Modernity, Coloniality and ‘Thinking Otherwise’ – An Attempt at a Summary

Over the years, the post-structuralist roots of much postcolonial thought have come under criticism in decolonial circles. The criticism has focused on postcolonial theory's inability to detach itself from the modern Western European tradition and history it sets out to critique and deconstruct. Thereby it has failed, the argument goes, to properly understand the relation between modernity and colonialism. Colonialism, decolonial thinkers argue, does not follow as a consequence or continuation of modernity: they are in fact ‘two sides of the same coin’ (Mignolo 2007: 464).

While it may be hard to see postcolonial scholars with roots in post-structuralist theoretical contexts agreeing with this accusation, it has nevertheless given room to a continued debate where the decolonial has been positioned as an ‘analytic’ which can supersede the modernist limitations of postcolonialism. In this, scholars such as Mignolo (2007), Grosfoguel (2007) and Escobar (2007) have been central and have pointed to the existence of two different traditions, one seen as constituting the basis for the decolonial analytic and one tainted with Eurocentric fallacies. The former includes names such as Amílcar Cabral, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Rigoberta Menchú and Gloria Anzaldúa, while the latter derives from Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida and leads up to Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi K. Bhabha (Mignolo 2007: 452).

From these debates the decolonial analytic has been further developed and defined. The emerging focus has been on coloniality as an ongoing process in need of specific perspectives to be understood, analysed and critiqued properly. Such perspectives cannot be derived from theories too entangled with the Western modern tradition, which in the end is inseparable from coloniality in itself. In light of this, other perspectives have been offered.

Escobar (2007: 180) defines decolonial thought as ‘an other way of thinking that runs counter to the great modernist narratives (Christianity, liberalism, and Marxism); it locates its own inquiry in the very borders of systems of thought and reaches towards the possibility of non-Eurocentric modes of thinking’. Similarly, Mignolo and Walsh (2018: 2) discuss it as a mode of thinking which straddles the theory/praxis divide and aims to ‘[create] and [illuminate] pluriversal and interversal paths that disturb the totality from which the universal and the global are most often perceived’. More particularly, decoloniality aims to ‘advance the undoing of Eurocentrism's totalizing claim and frame’ (Mignolo and Walsh 2018: 2) by way of an ‘[interruption of] the idea of dislocated, disembodied, and disengaged abstraction and [a disobeying of] the universal signifier that is the rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality, and the West's global model’ (Mignolo and Walsh 2018: 3), and to bring forth a ‘pluriversal decoloniality and decolonial pluriversality as they are being thought and constructed outside and in the borders and fissures of the North Atlantic Western world’ (Mignolo and Walsh 2018: 2).

The rationale behind this is an understanding of modernity and coloniality as deeply intertwined structures, as per Quijano's (2007) original formulation (cf. Bhambra 2014: 129–131; Escobar 2007: 184–190). Here, modernity and the modern world system are understood as constituted from the initial moment of colonisation of (what eventually became known as) the Americas. What was instituted through the conquest of the Americas is essentially what Quijano (2007) calls the coloniality of power: ‘a global hegemonic model of power in place since the conquest that articulates race and labour, space and peoples, according to the needs of capital and to the benefit of white European peoples’ (Escobar 2007: 185). With this concept, the notion that modernisation was an endogenous European development is refuted; rather, modernity is viewed as structurally dependent on its ‘outside’ from the onset. It was on the basis of the initial conquest of the Americas, and the institutionalisation of imperialism and racism that followed from this, that European modernity was able to initiate its path of economic development and domination through a globalisation of the capitalist system. Hence, decolonial scholars prefer to think of modernity and coloniality as conjoint processes: thus, the notion of modernity/coloniality.

Key for decolonial thinkers, however, is the way in which this is intimately tied to an intellectual or epistemological dimension (Asher 2013; Bhambra 2014: 129–137; Escobar 2007; Mignolo and Walsh 2018). Concurrent with conquest, underlying it, motivating it and expanding it was the institutionalisation of European modes of thinking, knowing, and doing as universally valid rationalities which were to replace and subalternise the supposedly ‘backward’ epistemologies of the colonial Others. At one stroke modernity/coloniality erases the knowledges and life-worlds of colonised peoples and posits the specific and local knowledges of Europe as universal and disembodied, radically expanding the scope of such knowledges and obscuring their rootedness in specifically European experiences. As put by Kiran Asher (2013: 832), ‘Eurocentric modernity obscures the specificities of race and place, and invisibilised other epistemes to masquerade as universal and total’. While viewing modernity as structurally entwined with coloniality and thus as a global(ising) process which should not be viewed as endogenous to Europe, thereby bringing the Others into the history of modernity, decolonial theorists thus also highlight how modernity/coloniality was founded upon a process through which experiences, histories, and knowledges specific to Europe's internal history were made the basis of a global norm for what is to be considered legitimate knowledge, language, culture, et cetera.

This latter objective – of ‘“provincializing” European modernist discourses’ knowledge claims – is linked to a ‘geo-politics of knowledge [ . . . ] and knowing’ (Mignolo 2011: 8) which asks, ‘who and when, why and where is knowledge generated’ (Mignolo 2011: 2). This is crucial for decolonial thought. It means a critical contextualisation of how any body of knowledge always becomes articulated from ‘geo-historical and bio-graphic loci of enunciation’ (2011: 2), defined from a position within the colonial matrix of power. This analysis, however, does not merely entail a decentring of European modernist claims, claiming its rootedness in a specifically European loci of enunciation, but extends to a radically pluralistic vision for social change which embraces a global ‘pluriversality’ of knowledges constituted outside of, prior to or in resistance against the European colonial project of cultural and epistemic erasure (Bhambra 2014: 132–137; Mignolo and Walsh 2018). For this project, we should identify ‘geo-historical and bio-graphic’ locations positioned on the border of the European modern/colonial project: the ‘exteriority in which [the Other] is located’, as this might become ‘the original source of an ethical discourse vis-á-vis the hegemonic totality’ (Escobar 2007: 186).

The ways of thinking and doing that emerge from these locations are what Mignolo (2007, 2009, 2011) dubs ‘border epistemologies’ – ways of thinking and doing which ‘engages the colonialism of Western epistemology [ . . . ] from the perspective of epistemic forces that have been turned into subaltern (traditional, folkloric, religious, emotional, et cetera) forms of knowledge’ (Mignolo cited in Delgado et al. 2001: 11). Engaging with these border epistemologies amounts to a form of ‘epistemic disobedience’ (Mignolo 2009) – an epistemic act which affirms a plurality of knowledges, practices, cosmologies, et cetera, sitting on colonialism's ‘border’ while simultaneously refuting European modern thought's supposedly universal reach. By engaging in epistemic disobedience and affirming inter-connectivity and communicative pathways between a ‘pluriversality’ of border epistemologies across the world, we point towards an ‘otherwise’ (Escobar 2007; Mignolo and Walsh 2018).

When rooted in political praxis, this might amount to a process of social transformation which activates a ‘decolonial option’, a pathway which radically departs from modernity/coloniality's political, economic, and epistemic set-ups (Bhambra 2014: 132–137; Mignolo 2011; Mignolo and Walsh 2018). As put by Escobar (2007: 188), this turn towards the decolonial option ‘has to do with the rearticulation of global designs by and from local histories; with the articulation between subaltern and hegemonic knowledge from the perspective of the subaltern; and with the remapping of colonial difference towards a worldly culture’, conjointly producing a project from which ‘it becomes possible to think of “other local histories producing either alternative totalities or an alternative to totality”’. From this, we might ‘unravel modernity/coloniality's hold; engender liberations with respect to thinking, being, knowing, understanding, and living; encourage venues of re-existence, and build connections among regions, territories, struggles, and peoples’ (Mignolo and Walsh 2018: 4). As pointed out by Kiran Asher (2013: 833), this is partly formulated by decolonial scholars as a way of moving beyond the limitations of postcolonial theory, as far as decolonial scholars ‘aim to go beyond critique and deconstruction to foster decolonial thinking’, building from ‘the cosmovision of exploited and marginal groups rather than from privileged institutions of higher learning’.

An underlying assumption informing the geopolitics of knowledge and the consequent ‘decolonial option’ is the notion that knowledge is always ‘incarnated and situated’ (Walsh 2018: 28) – it is produced ‘through embodied practice and from the ground up’ (Walsh 2018: 28) which means that any body of knowledge is fundamentally tied to, and situated within, practices, histories and beliefs which are particular to the local context in which the knowledge is being formulated. In this sense, decolonial thought regards theory/knowledge/text as firmly linked to place (Escobar 2007: 198–200). This rooting of theory in placed praxis is what makes epistemic disobedience such an important act: it affirms and ‘give[s] attention to the ways those who live the colonial difference think theory [ . . . ] and take (very) seriously the epistemic force of local histories and struggles’ (Walsh 2018: 28). In this sense, the key claim of decolonial thought is that we can build another world on the basis of subaltern subjects’ own modes of thinking, which are, ultimately, born out of a lived position of radical alterity or exteriority. It is from such places of alterity and exteriority that a ‘thinking otherwise’ becomes possible and, thus, the basis from which we might ‘[undo] Eurocentrism's totalizing claim and frame’ (Mignolo and Walsh 2018: 2).

Anti-Colonial Resistance as Alterity or Dialectics

After this summary, we now move on to discuss what we regard as some of the primary contradictions within decolonial thought. Mainly, this concerns its grounding of resistance in a position of alterity, which we view as connected to a tendency to essentialise the relation between a body of knowledge and its locus of origin, sidelining the complex manner through which varying bodies of knowledges are made politically agentic in concrete contexts. We contrast this to a dialectical and deconstructive view on resistance more prominent within Marxism and postcolonial theory, which we regard as more fruitful for the mapping and understanding of the manner in which actual resistances against colonialism become constituted. After discussing this, we move on to exemplifying our position through the work of two anti-colonial organic intellectuals who notably fused Marxism with anti-colonial, Black and pan-Africanist concerns: Frantz Fanon and Walter Rodney.

As expressed above, the political agency of the decolonial Other seems to come from its position of alterity – a self-identity constituted outside of the modern/colonial logic, something which enables it to ‘put forward an otherwise of being, feeling, thinking, knowing, doing, and living that craft hope and possibility’ (Walsh 2018: 20), or, as Escobar (2007: 183) puts it, to ‘think about, and to think differently from, an “exteriority” to the modern world system’. As discussed by Gurminder Bhambra (2014: 135) in relation to Mignolo, this signals a ‘decolonial epistemic shift that enables the histories and thoughts of other places to be understood as prior to European incursions and to be used as the basis of developing a connected history of encounters through those incursions’. Here, the political agency of subaltern categories of thought are guaranteed from their foundations in, and connectedness to, a specific local context characterised by its alterity or exteriority vis-á-vis the coloniality of power. As knowledges are always born out of locally specific practices and lived experiences, they are continually marked by the geo-historical and bio-graphic loci of their originary sites in this view. Following this logic, precolonial, native or indigenous knowledges are deemed oppositional almost by default, given their supposed rootedness in practices or experiences radically Other or exterior to that of coloniality.

This is, we argue, to be contrasted against a view of political agency as proceeding through dialectical processes – that agency or resistance emerges as a negation which carries with it a possibility to sublate the contradictions of a present system of power. We draw this view from a multiplicity of scholars who have reworked Marxist concepts to accentuate the constitutive function of colonial relations for the establishment and upholding of global capitalism (Anievas and Nişancıoğlu 2015; Chen 2013; Fanon 1963; Fraser 2022; Harvey 2004; Rodney 2018; Wallerstein 2004). According to these thinkers, alongside the fundamental dialectics in capitalism between labour and capital, there exists a constitutive dialectic between capitalism's insides and outsides or its core and peripheries. In contrast to orthodox accounts of primitive accumulation, these thinkers argue that dispossession of indigenous lands and resources and subjugation of non-white peoples were not only prerequisites for the initial establishment and globalisation of capitalism, but are indeed processes which continue to function as key mechanisms for capitalism's further expansions, reproductions and reconfigurations. Especially during the neoliberal era (Harvey 2004), capital utilised formerly colonised nations in the Global South as sites for unloading excess capital, hyper-exploiting low-wage workers, appropriating commonly held or state-owned resources to jump-start new cycles of accumulation, exerting political control and upholding hegemonic international relations. Throughout capitalism's history, these colonial processes have been underpinned by relations of geopolitical dominance, epistemic universalisation and discourses of racial inferiority; discourses and political projects to which capitalism is therefore articulated.

Drawing from this view, we can see anti-colonial resistance as emerging out of the constitutive opposition between the core and periphery in capitalism; by demanding the end of foreign occupation and domination, the end of universalisation of Western, capitalist norms, and the abolishment of a profit-motivated world system which leads to expropriation and exploitation, these movements negate the colonial core-periphery dialectic which is key to contemporary capitalism.

Viewing anti-colonial resistance in this manner, we should not view it as emerging out of a return to an externally constituted ‘otherwise’ but rather as emerging out of a dialectic which is entwined with those dynamics of expansion and expropriation which sit at the heart of capitalism's mode of operation. In other words, anti-colonial resistance emerges from one of the capitalist world system's core fault lines, and articulates itself as a negation of such a system. As a negation, it is relationally articulated to the dominant system in which it is imbricated and against which it positions itself; thereby, it will, from its moment of initiation, be ‘tainted’ by the contents and operations of the dominant system and its discourses. It seeks not to establish a firm position of alterity, but rather to sublate the terms of the contradictions it addresses. As such, anti-colonial resistance necessarily involves hybrid constellations of knowledge and struggle which emerge out of ‘in-betweens’ and draw from a multiplicity of resources and communications in attempting to make sense of its imposed position of constitutive Other-ness. In the following, we demonstrate why this view is preferable.

In the dialectical view, anti-colonial resistance is never clearly positioned on the exterior of colonial systems of power. As argued by Gopal (2019: 25), while anti-colonial ‘subjects of resistance often drew on cultural resources and social practices of their own that were not derived from the regime of the coloniser or his language, these rarely translated in any simple sense into radical difference’. Rather than from radical difference, resistance should be viewed as born out of an assigned position of constitutive negativity or Otherness within colonial discourse, as a necessary gap or contradiction within colonial ideology. This position allows for a refutation/re-articulation/sublation [Aufhebung] of the ruling discourse which points out its radical incompleteness and negativity; a resistance which might, for instance, claim European principles of liberty and equality for itself and assert the incompleteness of the original European formulations of such principles, in effect creating a hybrid discourse which draws from both the colonial Other's own ‘resources and social practices’ (Gopal 2019: 25) as well as its ambivalent insertion in, and boundedness to, European discourse. This can be likened to Susan Buck-Morss’ (2009) discussion of the Haitian Revolution, in which the revolutionaries are perceived as neither acting on the basis of a radical alterity nor from a mere repetition of European universalist notions of freedom, equality and fraternity. Rather, Buck-Morss (2009: 80) argues, the Haitian revolution invites us to think ‘in the spirit of dialectics’ and to ‘turn the tables and consider Haiti not as the victim of Europe, but an agent in Europe's construction’, that is, as a ruptural moment which dialectically highlights the gaps in European claims to universal freedom and equality and thereby constructs an alternative claim to universality which cannot be reduced to either Haitian ‘originality’ or European universalism.

The Underdetermination of the ‘Local’

But why should we regard this position of dialectical opposition more tenable than one of radical alterity? An answer to this question might be reached from a discussion of Mignolo and Walsh's (2018) view on the relationship between the local and the global, in which the fault lines of decolonial thought's insistence of alterity are demonstrated at its clearest.

Despite the global claims of modernist universalism – claiming to lay bare the truth of not only a specific time or place but of the world at large – any and all knowledge can only ever be thought of as local, according to Mignolo and Walsh (2018: 2): ‘all theories and conceptual frames, including those that originate in Western Europe and the Anglo United States, can aim at and describe the global but cannot be other than local’. The decolonial claim is thus to build from the radical alterity of local knowledges and struggles to ‘[undo] Eurocentrism's totalizing claim and frame’ (Mignolo and Walsh 2018: 2) – to embrace the alterity of the local and to build border epistemologies which can form an alternative to Western universalism and highlight its actual ‘local-ness’ and particularity.

We regard the main critical impetus behind this statement as largely correct. Knowledge is always already situated and partial (cf. Haraway 1988), and any claims to universality or a ‘view from nowhere’ will inevitably overwrite alternative viewpoints and obscure the social and political interests which lie beneath the knowledge claim. Such claims to universality have, largely, been characteristic of much Western knowledge production under colonialism, a fact that has certainly reinforced the West's colonial hold over the world, both historically and presently. What we take issue with, rather, is the assumption made by Mignolo and Walsh that a theory's situatedness corresponds to an embeddedness within a proper local scale – that a universal knowledge claim's fault lies not in its relation to complex sets of social and political interests and/or its attempt to overwrite language's irreducible deferral of meaning, but rather in its attempt to traverse its own ‘proper’ local context of origin, its imposing of its categories onto contexts which are ‘foreign’ to the knowledge's originary locus. This is perhaps most clearly identifiable in texts which combine a decolonial focus with actor-network theory and what has been dubbed the ‘ontological turn’ in the social sciences; such texts often assert that local knowledges do not merely represent varying representations of a singular underlying Ding an Sich [The Thing-in-itself], but rather that knowledge-making is inevitably bound up in the construction of its own objects and ‘worlds’ such that local, indigenous or native knowledges are fully bound up in the construction of actual, local ‘realities’.

Ultimately, this amounts to a view that knowledges are always connected to a proper location and scale – what is purported to be its place of origin, in which the knowledge becomes asserted as a lived reality. This corresponds to Mignolo's and Walsh's (2018: 2) mission statement, which they regard as concerned ‘not with eliminating but reducing to size [ . . . ] North Atlantic abstract universal fictions’. As said by Bhambra (2014: 135), this view means that, for Mignolo, ‘European understandings of modernity are necessary to the extent that they delineate its emergence and development in Europe, but insufficient to the extent that they fail to address (the relationship of) the “other” within such processes, or prior to such processes’.

The problem with this mission is, we argue, not that it undercuts North Atlantic claims to abstract, universal knowledge – which we regard as highly welcome – but that it suggests that there is a proper place for such knowledges, given a ‘reduction’ of their application to their proper local context of origin, thus downplaying the fact that these knowledges are contingent constructions of power even within their own ‘proper’ locations. This can thus be contrasted against what is a central impulse within postcolonial theory: not to only criticise colonialism's creation of globe-spanning relations of domination through discourses of colonial Otherness but to also deconstruct colonial discourse's hold on, and transformations in, the metropolitan core.

Always Already Hybrid: The Context of a Theory's/Knowledge's/Text's Interpretation, Application or Re-articulation

Contrary to the decolonial view, we argue that no knowledge is ever identical to its context of origin and that there is thus no ‘proper’ location or scale for a particular form of knowledge. Knowledge always represents something which is simultaneously less than and in excess of its context of origin and is thus always fractured or disjointed vis-á-vis such origins.

Knowledge always represents something less than its origin because all knowledge only ever derives from discourses and practices which are always fraught with antagonism and articulated from specific social positions of power, thus unable to fully suture the social field, whether local or global. To deny this, to claim indigenous knowledge as arising organically from a set of embodied experiences which it is capable of denoting and describing fully, is to invisibilise conflictual and dynamic sites of interest in the indigenous ‘location’ and to overwrite what Spivak (cited in Spivak and Young 1991: 229) calls ‘differance at the origin’ and to ‘[ignore] the subaltern in other space’.

Knowledge also represents something in excess of its origin insofar as the meaning of a particular text or knowledge body cannot be regarded as immediately given from its onset. It is rather dependent on forms of reading, interpretation and dissemination in order to be made understandable and agentic in a concrete social setting. This inevitably subjects the text or knowledge body to practices of repetition which open it up for potential reinterpretations and re-articulations within contexts both similar and foreign to its purported ‘origin’. In fact, no context of reading, interpretation, or dissemination can ever be identical to the context in which the text or knowledge body was originally formulated – thus no identical recovery of a text's or knowledge's originary meaning is possible.

When knowledge is made politically agentic – ‘resurged’ or ‘renewed’, to speak as Mignolo and Walsh (2018) – it never represents a clear continuation from or direct repetition of an (erased) past and can thus never assert a clear position of alterity from outside the current situation. Rather, any application, interpretation or articulation of knowledge is always already a re-articulation enunciated within a partially novel theatre of antagonism – a ‘third space’ to speak as Bhabha (2000a) – which necessarily overflows the knowledge's originary context. It is in relation to this space of re-articulation that we argue that resistance is more properly understood through the lens of dialectics as this recognises not only that resistance can and does draw from a multiplicity of (re)sources to assert its status but also that oppressed groups occupy a space which cannot be clearly positioned outside of the oppressor's discourse. It is rather a negated space, a position of constitutive Otherness, which is ‘third’ in the sense that it is located both within and outside the oppressing discourse and system, from which its gaps and contradictions can be illuminated, forced open, and subsequently sublated.

A consequence of this reasoning is the realisation that a theory's/knowledge's/text's political relevance cannot be regarded as immediately given from its position of origin – that is to say, a theory's usability in anti-colonial struggle does not emanate immediately from its perceived alterity, its perceived location within a ‘knowledge base’ seemingly ready to upend the neocolonial world order from its inclusion into a pluriversality of provincialised knowledges. Rather, the relevance and usability of a particular text or knowledge for a particular social struggle needs to be performed through an active process of selection, appropriation, interpretation and implementation of specific theoretical contents. This process is known within the Gramscian tradition as one of ‘elaboration’ (Gramsci 1971: 326–343; cf. Said 1983: 169–173) and has in social movement studies and anti-colonial thinking been connected to the notion of ‘movement texts’ (Ahmad 2023; Eyerman and Jamison 1991; Sunnemark 2023; Sunnemark and Thörn 2023; Thörn 2015; Thörn and Wilén forthcoming), and connects to the notion of ‘third space’ accounted for above (Bhabha 2000a). As put by Mascat (2021: 538), while ‘politics and political engagement certainly rely on experience’, and thus carry with them a certain rootedness in specific locations, ‘this mostly designates a starting point’. When lived experience becomes articulated, elaborated and disseminated as a politically agentic theory, it is equally dependent on ‘disidentification as well as identification; [it] presuppose[s] belonging and filiations that root us somewhere but also affiliations that uproot and project us towards some place that is not necessarily “ours” and that we can nevertheless choose as a “cause” to which we can feel committed’ (Mascat 2021: 538). This realisation would indeed be problematic for decolonial theory; it would disrupt its view of theory as overdetermined by the autochthonous ‘lived experience’ of its formulation of origin and instead point towards practices of attachment, identification and re-articulation which of necessity comes after such a formulation.

This accentuates a theory's plasticity, its necessary unfinishedness and possibilities for situated re-significations and reapplications. As per our contextualisation of this in relation to a Marxist notion of dialectics, however, we also argue that such re-significations and reapplications must be viewed as conditioned by a movement's or group's position within a given set of material conditions and relations. Class, poverty, segregation, development and political governance exert influence over how and where such re-signification and reapplications take place; as put by Zachary Levenson (2022: 202), ‘a dialectical analysis of articulation would think these two premises in relation to one another, balancing contingency and determination’.

Authenticity from Struggle, Not from Origin

The meaning and applicability of a theoretical text is thus not given from its onset, but is always dependent on being read, interpreted, and put into practice within a particular context which is always already contaminated by the intrusion of hybridity and locked into the dialectical interplay of a dominant social system – necessarily involving a plethora of knowledges, enmeshed and confronted with each other, none of which can lay claim to definitive originality. Any indigenous, native or original knowledge must in this – and every – situation become re-articulated in order to be made politically agentic. This is necessarily done within a context overdetermined not just by the originary event of colonialism – the original erasure of knowledge resulting from the first colonial encounter – but by the complex history through which colonialism turned into postcolonialism and/or neocolonialism, and all the different transculturations, migrations and shifts in political context that this entails. No knowledge is automatically reproduced from one situation, one site of antagonism, to another but must rather be actively relocated in relation to an at least partially new conjuncture. Any such site of re-articulation or relocation necessarily reconfigures the presumably ‘original’ knowledge in hybrid terms. As put by Bhabha (2000a: 1), there is thus a

need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences [ . . . ] The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation. The “right” to signify from the periphery of authorized power and privilege does not depend on the persistence of tradition; it is resourced by the power of tradition to be reinscribed through the conditions of contingency and contradictoriness that attend upon the lives of those who are “in the minority” [ . . . ] This process estranges any immediate access to an originary identity or a ‘received’ tradition.

From this perspective, the notion of ‘border thinking’, central to Mignolo's thought, is reconfigured, or perhaps re-emphasised: no longer viewed as the continual claims made by an outside positionality to redress the ‘terms of the conversation’ on the basis of its rootedness in a specific locality or tradition, but rather as located in ‘the emergence of the interstices – the overlap and displacement of domains of difference – [in which] the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated’ (Bhabha 2000a: 2; emphasis added).

A source of authenticity should therefore not be located in a theory's/knowledge's/text's origin, but rather in the network of practical politics through which a theory becomes read, elaborated, re-articulated and disseminated – the practice through which a theory becomes influential, the networks through which texts become disseminated, the intellectual forums in which texts are debated, and the overarching context of power and material relations in which all of this takes place. It is when a text or theory becomes mobilised in the service of anti-imperialist struggle, for the material liberation of a people from external domination, whether as conceived in the traditional model of colonisation or otherwise, a process which necessarily involves both a refutation and re-articulation of colonial modes of knowledge and identification, that it can be regarded as properly decolonial. As put by Mavish Ahmad (2023: 60), ‘not all anti-imperial critique is equally counter-hegemonic’: that a theory or critique is generally regarded as constituted outside or before a colonial regime does not necessarily mean that it is fruitfully mobilisable for the purposes of political insurgency. Rather than to ‘collapse’ all supposed exteriorities of coloniality into a ‘shared “southern standpoint”’, we need to ‘parse out different lineages of anti-imperial critique’ (Ahmad 2023: 60). It is from such a ‘parsing’, an attention to practices of interpretation, re-articulation, and dissemination of theory/knowledge/text, that we gain actual insight into concrete arenas of political struggle.

Within this discussion, we can also use Spivak's (1988) notion of subaltern speech to challenge the centrality of origin and alterity within decolonial thought. Spivak's suggested method of analysis is one attuned to the practical political context of enunciation in which a claim to subaltern speech is being made, and encourages us to interrogate the positionality of intellectuals, parties and states in making such claims. It recognises that there are no clear pathways to an authentic subaltern or indigenous knowledge, but rather that any claims to such knowledges are necessarily mediated through a network of practices which is always already overdetermined by contexts of political power. As Asher (2017) has also noted, this is a concern that Spivak shares with some feminists more clearly associated with decoloniality, such as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2012). In addition, Spivak's discussion can in and of itself be seen as a testament to the power of hybridising different strands of political thought and elaborating them in relation to a concrete context of political power and critique. Spivak's discussion emanates from a critical confrontation between complex struggles and patterns of identification within (post)colonial India and the concepts of ostensibly ‘Western’ theoretical strands, starting with her critical discussion of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, continuing with her appropriation of Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci, and finishing with her reading of Jacques Derrida. Here, she produces a theoretical discourse which cannot be reduced to a mere regurgitation of its Western ‘sources’ nor to an elaboration of a strictly indigenously Indian predicament or knowledge base: it is a hybrid text which is nevertheless firmly anchored within a context of (post)colonial struggle.

By Way of Conclusion: Subaltern Marxist Hybrids

As a concluding example, we point to the works of Fanon (1963) and Rodney (2022a, 2022b) to demonstrate the manner in which organic intellectuals have appropriated and re-signified intellectual traditions of purported Western origin in relation to concrete arenas of anti-colonial struggle, creating hybrids which are not reducible to the Western origin of some its theoretical sources nor to the geographic location in which the articulation is being made. What is brought forth is nevertheless a strident decolonial position enabled by powerful refutations of the (neo)colonial capitalist world system, done in connection and dialogue with actual social movements and contexts of struggle. The reason for this discussion lies in the fact that decolonial thought's centralisation of origin and roots comes forth at its clearest in its rejection of Marxism. Marxism is, according to Mignolo (2009: 172), ‘a European invention responding to European problems’, incapable of responding to colonialism as far as it ‘[privileges] class relations over racial hierarchies and patriarchal and heterosexual normativity’. As such, Marxism is understood strictly as part of a European canon – like post-structuralism, postmodernism and anarchism, it is a ‘eurocentered [critique] of eurocentrism’ (Escobar 2007: 186) forever tied to its European origins. Because Marxism emerged from Europe and was originally articulated in relation to European predicaments, its ‘proper’ area of application can only be that of Europe, according to decolonial thought. Any serious reading of Fanon and Rodney would severely complicate, if not outright refute, this stance on Marxism, and, from this, further complicate the notion that theories are bound to their originary contexts of formulation.

Neither Fanon nor Rodney were armchair theorists or academics in the conventional sense; their theory production was primarily conducted for the purposes of advancing anti-colonial, anti-racist and anti-capitalist political struggles within their immediate social contexts. In this sense, their subversion of ordinary academic discourse, their engaged activism and their clear connection to groups involved in revolutionary struggle, make them comparable to Gramsci's (1971: 5–14) organic intellectuals. If nothing else, this comparison accentuates the strategic and militant nature of their theorising and makes us aware that they did not act out of mere academic interest. They theorised for the purpose of ending colonialism and creating a new society; in this sense they were as ‘authentically’ decolonial as could be. And it was precisely out of this militant anti-colonial stance that they adopted Marxism as a primary frame of reference – not despite of it, as is clear from their texts. Here, Rodney (2022a: 45) views Marxism ‘as a weapon of theory [ . . . ] as that tool, at the level of ideas, which will be utilized for dismantling the capitalist imperialist structure’. Further, this notion is developed by listing where Marxism has been successfully implemented in, and modified for, anti-colonial struggle:

In many respects, when we ask the question today about the relevance of Marxism to black people, we have already reached a minority position, as it were. Many of those engaged in the debate present the debate as though Marxism is a European phenomenon and black people responding to it must of necessity be alienated because the alienation of race must enter into the discussion. They seem not to take into account that already that methodology and that ideology have been utilized, internalized and domesticated in large parts of the world that are not European. That it is already the ideology of eight hundred million Chinese people; that it is already the ideology which guided the Vietnamese people to successful struggle and to the defeat of imperialism [ . . . ] That it is already the ideology that was used by Cabral, that was used by Samora Machel, which is in use on the African continent itself to underline and underscore struggle and the construction of a new society. It cannot therefore be termed a European phenomenon. (Rodney 2022a: 41)

The notion that Marxism is a ‘tool’ or ‘weapon’ signifies the strategic nature of the anti-colonial organic intellectual's theory building and makes the question of Marxism's European nature irrelevant. In the end, the question is not if original European Marxism represents a universally valid and eternally true body of knowledge, making it necessary to obfuscate its European origins, and directly transpose its theoretical contents onto any and all possible cases. The question is rather whether it provides an analysis which can be used as a strategic framework which enables radical political action through its application and mobilisation in a concrete setting of social and political struggle.

Here, the analyses and formulations of Marx and Friedrich Engels are thus not approached as an eternally true gospel, the meanings of which are to be directly transferred to the Global South context. Rather, they are viewed as concrete analyses that Marx and Engels conducted of their own immediate political contexts. Such analyses are then actively and creatively addressed, reformulated and reworked in relation to a new political context defined under new circumstances. This process will necessarily build from locally specific impulses, experiences and material conditions; it will certainly critique or refute some aspects of Marx and Engels’ original analyses; thus, it will amount a to a process of third space re-articulation as has been accounted for above, insofar as this creates a ‘new’ body of thought which is reducible neither to original Marxism or the supposedly radically Other knowledges of the societies in which Fanon and Rodney worked. Subsequently, such re-articulations of Marxism from a colonially Other position has gone on to profoundly influence and change mainstream Marxism in the ‘core’.

In this context, it does not matter whether Marxism is originally or essentially Western: the question is whether it can be claimed and utilised for anti-colonial struggle. This mirrors Bhambra's (2007: 89) discussion on notions of freedom and equality: ‘the concepts and traditions are not European; what is at stake is the claiming of these concepts and traditions as European’. Rodney (2022a: 50) describes such a work of ‘claiming’ when he narrates the active work of making Marxism as ‘a living force within one's history’, ‘an ongoing social product which has to be adapted to their own society’. Fanon can be said to go through such a process of ‘claiming’ and ‘adapting’ throughout the whole of The Wretched of the Earth (1963; cf. Gibson 2018); adopting Marxist terminology and methodology but reworking it to eventually arrive at a description of class relations and political economy that is largely different from the ordinary Marxist description of Western relations, and bearing consequences for the political programme that he eventually suggests. This is what he means when he says that ‘a Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial issue’ (Fanon 1963: 40).

The first point here is that Marxism can and should be reworked and re-articulated to be put to work for anti-colonial purposes. The second point is that active re-articulation and application work is always necessary in order to make Marxism politically agentic. This can be said to go for any body of political thought: theory is always dependent on constantly being reworked to account for problems and situations that exist beyond its original context of formulation, thus creating hybridities in the process. These points are, we argue, inadequately accounted for in decolonial thought, even as its radical questioning of Western universality proves tantamount for anti-colonialism going forward.