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Latin American Decolonial Thought, or Making

the Subaltern Speak
Kiran Asher1,2*
1
Clark University
2
CIFOR

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 empha-
sis on deconstruction. This review provides a brief but critical overview of the MCD projects 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 engage-
ment with Latin American decolonial ideas and those they contest.

In June 1995, I was in Jurubir, a small village along the Pacic coast of Colombia. I was there as
part of a World Wildlife Fund project concerned with incorporating a gender component
into conservation programs. Then as now, this invariably translated into including women,
or soliciting womens participation, notwithstanding feminist work on the multiple dimensions
of gender and gendered relations of power. I was walking around the village to invite people to
come to a gender workshop later that afternoon. Jurubir was predominantly Afro-
Colombian, but there were a few indigenous families living there also. It was one such Ember
woman that I met that day. Discounting differences in my attire and childless status, I could well
have been her double. She looked at me curiously and asked me what river I was from and who
I was visiting in the village. Being from Bombay, India, I replied that I was from a large city
along an ocean on the other side of the world. Indeed, Christopher Columbus had been looking
for my people and our lands. But he got lost. He reached the Americas but called the people he
met Indians. Despite the distance then, we were related: perhaps not by blood but by colonial
misadventures and misrecognition of difference. Race, place, and gender are central and visible
in this narrative.
Race and place, if not gender, are also at the analytical and political heart of the modernity/
coloniality/decoloniality (MCD) project. Based on my reading of some of its key publications
(discussed and cited below), the following premises undergird the projects narrative:
1 The conquest of the Americas by Europe and the subsequent racialized colonial practices
constituted the modern world-system.
2 But Eurocentric modernity obscures the specicities of race and place, and invisibilized
other epistemes to masquerade as universal and total.
3 The coloniality of power ensures the expansion and continuation of this geopolitics of
knowledge production, which dominates disciplinary thinking about politics, economics,
society, and culture.

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4 For the sake of humans and nature, it is imperative to come up with alternatives to the
exploitative and destructive practices of colonial modernity.
5 Such decolonial alternatives or non-Eurocentric forms of knowing and being in the
world can emerge from the different wisdom and experiences of those who have been on
the borders of colonial modernity.
6 Latin America and the past and present experiences of Latin Americans are a key, though
not the only, loci of enunciation for decolonial thinking.
The MCD collective acknowledges some kinship with postcolonial critiques of modernity.
However, they differentiate their work from postcolonial studies and the metropolitan knowl-
edge of South Asian, African, and Middle Eastern scholars on three main grounds:
1 That unlike postcolonial scholars, they consider the Conquest of the Americas and its
formative role in modernity.
2 That they aim to go beyond critique and deconstruction to foster decolonial thinking.
3 That their critiques and proposals of liberation emerge from the cosmovisions of exploited
and marginal groups rather than from privileged institutions of higher learning.
In what follows, I offer an overview of the MCD projects genealogy and key themes by
reviewing some recent English publications by the collectives principal members.1 I then out-
line how decolonial thinking and subaltern knowledges are posited as the basis for alternatives to
capitalist globalization and other modern ills. I contend that these alternatives bear close resem-
blance to earlier postdevelopment proposals (especially Escobar 1995) and suffer from the same
shortcomings. Among others, decolonial thinking conates theoretical and political questions,
and its engagement with both is insufciently critical. Nevertheless, its appeal and a (re) turn
to nativist positions will prove to be, I suspect, irresistible for many. I am afraid that attention
to the important concerns raised by the MCD collective may be lost in the resulting stampede
to dash past the posts. (Asher 2012a) I conclude with an invitation to those concerned with
race, representation, gender, and the future of the socio-natural world, particularly develop-
ment geographers, to engage in a close reading of the work of both my kinpostcolonialists
and decolonialists.

1. The Analytical and Political Parameters of the Modernity/Coloniality/Decolonial Projects Critique

of Modernity
Critical reections on modernity, its institutions, and its effects have abounded since its incep-
tion. Marx and his work informed many of these critiques, including those of colonialism,
which Santiago Castro-Gmez (2008) cites as Marxs blind spot. Since the 1960s, a new wave
of critiques of modernity, Marxism and colonialismmany marked by the prex posthave
emerged and proliferated. Among the many issues that this new wave of critical reections
opens up are questions about the origins and parameters of modernity and the modern world.
How previous anti-colonial and postcolonial theories including the work of the South Asian
Subaltern Studies collective (Guha 1997) relate to diverse Latin American colonial experiences is
the subject of much debate.2 Castro-Gmez, Fernando Coronil, and other contributors to the
volume Coloniality at Large edited by Moraa et al. (2008) give excellent reviews of these debates
and contextualize the work of the MCD group within them. Mignolo (2007a, 2008) contends
that the new critiques, including postmodernist, and postcolonial variants, emerge from
within the modernist project. The implication is that they remain bound to modernitys
Eurocentric perspectives even as they critique them. Edward Saids seminal work Orientalism
(1978) serves as a key case in point. Castro-Gmez (2008) notes that Said offers a corrective
to Marxs blind spot in drawing on Gramscian and Foucauldian insights to show that Europe

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constructed the Orient, and thus itself, through its discursive practices. However, Said is silent on
Latin American colonialisms foundational role in constituting Europe and giving rise to
Occidental thinking.
Coronil (2008) commends the challenge posed by the eld of postcolonial studies, viz:

to develop a bifocal perspective that allows one, on the one hand, to view colonialism as a funda-
mental process in the formation of the modern world without reducing history to colonialism as an all-
encompassing process, and on the other hand, to contest modernity and its Eurocentric forms of
knowledge without presuming to view history from a privileged epistemological standpoint. (p. 400)

But he rightly notes that the canonical anthologies and readers of postcolonial studies that
emerged in the 1990s make scant, if any, reference to Latin American colonial and anti-colonial
experiences and texts. Furthermore, they make no mention of the many Latin Americanists,
who have produced monumental critiques of colonialism during the same period as Said,
Bhabha, and Spivakfor example, Enrique Dussel, Anbal Quijano, and Walter Mignolo,
among others. (p. 404).
Indeed, the ideas of the Peruvian sociologist Anbal Quijano (coloniality of power) and the
Argentinean/Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel (transmodernity, philosophy of libera-
tion) form the cornerstones of the MCD groups critiques of modernity and proposals for a
decolonized planet. Both have been writing in Spanish since the 1960s and 1970s, and their
seminal works and recent contributions have been translated into English.
Race and place take the analytical foreground in Quijanos coloniality of power, (2007).
Quijano develops this concept in the late 1980s while in necessary in conversation with depen-
dency critiques of the relationship between colonialism and political economy. Quijano concurs
with Immanuel Wallerstein (2004) that there has been a single world-system since the 16th
century, and that this capitalist economic system has been global since its inception. But while
Wallerstein locates its origin in Europe, Quijano argues that the modern world-system emerged
in conjunction with the Conquest of the Americas and is therefore simultaneously colonial.
Furthermore, Quijano contends that different people and placesclassied along racial lines
were organized or congured in particular ways to meet the needs of capital:

[C]oloniality of power is based upon racial social classication 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. (2007: 171)

Coloniality normalizes these particularities, which become hegemonic and subsumes our abil-
ity to imagine other possible congurations of people and places. That is, race and racialized
power anchor the modern world-system and the idea that European people are superior to
non-European ones. Such Eurocentric systems of knowledge production are not just historical
but continue to dominate present day political economy and social cultural relations.
Echoes of Quijanos position are evident in Enrique Dussels (1998) critique of modernity
and the modern world-system:

the centrality of Europe in the world-system is not the sole fruit of an internal superiority accumu-
lated during the European Middle Ages over against other cultures. Instead, it is also the fundamental
effect of the simple fact of the discovery, conquest, colonization, and integration (subsumption) of
Amerindia. This simple fact will give Europe the determining comparative advantage over the
Ottoman-Muslim world, India, and China. Modernity is the fruit of these events, not their cause.

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Even capitalism is the fruit and not the cause of this juncture of European planetarizaton and
centralization of the world-system. (p. 45)

Where Quijano racializes sociology and political economy, Dussel historicizes and materializes
philosophy and its universal claims. In the introduction to Dussels book, Beyond Philosophy,
Eduardo Mendieta notes that Dussel seeks to provincialize an alleged universality, thus open-
ing up a way to a transversality, or situated cosmopolitanism, that is attentive to its historical origin
but which seeks to dialogue across differences. (2003:14). Dussel enters into dialog with various
philosophers (Hegel, Marx, Apel, Levinas, Habermas, Rorty, Taylor, Vattimo, among others) to
revisit major issues of modern life: ethics, economics, religion, and freedom. Dussel claims to
engage these major issues from modernitys periphery, its underside or exteriority in
order to transcend modernity. His project of liberation aims:

to halt the practices of domination and exclusion in the world-system. The problem is not the
mere superseding of instrumental reason (as it is for Habermas) or of the reason of terror of the
postmoderns; instead it is a project of overcoming the world-system itself, such as it has developed
for the past 500 years until today. The problem is the exhaustion of a civilizing system that has
come to its end. The overcoming of cynical managerial reason (planetary administrative), of capitalism
(as economic system), of liberalism (as political system), of Eurocentrism (as ideology), as machismo
(in erotics), of the reign of the white race (in racism), of the destruction of nature (in ecology), and so
on presupposes the liberation of diverse types of the oppressed and/or excluded. It is in this sense that
the ethics of liberation denes itself as transmodern (because the postmoderns are still Eurocentric).
(Dussel 1998: 19)

In short, both Quijano and Dussel take the Conquest and colonization of Latin America
as constitutive of the modern world and contest the triumph of Enlightenment rationality and
its claims of universal totality on the grounds that they are based on erasure of colonial
difference. For the Argentinean/US semiotician and cultural theorist Walter Mignolo, this
colonial difference and the cosmologies and worldviews obscured by Eurocentric claims of
rationality contain the possibility of border thinking as an epistemology from a subaltern
perspective. (2008: 238). Such epistemologies could enable the radical transformation of
the social sciences and philosophy and lead to a decolonization and diversication of
knowledge production.
Readers might be forgiven if the reference to the subaltern perspective leads them to con-
nect decolonial thinking with Gramscis cultural Marxism and South Asian subaltern studies.
But not by Mignolo, who nds postcolonial critiques of modernity and colonialism necessary
but insufcient. He articulates how the MCD project parts ways with them:

Coloniality and de-coloniality introduces a fracture with both, the Eurocentered project of post-
modernity and a project of post-coloniality heavily dependent on post-structuralism as far as Michel
Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida have been acknowledged as the grounding of the
post-colonial canon: Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Hommi [sic] Bhabha. De-coloniality starts
from other sources. From the de-colonial shift already implicit in Nueva cornica and buen gobierno
by Waman Puma de Ayala; in the de-colonial critique and activism of Mahatma Gandhi; in the
fracture of Marxism in its encounter with colonial legacies in the Andes, articulated by Jos Carlos
Maritegui; in the radical political and epistemological shifts enacted by Amilcar Cabral, Aim
Csaire, Frantz Fanon, Rigoberta Mench, Gloria Anzalda, among others. The de-colonial shift,
in other words, is a project of de-linking, while post-colonial criticism and theory is a project of
scholarly transformation within the academy. (Mignolo 2007b: 452)

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That is, Mignolo differentiates the MCD project from postcolonial studies in terms of
those who inspire it (non-European thinkers and activists) and the locus of enunciation
(allegedly beyond or outside northern, metropolitan institutions). These claims notwithstand-
ing, Quijano, Dussel, and Mignolo engage the work of non-European thinkers and activists
largely in abstract, theoretical, or textual/rhetorical terms, and from within the academy or at
what Escobar (2007) calls the academic-intellectual level.
In his characteristically meticulous fashion, Escobar details what I have only sketched here:
the genealogy, inspirations, and key themes and concepts of the MCD research program. He
also outlines the contributions of its many members and their methods. For example, since
the turn of the twentieth century, the MCD research group has met in diverse locations includ-
ing universities in the USA, Europe, and of course Latin America, to discuss, reect on, and
collectively develop the parameters of their other paradigm. An editorial project of systema-
tization, translation, and publication to disseminate the groups ideas seems to accompany their
meetings.3 Escobar also anticipates the critiques that will be directed at the groups work and
acknowledges the tensions and pending tasks of the project. These include engaging more
seriously with three areas stated as being of critical importance to the group: gender, nature
and the environment, and concrete alternative economic imaginaries. (Escobar 2007)
Addressing the gender lacunae are Maria Lugones (a feminist philosopher and a Latina
cultural critic) and Freya Schiwy (a German cultural critic who may have studied under
Mignolos supervision at Duke). Lugones (2010) begins with a critical review of Quijanos
concept of coloniality of power, noting that the way race and gender intersect in his work is:

too narrow an understanding of the oppressive modern/colonial constructions of the scope of

gender. Quijanos lenses also assume patriachal and heterosexual understandings of the disputes over
control of sex, its resources, and products. Quijano accepts the global, Eurocentered, capitalist
understanding of what gender is about. (p. 370)

Lugones draws on the work of third world feminists, women of color, and African anthropol-
ogists to formulate a colonial/modern gender system. Lugones concept expands Quijanos
coloniality of power to highlight how race, sex, and gender underlie coloniality. It also expands
white feminist perspectives to ag the centrality of race in constituting the sex/gender system.
Schiwy (2007: 274) also remarks on how gender appears as an afterthought in reections
on the coloniality of power and processes of decolonization. Like Lugones, she aims to disrupt
the colonial legacies of gender dualities (man/woman) and binary thinking, which continue to
permeate mainstream and radical thought and actions. De-essentializing identities and dealing
with the heterogeneity of subjectivity is no easy task, as feminists and other critical scholars have
discovered. Schiwy explores these complexities through a focus on the work of Mujeres Creando
(a group of radical Aymara and mestiza lesbians and performance artists in Bolivia) and indige-
nous lmmakers. She notes that:

Mujeres Creando has been paramount in questioning not only the colonial legacies underlying
feminist geopolitics of knowledge and the patriarchal discourses meshed with racism but also its
normative heterosexism. Like indigenous videomakers, Mujeres Creando create knowledge and
debates through technologies of knowledge that do not primarily rely on literacy. In their
performances and publications, the group enacts homosexuality without creating the gure of
the homosexual as an exclusive identity. (Schiwy 2007, p. 287)

Similarly, Catherine Walsh traces how indigenous and Afro-descendant people in the Andes
shift the geopolitics of knowledge. Walsh (2007, 2008) notes that there is a long tradition of

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indigenous and black critical thought, including in written form, but that Latin American
scholars and Leftist intellectuals have seldom recognized or valued them. What and how this
other thought contributes to a cultural studies of decolonial orientation (2007: 225) is a
key question of the Latin American Cultural Studies program at the Universidad Andina Simn
Bolivar in Quito that Walsh directs. Though located in a university, the program is a space from
which indigenous and Afro-social movements and intellectuals build new critical communities
of thought, interpretation, and intervention (p. 234). Walsh remarks that the lived subjectiv-
ities and agency of such groups seldom inform postcolonial critiques. In contrast, how such
groups and their heretofore marginalized knowledges contribute to formulating alternatives
to modernity is at the heart of Escobars contributions to the MCD project.
2. Making the Subaltern Speak: Decolonial Thinking and Development Geography
Arturo Escobars critique of development and his postdevelopment proposals (1995) are of
course familiar within development geography. Indeed, Encountering Development played, and
continues to play, a catalytic role in bringing poststructuralist and postcolonial theories into
development discussions. Given the development elds pragmatist focus and antagonism to
critique (McEwan 2009; Asher 2012b), this is no small feat. But if Escobars critique of devel-
opment as an invention and colonialist move (p. 9) was informed by Michel Foucault, Edward
Said, V. Y. Mudimbe, Chandra Mohanty, and Homi Bhabha (but never Spivak), his
postdevelopment alternatives were already inspired by Latin American social movements and
critical perspectives on modernity from the continent (pp. 217222).
Latin American critical traditions and decolonial thinking are at the forefront in Escobars
newer works (2008, 2010). In his much-awaited 2008 book Territories of Difference: place, move-
ments, life, redes, he draws on the counternarratives of place-based cultural politics, practices,
and movements, to build bridges between political-intellectual conversations in social move-
ments about environment, development, and so on and conversations in the academy about
corresponding issues (p. 25). Escobar develops his prior critique of the uneven effects of devel-
opment (understood as modern, liberal, Eurocentric, and capitalist) and turns to ethnography to
connect the ground-up knowledge of social movements, especially of Afro-Colombian
groups, with the academic-intellectual proposals of the MCD project.
Latin America has long been a poster child of resistance and revolutions. In the last few
decades, there has been a proliferation of struggles against the neoliberal model of capitalist
development and in support of various cultural and economic rights (see Daza et al. 2012). In
a long essay in a 2010 issue of Cultural Studies, Escobar examines the implications of these recent
social and political transformations. After giving an overview of the changes at the level of the
state in Bolivia, Venezuela, and Ecuador, he argues that these states may be putatively left-
leaning in their attempt to move beyond neoliberal capitalist development. He adds, however,
that they remain bound within the dualist ontology of liberal modernity, and that the
practices of these states are examples of alternative modernizations at best.
Drawing attention to various social movements in Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Bolivia,
Peru, and elsewhere in the continent, Escobar asks whether they have the potential for more
radical societal transformations toward post-capitalist, post-liberal, and post-statist options or
what could be called alternatives to modernity (p. 3). He is cautiously optimistic that the
relational ontologies on which many of these movements are based might give esh to what
Dussel (2008) terms transmodernity. According to Escobar:

Relational ontologies are those which eschew the divisions between nature and culture, individual
and community, us and them that are central to the modern ontology (that of liberal modernity).
This is to say that some of the struggles can be read as ontological struggles. Well beyond a turn

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to the Left, these worlds and knowledges otherwise have the potential to de-naturalize the
hegemonic distinction between nature and culture on which the liberal order is founded and which
in turn provides the basis for the distinction between civilized and Indians, colonizer and colonized,
developed and underdeveloped. (p. 39)

As examples of the prevalence of other ontologies, he lists the communal forms living and
organizing among the Zapatistas in Mexico and the granting of special rights to Pachamama
(roughly translatable as nature) in the Ecuadorian constitution. In Ecuador and Bolivia, buen
vivir (in Spanish) and sumaq kawsay (in Quechua)understood as the well-being of people
and natureappear as fundamental goals in the new constitutions. For Escobar, these signal
a postliberal form of representation and a challenge to the idea of autonomous individuals
living separate from their community. Developing these themes, he draws special attention
to the role of decolonial feminism and indigenous and Afro-Latina women in imagining life
according to other paradigms, noting:

decolonial feminism, while questioning Enlightenment-derived modern/colonial feminist

discourses, also unveils patriarchal constructions of womanhood harbored within appeals to tradition
and cultural difference. Two spaces have been prominent for this task: the growing Latin American
and global transnational networks of indigenous women and Afro Latin-American womens networks
in which women committed to the struggles of indigenous peoples are nding a space to articulate
gender perspectives. (p. 43)

Escobar is clear that solidarity with cultural struggles and the urgent necessity of alternatives to
modernity drive his decolonial politics. In his earlier work, he notes, subalterns do in fact
speak (1995: 223). Because their lives and ours are at stake, Escobars subalterns not only
can but also must be made to speak. Then as now, he ignores the problem of representation
or resolves it through ethnography.
In contrast, Spivak (1999, 2012) forces us to grapple with the complexities of representing the
subaltern and what circumscribes their speech and reception. As Rosalind Morris (2010) explains:

At no point does Spivak ever express a normative goal of transparency; indeed all her writing, testies
to the impossibility of such transparency, not because representation is always already inadequate to the
real that it seeks to inscribe but because the subaltern (as woman) describes a relation between subject
and object status (under imperialism and then globalization) that is not one of silenceto be overcome
by representational heroismbut aporia. The one cannot be brought into the other. (p. 13)

That is, Spivaks deconstructive approach makes clear that it is impossible to avoid the pitfall
of lapsing into precisely that which one critiques. But of course the MCD project is premised on
the claim that decolonial thinking is different from Marxist critiques of capitalism, deconstruction
or any other prior critiques of modernity. It is only through such rejection that they can walk
the tightrope of critiquing colonial modernity and proposing to go beyond it. Indeed, in
light of the havoc caused by capitalist expansion and the inadequate responses of
alternative modernities, including Leftist ones, the temptation to turn to decolonial thinking
may be too seductive to resist. It is too soon to say whether such thinking will be adequate to
its tasks. However, I am afraid that unless we engage with the MCD research program crit-
ically, we risk resuscitating old binaries (theory vs. practice, structure vs. agency, and identity
politics vs. anti-capitalist struggles) at best and simple reversals (modern bad and tradition
good) at worst. While I concur with the MCD groups call to critique colonial modernity
and pay attention to the specicities of different colonial experiences, I must resist turning

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to subaltern knowledges to fulll my desire to create a just world for humans and non-
humans. Rather I outline what a critical and relational engagement with the MCD
research program might entail.

3. Returning to Race, Place, Gender, and Representation

Mignolo (2007a) and Escobar (2007) assert that the MCD is not a traditional research
program. They further maintain that the collective does not aim to institutionalize MCD as
another master theory, model, or approach (as this would mean remaining tied to disciplinary
and Eurocentric modes of thinking). But as Escobar notes, where one thinks from, with
whom, and for what purpose become important elements of the investigation; this also means
that the investigation is, more than ever, simultaneously theoretical and political. (2010: 3) My
quibble with the project is that it conates its theoretical and political aims, turning to the one to
ll the others gaps. This detracts from the serious questions and concerns that the project raises,
especially when the politics are related to identities and theoretical posturing. Let me illustrate
with a few examples.
Contributors to the MCD project acknowledge that both decolonial thinkers and postcolonial
studies ask how colonial legacies shape development, globalization, and modern subjectivity. Yet
they do not engage with postcolonial theories on the grounds that they come from metropolitan
institutions of higher learning. This seems odd given that most decolonial thinkers are also based
at universities of the West (either epistemological or geographically). And if we are urged to go
beyond the geopolitics of modern knowledge and attachment to disciplinary thinking, why then
identify members by their disciplines and their national (and institutional) locations?
Furthermore, many of the questions, concerns, and concepts raised by them, such as those of
the double-bind, planetarity, ground-up thinking or learning from below, and the
intersectionality of race and gender in political economy, are also central to the work of Gayatri
Spivak. She also engages with many of the same philosophical and political texts that are central
to the MCD program. If theory and politics are simultaneous concerns, why ignore Spivak and
claim Gandhi? Far from going beyond binaries, classifying whose work contributes to decolonial
thinking and whose is to be rejected on the basis that it tainted by modernity gives the impression
that MCD scholars are patrolling theoretical and political borders. Bringing Spivak (1995, 1999,
2012) into the conversation would be one way of exploring how the problem of representation
is linked problem of relationsbetween the West and the Rest, metropole and colony, rural and
urban, capital and culture, aborigine and national culture, and western philosophy/science and
indigenous knowledge/episteme. While we inherit and inhabit these relations and their legacies,
isnt the decolonial challenge precisely to disrupt such boundaries?
The MCD project is right in calling attention to the need to pay attention to the
specicities of Latin American colonialism in shaping colonial modernity. The project also
opens up several questions that are imperative and necessary to understand and address the social
and environmental crises of the day. Among these are the need to pay attention to the interac-
tion of race, place, and gender in shaping economic, political, and socio-cultural relations in the
past and present and to question how the categories and units of analyses of modern disciplines
are produced discursively rather than to take them as given. But other than rhetorical attention to
going beyond essentialism, the texts reviewed here pay scant attention to heterogeneity and
diversity within the continent. More problematic, Latin American people and places are
assumed as categories of analysis rather than parsed. Of course, engaging with the entirety of
scholarship on Latin American colonial history, culture, and politics is an impossible task. Yet,
one notices the curious absence of engagement with the Caribbean, which is surely central
when discussing the Conquest (see de la Luz 2008).

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Quijanos discussion of colonial foundations of capitalism, though not new, is nevertheless

crucial, as is Dussels engagement with Marx (2003). Yet, even as they draw and build on
critiques of capitalism and Marxism, there is little or no serious engagement with Marxs oeuvre
in the formulation of the MCD theses. For example, no contributor in the volume Coloniality of
Power engages with Marxs Capital. The only reference to Marxs work is through a critique of
the Communist Manifesto and his journalistic writing on Simon Bolivar (published in 2001 in
Spain). This rejection of Marxs critique of capitalism (on the grounds that he was an apologist
for colonialism) does a disservice to the groups analysis and politics. Reading the recent English
publications of the MCD group, I am also forcibly reminded of the debates between cultural
studies and Marxism of a few decades ago.4 Is this a new version of such debates? Who is to
be spoken to and cited seems to have something to do with de/postcolonial identity politics
and nationalism within academia. In this sense, theory and politics do seem to coincide again.
As I articulate these quibbles, I have to remind myself not to fall into the trap of not wanting
to read Quijano et al., because they are men, and mostly cite men.5 Mignolos (2008: 247) point
that disciplinary knowledges need to be decolonized, (and I might add gendered and
queered) is indisputable. The trouble is that the MCD proposals as articulated in their theoret-
icalpolitical literature are dangerously full of rhetoric and reversals. In so doing, they gloss over
the point that dismantling one axis of power may leave others intact or exacerbate them.
Finally, a few words about social movements and alternatives to modernity. There is of
course a growing literature that is afrmatively critical of the links between social movements
and postdevelopment (Asher 2009, 2012b; Bryan 2012; Pieck 2011, Wainwright 2008). Ral
Zibechis observation on the limits of social movements bringing alternatives to modernity is
particularly insightful:

Organizing on the basis of modes of everyday life is slow, and using it to make decisions can be a time-
consuming process. It probably cannot be exercised much beyond local groups, where there is a lot of
personal trust and many small, everyday interests in common. So I do not think it is a perfect paradigm
for opposing large bureaucracies, but it is, nevertheless, a way that thousands of grassroots groups have
found to resist autonomously. What I want to emphasize is that we cant ask this model for more than it
has already provided. For instance, we have the crisis of the social forums that have lost a lot of their
steam because, among other things, they were taken over by those who were most capable of leading
assemblies and raising money for travel and so onin other words, by professionals from universities
and NGOs. This reveals one of the limits of this new way of doing (a name I prefer to organization,
which always retains an air of Taylorism to it). (2011: 167168)

The MCD collective is cognizant of this and other pitfalls of their project. Yet, their categorical
rejection of postcolonial approaches is a snag they do not recognize. An engagement with the
MCD projects theoretical and political writings would surely be productive for development
geographers, provided they are skeptical about the MCDs rejection of postcolonial approaches.
Lest I be misunderstood, let me be clear that I am not advocating an uncritical acceptance of
anything, postcolonial studies included. As I indicated at the beginning of this review, I count
decolonial and postcolonial thinkers among my many kin and argue that we engage both their
approaches critically. This review is my attempt to begin taking decolonial thinking seriously.

Short Biography

Grounded in two decades of eld-based research in Latin America and South Asia, Kiran
Ashers diverse research interests focus on the gendered and raced dimensions of social and

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 Latin America Decolonial Thought 841

environmental change in the global south. Her publications include a monograph, Black and
Green: Afro-Colombians, Development, and Nature in the Pacic Lowlands (Duke University Press,
2009). Her current work includes a theoretical and political critique of the development the-
ories and post-development proposals. She is an associate professor of the International Devel-
opment and Social Change at Clark University, Massachusetts, and a senior scientist in the
Forests and Livelihoods Program, at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR),
in Bogor, Indonesia.

Notes
* Correspondence address: Kiran Asher, Clark University, Worcester, MA, USA. E-mail: kasher@clarku.edu

1
I want to clarify that this is not a review of all works that may be classied as decolonial thinking emerging from Latin
America. An engagement with that rich literature is beyond the scope of this piece. Rather, my aim is to focus on the
MCD project, which is being institutionalized and being taken as representative of Latin American decolonial thought. I
recognize the risk I run in focusing only on the MCD projects work here and hope that the critical perspective I offer
will ameliorate that risk.
2
What constitutes the early anti-colonial and post-colonial canon is also subject to much debate. But the works of
Lopold Senghor, Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, Aim Csaire, among others are often associated with it.
3
For example, the papers presented and discussed at a workshop of the group in May 2004 in North Carolina were pub-
lished in a special issue (volume 27, numbers 23) of the journal Cultural Studies (several of the articles from this volume are
cited in this essay). These articles and a few others (such as Maria Lugones contribution) were later in a volume, Globali-
zation and the Decolonial Option edited by Mignolo and Escobar (2010). This wikipedia site (http://es.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Grupo_modernidad/colonialidad) contains what Mignolo endorses on his website (www.waltermignolo.com) as an
excellent bibliography of the groups publications.
4
It is beyond the scope of this essay to engage in a full discussion and assessment of these debates. But in a nutshell,
cultural studies scholars critiqued Marxist approaches for being too materialist in their analyses and deterministic in their
politics. Drawing on Foucault, they emphasized discursive aspects of power and subjectivity, and the cultural politics of
new social movements (NSM). NSMs are ostensibly unlike Leftist or class-based old social movements, in that they
neither seek inclusion within existing political structures nor call for a revolutionary overthrow of the state. Rather they
are characterized by heterogeneous interests and organizing strategies, and their politics involves reclaiming or celebrat-
ing diverse identities.
5
See Rivera Cusicanqui (2012) for a trenchant and ascerbic critique of the work of MCD writers such as Quijano,
Mignolo, and Dussel.

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