Coloniality of Power: A short story of a concept

Coloniality as a concept was born out of various closures in the debates and praxis of several projects: liberation theology, Marxism, dependency theory, and World System theory, particularly in Latin America. Historically, the politics of the Cold War and the failures of political decolonization marked not only the emergence of decolonial theory but also all post-colonial discourses and projects of liberation, especially in their nationalist and Marxian programs.1 Decoloniality thus has a bold political and epistemic endeavor: rehistorising and thus reconceptualizing World History beyond the repetition of failures of these different projects and, first and foremost, beyond various forms of Eurocentrism. The aim is to bring about a livable change in the lives of human beings by giving rise to various future possibilities and potentialities of building up histories animated by creative thinking and praxis embedded in the local histories of Latin America and different regions of the Global South. Against the different forms of amnesia imposed by colonialism on the colonized mind, the theory of coloniality engenders something like a disruptive re-origination as an imperative task. Abandoning the linear temporalities and colonial narratives of modernity, the task of re-origination is to reconnect and disconnect with the histories of the Global Souths to construct new futures without colonial relations. This is what the theory of coloniality of power attempts to achieve, enacting a paradigm shift in understanding world history since 1492 (Segato 2022: 22). The concept was first coined by the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano and has been deployed and expanded by various decolonial thinkers like Walter Mignolo, Ramón Grosfoguel and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, among others.2 In this entry, I briefly lay out some tenets of this concept as theorized by some decolonial thinkers, but I mainly draw on Quijano’s conceptualization because it is foundational not only in initiating the coloniality/modernity group but also in rethinking a wide range of academic disciplines.

The theory of coloniality in the works of Quijano is formulated in relation to power and knowledge. 3 He challenges the story of the emergence of colonialism and modernity, which is conventionally located in the 18th and 19th centuries. Quijano offers a different point of emergence.4 Constitutive of the emergence of the modern world system of colonialism and capitalism, or what is sometimes referred to as the first modernity, is the European colonialism of America. The formative historical moment is 1492, decisive in the history of coloniality in which the Reconquista meant the end of Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula, the expulsion or forced conversion of Muslims and Jews, and the so-called discovery of America. The concept of “race” has its roots in this history, where Muslims and Jews posed as prototypical others before the colonial encounter with the inhabitants of the Americas. The world system was enacted in the 16th century, which witnessed the debates of conquest and colonization of the Americas and the Debates of Valladolid on the rights of people. This century was formative in constructing Europe’s self-image through creating its other, long before the second wave of colonialism in the 18th and 19th centuries. Thus, the emergence of the capitalist world system was at once a world racial system generating matrix and patterns of social and cultural classifications based on Europe’s conceptualization of herself as rational and modern whose knowledge is universal by birth while at the same time negating and subalternizing other humans and their geographies as irrational, primitive, and so on.5

Race is then the sorting tool of coloniality in Quijano’s thinking, shifting away from centering class as the organizing principle or the master tool of analysis. But this does not mean that class as a category is completely abandoned in his formulation; rather, it is subsumed in his thinking of the “racial, social classification” of humans and their cultures, languages, and labors. The class rather functions within a racial, social classification in which the dominant classes in Euro-America and in the regions of their allies in the Global South remain the primary beneficiaries of the colonial world system. In this sense, coloniality has a class dimension, and this is a significant reminder to avoid sweeping generalizations. This system of classification was produced by colonial Europe and made possible through its colonial enterprise. Modernity itself is a by-product of this history. Quijano: “coloniality of power is based upon ‘racial’ social classification of the world population under Eurocentered world power. But coloniality of power is not exhausted in the problem of 'racist' social relations. It pervaded and modulated the basic instances of the eurocentered capitalist colonial/modern world power to become the cornerstone of this coloniality of power” (Quijano 2007a: 171). The racial classification was central to a world capitalist system in which Europe became the geopolitical site of controlling labor, laborers, resources, and products, a global structure in which “the new historical identities produced on the foundation of the idea of race in the new global structure of the control of labor were associated with social roles and geohistorical places” (Quijano 2000: 536). Coloniality of power then becomes at once coloniality of being (Maldonado-Torres 2007; See also Wynter 2003; Maldonado-Torres 2008; 2014a; Gordon 1995; Quijano 2007a).  Maldonado-Torres argues that racial/colonial classifications are also predicated on “religion” as a sorting and classifying category central to the coloniality of being and the colonial world system in general (Maldonado-Torres 2014a; 2014b; 2017). Maldonando-Torres: “The general skepticism about the full humanity of the indigenous peoples led Europeans to explain cultural differences on the basis of alleged differences in the degree of humanity. That is to say, cultural difference came to be crossed-over or over-determined by racial and colonial difference [. . .]. This way of understanding cultural production and intersubjective relations would survive the formal elimination of colonialism, and would continue to define relations among people in the modern world up to the present. Racism, then, is from this point of view a central element in the formation of the modern/colonial world” (Maldonado-Torres, 2014b: 653). Coloniality of being names the ideologies and practices of a racist/colonial imperial project that renders the lives of others disposable and killable by putting their humanity into permanent suspicion and thus justifies their annihilation with impunity through reactivating the barbarism and civilization divide. Iskander Abbasi recently calls into question the erasure of Islamophobia and the tropes and problematics of “the Muslim Question” as well as “the Dalit Question” from thinking coloniality of being [13].

Unlike the relation of direct socio-political and cultural domination exercised on the conquered nations through “colonialism” as a historical and real experience, coloniality signifies the aftereffects, the duress of this “Eurocentered colonialism”. This duress is a pattern of power that generates hierarchical social discriminations through which human populations are anthropologically classified, codified, and ranked in religious, racial, ethnic, or national terms, depending on the agents and populations involved (Quijano 2007a: 168). As Syed Farid Alatas aptly noted, colonialism and coloniality should be thought of as coexistent.6 The differentiation that is established between colonialism and coloniality in Quijano’s work is that of discontinuous continuity, not of a total rupture, in the sense that the colonial pattern of racial classification no longer needs direct political and economic domination to be enacted through establishing the colonial difference. These social and cultural classifications and categories of human beings have been supplemented by and enframed into a story of progress and science in which these classifications are assumed as “objective” and “scientific.” What Quijano calls social classification is expanded to the epistemic and cultural in Walter Mignolo’s reading: “Social classification, for Quijano, facilitates creating hierarchies and devaluing who/what doesn’t fit (for whatever and multiple reasons) the scheme of who is classifying and ranking. In the sixteenth century, purity of blood and Christian religion were the two basic criteria for valuation: the first was clearly racial, the second, theological. Colonial and imperial differences unfolded, transformed, and grew out of these basic classifications” (Mignolo and Walsh 2018: 181).

The old classifications of superiority and inferiority that defined the relation between the dominated and the dominator became structural and biological in European colonialism and, one would say, naturalized relations of superiority and inferiority. This is the defining feature of European colonialism, according to Quijano. Building on Quijano, Mignolo further argues that the colonial matrix of power “became the foundation of capitalism . . . and capitalism, as the engine of the system that bears the name of ‘neo-liberalism’, a conservative and violent narrative advancing war and free trade to expand the Western world, continues to reproduce the colonial matrix of power” (Mignolo 2007: 483). Maria Lugones, moreover, brings gender into the frame of coloniality that regulates almost all domains of human life (Lugones 2007; 2021).

 The question of epistemology and knowledge generation is entangled with the colonial matrix of power and its theologies. As Mignolo puts it, “The control of knowledge in Western Christendom belonged to Western Christian men, which meant the world would be conceived only from the perspective of Western Christian men” (Mignolo, 2007: 478 original emphases). Ramón Grosfoguel maps out the transition from the theopolitics to the geopolitics of knowledge that occurred when Descartes replaced God “with (Western) Man as the foundation of knowledge in European Modern times”(Grosfoguel 2010: 68)  and hence All-knowing god as a source of knowledge was replaced by an all-knowing autonomous western Man who can analyze the world since he becomes the center and source of all knowledge. Consequently, “[u]niversal Truth beyond time and space, privilege access to the laws of the Universe, and the capacity to produce scientific knowledge and theory is now placed in the mind of Western man” who, because of the decoupling the mind from body and nature, can claim a “non-situated, universal, God-eyed view knowledge” (Grosfoguel 2010: 68). This development was made possible through the rupture established by Europe itself as humanitas defined through the epistemic privilege of dominating European knowledge systems that produce their exteriority7: the rest of the world as Anthropos as the radically different rendered as such by, “the epistemic colonial difference” (Mignolo 2011: 85). The anthropos as fallen outside “humanity” assumed different names depending on the times and places and the political agents.  In Euro-modern history, there is a complicity between the rational and racial classifications. Grosfoguel: “The social, economic, political and historical conditions of possibility for the subject to assume the arrogance of becoming a God-like and put himself as the foundation of all Truthful knowledge of the world was the Imperial Being, that is, the subjectivity of those who are at the centre of the world because they have already conquered it” (Grosfoguel 2010: 69).

Thus, the dominance of European epistemologies is weaved within webs of hierarchies of languages, knowledges, and peoples maintained by epistemic coloniality that monopolizes on a global scale the parameter of what can be qualified or disqualified as knowledge. It is worthwhile to point to the durability of the coloniality of secularity in the politics of knowledge not only within postcolonial but also within decolonial approaches (Maldonado-Torres 2021; Vizcaíno 2021). Mignolo, Grosfoguel and Maldonado-Torres’s elaborations on the question of the coloniality of European knowledge owe so much to Quijano’s critique.

 The target of Quijano’s critique is the foundational presuppositions of modern/rational knowledge. The conjunction of colonialism (and early capitalism) and the elaboration of the paradigm of modern/rational knowledge is not accidental. Quijano dwells on the question of Western knowledge production through his critique of the foundational presuppositions with regard to the concept of the subject, the object of knowledge, and the relation between them. For him, the individualistic isolated and ‘autonomous’ subject of the cartesian cogito, like all half-truths, falsifies the problem by denying or concealing the relation of the subject to the formative intersubjective relations and social totality within which the subject is located.  This subject is presented as constituting themselves by themselves and is capable of reflection. This may be a momentary possibility, but it becomes the unchanging hubris and “universal” claim of the knowing subject.

Second, Quijano challenges the conception of the object as being identical in itself and constituted of “properties” that define it and simultaneously put it in relation to other objects. In this understanding, there is a radical difference between the subject and the object based on their very nature.  For Quijano, this exteriority of the relations between “subject” and “object,” based on differences in nature, is an arbitrary exacerbation of differences since current research leads rather to the discovery that there is a deeper structure of communication in the universe. While Quijano recognizes that the conception of the autonomous subject had been a moment of liberation within societies that defined and fixed the subject within already existing hierarchies and social imaginaries, this conception is no longer attainable. Though differentiated human subjectivity is real, it cannot exist in itself and for itself. This subjectivity is simply differentiated but not isolated from the intersubjective relations and the social imaginaries in which one is located.

Consequently, when it comes to the question of knowledge production, knowledge is an intersubjective relation to something and cannot be a relation between an individualistic, autonomous subject and an object of knowledge that is radically external to it. Though no form of knowledge is conceivable outside the intersubjectivity and social totality, European knowledge production is barely seen as tied to its local historical and social formations. This is made possible through the concealment of the local origin of her knowledge within the rhetoric of Modernity and “the rhetoric of universality” (Mignolo 2007: 463). Thus, the divide between the knowing subject and the object to be known is all the more problematic for the subject “exists as a differentiated part, but not as separated, of an intersubjectivity or intersubjective dimension of social relationship” (Quijano 2007a: 173). Quijano instead argues to see knowledge in relational terms: as “a relation between people for the purpose of something” (Quijano 2007a: 173).  As I indicated elsewhere (Al-Zayed 2022), this invites the usually uneasy questions in the epistemological performances: Why do I want to know what I want to know, and for what/whom is this knowledge generated?

If these are some of the tenets of coloniality as a concept, in what sense, then, Quijano’s coloniality engenders a paradigm shift? Given the history within which Quijano thought of the problems of Latin America, it seems that for him, the paradigm through which the problems are conceived proved to be unsatisfactory. These problems remained unresolved precisely because they were misconstrued and misconceived, and consequently, the approaches to them and the answers offered were nugatory. Thus, a new paradigm becomes a necessity, and a new language and new thinking are needed to redefine and address these problems. It is in this sense one should think of him abandoning class as a sole category of analysis and thinking with race. Likewise, abandoning the narrative of European modernity that tells about itself. However, in both cases, this does not mean completely leaving out the tools and vocabulary of the “old” paradigm. It is more a matter of reordering and redefinition within a new language and paradigm, and the latter is called by many decolonial thinkers as coloniality/modernity.

Coloniality is the cryptogram of modernity, a totality that negates plurality and radical alterity. It produces hierarchies as inequalities in the forms of exploitation, discrimination, and domination.  This is one of the most decisive features of coloniality, the materialization of which can be seen in the way majoritarian societies and states deal with the different and the plural. In this sense, the nation-state is one of the obvious concretizations of coloniality that could not be dethroned even in the political projects of decolonization and other liberation movements worldwide, not to mention “progressive movements” in the Global North. Quijano thinks that the nation-state has been at the center or even a telos of various projects of liberation, including that of the Left.  He deems this attitude Eurocentric and bound to fail  (Quijano 2002). Decolonization, in effect, requires a difficult, enormous task: to imagine and work out a liberatory project beyond the nation-state and the epistemic orders of coloniality.