On a flight from South to North America, I decided to watch Beatriz at Dinner (dir. Miguel Arteta, 2017), a film about Beatriz (Salma Hayek), a massage therapist who ends up attending her wealthy client’s dinner party after her car breaks down. The center of attention at the dinner is a Trumpian real estate developer (John Lithgow), who brashly regales the gathering with his disdain for bleeding-heart liberal types. Consequently, worlds collide: Beatriz, originally from Mexico, is driven to heal those sickened and wounded by contemporary North American ways of living, whereas he destroys lifeways, including those south of the border, so as to build profitable monuments to his outsized ego. Hardly a subtle study, the film discredits its own criticisms of the encounters between North and South by risking caricature.

While reading The End of Cognitive Empire and On Decoloniality, I frequently recalled Beatriz at Dinner, because both of these books risk discrediting their common project: exposing and displacing the entrenched dominance of Global North ways of thinking so as to encourage other ways of knowing that would reinvigorate the various political struggles across the Global South (including, the books rightfully insist, Souths in the North). To say that they advance a project in common does not mean that there are not significant differences between them, however. Indeed, each positions itself against the other. In the end, however, they both mar their potentially fruitful diagnoses by caricatural quasi-structuralist binary oppositions.

On Decoloniality is divided into two parts, the first by Catherine Walsh, the second by Walter Mignolo, with a coauthored introduction and afterword. Though they insist that the division of labor is not praxis first and then theory, Walsh has built her career in close contact with social struggles—Boricuas in the United States, Afro-Colombian women, indigenous Andeans, and Afro-descendants in Ecuador—whereas Mignolo has for decades interrogated coloniality as a structure of ideas. Walsh’s focus is “the decolonial how and the decolonial for” (p. 9, italics in the original); that is, the ways in which and the ends for which certain, usually minority, groups have resisted the modes of colonial domination that persist in and pervade late modern global society organized as formally sovereign states. Walsh, Mignolo, and other decolonial thinkers argue that modernity and coloniality are coextensive and co-constitutive. Thus this “colonial matrix of power” (CMP) reigns despite the nineteenth-century independence struggles against Iberian overrule in the Americas and the wave of formal decolonization after World War II.

In Walsh’s words, then, decoloniality “is a form of struggle and survival, an epistemic and existence-based response and practice—most especially by colonized and racialized subjects—against the colonial matrix of power in all of its dimensions, and for the possibilities of an otherwise” (p. 17, italics in the original). More than resistance, these collective praxes are modes of “re-existence” (p. 18), a term coined by Adolfo Albán that Mignolo also uses (as does Santos) and that prioritizes the affirmative, creative moment of resistance against its negative, reactive connotations. The “decolonial insurgencies” (pp. 33–34) that Walsh documents, describes, and analyzes are embodied and literally grounded struggles for the re-existence of living persons and land against gendered and racialized exploitation and extractivism. She details her participation in the collective effort to create an intercultural, plurinational political framework in Ecuador and also a decolonially insurgent university, Amawtay Wasi, that would practice a radical pedagogy that valorized indigenous Andean ways of knowing. Both projects were compromised by entanglements with the Ecuadorian state, and Walsh closes her half of the book with critical reflections on the dangers facing decolonial praxis.

Whereas Walsh’s half of On Decoloniality offers analysis grounded in concrete references, Mignolo’s veers toward abstract and unreferenced critique. His intentions are clear enough: to differentiate decoloniality from decolonization; to sketch the links among modernity, coloniality, and decoloniality; to show that the CMP depends on an exclusionary concept of the human; and to reveal coloniality’s epistemic effects. The target of decoloniality is epistemic transformation—changing Eurocentric ways of knowing and acting—not, as in decolonization, the mere capture of state apparatuses. Modernity was conceived in Europe over the Americas and the rest of the world and thus depends on coloniality, to which the necessary response by oppressed peoples is decoloniality. Hence, “modernity/coloniality/decoloniality...are simultaneously, since the sixteenth century, divided and united” (p. 139). The CMP works through exclusions on the basis of race and gender and the alienation of humans from nature. I want to focus here on that last intention, not only because it absorbs all the others but also because, in revealing modernity as epistemic coloniality, Mignolo makes his most problematic moves.

Although many European critical theories have developed what Mignolo calls “Eurocentric critiques of Eurocentrism,” “decolonial critiques of Eurocentrism” promote the refusal of “North Atlantic fictions as the only way” (p. 3). The key words here are “fictions” and “only,” because Mignolo argues that modernity/coloniality is ultimately a “rhetoric” imposed from Europe universally on the rest of the world “to convince the population that such-and-such a decision or public policy is for the betterment...of everyone” (p. 143). The discrete rhetorics or domains of discourse correspond to “different levels of management and control” that function through the multiple fictions enunciated, whereas the discourse or rhetoric of modernity as a whole is the broader level of enunciation (p. 143). Taken plurally, the enunciated fictions comprise the “contents” of knowledge, the multiple kinds of knowledge; the enunciation consists of the epistemic “terms” that make knowledge count as knowledge, as Western rationality (p. 144). Mignolo illustrates this abstract distinction by analogy to a puppeteer enchanting an audience: “Coloniality of knowledge is enacted in that zone in which what you see and hear from the puppets that enchant you distracts you from the tricks and designs of the enunciator. Decoloniality of knowledge demands changing the terms of the conversations and making visible the tricks and designs of the puppeteer” (pp. 144–45, italics in the original).

In other words, coloniality produced a set of illusions, “a powerful fiction,” that it imposed on the world as modernity, the one universal rationality for all who would be human (p. 196). Modernity in turn works to “hide or disguise” coloniality (p. 141). Decoloniality therefore involves the piercing of the illusions to which we have been captive and the revelation that they are trickery. Modernity/coloniality is the ideology that oppresses; thus a critique of it, through decoloniality, points the way to liberation. This is classic ideology critique. But it is also a caricature that risks discrediting decolonial theory because a classic ideology critique depends on a notion of material reality behind the illusion and also must account for what makes critique possible; that is, what conditions the possibility for some to see through the illusion. What Mignolo offers is a quasi-conspiratorial view of a world divided into the few “controlling and managing” and the many “being managed and controlled” (p. 139); a subset of the latter are those who have managed to retain “devalued and demonized” praxes of living and knowledges (p. 173). That subset grounds decoloniality’s standpoint of critique.

In the final analysis, it strikes me that decolonial theory qua unreconstructed ideology critique lacks a theory of power. Mignolo offers his diagnosis of the organization of power (enunciated, enunciation) and its positionings (controllers, controlled): “He who has the privilege of naming and implanting His naming is able to manage knowledge, understanding, and subjectivity” (p. 139). Yet I finished Mignolo’s half of the book with no sense of how such privilege becomes authority; in short, how power is generated, how dominance and hegemony are achieved, how sovereignty backs its claims, how forces interact and conflict, how subjects of power are produced, and how resistances persist and surge despite being marked by the ruses of power.

Despite Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s criticism of decolonial scholarship as “reductionist” (p. 26), his book runs into similar problems: it flirts with caricature in similarly discrediting ways as On Decoloniality. Santos’s analysis too depends on obvious positionings. Indeed, “the epistemologies of the South,” he claims, “operate by polarizing the contrast between oppressors and oppressed” (p. 252; emphasis added), but this ignores the complicities and ambivalences by which one becomes a subject of domination rather than a mere object. If Mignolo lacks a theory of power, Santos lacks a theory of the subject. Moreover, in his zeal to distance himself from oppressive ways of knowing associated with the European tradition, he makes caricatured claims—for example, that the epistemologies of the North have not paid attention to the senses (p. 165), when in fact Hobbes, Locke, and Condillac authored influential sensationist theories of knowledge; nor to the body (p. 88), which in fact feminist, queer, trans, race, and postsecular theorists have treated innovatively. Inversely, Santos promotes gushingly a “deep experience of the senses” (Chapter 8) and asserts—descriptively or prescriptively?—that “the epistemologies of the South are interested in three types of bodies”: dying, suffering, and rejoicing (p. 90).

Despite such exaggerated oppositions, Santos does offer a core, potentially useful, distinction between kinds of exclusion: “The epistemologies of the North are premised upon an abyssal line separating metropolitan societies and forms of sociability from colonial societies and forms of sociability, in the terms of which whatever is valid, normal, or ethical on the metropolitan side of the line does not apply on the colonial side of the line” (p. 6). Consequently, dominations and inequalities within metropolitan society produce non-abyssal exclusions, whereas those between the metropolitan and colonial worlds produce abyssal exclusions (pp. 20–21). Santos limits his focus to the latter: “The epistemologies of the South concern the production and validation of knowledges anchored in the experience of resistance of all those social groups that have systematically suffered injustice, oppression, and destruction caused by capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy.” Such epistemologies aim “to allow the oppressed social groups to represent the world as their own and in their own terms, for only thus will they be able to change it according to their aspirations” (p. 1). Other ways of knowing would, again, enable an alternative politics of liberation, because what is needed is “an alternative thinking of alternatives,” not the mere multiplication of alternatives (p. 6). Such a project is necessarily intellectually “rearguard” rather than vanguard (p. ix), because epistemologies of the South follow from and develop out of struggle rather than lead them with dogma. The book systematically develops these insights: in the first section by approaching what grounds other ways of knowing, in the second by sketching the methodologies of research appropriate to epistemologies of the South, and in the last by speculating how learning and pedagogy would need to be transformed to accommodate epistemologies of the South.

Santos’s project is ambitious—but fatally programmatic. It taxonomizes and maps entire fields of research on social/political struggles against “abyssal” exclusions. Yet it is often rarely clear whether he is writing descriptively, thus ordering fields of research that already exist or, more likely, trying to coax them into being. But if it is the latter, then Santos’s prescriptive tone may prove grating to researchers and activists. In sum, the status of the objects of Santos’s mapping and taxonomies is ultimately not clear because, although he writes in the declarative, he provides few concrete indices that would help his readers connect his architectonic vision to a recognizable world. Santos is a seasoned researcher of social struggles in Brazil, Mozambique, and elsewhere, and the book is at its most useful when he gives concrete details and scholarly support. Yet it is least convincing when he soars at a high level of abstraction and cites no one but himself. Epistemologies of the South, Santos claims, “aim at a bottom-up subaltern cosmopolitanism” (p. 8). The book, however, in effect offers a top-down global overview of them.

In sum, while the project of countering the hegemony of Global North ways of knowing is crucial, and whereas Walsh’s contribution explores the problems and promise in doing so, Mignolo and Santos discredit the project with exaggerated and abstract oppositions and thus pay insufficient attention to the contradictory nuances and ambivalences of power and subjection.