Warning: it is a long review, but scathing
“Why, after all, is there so little to be found in PDCI [The Politics of Decolonial Investigations] — and generally throughout the decolonial screeds of Mignolo — concerning the specifics of colonialism itself, its material basis and conditions, not to mention the actual, practically inexhaustible details of its historiography, anti-colonial movements proving no exception to this rule? Whatever the deeper reasons for it, this factual deficit is crucial to the critique and critical decipherment of the jargon of decoloniality — almost as if its terminological extravagances and redundancies and its flat-out rhetorical hubris were ironic compensation for an underlying historical vacuum.
Part of the answer will no doubt also reflect the typically contemporary and cosmopolitan purview of more vernacular calls to “decolonize.” While, as a slogan, the latter does not necessarily ignore the historical impact of colonialism on questions of present-day racial injustice and struggles against the barriers set by national-imperial privilege, even the most practical and engaged demand for decolonizing does not usually get beyond the limits of identity politics and its conventional intellectual backdrop, culturalism. [my emphasis , N. M.]
Mignolo’s explicit championing of the anti-Western “civilization-states” of China, Russia, and Iran exposes a flagrant decolonial flirtation with autocracy and great-nation chauvinisms.
But Mignolo’s sympathies and admiration for Deng Xiaoping, Xi Jinping, and the upper echelons of the Chinese civilization-state do not appear to extend to rank-and-file Chinese workers themselves. Mignolo’s clear tendency to subordinate the class contradiction to questions of cultural and ethnic hierarchy and difference — if not to ignore class altogether — cannot conceal a de facto decolonial endorsement of current ruling, capitalist-class policies as long as they can be identified as ‘de-Westernizing’. [my emphasis , N. M.]
Meanwhile, Mignolo blithely dismisses the erstwhile Soviet Union, and with it an entire epoch in the history of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism of enormous, practically incalculable importance.
For all its default-setting culturalism and its touting of “pluriversality,” decolonial theory per Mignolo as a rule seems hesitant to cast a self-evidently global capitalism itself in strictly cultural terms or to declare it to be a mere “epistemic projection.” Excepting those less overt instances in which it can be slipped in on the back of “de-Westernization” and its “civilization-states” (see again Mignolo’s indirect endorsement of “capitalism with Chinese characteristics”), capitalism as such ultimately and effectively drops out of the overall picture envisioned implicitly in PDCI and the jargon of decoloniality.
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