The term decolonial has partially been diluted from its original meaning. Many of us probably won’t disagree. Centering land and Indigenous sovereignty is certainly a way to reinspire the term, but we should go further by replacing the decolonial at the center of Latin American epistemologies. This is what Sergio Calderón Harker proposes to do in this small text, invoking a powerful pantheon of Abya Yala thinkers.
“Decolonization, which sets out to change the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder.”
Published in 1961, these words from Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth set the stage for thinking of the decolonial as both a world-shattering and world-building project. This was subsequently reflected in the multiple manifestations of decolonial endeavors in the late 20th century. For some, decolonization was a call for an emancipatory and popular nation-building process, severing the shackles of imperial political and economic entanglements. For others, it was the reassertion of autonomy in its different arrangements: institutional, spatial, and oftentimes even cultural. Across the board, what remained was the centrality of the “political”; the necessity to think and enact the decolonial project as a collective and communal question: a re-imagining (and abolition, some would argue) of the world as it is.
This, too, remains central to the decolonial epistemologies which find their home in Abya Yala, the term various Indigenous communities and nations use to refer to the American continent. The name has its origins in the Guna people who live in the Darién Gap, located in today’s northwest Colombia and southeast Panama.
The very notion of Abya Yala exemplifies what is fundamental for decolonial epistemologies: an intimate and indissoluble relation between body, place, and knowledge.
To use the term implies to reassert an understanding of the decolonial where land and discourse, territorio y palabra, cannot be disjointed, severed.
Fanon’s own vision of decolonization as a world-shaking programme should not be understood outside of its Caribbeannes, considering, of course, that Fanon’s Martinique inhabits a dissimilar yet inextricably shared world with Abya Yala. But what happens when land, space, territorio, become abstracted from the equation? Can the decolonial project retain its political dimension if the issue of territorial, indigenous sovereignty—crucial within Abya Yala—is no longer at the concept’s forefront?
Already in 2012, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang warned that, steadily, decolonization was becoming a metaphor. The particular situatedness of their claim within a settler-colonial context (i.e. Canada) should not be understated. However, their warning reflects a reality beyond North America, and reverberates in a variety of institutionalized settings, especially across the so-called Global North.
The “decolonial” (as a metaphor) is the term of the hour. In the context of liberal institutions, including academia, healthcare, and governance, to mention a few, the “need to decolonize” is no longer a matter of debate. Unsurprising conservative backlash notwithstanding, the decolonial is no longer radical. Calls for “decolonizing” curricula, media consumption, global health, educational access, and even romantic relationships are slowly becoming the norm.
We may even go as far as saying that the decolonial has become fashionable, as Aymara/Bolivian writer and activist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui noted during a talk with Silvia Federici in 2018. According to Rivera Cusicanqui, the “decolonial” is a more recent fashion employed primarily in a Global North context, which uses and reinterprets the histories of anti-colonial struggle and depoliticizes them. It implies a “state,” a “situation,” and not an “activity,” an “agency,” or a form of “conscious participation”; hence why she asserts that “the decolonial is a fashion, the postcolonial a desire, and the anti-colonial a permanent and daily struggle.”
While Rivera Cusicanqui’s differentiation remains helpful and necessary, the task at hand may not be to completely discard the “decolonial” as a concept, as her reading may suggest. However, it must be taken as a call to enquire for the “political” that is – and should be – central to the decolonial project. Beyond her analysis, the danger with the metaphorization of the decolonial is not only its inevitable transformation into a catch-all, empty signifier; easily universalizable, effortlessly ubiquitous. If anything, under certain conditions, a broader understanding of the decolonial can and has stood for internationalist politics against imperial and colonial extractivism and in solidarity with Indigenous struggles across the world. The issue here is the ways in which the decolonial, as a normalized, fashionable discourse, has become subsumed into the very structures it attempts to break away from.
What is at stake here is not whether efforts to “decolonize” institutions in the Global North can genuinely “make the world a better place.” Instead, it is crucial to situate these within the transformation of what “decolonizing” means and, to follow Rivera Cusicanqui’s lead, to question how these meanings stray away from histories of anti-colonial struggle and their respective epistemologies.
Unlike epistemologies originating in Abya Yala (and throughout the so-called Global South, for that matter), the everyday realities of diasporic communities in the Global North do not necessitate for the decolonial to be anchored to a relation to the land, el territorio. While their relationship to the state remains asymmetric given long histories of racialization, minoritization, and socio-economic precarization, the issue of land sovereignty is not indispensable. Importantly, the notion of “land” here exceeds the frameworks of private property; it cannot be fully comprehended within a reading of sovereignty as the right to one’s “parcel.”
Instead, within the decolonial epistemologies of Abya Yala, the land represents a greater ecosystem.
For the Misak Indigenous people, who live in nowadays southwestern Colombia, the land exists at the junction of a spiritual, symbolic, and educational practice to preserve ancestral knowledge. In the Misak case, land sovereignty, as the core issue of decolonial and anti-colonial struggle, equals the conservation of their own cosmologies, knowledge, and ways of living.
For Francia Márquez Mina, renowned environmental activist and 2018 Goldman prize winner for her opposition to illegal mining, to be a feminist in Abya Yala is to be immersed in “permanent and daily struggle.” Since August 2022, Colombia’s first-ever Black female Vice-President, Francia hails from the Cauca region, home to various Afro-Colombian communities living in the midst of paramilitary violence, state negligence, and extractivist projects. During her presentation as a presidential candidate for the 2022 elections, Francia spoke clearly: “One cannot be a feminist without being anti-racist; one cannot be a feminist without being anti-system; one cannot be a feminist without interrupting the politics of death, the politics of capitalism.” Her words articulate popular, rural, Black, anti-state and anti-capitalist feminisms. The now Vice-President’s speech is as much a reflection of important shifts within contemporary Colombian political culture, as well as broader struggles of the present in Abya Yala.
During the campaign, which resulted in her election alongside now President Gustavo Petro, Francia publicized the proclamation of vivir sabroso; loosely interpreted as “living joyfully”; literally translated as “living deliciously.” More than just a campaign slogan, vivir sabroso refers to “living without fear, to live in dignity.” Sabor (flavor, joy) becomes central to a decolonial epistemology that is embodied through and oriented by a Black feminist perspective. It originates in the Black Atrato, where body and territory are inseparable; an epistemology born from practices of existence as resistance in the context of systemic racism, state violence, and extractivist exploitation.
Although evidently located within histories of Afro-Colombian struggle, Francia Marquéz’s vivir sabroso encapsulates the “permanent and daily struggle” of decolonial feminisms in Abya Yala – the term “decolonial feminism” having been offered by scholars, philosophers, and activists such as Afro-Dominican Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, Argentine Maria Lugones, and Puerto Rican Nelson Maldonado-Torres, to mention a few.
Francia’s vivir sabroso exemplifies what Afro-Colombian scholar Betty Ruth Lozano Lerma terms “insurgent epistemologies,” which are at the center of Black, decolonial feminisms.
Lozano Lerma’s work centers on mujernegra subjectivity; a term which collapses, problematizes, and thereby highlights the intersectionality of the categories of “Black” and “woman.” Subsequently, the mujeresnegras of the Afro-Colombian Pacific are interpreted not just as marginalized subjects, but creators of worlds via cultural and social practices constituting present day alternatives to “predatory hegemonic development.”
For Lozano Lerma, these practices and epistemologies, anchored in the regions of the Afro-Colombian Pacific, represent contributions towards buen vivir. This term is a contentious translation of sumak kawsay, a Quechuan neologism popularized by socialist Indigenous organizations from the 1990s. This idea is similar to vivir sabroso and can also be found throughout Abya Yala in Indigenous communities such as the Mapuche (nowadays Chile), the Guaraní (present day Paraguay and Bolivia), and the Guna (in today’s Panama, who coined the term Abya Yala). At its core, sumak kawsay represents a challenge to neoliberal, extractivist development, and towards an autonomist non-Western socialism embracing ancestral, communitarian knowledge and social practices.
Decolonial feminisms, as feminist philosopher and activist Maria Lugones suggests, precisely reassert these otherwise “subjugated knowledges.” Unlike the understanding of the decolonial criticized by Rivera Cunsicanqui, these epistemologies are fundamentally anchored on historical struggles where ancestral knowledge and the land are elementary pillars. Decolonization is then necessarily political: it is a struggle for sovereignty and resistance on an everyday basis for Indigenous communities throughout Abya Yala, as well as a “civilizational dispute”—to borrow the words from scholars from the Latin American Modernity/Coloniality group, such as Edgardo Lander, Walter Mignolo, and Arturo Escobar, to mention a few.
This understanding of the decolonial illustrates a horizon woven together from situated epistemologies. In their struggle for preservation, existence, and sovereignty, they present vivir sabroso, buen vivir, sumak kawsay, as practices of “changing the world,” as Fanon had dreamt of. ■