Latin American Decolonial Thought, or Making the Subaltern Speak

Abstract

The Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality (MCD) research program is a collective project associated with Latin America. In addition to a critique of Eurocentric “colonial modernity,” the project highlights non‐Eurocentric forms of knowing and being in the world. It also aims to foster alternative or decolonial thinking emerging from the lived colonial experiences of those situated “outside” Europe. This last is what MCD proponents claim differentiates it from postcolonial critiques of modernity with their emphasis on deconstruction. This review provides a brief but critical overview of the MCD project's parameters and claims. It makes a cautionary call to those tempted by “alternatives to modernity,” who might want to uncritically adopt alternative decolonial thinking. It concludes with a call for a closer and critical engagement with Latin American decolonial ideas and those they contest.

Decolonial education and geography: Beyond the 2017 Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers annual conference

“…I am also particularly connected to the MCD because it is the framework most often used by my research partners in Bolivia. While there are significant differences and disagreements within and between different strands of postcolonial, decolonial, and anti‐colonial thinking, these are beyond the scope of this brief review (for accounts of these differences, see Asher, ; Bhambra, ). In here, I see these approaches as parallel and focus on how geographers have taken debates about decoloniality up within the context of our discipline.…”

Interventions: Bringing the decolonial to political geography

“…This set of writings, while launching an intervention in political geography also provides a platform to critique and reimagine decolonial theory through a geographic lens. While decolonial approaches provide an arena to redirect our thinking, Asher (2013) argues that it does so via conflating the theoretical and the political, which undermines the project. Moreover, the writings in decolonial scholarship are in many cases populated by a heterosexual and heteronormative male gaze (Mendoza, 2015, p. 100; see also: Ramírez's contribution here), sidelining the position of other genders.…”

Mainstreaming geography's decolonial imperative

“…Perhaps the key difference then between postcolonial theory and decoloniality scholarship, at least as some decolonial scholars have it, is that the decolonial shift is a project of de‐linking, whereas postcolonial theory is a project of scholarly transformation within the academy (Asher , 835).…”

“…Decolonial scholarship thus looks toward the academy's outside for the practical and methodological decolonisation of theoretical modernity. It looks to ‘Indigenous’ and ‘southern’ thinkers for epistemic perspectives and cosmologies heretofore obscured by Eurocentric rationality (Asher , 835), just as it interrogates the coloniality of the representational containment of thinkers via the very adjectival prefixes ‘Indigenous’ and ‘southern’.…”

“…Indeed, Spivak has been persistent and insistent about this tension, such that her 1999 book is explicitly tabled as A critique of postcolonial reason (added emphasis), a title that implies the necessary and perennial movement toward ever‐more‐equitable conjunctures. Furthermore, as Kiran Asher (, 839) writes, it is not as if the double bind does not impinge on decolonial scholarship itself. Its authors seem to want to disavow the institutionalisation of their own work as theoretical paradigm, yet Mignolo and co. persistently fall into the trap of equating their political aims with theory.…”