At a moment when the United States has recently kidnapped the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, assassinated the Iranian supreme leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei, is plotting regime change in Cuba, and is continuing to support genocide and colonial oppression in Palestine, the question of how to understand empire, capitalism, and possibilities for resistance is as pressing as ever. In a new article, I argue that any radical decolonization agenda must be aligned with critique of and resistance to contemporary oppression. I also posit that the most dominant form of decolonial theory – the one that is now pervasive across global North universities as well as many institutions across the global South – does not lend itself to such radical critique and resistance.
Today, “Eurocentrism” tends to be equated with the study of Europe or studies by Europeans, and the process of intellectual decolonization tends to be equated with elevating indigenous or global South voices and perspectives as well as the inclusion of case studies from the global South. When liberal institutions use the term ‘decolonization’, a very particular, arguably essentialising and epistemic-oriented, worldview is often underlying the approach taken. When academics use it, a particular understanding of a decolonial framework is very often assumed, if not explicit. In fact, the decolonial framework has become so prominent and dominant that it is difficult to present arguments about decolonization and Eurocentrism without being automatically associated with this specific decolonial tradition. The consumption of decolonial theory in the global North and beyond thus serves to water down the radical core of decolonization and anti-imperialist projects.
It was in the early 2000s that a large and diverse group of Latin American scholars formally organized themselves into the Modernity-Coloniality-Decoloniality (MCD) group. By the 2010s that tradition had started to become a misinterpreted artifact of consumption in Northern academia. This is not the first time global North audiences misinterpret, flatten and distort traditions that have primarily emerged in the global South. Just as the original debate about dependency theory became distorted to fit a global North audience’s worldview, rendering dependency theory ‘a strawman easy to destroy’, the debates about decolonisation and decoloniality have been shoehorned into the frameworks and politics of global North academia. As André Gunder Frank became the representative of dependency theory in the global North – papering over rich discussions and nuance within Latin America and beyond – the decolonial scholar Walter Mignolo has, arguably, to a large degree become the spokesperson for decolonisation efforts, representing a similar kind of distortion and simplification. And as with dependency theory, decolonial theory was also twisted to serve a political function for global North academia, which became increasingly concerned with discrimination, identity, epistemology, and critiques of grand structural narratives in the 2010s.
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