitics of knowing and understanding, which Euro-centered scholars and intellectuals rarely consider, which I explored in my previous newsletter. First, I would like to repeat a caveat from previous newsletters concerning my critics. I am responsible for what I say; I am not responsible for what my critics say I said. I am nevertheless thankful to them, because their criticism allows me to return to the foundational premises of my thinking and practice.

Second, I would like to help circulate a LinkedIn post by Professor Sindre Bangstad, a Norwegian anthropologist, as far as I can tell. He has devoted so much time, energy, and emotion to discrediting the decolonial perspective inaugurated by “Quijano and his successor Mignolo” (sic) that he deserves support.  He seems to be really obfuscated. I feel like I have to apologize for causing him so much malheur.

 His criticism offers an occasion to clarify the distinction between delinking and coloniality—and to examine the terms on which European scholars receive decolonial thought.

I will take Sindre Bangstad’s post point by point. As you read it, Sindre Bangstad’s LinkedIn post, keep in mind Jesus Christ’s advice in Matthew 7:3–5. Without suggesting any disproportionate comparison, I ask readers to also keep in mind my short article (2011), “Geopolitics of Sensing and Knowing: On (De)Coloniality, Border Thinking and Epistemic Disobedience”.

II

Ready for Sindre? Here he is. I will parse his post:

1)        I sometimes catch myself wondering whether any of the 4588 academic scholars who have cited this 2007 Cultural Studies article, which also traduces the late Egyptian Marxist dependency theorist Prof Samir Amin’s original concept of ‘delinking’ in a way that would be inconceivable for Amin (so much for highlighting the work of scholars from the South: by way of comparison, Amin’s original 1987 article now stands at a measly 193 ci

2)        […] have asked themselves what the following paragraph does in terms of (a) collapsing the distinction between widely divergent historical and intellectual traditions and (b) causing the epistemic erasure of the hundreds of thousands of lives lost to Islamist state terror in Iran and to salafi-jihadist terror in the Muslim world and beyond: «De-coloniality was clearly formulated, in the sixties and seventies, by radical Arabo-Islamic [sic?] thinkers (Sayyid Qutb, Ali Shariati, Ayatollah Khomeini); by philosophy of liberation in Latin America and by Indigenous intellectuals and activist [sic] in Latin [sic] America, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.»;

3)        Mignolo, «Delinking», Cultural Studies 21 (2-3) 2007: 457. For real academic scholarship on the mass torture and executions of tens of thousands of ‘secular left’ Iranians who were erstwhile supporters of the 1979 Iranian Revolution which led to Khomeini’s consolidation of Islamist power in Iran, I recommend Prof Ervand Abrahimian’s ‘Tortured Confessions’ (University of California Press, 1999); for how Sayyid Qutb’s prison-written ‘Milestones’ inspired salafi-jihadist terrorism in the Muslim world and the West from the 1980s onwards, I recommend Prof John Calvert’s nuanced ‘Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism’ (Hurst Publishers, 2010.) About which you will not read a word in Mignolo’s entire oeuvre.

Let’s begin with point 1 of the passage. It joins two different issues. The first is statistical: Samir Amin’s “delinking” (1987) has 193 citations, while Mignolo (2007) has 4,588. But the appeal to statistics brings forward another issue: Professor Bangstad’s fixation on debunking the South American school of thought, particularly Aníbal Quijano, although the main target seems to be “Mignolo’s entire oeuvre.” What we face here seems less like an academic disagreement than a far-right style of discrediting an adversary—an argumentum ad hominem.

Professor Bangstad claims that he has written 19 pages in Norwegian discussing Quijano’s concept of “coloniality,” its uses and misuses.  I do not read Norwegian. What I could read was his English post on LinkedIn and an article where he is obfuscated than I mentioned above. I am not a subscriber to any social media; a friend in Europe keeps me informed of the furious storm from the North. Professor Bangstad found, in a paper written by a scholar based in the US, Abraham Acosta, that the translation of Quijano’s groundbreaking paper “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” reprinted in Cultural Studies in 2007 in a special issue edited by Walter D. Mignolo, was based on a literal translation from Spanish published in an obscure (his word) Swedish publication. The Spanish original appeared in an obscure Peruvian journal, Perú Indígena, in 1992 as “Colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad”.

Why would an anthropologist in Norway become so preoccupied with a handful of Third World Thinkers from South American, even if some of them live in the US and other in Europe? What seems to troubled him beyond some authors are the concepts of coloniality, and of decolonial thinking more broadly. I cannot answer that question. I can, however, place the controversy within the distribution of scientific and scholarly authority among the Three Worlds, which I explored in my previous newsletter, Can Euro-Centered Scholars Understand Third World Thinkers?. That distribution is changing: Eurocentrism and European thoughts are becoming less authoritative for many Third World scholars and intellectuals. In fact, are becoming “an object of study” for Third World thinkers. The prominence achieved by coloniality must be understood within that reversal.

There may be another factor: Professor Bangstad’s interest in statistics. In one his many LinkedIn post wonders if the 4588 scholars who quoted Mignolo’s article, next to the 193 quotation of Amin’s translation into English of his French “la deconnexion¨have read the paragraph on Sayyed Qutb (that I will address in the next newsletter). So, if he noticed the discrepancy in the quotations of Amin’s delinking and Mignolo’s adaptation, he must also have noticed the 97,406 views of the literal translation of from Spanish, of Quijano´s article  (Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality) to which devoted a considerable amount of research.

That must indeed be too much when immigrant thoughts enter Europe and it is not addressing the Europeans. Remember Jean-Paul Sartre in his preface to Franz Fanon’s Les damnées de la terre, “Listen, Europeans, he is talking about you, but not addressing you.” Perhaps that is another reason: we are not addressing European intellectuals. So, by way of compensation, I am now speaking about—and to—an European audience. My main audience, however, remains Third World, including Euro-centered intellectuals in the Third World.

III

Let’s turn to point 2 of the passage. Before doing so, however, let’s stay a little longer with delinking, since it has further ramifications. Two caveats first. In endnote 10 of my article “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of Decoloniality,”

I wrote:

The concept of ‘delinking’ (in French, ‘la desconnection’) was introduced by Egyptian sociologist Amin (1985), especially, ‘The problematic of delinking’, pp. 44–84. The concept is a crucial one, although in Samir Amin’s version it is formulated at the level of economic and political (state) delinking. Without an epistemic delinking it is difficult to really delink from the modern notion of Totality. In the case of Amin, he was still caught in the mirage of Marxism and, therefore, of modernity. Thus, his delinking was proposed at the level of the content rather than at the epistemic level that sustains the logic of coloniality. I will bring together, in complementary fashion, Amin’s ‘delinking’ with Quijano’s ‘desprendimiento.’ Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of Decoloniality

A clarifying note before pursuing. There are three translations of this piece, and each translation contains changes and adjustments. German translation (2012); French translation (2015); Spanish translation (2014)

It is true, as several critics who hold a European idea of Latin America and of Latin American scholars in what they call the Global North have noted, that Aníbal Quijano came from a Marxist formation, which, without abandoning it, began to question historical materialism.

But let’s begin briefly with the differing orientations of Samir Amin and Aníbal Quijano. Amin proposed delinking from capitalism. This is Amin: A Note on the Concept of Delinking. Quijano, by contrast, proposed “disconnecting” from the colonial matrix of power, of which the economy is one of four domains (see the article, literally translated, that Bangstad questioned: Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality). I should add that Bangstad wrote to Duke University Press to denounce the inclusion of that translation in the Aníbal Quijano reader (The Aníbal Quijano Reader). Rita Segato wrote to him, but there was no answer, of course. Conservative snipers do not enter in conversation.

Yet, the economy is not an actor, doesn´t have agency. It is a domain of management and control. Amin seeks to delink peripheral societies from the global law of value so that popular forces can pursue an autonomous transition beyond capitalism. Quijano seeks the decolonial dismantling of the entire colonial matrix that organizes capital, authority, race, subjectivity, and knowledge through modern European languages (and their foundations in Greek and Latin), as well as the praxis of living. Quijano’s horizon of meaning is Buen Vivir, a vision that honors the horizon of meaning of Pueblos Originations, rather than Vivir Mejor. This is not simply Quijano’s substitute for socialism; it changes the civilizational question from who controls development to what forms of existence, relations, and knowledge should be reproduced. Nevertheless, I do not see Amin/Quijano as either/or but rather as and/and. As I explained elsewhere, decolonial is relational thinking, delinking (here we go again) from the hegemonic ontological reasoning of Western modernity.

What seems to bother Bangstad, I suppose, is that he does not find in his target—Mignolo’s entire work—what he would like to find. That, I understand, is frustrating—if he read Mignolo’s entire work. On LinkedIn, Bangstad warns against a creeping “academic authoritarianism.” He argues that prominent decolonial theorists (such as Walter Mignolo) use concepts like “delinking,” “de-westernization,” and “epistemic sovereignty” to excuse or pander to state authoritarianism and imperialism, specifically citing justifications made regarding Russian and Chinese state policies. I know that I can be perplexing to Europeans because South Americans, beyond being immigrants in Europe, have not been trapped by irrational European Russophobia or by the neoliberal globalists’ finding China unacceptable. All that, I understand, is hard for Euro-centered minds to swallow.

Northern European critics, mainly, are also overlooking the fact that, in my case at least—but not only mine—I am based in the US but active in South America. My work is much better received in the former Third World than in the US and, obviously, in Norther Europe! I am nevertheless pleasantly surprised that my work has caught the attention of Northern Europeans, since the reception in Southern Europe, including France is gentler. One of these Northern European critics seems to be using Samir Amin in the European North, perhaps because Amin was a scholar dwelling in North Africa, although I may be mistaken in what I see. In this case, I am referring to Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, a Senior Lecturer in International Development at King’s College London, and “Inverted Eurocentrism: The Consumption of Decolonization in the Global North and a Radical Decolonization Agenda”.

I must confess that, with all due respect to Samir Amin, I found this formulation awkward, although I understand the reference he was making. Like Frantz Fanon twenty-five years earlier, Amin was, I think, referring to the elites who created the nation-state without questioning political theory, political economy, or education. They were enacting reverse eurocentrism. If that is what he meant, I agree. The awkwardness lies elsewhere, perhaps in his actual readers: Amin was still operating within a fully modern, Euro-centered conceptual structure in the former colony. Here I find a radical difference between Amin and Quijano. Without abandoning Marx’s contribution to our understanding of capital, Quijano leaves Marxism behind by developing four crucial concepts: coloniality, the darker side of Western modernity, the colonial will to power, and the colonial matrix of power. The central task is to extricate oneself—desprendernos in Spanish, to delink—from the colonial will to power and the colonial matrix of power. Apparently, this creates discomfort among Northern European scholars, who defend themselves against the alleged “perversion” of MCD by insisting that Quijano was a Marxist. It is an advantage to be a semiotician and to pay attention to ¨words in relation to ¨facts¨.

Today I would say that Amin’s delinking is a delinking of the state from the global law of value. In that sense, Amin proposes de-Westernization rather than decoloniality. His delinking presupposes a strong state capable of breaking with global law and hegemonic values so that, in his own words, “popular forces” can pursue their own paths beyond capitalism. They can thus re-exist: they can reconstitute forms of existence eroded by colonial imposition. This is not a critique of Amin, but a clarification of my understanding of his project in relation to decolonization and de-Westernization. Amin found in China the direction he had envisioned in his programmatic text on delinking. In 2013, he offered a clear and forceful argument in praise of the course taken by the Chinese state: China 2013.

By contrast, Quijano relinquished the expectation that the state could serve as an instrument of decolonization. His concept of decolonization as epistemological reconstitution is therefore a sine qua non of decolonial liberation. When he introduced the concept of coloniality, he was confronting more than 150 years of nation-state formation and 500 years of Ibero-Christian conquest and colonization, together with the more recent splendors and miseries of decolonization in Africa and Asia. Epistemological reconstitution had become indispensable. The colonial matrix organizes capital, authority, race, subjectivity, knowledge, language, and life. Because this organization depends on knowledge—on knowing what to do and what means to use in managing domination, exploitation, and disavowal—knowledge constitutes the “spirit” of the colonial matrix of power. For Quijano, it is therefore not only necessary but urgent to delink from every domain of that matrix, not solely from the economic domain. By 2010, he had reoriented the horizon of meaning away from socialism and toward buen vivir, or bien vivir, concepts through which he honored Quechua and Aymara thought and practice. Quijano’s elaboration of these concepts in relation to development—an issue that had deeply engaged him during the dependency debates—shifts the civilizational question away from development and toward the forms of existence, relation, and knowledge that should guide collective life.

As for Harvold Kvangraven, the weapon of “inverted Eurocentrism” is used to attack the second generation of MCD—those allegedly inattentive to material conditions—looks like a defense of straightforward Eurocentrism from a Northern European perspective. I do not know; readers can judge for themselves. The article is linked above. In any case, the accusation that MCD moved from Quijano’s materialist concerns to a preoccupation with identity is, as far as I am concerned, truly far-fetched and based on ouï-dire. I offer this 2007 piece, published in an obscure journal in Gothenburg: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-coloniality. As for the radical decolonial agenda, to which I wish all the best, I suggest looking at these two pieces: “Capital without Liberalism”, and “Capital without Socialism”.

I find it quite interesting that “the consumption of decolonization in the Global North” seems to refer to the United States, although the author is based in England, which was, I think, the greatest national empire until 1945, when the United States took the lead. And as far as my geographical knowledge goes, England is in the Global North. II remember Jesus’s dictum, once more. Consequently, the radical decolonization agenda is not in and from the Global North, but in and from the European North. Here, “radical decolonization”—and the descriptor is important—means concentrating on the critique of capitalism and imperialism. The critic writes: “The article argues that a radical decolonization agenda entails the critique of political economy and it evaluates the extent to which the original MCD tradition reflects such an agenda” (abstract), as if MCD had not been doing precisely that. Perhaps MCD has been doing it in a language that Euro-centered scholars cannot understand because it is not cast in the terms in which they would like us to argue.

That is my reading, though there may be another explanation. What is certain is that, to advance the “radical decolonization agenda” in the European North, it is necessary to devalue the MCD decolonial agenda because it was taken up by Latin American scholars and intellectuals in the US. In the end, it seems like a conflict between the US academy and the British—and Northern European—academy, since Harvold Kvangraven is at King’s College and Bangstad is based at KIFO (Institute for Church, Religion and Worldview Research), where he serves as a Research Professor in Oslo, Norway. He is an affiliate researcher in the Department of Sociology and Social Work in Kristiansand, Norway.

IV

Because Bangstad and Harvold Kvangraven appear to address European readers—and perhaps Euro-centered scholars and intellectuals in the Third World—I offer a few indications of what may lie beyond their conceptual horizon. In several places, I have described the sixteenth-century “colonial revolution” through a set of interrelated factors that, in Quijano’s outline, constitute the colonial matrix of power. No such matrix existed before the sixteenth century. This colonial revolution laid the foundations of the world order in which we live today, although a fuller account must wait for another occasion. I offer a summary here to spare my critics the effort of reading, since they prefer to rely on ouï-dire. Those inclined to read further may consult The Darker Side of Western Modernity (2011), pp. 1–25; my 2014 talk in South Africa, The Concept of Coloniality; and “The Colonial Matrix of Power,” in Talking About Inequality.

a)        Massive appropriation and expropriation of land.

b)        Massive exploitation of labor, first of Indigenous people, then of enslaved Africans.

c)        Reinvesting the surplus to produce more, which was not a practice of all coexisting economies.

d)        This reinvestment was necessary because global markets had opened through navigation, first Iberian, then Dutch, British, and French.

e)        Massive control of knowledge through convents, schools, and universities, which displaced local knowledges.

f)           The disposability of human lives, Indigenous and enslaved Africans, from then to Gaza. The massive displacement of knowledge put interests above human lives, as testified by the dumping of sick enslaved Africans into the ocean.

g)         These basic structures remain, with surface changes, in the West to this day, while China took capital into its own hands and put it to work in its own way, though not as capitalism.

Together, these components first transformed the Christian will to power and later continued in secular form, mainly through the British, French, and Dutch empires. Critics of MCD—and of its principal delinquent, as they would have it—may overlook these components or find them misleading. Perhaps this brief outline will encourage them to read more before judging by ouï-dire.

The bottom line is this: European critics, especially those from Northern Europe and shaped by Proto-Germanic language traditions, may find coloniality difficult to understand because its terms do not arise from the familiar vocabulary of capitalism and colonialism. They may therefore interpret the present as merely an era of changes and imagine the radical choice as one between remaining within capitalism and delinking from it to build sovereign socialist economies in the former colonies.

This is the point at which delinking and coloniality part company. Delinking from capitalism is not e..nough for decolonization if the colonial matrix of power remains intact. But it is enough for dewesternization. The decolonial processes during the Cold War had already failed by the time Amin elaborated delinking in a final valiant effort to save decolonization. Forty years later, the failure of independence, like in South America 150 years earlier, was even clearer. Socialism, like liberalism and conservatism, remains a Euro-centered ideology: delinking from liberal capitalism confronts the content but not the logic that established the rules of the game. In this regard, a radical decolonial agenda confined to capitalism and imperialism may speak to England, or at most to former Western Europe.

I doubt that many in former Eastern Europe will embrace it, and even fewer thinkers and activists in the former Third World will do so. China, however, must also be considered. The Chinese Communist Party has been doing a significant job in disputing the control of the colonial matrix of power, although not yet its shortcomings. That delinking is what I call dewesternization, and I refer again to Amin’s great article “China 2013,” quoted before. My meditation, then, ends where it began: the question is not whether European scholars approve of decolonial thought—which we do not need, certainly—but whether they are prepared to encounter patterns of thinking, sensing, and knowing whose terms, horizons, and authority do not originate in Europe.

In the next newsletter, I address point 3 above, giving Sayyid Qutb’s Milestones the attention it deserves. That discussion requires a different terrain from the one covered here.

Nota Bene: As I was ready to close of this newsletter and move to publish it in Buttondown.com I received from friends in Europe another posting of the obfuscated professor Sindred Bangstad, praising the author abut above all, her take on ¨Mignolo´s scandalous characterization of Patrice Lumumba: Muriam Haleh Davis at UC Santa Cruz has written an important critique of the decolonial interpretations of the Algerian revolution. She also takes issue with Mignolo’s rather scandalous characterization of the late Patrice Lumumba herein. Open access. https://lnkd.in/e_svD5YP. I really feel sorry for Sindred. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sindre-bangstad-35970835_the-algerian-revolution-and-the-pitfalls-share-7516420676136796160-9OZM/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&rcm=ACoAAAsqaUABTexWddugbi4q5ADY1q4bVi0ZcCI . The author of the article Professor Murian H. Davis is an associate professor at the University of California Davis. The same pattern continues in the Global North. Here is what seems uncomfortable for scholars and intellectuals in the Global North:     ¨A Google Ngram search reveals that the word “decolonial” enjoyed a precipitous uptake in the Anglophone academy after 2010. While it is common in French to speak of “les études décoloniales” (sometimes referred to as la pensée décoloniale or le camp décolonial), this generally refers to a more capacious discussion that centers on multiple intellectual traditions that offer a structural critique of colonization and its continued role in fashioning racist discourses and institutions in Europe […]In English, however, the decolonial turn has been articulated as a critique - or even rejection - of postcolonial studies (Mignolo, 2007).”  https://lnkd.in/e_svD5YP. I have no comments for this confusion. We are not talking about the generic decolonial. That is not our problem.