How do our struggles to produce more rigorous ideas about liberation and decolonization relate to a variety of struggles across Abya Yala to produce concrete, material conditions that can correctly be described as liberated? I take Struggles for Liberation in Abya Yala (2024), the recent volume edited by Luis Rubén Díaz Cepeda and Ernesto Rosen Velásquez, to be a marvelous attempt to address this question and many related ones.
This volume brings together abstract theoretical questions regarding liberation with descriptions of concrete practices of liberation—struggles for change that have produced tangible manifestations and yet reflect theory. For the student or activist who wants to know more about how contemporary political movements relate to broader theoretical questions, as well as for the student or activist with an interest in those theoretical questions who seeks to beyond the abstractions, this is an excellent text that offers a variety of riches.
These riches include a plethora of engagements with Enrique Dussel’s philosophy of liberation, as evident in chapters by Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Enrique Téllez Fabiani, AFyL Women Collective, Nadia Heredia, Gabriel Herrera Salazar, Paloma Griffero, Luis Rubén Díaz Cepeda, and Iván Sandoval-Cervantes and Amy Reed-Sandoval. As I will discuss later on, many of these focus predominantly on theoretical questions, while others embed the philosophical matters within examinations of particular forms of contemporary political action. Extended engagements with other thinkers central in decolonial studies include Alejandro Vallega’s chapter exploring the work of Aníbal Quijano through the thematic of utopia and Elisabeth Paquette’s chapter on the salience of Sylvia Wynter to struggles for queer and trans liberation. Stephanie Berruz Rivera’s chapter explores the limitations of academic decolonial thought by way of, among other things, its decoupling from praxis, while Rosen Velásquez’s chapter reflects on the perverse politics of academic “diversity” initiatives before offering a case study of student-driven praxis that challenges many of the presumptions of the neoliberal university. The volume also includes a chapter by Ernesto Castañeda synopsizing and analyzing the Zapatistas and a chapter by Osiris Sinuhé González Romero on the criminalization of peyote and political struggles toward its decriminalization.
This collection, from start to finish, stands as a testament to the editors’ commitment to spurning disciplinary decadence: this volume would fit equally well in courses in such academic disciplines as Political Science, Sociology, Philosophy, Anthropology, Latin American Studies, Africana Studies, and Women/Gender/Sexuality Studies. Nonetheless, while its eclecticism is a clear strength, it raises issues that merit further consideration and discussion.
The editors describe their use of the eponymous “Abya Yala” (denoting what might otherwise be termed “the Americas”) as an effort to shift the geography of reason (2). This effort by Díaz Cepeda and Rosen Velásquez to shift the geography of reason, though, goes far beyond the nominal and is clearly reflected in both the selection of authors and topics covered by the volume. On this note, they remark:
Although the range of contributors may not always necessarily share the same view, method, or liberation praxis, each of them in some form declare another world is possible. Such is the scream that comes from the underside of modernity; from the people that have chosen to rebel and act in solidarity against the system that oppresses them. These voices have been listened to and amplified first by philosophy of liberation and later by the decolonial turn, which has grown to be a fruitful philosophical tradition with influence in Africana philosophy, feminism, critical race theory, ethics, and political philosophy. It is in the latter area where we focus in Struggles for Liberation in Abya Yala by reflecting on the theoretical reach of the decolonial turn, as well as its implications in education and social movements in search of liberation in the United States, México, Argentina, Chile, and the Caribbean (3).
The volume the editors have produced is a collection of novel and meritorious scholarship on the decolonial turn and its political ramifications very much worthy of attention from any researchers engaged in these topics. This volume would also function well as a textbook in a college course seeking to introduce students to decolonial thinking and its linkages to concrete social movements. For activists interested in “the decolonial turn,” while this text does not as such endeavor to create a universally-intelligible introduction—prior familiarity with other literature on the topic might be needed for some readers—this text will no doubt reward the studious interlocutor.
A possible criticism I found myself reflecting on in reading this text and afterward pertains to its organization. While I think this collection would be an excellent one to assign to undergraduates or graduate students in a variety of courses, I found myself thinking that, as a pedagogical affair, I would likely assign these chapters in the reverse order of how they appear in the book. In effect, the text moves from the most abstract to the most concrete. Section I, titled “Theoretical Approaches,” offers Maldonado-Torres’s critical assessment of liberation philosophy in light of what he terms “combative decoloniality” and Vallega’s and Téllez Fabiani’s explications of theoretical frameworks laid out by Quijano and Dussel, respectively. Section II—titled “Gender”—offers the AFyL Women Collective’s searing theoretical analysis of patriarchy and Paquette’s account of Wynter’s salience to queer and trans struggles. Section III is titled “Education,” and it begins with two accounts—those of Rosen Velásquez and Rivera Berruz—decidedly centered on (though not privileging) sites of higher education in the United States. The section then turns to Heredia’s theoretical reflection on the decolonization of Latin American education in the context of its historical evolution and neoliberal present before closing with Herrera Salazar’s call for a praxis fusing social research and practices of learning. Section IV, titled “Social Movements,” begins with Griffero’s provocative account of the aesthetics of weaving in the context of Chilean education and social movements, followed by Diaz Cepeda’s account of struggles for migration justice and Sandoval-Cervantes & Reed-Sandoval’s account of animalista praxis in Latin America. The section closes with the chapters from Castañeda and González Romero, noted above, concerning the Zapatistas and then peyote decriminalization.
On the one hand, it is not only customary but often intellectually requisite to begin a work with theoretical foundations before moving into questions of their concrete application. The organization of this text certainly aligns with such an approach. On the other hand, though, while one might reasonably expect such an ordering in a monograph, for this edited volume I wonder if a reversal would have been more warranted: should this text begin with descriptions of the praxis of concrete social movements and then move toward the more vexed and abstract questions raised by authors whose analysis tends to be more strictly theoretical?
On this front, it should be noted that many readers attracted to the volume’s concise title might be expecting more attention to the empirical dimensions of liberation struggles in Abya Yala. I wonder if such readers might find this text’s theoretical richness more rewarding if it started with the discussion of social movements and concluded with the more densely theoretical. Given that, as noted in the passage quoted above, the editors make no pretense that the various authors collected here are in consensus on theoretical frameworks, perhaps concluding with the strictly theoretical would allow readers to reflect more directly on the empirical social movements in assessing the theoretical questions being raised.
The titling of the volume’s middle sections also presented this reader with certain questions. Section II does speak directly to gender, yet it does so in part by demonstrating the problem with the reduction of the issues its chapters describe to one of gender alone. As the two chapters in this section are decidedly oriented toward the theoretical, it strikes me that they would have belonged equally well in Section I. As three essays in Section I are relatively silent on gender, mixing these into Section I might, as I see it, offer a more accurate portrait of theoretical approaches within “the decolonial turn.”
Likewise, Section III (“Education”) begins with chapters by Rosen Velásquez and Rivera Berruz that, though contextualized by the institutional dynamics of institutions of higher learning, are somewhat scant in addressing education as such. Rosen Velásquez’s discussion of the “reverse empiricism” of university approaches to diversity is both clever and apt, and Rivera Berruz’s discussion of the “trap of critique” speaks to the evergreen problem of the compatibility of decolonial and academic projects. I wonder, though, if these chapters could have better served the volume’s project by being recast in the context of other sections. Rosen Velásquez’s account of the activist project of Breonna Taylor Day speaks well to questions of how social movements engage in liberation struggles and stands in stark contrast to how university practices tend to transform liberatory fervor into non- or anti-liberatory practices. Reframing this as a case study on liberatory social movements might have enhanced its contribution to the volume’s project at a conceptual level. Meanwhile, I wonder if Rivera Berruz’s essay would have simply been better cast in the “Theoretical Approaches” section, treated as, in effect, a theoretical approach to the role of the theorist.
With those potential criticisms regarding organization in mind, though, it must be noted how well the interrelation between the chapters in this volume functions to produce a provocative whole. For present purposes, let me focus on two instances. The first is the chapter by Maldonado-Torres. It offers a fascinating discussion of Augusto Salazar Bondy’s philosophical dialogues and the central role of Frantz Fanon therein but contends that Latin American philosophy quickly diverged from this initial impetus. The radicality of Fanon’s centering of the damned—or, indeed, one might say, the most damned—is displaced by the concerns of academic philosophers, with the consequence that, as Maldonado-Torres surmises, “The obsession with the question about the authenticity of Latin American philosophy remains within the orbit of mestizo intellectuality” (22). An antidote, Maldonado-Torres maintains, is for the decolonial turn to offer close attention to the question of combativity, taking note of whether theories and praxes are combative or non-combative or somewhere in between (e.g., the “pre-combative”).
I hold Maldonado-Torres to clearly be correct in demonstrating that a strictly non-combative decoloniality would, in effect, prove insufficient for decolonization. Nonetheless, I found Sandoval-Cervantes and Reed-Sandoval’s chapter on the animalista movement to implicitly suggest a possible response that might trouble Maldonado-Torres’s argument around the margins. They write that “the animalista movement…engages Global South and decolonial theories, such as those of Dussel and Mignolo, in support of its aims. …[R]elatedly, animalistas tend to eschew universalist and ‘top-down’ approaches to animal ethics, which are often perceived as being imposed from above by Global North animal rights movements” (175). In short, animalistas—roughly, communities in Latin America seeking both human and animal liberation through developing critical forms of animal-human relations—draw on decolonial thought in reconceiving animal liberation. Yet such implies, first, the salience of decoloniality to animal liberation independent of the latter being seen simply as an effort on the part of non-human animals to combat human encroachment and regimes of violence. Second, it suggests that, while struggles for indigenous sovereignty and against the entrenched power of those trading in animal flesh are necessary, the work of integrating human and non-human animals in healthy communal relations would seem to have important decolonial force beyond the mere combating of colonial hegemony. In other words, a critical study of the animalistas demonstrate some of the ambiguities of the project of decolonizing Abya Yala that, while not negating the salience of combativity, may nevertheless entail that its centrality to that project is somewhat different than Maldonado-Torres’s analytic framework maintains.
Somewhat similar to Maldonado-Torres, Rivera Berruz’s contribution explores limitations of academic critique, centering Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s contention that decolonization is not a metaphor. Rivera Berruz criticizes the orientation in Latin American decolonial thought to ignore North American indigenous thought and politics, noting that “Tuck and Yang are seldom considered in conversation with Latin American philosophical concerns, most notably in its decolonial key” (110). Drawing on the work of Gregory Pappas, Rivera Berruz raises the problem “that the theme of decolonization has become a new synonym for liberation in Latin American thought, but falls short of its own decolonial goal in so far as it begins with a global standpoint about injustice that risks a dangerous over-simplification” (110).
I agree with Tuck, Yang, and Rivera Berruz that struggles for decolonization that ignore questions of land and sovereignty are non-starters; simply put, changing cultural institutions and epistemes can alone never suffice for achieving decolonization, as Rivera Berruz’s notion of the “trap of critique” indicates. Thus, sovereignty and land are necessary for decolonization. However, some interlocutors represent Tuck and Yang’s argument as if it successfully demonstrated that indigenous sovereignty suffices for decolonization. Perhaps ironically, such a reading would align with Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s recent Against Decolonisation (2022), which is grounded in regarding decolonization as solely being a matter of sovereignty. While Taiwo’s position is specific to African political thought—on the grounds that African sovereignty has already been achieved—the assault on essentially culturalist or idealist conceptions of decolonization aligns with that of Tuck and Yang.
Yet as I see the matter, “colonization” is a concept that from its inception is grounded in metaphor and thus inescapably conducive to ambiguity. It logically follows that we would expect the same for “decolonization.” What is essential is to insist that decolonization not be mere metaphor, yet it strikes me as short-sighted to take intellectuals grounded in one particular iteration of liberation struggle as being able to define the relevant meaning of decolonization for all liberation struggles. In other words, the issue identified by Pappas and Rivera Berruz cuts both directions: global theories of decolonization may fail to understand the specificities of liberation in particular contexts, but in turn such specificities can still support the refinement of theoretical conceptions of decolonization, whether in the form of a localist decolonization or in producing more rigorous global conceptions. Thus, a task for theories of and/or in the decolonial turn is to assess polyvalent and contextual meanings of struggles for decolonization in such a way as to challenge the sufficiency of any given model both within and beyond the context of its enunciation. (My earlier review of Táíwò’s text in this blog series rests on the same premise.)
The juxtaposition of Rivera Berruz’s essay with several other chapters in this volume is thus, as I see it, theoretically generative. Consider Vallega’s important terminological clarification: “I should note that I speak of ‘those being colonized’ rather than of the ‘colonized’ past tense, in order to indicate that full colonization has never happened, and that to speak of the ‘colonizer’ over against the ‘colonized’ places the latter in a fait accompli…” (30). If decolonization refers only to the movement from “being colonized” to “not being colonized,” it would seem that Vallega’s point would become unintelligible. But addressing many of the social movements discussed in this text, Vallega’s observation appears quite clearly to be apt. In this text, we find discussions of indigenous and mestizo communities alike (to speak nothing of the impurity of any applications of this distinction) engaged in processes of decolonization grounded neither in their strict non-colonization nor in their simply moving from non-sovereign to sovereign. Sinuhé González Romero’s contention that “Decolonizing peyote politics involves decriminalizing its cultural uses…” (207) similarly evidences the point. A strict rejection of any metaphoric dimension in decolonization would seem to entail rejection of this interpretation. Nonetheless, González Romero demonstrates the colonial dimensions of such criminalization. Hence, insofar as decriminalizing peyote renders colonization less “full,” it can be discussed in terms of its fit within a process of decolonization without metaphor.
In short, Díaz Cepeda and Ernesto Rosen Velásquez have compiled a rewarding collection of essays that speak to the theoretical dimensions of the decolonial turn while giving special attention to how these are manifest in social movement praxis. For those struggling for liberation in Abya Yala and beyond, this text offers both a bevy of insights and a variety of fascinating juxtapositions.
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