Walter D. Mignolo

Catherine E. Walsh

Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh introduce the concept of decoloniality by providing a theoretical overview and discussing concrete examples of decolonial projects in action.

Concepts, Analytics, Praxis

On Decoloniality

Laurence Favre

Furthermore, the series seeks to interrupt the idea of dislocated, disem- bodied, and disengaged abstraction, and to disobey the universal signifier that is the rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality, and the West's global model. For us, the pluriversal opens rather than closes the geographies and spheres of decolonial thinking and doing. It opens up coexisting temporali- ties kept hostage by the Western idea of time and the belief that there is one single temporality: Western-imagined fictional temporality. Moreover, it con- nects and brings together in relation-as both pluri- and interversalslocal histories, subjectivities, knowledges, narratives, and struggles against the modern/colonial order and for an otherwise. This is the understanding and project of pluriversal and interversal decoloniality that orients the series and this introductory book. 

Once the colonial matrix of power is no longer managed and controlled by the so-called West, it impinges on and transforms all aspects of life, par- ticularly with regard to two interrelated spheres: (a) the coloniality of po- litical, economic, and military power (interstate relations), and (b) the co- loniality of the three pillars of being in the world: racism, sexism, and the naturalization of life and the permanent regeneration of the living (e.g., the invention of the concept of nature).

The answer to the question "What does it mean to decolonize?" cannot be an abstract univer. sal. It has to be answered by looking at other W questions: Who is doing it, where, why, and how?

Representing is a toxic word in the vocabulary of modernity and modern epistemology. Why? Because representation presupposes a constituted world or reality that is somehow represented and then different schools or people in daily life provide different interpretations of something that is objective and real. If the decolonial is argued as an option, it is because life is lived among options, and options are built by people and institutions according to their own assumptions and interests. Interests are not bad in and of themselves: being interested and acting in favor of conviviality, harmony, creativity, and plenitude are some of the ideals and interests that decoloniality promotes; being aware, nonetheless, that this is not the direction that states, corporations, finances are taking and mass media promoting. ocolonial.

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