We are witnessing an unmistakable decolonial turn in contemporary theory. If the “post” of postcolonialism suggested a misplaced optimism that colonialism was a thing of the past, decolonial thought today sets out from those long-term legacies of colonialism that continue to scar the present. Colonization was never simply political (to be undone by formal liberation) nor purely economic (as in the neocolonialism that followed) but also saw the birth of new racial, gendered, and sexual orders and new forms of subjectivity, epistemology, and even ontology itself. The persistence of these deeply sedimented residues—what the late Aníbal Quijano termed “coloniality”—means that what Nelson Maldonado-Torres has called the unfinished project of decolonization remains an active imperative for the present and foreseeable future.
Bernd Reiter’s edited volume is one of the most recent contributions to this project. Constructing the Pluriverse seeks to enact a turn within a turn, pushing decolonial thought “beyond the critique of colonialism”—although it has never been only this—“to elaborate different ways to perceive and explain the world and find solutions for the many pressing problems of the Global South” (p. 1). For Reiter, pushing back against the universal pretensions of Western thought means, however, that these alternatives must instead be pluriversal, that we must establish—to borrow from the Zapatistas—a world in which many worlds fit, and that “all knowledge production must henceforth be partial, context specific, and limited” (p. 2). This implies new tools and new research methods that, by virtue of explaining “different, place-bound phenomena,” will be more objective, not less (p. 9).
The first three contributions—from Raewyn Connell, Sandra Harding, and Arturo Escobar—are among the best the volume has to offer, tackling head-on what it would mean to think pluriversally. Connell confronts the persistent coloniality of gender with specific attention to a global “economy of knowledge” (p. 21) that ensures what we might call a global structure of epistemological dependency, in which theory (the epistemological correlate to high value-added goods) is produced in the Global North with raw materials extracted from the Global South. There is no “deficit of ideas from the global periphery,” however; there is only a “deficit of recognition and circulation” (p. 22). Connell thus proposes not less interaction, but more, through a “solidarity-based epistemology” connecting different approaches globally in conversation with social movements (p. 31).
If Connell proposes a dynamic global solidarity, this is also reflected in Harding’s contribution, which interrogates the desirability of the “unity of science thesis” and the destruction of indigenous knowledges it has underwritten worldwide (p. 39). Without romanticizing indigenous knowledge but being resolutely attentive to the structured unreason of global elites, Harding proposes “keeping both eyes open—one on contemporary Western sciences and their philosophies and the other on other cultures’ scientific practices and legacies” (p. 41). If the unity of science gives way to standpoint epistemology, the practical task is to inhabit the interaction between different standpoints, and Harding offers a useful series of strategies through which those in the Global North and South can reach out toward one another in collaborative ways.
Escobar reminds us that globalization has not upheld but instead undercut relationality and that the crisis of this order raises the question of how we might transition toward something radically different. Focusing on Latin American movements, Escobar poses a three-way struggle “between neoliberal globalization (the project of the right), alternative modernizations (the leftist project at the level of the state), and the creation of post/noncapitalist and post/nonliberal worlds” (p. 64). Today’s Latin American movements, for Escobar, are activating relational ontologies and redefining their own autonomy, both of which are present in the indigenous notion of buen vivir (living well) that has been incorporated, however partially, into the constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia. Rejecting linear notions of development in favor of communal, noncapitalist alternatives, buen vivir is a relational epistemology that helps us grasp how “different ontologies do not mean separate worlds” (p. 83).
That Constructing the Pluriverse comes off as slightly eclectic would neither surprise nor concern Reiter, who is clear about its provisional, indeed experimental, nature. But the tensions that emerge in and between the different contributions point toward hard questions for the decolonial turn more broadly. For example, Reiter’s introduction praises Connell’s formulation of a “mosaic epistemology” of the pluriverse in which different approaches coexist side by side, but Connell herself insists that the mosaic approach can fall prey to essentialism and offers her interactive “solidarity-based epistemology” as an alternative. Is this simply a case of misreading or a tension that underlies the volume as a whole? Between universal and particular, the space is vast—where does the center of gravity fall?
Reiter explicitly rejects the twin dangers of romanticism and relativism: mere inclusion does not decolonization make, and adding “random non-Western epistemologies” or assuming that “one approach to explaining the world is as good as the next” is insufficient (p. 2). But here too there is considerable unevenness. Zaid Ahmad’s discussion of the fourteenth-century thinker Ibn Khaldun contributes to theoretical diversity but strains to speak to the present. Ehsan Kashfi’s analysis of Islamic reformism in Iran maps an interesting theoretical trend but fails to mention tensions between liberal democracy and decolonization. Contrast these, however, with Issiaka Ouattara’s excellent analysis of the West African griot as “a historian, a genealogist, a mediator, and a grand custodian of oaths” (p. 160)—all tendentially decolonial functions in their context—or Venu Mehta’s careful delineation of anekāntavāda epistemology in Jainism, whose foregrounding of different standpoints is quite literally pluriversal.
Romanticism is also palpable at moments. Ulrich Oslender offers a “deep ethnography” of the aquatic epistemology of Afro-Colombian communities on the Pacific coast (p. 147), but the result is not so deep, and it reminds us that not every difference bears a distinct epistemology. Reiter’s own suggestion that indigenous peoples of the Americas offer the key to a “true democracy” is one that I sympathize with, but it homogenizes indigenous peoples across the Americas while excluding the communal forms practiced by many cimarrón communities of escaped slaves, for example. And like many inspired by the “indigenous” democracy of Mexico’s Zapatistas, Reiter neglects to consider that it emerged from the productive fusion of indigenous communities, communist militants, and left-wing Catholicism.
Further, Oslender’s central concept is Deleuze’s assemblage, and Reiter leaves the definition of democracy to Rousseau—at times, it is still easy to slip into a global division of intellectual labor in which theory comes from the North and experience from the South. This is transparently true of Jürgen Burchardt’s chapter on the value of two European thinkers—Spinoza and Norbert Elias—for decoloniality. Of course, this is not to say that no European thinker can prove useful for decolonial purposes, but only that the nature and extent of that contribution must be carefully specified. Speaking to the Ecuadorian context, Catherine E. Walsh wonders if the institutionalization of buen vivir has broken with or simply repackaged “the multicultural logic of neoliberal capitalism” and insists that “we must be ever-more vigilant” of the new guises that “colonial entanglements” (pp. 187, 192) can assume. We should take this concern seriously in a broader way as well, asking whether pluriversality runs the risk of simply repackaging neoliberal multiculturalism.
Here, two contributions are particularly instructive. On the one hand, Manu Samnotra finds a pluriversal kernel in Gandhi’s “dialogic engagement with others” (p. 168) and his advocacy of dialogue and “compromise” between “multiple truths” (p. 171). This view would seem to raise the possibility of a tension between the decolonial and the pluriversal. For Frantz Fanon, to take just one example, “truth is what hastens the dislocation of the colonial regime, what fosters the emergence of the nation” (The Wretched of the Earth 2004, p. 14). In other words, recognizing multiple truths and dialogue within that nation does not entail compromise with colonial oppressors. A similar concern arises from a different angle in Manuela Boatcă’s call to “creolize” Europe by including its Caribbean overseas possessions. Although this call is well intentioned, we could wonder whether such nuance is worth the risk of rehabilitating a category like Europe and effacing the colonial difference at its heart.
Ironically, the least satisfying chapter in Constructing the Pluriverse comes from its most well-known contributor. Walter Mignolo frames the global crisis of the present as the inevitable failure of a 500-year process of Westernization, which today confronts two antagonists: on the one hand, the state-led de-Westernization that has—through the efforts of Russia and China in particular— yielded a multipolar world, and on the other, pluriversality as a nonstate alternative that refuses the terms of modernity in toto. Although these three terms—Westernization, de-Westernization, and pluriversality—are instructive as ideal types, as Mignolo deploys them they are simply too loose, the distinctions between them too stark, and the causal historic claims they uphold too unconvincing.
Most worrying, however, is the oddly sanitized formulation of coloniality that undergirds his analysis. Quijano was careful to stress the material element of coloniality; the centrality of race, class, and gender to its function; and the importance of material struggles for decolonization. Mignolo instead argues that “the essential feature” of coloniality “is the domain of knowledge” (p. 99) and that decoloniality is therefore fundamentally about “changing the terms of the conversation” (p. 105). Mignolo’s argument that “the pluriverse cannot be enacted if there is no conceptualization of the pluriverse” (p. 108) risks erasing the actually existing pluriverse and privileging academic interventions over concrete struggles.
As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang remind us, decolonization is no metaphor, nor an idea or a conceptualization, but above all a material practice. Those of us who care deeply about the unfinished project of decolonization are well advised not to forget it. As a contribution to this task, Constructing the Pluriverse is a mixed bag, providing useful tools but delivering only partially on its promise.
