Decolonization of the Mind

by Aditya Nigam, Kafila

Our modernity is incomplete, our secularism impure, our democracy immature, our development  arrested and our capitalism retarded: ask anyone trained in the social sciences, economics in particular, about what ails India today and you can be sure of getting one or all of these answers. And you can go on adding to the list of more and more things ‘we’ lack. We did not have ‘history’, we do not have social sciences – and of course, we do not have theory/ philosophy.

Everything, in other words, is about our ‘backwardness’ and our need to catch up with the West. And seen through the lens of social science, most of the world looks like this – living ‘inauthentic’ lives, always ever in the ‘waiting room of history’, to steal historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s suggestive phrase.

Global Coloniality and the Decolonial Option

Madina V. Tlostanova & Walter D. Mignolo, 2009

In the title of this article we offer two concepts by means of which it is possible to rethink modernity and its darker side — coloniality - on a global scale, not only historically but also synchronously. These concepts also allow us to formulate the epistemic, political and ethical basis of global decolonial options to the existing world order, which we all witness or take part in today. The concept of global coloniality will enable us to go beyond the British/US imperial formations and the forgotten Spanish empire and consider the enormous importance of the surfacing of the Atlantic economy (the west coast of Africa, the west coast of Europe and the east coast of all the Americas), which displaced the weight that the Mediterranean had had for the Western confines of the world until 1500. We wish also to take into account the Russian revolution and the split of the Enlightenment project into two modernities (the liberal and the socialist). Finally, we will turn to consider the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent rogue of today’s neo-liberalism, which has enabled the emergence of what we describe here as polycentric world order.

Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity

Reviewed by Felipe Martínez-Pinzón

Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. 360 pages. $84.95 cloth, $23.95 paper.

One of the most enduring images in Against War is from another book, Enrique Dussel’s The Invention of the Americas. It is of an event that happens in privacy, behind the scenes of History: Hernán Cortés learns from Moctezuma’s envoys that the indigenous inhabitants take him to be God. Alone, and then surrounded by his men, Cortés acknowledges the power bestowed on him by those very words that constitute him. This scene of solitude is also one in which unmistakable and egotistical grandeur works as self-fashioning. Even more so than for Dussel himself, it serves Maldonado-Torres as an occasion to reflect on the birth of modern subjectivity as a consciousness born out of the radical unevenness between the European and the native. Far from Spain, freed from the all-seeing gaze of the King, Cortés can truly believe himself to be God.