In the jumble that passes for public debate in France, the term
"decolonial" has imposed itself over the past decade to the point ofbecoming, for conservatives, a convenient scarecrow, waved to disqualify
the slightest challenge to the established order. Conversely, in the
eyes of many progressives, it is more of a rallying banner that covers
authentically emancipatory quests but also much more questionable
enterprises. ---- The Manicheism inherent in intellectual controversies,
the rise of an uninhibited extreme right, and the sectarianism of a
certain radical left have until now prevented a clarification that is
not only salutary but above all essential in this reactionary period.
This is why we should welcome the publication of Critique de la raison
décoloniale. Sur une contre-révolution intellectuelle (Paris,
L'échappée, 2024).
This collective work, translated from Spanish by the journalist Mikaël
Faujour and the essayist Pierre Madelin, brings together, for the most
part, texts from the book coordinated by the researcher Gaya Makaran and
the sociologist Pierre Gaussens, Piel blanca, máscaras negras. Crítica
de la razón decolonial (México, Bajo Tierra AC, 2020) - with the
exception of the contributions deemed "too anchored in Latin American
realities" - as well as an article by the academic Andrea Barriga taken
from the collection edited by the sociologist Enrique de La Garza Toledo
(1947-1921), Crítica de la razón neocolonial (Buenos Aires, Clasco, 2021).
Their common origin is not by chance. Indeed, if in the French language
the adjective "decolonial" could be used in the middle of the 20th
century as a synonym for "anticolonial", its meaning evolved over the
following decades, as decolonial studies, developed by Latin American
academics, spread to the North American and European camps. And this, at
the risk of many ambiguities, as the sociologist Stéphane Dufoix
mentions in the essay Décolonial (Paris, Anamosa, 2023):
"Among the dangers to be avoided, the most obvious is undoubtedly the
belief that the same word means the same thing, that it has the same
definition and the same uses according to the spaces in which it
circulates, and according to the language in which it circulates. The
unbearable lightness of letters often hides, under its uniformity,
abysses of difference which make understanding particularly delicate and
produce misunderstandings as well as anathemas."
Among the best-known theorists of this movement are the philosopher
Enrique Dussel (1934-2023), the sociologist Ramón Grosfoguel, the
anthropologist Arturo Escobar and the semiologist Walter D. Mignolo.
However, the sociologist Aníbal Quijano (1928-2018), to whom we owe the
concept of "coloniality", occupies a special place within this
intellectual family, as researcher Claude Bourguignon Rougier points out
in the article she devotes to the notion of "coloniality of power" for
the work published under her direction, Un dictionnaire décolonial
(Québec, Éditions science et bien commun, 2021):
"Coloniality is the main beam of the decolonial theoretical edifice. The
term designates, beyond the political superstructures that were those of
Spanish colonization, a certain type of social relationship based on
premises that would survive the wars of independence of the 19th
century: the division of the world and of work based on a racial
hierarchy and the diffusion of a relationship to knowledge and
understanding based on the principles of a European rationality that
would condemn and destroy other forms of knowledge and understanding. It
is therefore not what remains of colonialism nor what succeeds
colonialism, but the other face of the modern world."
However, such conceptions are not without posing some problems for
consistent materialists, attached to the critique of colonialism,
without subscribing to the confusionist discourses that claim to combat
it. In this regard, the professor of comparative literature Neil Larsen
published in 2022 in the Marxist journal Catalyst a brilliant review of
Walter D. Mignolo's work, The Politics of Decolonial Investigations
(Durham, Duke University Press, 2021), under the title "The Jargon of
Decoloniality", in reference to the book by the philosopher Theodor W.
Adorno (1903-1969), Der Jargon der Eigentlichkeit. Zur deutschen
Ideologie (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1964) - Jargon de
l'authentification. De l'idée allemande (Paris, Payot, 1989).
Reprinted in 2023 by the socialist magazine Jacobin and translated into
French the following year in the journal Jaggernaut, the article
highlights the fact that such use of decolonial theory can lead to
recycling the less attractive aspects of "identity politics," but also,
through its obscure jargon, to dehistoricizing and culturalizing
colonialism, or even to supporting authoritarian regimes in the Global
South. The arguments put forward in this left-wing critique-not to be
confused with the right-wing denigration-echo those developed in the
collection Critique de la raison décoloniale.
In an introductory text entitled for the occasion "White Skin, Black
Masks" - the original title being "Autopsia de una impostura
intelectual" - Pierre Gaussens and Gaya Makaran place their approach in
the wake of the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), whose classic
Black Skin, White Masks (Paris, Le Seuil, 1952) they quote as an
epigraph, in order to explain their point:
"If we thus evoke the spirit of Fanon as a preamble to a critique of
decolonial studies, it is because we wish to draw on his active,
critical, reflexive and antiessentialist anticolonialism, to oppose what
we consider to be a distortion of his legacy by a certain intellectual
fashion. And if we mobilize the image of masks, it is also to highlight
the problem of imposture and the ventriloquist representation of
otherness, of "others". Our reflection focuses on the imprint left by
colonialism in the social structures of domination in Latin America, but
instead of erecting skin and its color as a source of (de)legitimization
of the people who express themselves, we will more honestly take the
side of not usurping any identity, in order to unmask by contrast the
academic discourses that claim to speak in the name of the subaltern."
This emphatic homage to Fanon is in fact a response to the Spanish
translation of his aforementioned work - Piel negra, máscaras blancas
(Madrid, 2009) - accompanied by several articles by decolonial
theorists, such as Ramón Grosfoguel, Walter D. Mignolo, as well as the
philosophers Nelson Maldonado-Torres and Sylvia Wynter. However, Pierre
Gaussens and Gaya Makaran criticize these authors for wanting to
"inscribe Fanon's legacy in their own intellectual current, without
respecting his autonomy or the historical and theoretical circumstances
in which his work appeared."
While they recognize the diversity of "decolonial studies," Pierre
Gaussens and Gaya Makaran use this term to designate an original matrix,
namely the Modernidad/Colonialidad group formed at the beginning of our
century by Latin American intellectuals who reformulated, in their own
way, earlier debates marked by liberation theology, dependency theory,
postmodernity, subaltern studies, or the "world-system" theory developed
by sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein (1930-2019). This disparate group,
however, is based on a central postulate:
"Latin America has not entered a postcolonial period, and the processes
of decolonization of Latin American societies have remained unfinished.
Despite the official end of colonization, colonial social relations
would continue to be reproduced there according to veiled patterns of
domination."
Thus, decolonial studies draw the following principle as a consequence:
"The structures of long-term colonial domination, formed in 1492,
continue to reproduce themselves, (...) they constitute a logic of
global power born with capitalist modernity, but which extends to our
times to perpetuate the exploitation and domination of Latin American
societies."
It is therefore this form of global power that the term "coloniality"
designates, still associated with the Eurocentrism of knowledge, with
social hierarchies, in particular with regard to racism. This leads in
particular, in the works resulting from this current, to granting a
preeminent role to the notion of "race". As a perspective, these
theorists propose to break with "coloniality", to engage in the path of
decolonization, which "must involve a radical critique of the
epistemological foundations of Eurocentrism."
For their part, Pierre Gaussens and Gaya Makaran invite us to "debate
the theoretical core of decolonial studies, their fragilities and the
essentialist dangers they entail". Without denying "the current vigor of
colonialism" or confining ourselves to a "typical exercise of
intellectual distinction", the coordinators of Piel blanca, máscaras
negras consider it necessary to distinguish decolonial studies "from a
vast field of anticolonial reflection and action" - which includes,
according to them, postcolonial studies, subaltern studies, the work of
the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, etc. - but especially from
"the revolutionary anticolonialism of the 19th and 20th centuries,
whether it be the intellectual movement of negritude (...) or Latin
American critical thought (...) which decolonial studies nevertheless
claim without scruple."
Several clarifications are necessary to the extent that we must mention
the Marxist critique of postcolonial and subaltern studies undertaken,
among others, by the sociologist Vivek Chibber, with his now classic
work, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (New York, Verso,
2013) - La théorie postcoloniale et le spectre du capital (Toulouse,
L'Asymétrie, 2018). In the same vein, it seems difficult to accept to
assimilate, en bloc, Negritude to revolutionary anticolonialism,
especially since this literary movement of the last century was not
without raising problems similar to those posed by decolonial studies
today. To be convinced of this, one only has to read the article by the
co-founder of the African Democratic Rally, Gabriel d'Arboussier
(1908-1976), published in 1949 in La Nouvelle Critique - a journal
published under the control of the French Communist Party - under the
title "A dangerous mystification: The theory of negritude". Finally, as
regards the author of Black Skin, White Masks, we can only refer to the
excellent biography devoted to him by the essayist Adam Shatz, The
Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon (New York,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024) - Frantz Fanon. Une vie en révolutions
(Paris, La Découverte, 2024).
These reservations having been made, we can add that Pierre Gaussens and
Gaya Makaran are honest enough to cite earlier critiques, such as the
work of the sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Ch'ixinakax utxiwa.
Una reflexión sobre prácticas y discursos descolonizadores (Buenos
Aires, Tinta Limón, 2010) - a reference absent from the biographical
notice devoted to him by Claude Bourguignon Rougier in Un dictionnaire
décolonial.
Among the other texts that make up Critique of Decolonial Reason, we
would like to salute the contribution of the researcher Daniel Inclán,
who formulates a "critique of the philosophy of history that underlies
the decolonial turn." Indeed, the presuppositions of the theorists of
this movement are based "on a simplification of the history of
modernity, and especially of the role played in it by what is so lightly
called Europe." This is why his text refuses to endorse "the simplistic
renunciation of dialectics, which leads to essentializing certain
realities and mechanically explaining all the phenomena that result from
them."
For his part, the philosopher Rodrigo Castro Orellana draws on Michel
Foucault (1926-1984) to discuss certain concepts used by decolonial
theorists - such as the "colonial difference", "border thinking", the
"other paradigm" - in order to better invite us to "renounce a set of
presuppositions that have hindered any understanding going beyond
dichotomies such as domination/liberation, friend/enemy or
executioner/victim. This is the only way to open up a horizon of common
reflection."
For his part, the philosopher Martín Cortés highlights the fact that
Marxism, "partly recovered by these currents", has not only "lost its
centrality" and finds itself "increasingly classified among the
Eurocentric theories that would threaten, by their conceptual rigidity,
the richness of Latin American culture." In contrast to such a vision of
things, it is rather a question of taking into consideration the
innumerable "contributions of Latin American Marxism to the great
questions related to emancipation."
As we can see, the critique of decolonial studies - especially of its
best-known authors - at least as outlined in the contributions to this
collection, refers to diverse and even contradictory theoretical
references. But this is not the main flaw of this work, since the object
of the critique is itself marked by the seal of heterogeneity despite
its common matrix.
While we may regret that not all the chapters of Piel blanca, máscaras
negras have been translated into French, the fact remains that Critique
de la raison décoloniale happily joins the library of those who seek to
dispel misunderstandings - without sectarianism -, overcome
contradictions - without dogmatism - and above all get out of the rut we
are in, without giving in to the pressures of reactionaries or the
opportunism of progressives.
Yesterday as today, revolutionaries remain on a ridge line. If
colonialism and its specters still weigh on the conscience of many of
our contemporaries - from the North to the South, from the East to the
West -, we must therefore rise to the challenges by refusing a world
based on oppression and exploitation. It is certainly on the terrain of
social struggles and internationalism in action that the path to
emancipation will be found.
Indeed, intellectual fashions pass, labels change, but the fundamental
problems posed to humanity remain. This is also why we should avoid
getting lost in sterile controversies, in order to better tackle,
collectively, giving back all their meaning to the ideals of liberty and
equality, so debased by the predatory bourgeoisie.
Nedjib Sidi Moussa
December 23, 2024
P.S.
This text, initially planned for Courant Alternatif No. 346 of January
2025, will not be able to appear there due to lack of space. We are
therefore publishing it on the site
title attached documents
Critique of Decolonial Reason (PDF - 94.2 kio)
http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/IMG/pdf/recension_critique_de_la_raison_de_coloniale.pdf
the text in pdf format
http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4327
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