A book review 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 questio
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51