Coloniality

Coloniality was instituted during European colonialism (including settler colonialism and ongoing colonialism) and continues to be maintained today through long-standing patterns of power. Maldonado-Torres writes that "coloniality survives colonialism" (2007, p. 234).

Brendane & Alyssa of the podcast Zora's Daughters summarize coloniality as "the logic, the mindset, and the intersections of power created by colonization and settler colonialism....So this structure...is abstract, but has, of course, actual factual consequences" (James & Tynes, 2022).

Ndlovu-Gatsheni describes coloniality as "an invisible power structure, an epochal condition, and epistemological design, which lies at the center of the present Euro-North American-centric modern world." He writes that race is "at the center of coloniality" and is "an organizing principle that not only hierarchized human beings according to racial ontological densities but also sustains asymmetrical global power relations and a singular Euro-North American-centric epistemology that claims to be universal, disembodied, truthful, secular, and scientific" (2015, p. 488).

Coloniality of Being

Coloniality of being is concerned with the “lived experience of colonization and its impact on language” (Maldonado-Torres, 2007, p. 242). European colonizers did not see colonized people as human, and this has ongoing tangible effects on their lives.

Coloniality of Knowledge

Coloniality of knowledge questions who produces knowledge and for what purposes. Dominant Eurocentric knowledge systems are applied universally and have been used to other, silence, and oppress other non-European forms of knowledge production.

Coloniality of Power

The coloniality of power is a way of thinking about global power over the last 500 years since 1492, and how coloniality continues to shape the world despite the official end of colonialism. “Europe and the Europeans constituted themselves as the center of the capitalist economy” and thus as the center of power (Quijano, 2000, p. 539). This power is founded on exploitation and oppression.

Decoloniality

Brendane & Alyssa of the podcast Zora's Daughters describe decoloniality as “an orientation of thought that allows us to unlearn and relearn the world outside of white supremacy, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism...[It] aims to make visible the colonial logics that underpin knowledge, practice, history, identity, and beliefs, and also to revalorize the things that have been stolen and discredited by those logics” (James & Tynes, 2022)

Decoloniality theorists argue that while de jure colonization may have ended in much of the world, its underpinning ideologies, hierarchies, and structures continue to shape contemporary social relations and experiences in the form of “coloniality” in both exceptional and mundane ways.

Decoloniality “means working toward a vision of human life that is not dependent upon or structured by the forced imposition of one ideal of society over those that differ” (Mignolo, 2007, p. 459).

Ndlovu-Gatsheni defines decoloniality as "an epistemological and political movement: and "a necessary liberatory language of the future for Africa" that is "born out of a realization that the modern world is an asymmetrical world order that is sustained not only by colonial matrices of power but also by pedagogies and epistemologies of equilibrium that continue to produce alienated Africans that are socialized into hating Africa that produced them and liking Europe and America that reject them" (2015, pp. 485, 489).

Decolonization

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui emphasizes praxis in her understanding of decolonization: "There can be no discourse of decolonization, no theory of decolonization, without a decolonizing practice" (2012, p. 100).

References

James, A. A., & Tynes, B. A. (2022, February 2). S2 E9: Separate But Equal Month. Zora’s Daughters. https://zorasdaughters.com/episodes/separate-but-equal-month/

Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007). On the coloniality of being. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 240–270. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162548

Mignolo, W. D. (2007). Delinking. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 449–514. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162647

Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. J. (2015). Decoloniality as the Future of Africa: Decoloniality, Africa, Power, Knowledge, Being. History Compass, 13(10), 485–496. https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12264

Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America (M. Ennis, Trans.). Nepantla: Views from South, 1(3), 533–580.

Rivera Cusicanqui, S. (2012). Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization. South Atlantic Quarterly, 111(1), 95–109. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-1472612