The decolonial thinking and the limits of geographical imagination

Francine Rossone de Paula1

Abstract
This paper examines the limits that the geographical imagination imposes on the
emergence of an epistemology that challenges the logic of modernity/coloniality. Many
of the analyses on alternative ways of thinking, being, and doing are still confined to a
‘colonizing’ spatial and temporal representation. This paper focuses on the decolonial
option. My argument is that some projects end up reiforcing the dichotomous relationship
between global and local or the modern and the subaltern (colonial) in its attempt to
situate knowledge and experience geographically and historically. ‘Border thinking’ is
insufficiently emancipatory if it does not consider the complexities of the relationship
between spatiality, representation and power in order to de-essentialize human
experience both in its temporality and spatiality. Decolonization requires unlearning the
geographical imagination that allows the demarcation of the space between ‘self’ and
‘other’ .
Keywords: decolonial option; border thinking; alternative epistemology; politics of
place; spatiality

Resumo
Este artigo examina os limites que a imaginação geográfica impõe à emergência de
uma epistemologia que desafie a lógica modernidade/colonialidade. Muitas análises
sobre formas alternativas de pensar, ser, e fazer ainda são limitadas por representações
espaciais e temporais dominantes. Este artigo foca na opção decolonial. Meu argumento
é que alguns projetos acabam por reforçar a relação dicotômica entre global e local, ou
moderno e subalterno (colonial), em sua tentativa de situar conhecimento e experiência
geográfica e historicamente. O ‘pensamento de fronteira’ é insuficientemente
emancipatório se não considera a complexidade da relação que há entre espacialidade,
representação e poder em seu esforço de de-essencializar a experiência humana
tanto em sua temporalidade quanto em sua espacialidade. Descolonização requer que
desaprendamos a imaginação geográfica que permite a demarcação do espaço entre o
‘eu’ e o ‘outro’.
Palavras-chave: opção decolonial; pensamento de fronteira; epistemologia alternativa;
política de lugar; espacialidade

1 M.A. in International Relations from Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio); doctoral candidate in
Social, Political, Ethical and Cultural Thought at Virginia Tech http://www.aspect.vt.edu/people/rossonedepaula-bio.html
 The decolonial thinking and the limits of geographical imagination

We live in space; we are physically grounded on Earth. We are taught that everything needs
to be ‘put in its place’, since two bodies cannot occupy the same spot. Even though one might
not deny the accuracy of this statement when it comes to the materiality of bodily presence
and encounters, at a representational and discursive level, the fact that some bodies are cast
out of space, rendered invisible and never allowed in has intrigued scholars that find in the
uncertainties of the twenty-first century a particularly fertile ‘terrain’ for advocating for the
‘repossession’ by the destitute of the space for human experience to which they are entitled.
As Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2011:24) would argue, “it is as difficult to imagine the end of
colonialism than to imagine that it has no end”. According to him, the difficulty in imagining an
alternative to colonialism lies in the fact that we are no longer talking about institutionalized
relationships between colonizers and colonized. Colonialism is a “vast social grammar that
traverses society, public and private spaces, culture, mentalities and subjectivities” (ibidem).
Even though decoloniality is a trajectory that has existed since the sixteenth century (Mignolo,
2011b:185), when the histories of the colonized and colonizers became entangled, since
the end of the Cold War, ‘decoloniality’ has been reoriented towards emancipation from
colonization at the level of bodies, knowledge, and subjectivies. The colonizer is no longer
simply an external threat that may be expelled from the ‘colonized’ territory, but a dominant
idea that controls the borders of the acceptable and the intelligible. This dominant idea has
different names, such as the ‘West’, ‘modernity’, or ‘globalization’, terms that are usually
used interchangeably.
The ‘decolonial’ option is understood as one of the current trajectories from and out of the
colonizing and normalizing forces of modernity. Walter Mignolo presents three types of
critique:

One is internal to the history of Europe itself and in that sense these
premises are a Eurocentered critique of modernity (for example,
psychoanalysis, Marxism, poststructuralism, postmodernity), and the other
two types emerged from non-European histories entangled with Western
modernity. One of them focuses on the idea of Western civilization (for
example, dewesternization, Occidentosis), and the other on coloniality
(such as postcoloniality, decoloniality) (Mignolo, 2011a: xi-xii).

The differences between these types of critique are justified on the basis of “their point of
origination and their routes of dispersion”. A geographical and historical distinction marks
the very definition of the decolonial perspective:

postmodernity originated in Europe but dispersed around the world.

Decoloniality originated among Third World countries after the Bandung
Conference in 1955, and also dispersed all over the world. Dewesternization
originated in East Asia, but the dewesternizing argument can be found in

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other parts of the world (Mignolo, 2011a: xi-xii).

The decolonial option is not simply invested in ‘deconstructions’, but in the construction
of global futures. The main target is “the dispute of the control of the enunciation, for it is
from there that the colonial matrix can be eroded and that another world would be made
possible” (Mignolo, 2011b:184). In opposition to other forms of critique, decolonial thinkers
aim to erode the exclusionary spatiality of the modern western world not from within, but
at the border - in the spaces of encounter between modernity and coloniality. They invite us
“to question European modernity considering its antithesis, colonialism in America, and the
effects of Coloniality of power, knowledge and being, on the global colonial subject” (Fonseca
& Jerrems, 2012:103).
In this paper, I discuss the decolonial project, its potentialities and the challenges decolonial
thinkers face in their endeavor to redistribute the geographies of history and the histories
of geography. In the first section, I analyze their proposition of ‘an-other’ way of thinking.
One of the key arguments of decolonial thinking is that thought is always geographically
and historically located. Here, I explain decolonial thinkers’ premises and discuss the
implications of thinking as ‘border thinking’. The second section investigates the reliance
on place that emerges from the insistence on searching the border, and the possible traps
and consequences of localizing the local. Finally, I try to problematize the concept of power
in decolonial thinking, suggesting that ‘decolonization’ requires a broader understanding of
power that may not necessarily turn a legible face to us in order to be resisted.

Thinking ‘Border Thinking’

In 1998, there was a conference/dialogue at Duke University between the South Asian
Subaltern Studies Group and the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group. After the
publication of the proceedings in the journal NEPANTLA, there was a split. For those expecting
the production of radical and alternative knowledges, the result was rather a reproduction of
the epistemic schema of Area Studies in the United States. They produced studies about the
subaltern rather than studies with and from a subaltern perspective (Grosfoguel, 2007:211).
In addition to exposing the location of knowledge and making the pretentious universal a
universalized particular, decolonial thinking emerges as a radicalized ramification of Latin
American Subaltern studies that emphasizes the significance of breaking with the logic that
dominates subaltern studies in which the ‘subaltern’ is the object and never the subject
of knowledge. Grosfoguel adds that in order to decolonize knowledge, one needs “to take
seriously the epistemic perspective/cosmologies/insights of critical thinkers from the Global
South, thinking from and with subalternized racial/ethnic/sexual spaces and bodies” (ibidem:
212).
Decoloniality, initially inspired by the Bandung Conference in the 1955 and the non-alignment

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movement in 1961, is reoriented from the initial campaign geared towards self-determination
and self-government at the level of the state to a focus on the ‘decolonization of knowledge’
(Mignolo, 2011a:54). Decolonization can no longer be thought in terms of conquering
power over the juridical-political boundaries of a state. Neither a nationalist movement of
development nor socialist strategies of delinking would be sufficient, since global coloniality
is not reducible to the presence or absence of an external influence (Grosfoguel, 2007:219).
Rather than expelling the colonizer from the territory, “decoloniality became synonymous
with being epistemically disobedient” (Mignolo, 2011a:54). Decoloniality proceeds from the
assumption that:

the locus of enunciations shall be decentered from its modern/colonial

configurations and limited to its regional scope. Decoloniality shall dispel
the myth of universality grounded on theo-and ego-politics of knowledge.
The open questions are then: what kind of knowledge, by whom, what for?
(Mignolo, 2011a: xvi).

Decolonial thinkers shed light on the fact that scholars often take for granted the universal
validity of some knowledges, in the sense that we do not keep tracing them back to the
historical and geographical context from where they emerged, such as Liberalism and
Marxism, while some other knowledges are associated with specific regions that produce
non-generalizable knowledge, such as Dependency Theory for instance. European and
American scholars have historically been the ones who are considered able to contribute to
world philosophical history and thus to universal knowledge (Fonseca & Jerrems, 2012:106).
The problem is that the locus of enunciation from which inclusion is established “is always a
locus holding the control of knowledge and the power of decision across gender and racial
lines, across political orientations and economic regulations” (Mignolo, 2011a:p.xv).
Decolonial thinking, promoted mainly by Latin Americans and ‘Latinamericanist’ scholars in
the United States such as Arturo Escobar, Walter Mignolo, Ramón Grosfoguel and Aníbal
Quijano, is distinguished from the postmodern/poststructuralist project and the postcolonial
project under the justification that the former is Eurocentered and deploys a critique from
within, while the latter is heavily grounded in Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Jacques
Derrida, as we see in the works of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha (Mignolo,
2007: 52). The epistemic privilege of western modern thought in these other critical
perspectives is what distinguishes these projects from decolonial thought.
Mignolo (2007:452) asserts that the decolonial shift must be a shift of perspective to an-
Other geography and other forms of knowing and being, whereas the post-colonial criticism
is a project of scholarly transformation within the academy. According to him,

[De-linking is] implicit in Nueva Corónica and Buen Gobierno by Waman

Puma de Ayala, in the de-colonial critique and activism of Mahatma

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Gandhi, in the fracture of Marxism in its encounter with colonial legacies

in the Andes, articulated by José Carlos Mariá Tegui; in the radical political
and epistemological shifts enacted by Amilcar Cabral, Aimé Césaire, Frantz
Fanon, Rigoberta Menchú, Gloria Anzaldúa, among others (ibidem).

The examples illustrate alternative and legitimate sources of knowledge, according to this
literature. But it does not mean that any of these could replace western modern knowledge
as a new universality. Universality is not part of this project, since abstract universals, such as
Christianity, Liberalism, Marxism, and Islamism, always run out of fashion and become part
of the same fundamentalist and imperialist logic for not being able to offer a solution for
the entire population of the planet (Mignolo, 2007:458). De-linking from the imperial logic
implies the rejection of any effort towards an ultimate truth.
Decolonization requires the de-colonization of knowledge, or what goes hand in hand with
the geo-politics of knowing. The question of who and when, why and where knowledge is
generated is more relevant than the question of what is materially produced, when and
where. Mignolo proposes to turn Descartes’ dictum inside out: “rather than assuming that
thinking comes before being, one assumes instead that it is a racially marked body in a geo-
historical marked space that feels the urge or get the call to speak, to articulate, in whatever
semiotic system” (Mignolo, 2009:160). The first step in decolonial thinking is then:

to accept the interconnection between geo-history and epistemology, and

between bio-graphy and epistemology that has been kept hidden by linear
global thinking and the hubris of the zero point in their making of colonial
and imperial differences. That is, the first step is to assume the legitimacy
of ‘I am where I think’ and not be afraid of inquisitorial corporate and/or
postmodern thinkers (Mignolo, 2011a: 91).

Resistance depends on changing the terms of the conversation. The decolonial agenda asks for
the delinking from the hegemonic ideas of “what economy and politics, ethics and philosophy,
technology and the organization of society are and should be” (Mignolo, 2007:459). On the
specific topic of development, Arturo Escobar has actively advocated for the concept of
post-development or alternatives to development since development, like other concepts
and technologies, could not pretend to be universally applicable. Escobar argues that it is
necessary to generate new ways of seeing, of renewing social and cultural descriptions “by
displacing the categories with which Third World groups have been constructed by dominant
forces, and by producing views of reality which make visible the numerous loci of power of
those forces” (Escobar, 1992:49).
Delinking has in part meant to reject what is western-like. It involves to some extent the
rejection of the analyses about the ‘subaltern’ that are not written by and from the position

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of subalternity. As a result, most decolonial thinkers have been engaged in research that
privileges indigenous ways of thinking and being in Latin America and other underprivileged
parts of the globe. The problem is that the duality modernity/coloniality that these studies
initially problematized remains unsolved. Decolonial scholars initially reject the difference
between oppressed humans and dominant humans based on essentialist explanations. But
they end up reinforcing the essentialist position by implying that subalternity is more than
an impermanent and relational position within a dominant and historical structure. Instead,
they insist that the subaltern position is a particular position by and from which the project
of decolonization has to start.
The critique of the imperialism of knowledge seems to lead decolonial thinkers to an
overestimation of places and bodies. It seems that they are leaning towards a reification
and substantiation of some subjects, something which I discuss more specifically in the next
section, while perhaps overlooking the relations that create these subjects. The location
from which the de-colonial project should start is well established, even though it is not a
particular geographical location. Mignolo (2007:498) observes that “the west is all over the
rest”, and “the rest is all over the west” and claims that the project starts from “the weaker
end of the imperial and colonial differences” (ibidem).
Considering the importance of locating and identifying the weaker end in the ‘matrix of
power’, one method proposed to enact the decolonial shift is critical border thinking.
Critical border thinking would function “as a connector between different experiences of
exploitation that can now be thought out and explored in the sphere of the colonial and
imperial differences” (Mignolo, 2007:498). The pluriversality of different colonial histories
entangled with imperial modernity would be connected to a universal project of delinking
from modern rationality. Therefore, “critical border thinking involves and implies both the
imperial and colonial differences” (ibidem). At this level, we do face a complex entanglement
of particulars and universal, when the ‘pluriversalization’ of the world depends on the
universality of the project.
Mignolo (2000:45) insists that “border thinking can only be such from a subaltern perspective,
never from a territorial (e.g., from inside modernity) one”. According to him, when the colonial
difference or subalternity becomes an object of study instead of an ‘epistemic potential’, the
‘subaltern study’ becomes a machine of appropriation of the colonial differences. But when
the subaltern perspective, instead of a perspective on subalternity, is elevated to the level
of valid knowledge, border thinking becomes “a machine for intellectual decolonization”
(ibidem).
One of the incongruities of ‘border thinking’ is that one needs to assume that the ‘border’
between dominant and subaltern positions is somehow fixed or clear to the extent it can
be identified. According to this logic presented by decolonial thinkers, the subaltern is
authorized into the ‘decolonial’ project at the same time that its subaltern position is

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recognized and legitimated. My concern with the insistence on the exclusiveness created
by the decolonial project that needs to be developed from a certain alternative epistemic
and subaltern position is that these positions may be actually being essentialized and fixed
at the ‘weaker end of the imperial/colonial differences’ from which the legitimacy of these
positions is supposed to be derived.
If we think ‘border thinking’ and try to locate it, we are already intervening in the ‘placement’
of the border. One might argue that this is exactly the goal: to destabilize and shift the
borders, to enable the ‘subaltern’ to free him/herself from his/her subalternity. But if that is
the case, it is still not clear why this intervention needs to happen from an ‘outside’. Yet more
problematically, why does the subaltern need to remain an ‘outsider’? There is a contradiction
in relation to the goal established by decolonial thinkers, which is ‘pluriversalization’. On the
one hand, they contend that the totalizing global space needs to be broken into its many
parts - each containing its own valid expressions of knowledge and ‘beingness’ - in order to
allow the different geographical and historical experiences to appear. On the other hand,
they are claiming that decolonization depends on a delinking from the dominant rationality.
Thus, the subaltern should give up on recognition, because that would lead to incorporation
into the dominant ways of thinking. Mignolo is very emphatic about the options the colonial
subject has:

The awareness of being on the side of anthropos [created from the

perspective of the zero point of observation] leaves a bad taste in the
mouth. However, if those of us have been seen and classified as anthropos
want to join humanitas [those who inhabit the epistemic zero point], the
bad taste in the mouth persists, although it is a different taste. Someone
who has been classified as anthropos will choose which of the two bad
tastes he or she prefers, and then decide what to do. And if you do not
feel that you are on the side of anthropos - either because you belong
to humanitas or because you prefer to ignore your situation and to fool
yourself, pretending that you belong to humanitas - that is of course your
responsibility (Mignolo, 2011a: 83).

The explanation of dominance and subalternity is offered in terms of belonging or not

belonging, of being aware of one’s position and deciding to transpose or not a certain line
between two well-established spaces. Scholars are called by decolonial thinkers to fully
embrace these alternative manifestations of life expressed from different epistemic positions,
but it seems that the decolonial option relies on a notion that these manifestations should
remain true to themselves, which implies a notion of authenticity. The subaltern, according
to what Mignolo calls the most rewarding and hopeful possibility, “claim[s] and assert[s],
through argumentation, his or her epistemic rights, to engage in barbarian theorizing in order
to decolonize humanitas and in knowledge-building to show that the distinction between

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anthropos and humanitas is a fiction controlled by the humanitas” (Mignolo, 2011a:90).

Here, it is not clear why the subaltern would have to argue and with whom if the ‘hopeful
possibility’ does not involve claiming recognition.
I argue that the distinction between the anthropos and humanitas, while is defined as a
fiction that needs to be demystified, is actually protected from contestations by the very
definitions and conditions for ‘decolonization’ established by decolonial thinkers. As I will
explain in the next section, the determination to find the borders and to define the spaces of
‘coloniality or power’ leads to a localization of ‘subalternity’. The spatial imagination that leads
to localization, distinction, and separation imposes a serious limitation on ‘decolonization’ at
both epistemological and ontological levels.

Putting the subaltern in its place

I would argue that the decolonial project has ultimately consisted of a politics of place.
Decolonial thinkers de-essentialize subordination by claiming that it has always been a
matter of position within an asymmetric spatial colonial structure of power. The modern and
the subaltern subjects are co-emergent. However, the dominant position of the former has
depended on the displacement and denial of the latter within the modern space. Boaventura
de Sousa Santos explains this mechanism in terms of ‘abyssal thinking’, through which a radical
distinction is created and reproduced between visible and invisible worlds (Santos, 2007:4-
5). Modernity becomes a singularity by subjecting the subaltern positions that it creates,
transforming them into conditions that can be measured against a totalizing standard and
represented as anomalies that often need to be fixed. In this sense, the subaltern positions
that created and were created by modernity can no longer be seen as geographical and
historical possibilities that coexist in modern space and time, but rather as obscure presences
that remind the modern of its past.
Decolonizing requires the redistribution of space and time, the dismantling of the abstract
totalizing space into its many fragments, enabling the pluralization of human spatial and
temporal experience. Grosfoguel (2007:213) notes that the “’ego-politics of knowledge’ of
Western philosophy has always privileged the myth of a nonsituated ‘EGO’”. The decolonial
project then consists in revealing the “geo-political and body-political location of the subject
that speaks [...], always hidden, concealed, erased from the analysis” (ibidem).
Most decolonial thinkers return to place as a form of empowerment of the dispossessed.
Escobar (2008:67) argues that, in the context of imperial globality, “the politics of place can
be seen as an emergent form of politics, a novel political imaginary in that it asserts a logic
of difference and possibility that builds on the multiplicity of actions at the level of everyday
life”. The desire and possibility of alternative worlds led these scholars to focus their analysis
at the level of the ‘local’, in which a ‘politics of place’ becomes the antidote for a ‘politics of

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empire’ (ibidem).
Mignolo explains that his aim is to “work out genealogies across national and regional
histories; non-national genealogies that are connected through the common experience of
the colonial wound - of sensing that, in one way or another, one belongs to the world of the
anthropos” (Mignolo, 2011a:93). Here, even though place does not appear as the territory of
intervention, it is still implicit that there is a need to ‘localize’ the ‘colonial’ and the ‘colonial
worlds’.
Mignolo also claims that the ‘global south’, which has come to mean the place from where
the subaltern may tell his/her stories, is not a geographic location on our planet, but rather
refers to “the places on the planet that endured the experience of coloniality—that suffered,
and still suffer, the consequences of the colonial wound (e.g., humiliation, racism, genderism,
in brief, the indignity of being considered lesser humans)” (Mignolo, 2011b:185). What seems
to be implicit in his explanation is that these ‘places on the planet’, in the plural, where the
victims of coloniality reside, need to be elevated against an imperialist and capitalist world,
in the singular. When he asserts that these decolonial options contribute to build a non-
imperialist and non-capitalist world (ibidem), he is also universalizing the ‘norm’ that enables
one to identify the alternatives to it. By recognizing and defining ‘decolonial options’, one is
inevitably recognizing and defining the boundaries of the dominant ‘episteme’ against which
the ‘subordinate’ is called to emerge.
Escobar points out that, since the 1990s, the social sciences debate has been dominated by a
concern with globalization. He highlights the fact that these debates have been marked by “a
pervasive asymmetry by which the global is equated with space, capital, and the capacity to
transform while the local is associated with place, labor, tradition, and hence with what will
inevitably give way to more powerful forces” (Escobar, 2008:30). The justification for a return
to place is built upon the perception that a focus on “the continued vitality of place in the
creation of culture, nature, and economy” may challenge the asymmetry (ibidem).
My main argument in this paper is that decolonial thinking as a project that starts with the
‘localization’ of the ‘colonial’ may be actually reinforcing the asymmetry and doing exactly
what they were supposed to contest. By looking at the dynamics of local knowledges and
cultures that are considered alternatives to dominant forms of thinking, being, and doing,
decolonial thinkers are reproducing the idea that the global remains in the abstract space,
while the local can be recognized in its place, living in/with its tradition. Similar to many
other scholars trying to escape globalization, “they institute, implicitly but held within the
very discourses that they mobilize, a counterposition, sometimes even a hostility, certainly an
implicit imagination of different theoretical ‘levels’ (of the abstract versus the everyday, and
so forth), between space on the one hand and place on the other” (Massey, 2005:6).
Sarah Hunt, a member of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nation and a geographer in Canada, argues
that “the future of Indigenous rights and political struggles depend on the ability of Indigenous

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knowledge to retain its active, mobile, relational nature rather than the fixity it is given in
colonial law, stuck at the point of contact with colonizers” (Hunt, 2014:30). How open can
any representation of the local be? As discussed in the last section, the point for decolonial
thinkers is not to open the space for representation of the subaltern, but to acknowledge
that subalternity is a valid and legitimate site for the production of knowledge. However, by
looking at these specific peoples, movements, and places as representations of an alternative
to the dominant epistemic position, one may end up privileging space over time while still
being concerned with preserving these alternatives from the irresistible and pervasive forces
of transformation associated with the dominant side of the struggle.
Can we, as scholars, discuss alternatives to imperialism and capitalism that remain open
enough to recognize the dynamic and contingent nature of their existence? Escobar
elucidates that, by place, he means “the engagement with and experience of a particular
location with some measure of groundedness (however unstable), boundaries (however
permeable), and connections to everyday life, even if its identity is constructed and never
fixed” (Escobar, 2008:30). However, activists, social movements, and scholars from the third
world who become subjects in decolonial thinking are ‘othered’ at the very moment that
they become visible. They are not only the ‘other’ of the modern western world, but they
also need to stay the ‘other’ because we desperately need an alternative and to place the
alternative somewhere.
In the 1990s, David Harvey discussed the tendency of the geopolitics of place to become more
emphatic. He argued that “concern for both the real and fictional qualities of place increases
in a phase of capitalist development in which the power to command space, particularly with
respect to financial and money flows, has become more marked than ever before” (Harvey,
1990:428). Massey further observes that

in the context of a world which is, indeed, increasingly interconnected the

notion of place (usually evoked as ‘local’ place’) has come to have totemic
resonance. Its symbolic value is endless mobilized in political argument.
For some it is the sphere of the everyday, of real and valued practices, the
geographical source of meaning, vital to hold on to as ‘the global’ spins its
never more powerful and alienating webs. For others, a ‘retreat to place’
represents a protective pulling-up of drawbridges and a building of walls
against the new invasions (Massey, 2005:5).

The danger of the second reading of place is that it becomes “the locus of denial, of attempted
withdrawal from invasion/difference. It is a politically conservative haven, an essentializing
(and in the end unviable) basis for a response; one that fails to address the real forces at work”
(Massey, 2005:6). Here we may draw a parallel with the justifications offered by decolonial
thinkers to search for local alternatives to the ‘matrix of power’. It is implicit in the decolonial

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narrative that place becomes the locus of denial of whatever and whoever is western-like, a
response and an attempt to de-link from dominant ways of thinking, doing and being.
What if the ‘local’ transcend the ideological boundaries offered to them by decolonial
thinking? Sarah Hunt, as a member of an indigenous Nation and the academic world, struggles
with the boundaries between these two worlds. As an academic, she is not fully integrated
with her indigenous self, and as a member of this indigenous Nation experiencing the ‘local’
tradition, she must partially let go of her academic self. I am not endorsing the notion that
there is a fully integrated self, but trying to expose the thickness of the boundaries that are
not effectively challenged by the decolonial project. There is a limit to ‘localized’ resistance,
as it is easily rendered irrelevant or inexistent in relation to the dominant ways of thinking,
being, and doing that remain the only ones capable of generating global experiences (Santos,
2007: 27). The decolonial option fails to the extent that it needs to put the local back in its
place in order to ‘decolonize’. Borrows (2009: 415) notes that

[Indigenous people] are told ‘you can’t go there’ when [they] want to
trek beyond imposed ideological boundaries, which stereotype [them] as
past-tense peoples. The same restrictions cannot be said to apply to non-
Indigenous people. When they want to venture through land or time, they
are presumed to carry their rights with them (apud Hunt, 2014:30).

My critique does not reject the importance of the decolonial effort to validate and legitimize
different narratives. What needs to be problematized, however, is the duality that is created
between the global and the local, between space and place. By emphasizing the local and
making it visible in place, decolonial thinkers overlook the fact that the global remains a
virtual space characterized by ‘sameness’ and invisibility. The presence and mobility of global
subjects does not need to be recognized, justified, and legitimated. One may argue that, by
defending territory, the local may control at a practical level the space for resistance and
limit the mobility of the ‘global’. In this case, the ‘global’ can indeed be displaced or even
localized when its omnipresence and universality are refuted. But, at a representational
level, shedding light on local practices may result in the imprisonment of the local, while the
‘global’ continues to be deterritorialized, unreachable and free. As David Harvey remarks,

Ideological struggles over the meaning and manner of such representations

of place and identity abound. But over and beyond the mere act of
identification, the assignment of place within a sociospatial structure
indicates distinctive roles, capacities for action, and access to power within
the social order (Harvey, 1990:419).

Matthew Sparke (2005:xiv) adds that “any assumption about geography either as a result
of or as a basis or container for other social relations always risks fetishizing a particular

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spatial arrangement and ignoring ongoing processes of spatial production, negotiation, and
contestation”. Even claims about the inherent disruptiveness of some places, as is the case
with decolonial thinking, “remains vulnerable [...] to the deconstructive point that it is at
some level an anemic geography: a geography that, like white chalk on slate, conceals the
complex geographical palimpsest over which it writes a singular and supposedly coherent
geo” (ibidem: xvi). Discussing these limitations imposed to the study of space, Massey
(2005:9) argues that “perhaps we could imagine space as a simultaneity of stores-so-far”.
This proposition, while it aligns with the decolonial option of recognition, is contrasted to
the distinction decolonial thinkers make between place and space. This contradiction is not
new and does not emerge in one specific field of study. Harvey observed about the field of
geography:

I [...] find it odd that geographers have concentrated so much more upon
the importance of locality in the present conjuncture, leaning, as it were,
to one side of the contradictory dynamic of space and place, as if they are
separate rather than dialectically related concepts (Harvey, 1990:428).

For Massey (2005:11), “space is the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity
[since] the very possibility of any serious recognition of multiplicity and heterogeneity itself
depends on a recognition of spatiality”. As I argued above, perhaps it would be fair to say
that the decolonial option needs to free itself from the borders it creates between space and
place. If the west, modernity, or the global are at the realm of space, decolonization should
take seriously the importance of articulating a critique and discussing processes of exclusion
and marginalization without reproducing inclusions and exclusions. For example, within
the coloniality of power, the colonial subject has already been regionalized and localized.
Reclaiming place when the universality of space is not directly confronted does not necessarily
affect the asymmetries. The global and the local, abstractly speaking, continue to be different
‘bodies’ that cannot occupy the same space, both epistemologically and ontologically.
As the critics of Edward Said would argue, Occidentalism is also a form of Orientalism. By
claiming that we need an alternative to the ‘imperial globality’, decolonial thinkers are
essentializing the enemy that needs to be resisted, as if it was indeed a universality. They are
also forgetting that coloniality (the alternative) emerged from the encounter with what they
call ‘imperial globality’. In that sense, rejecting the ‘stronger end of the relation’ is ultimately
a rejection of oneself.
Given the unintended consequences of localizing the ‘alternative’ and ‘putting the subaltern
in its place’, the decolonization project then requires a deeper and more complex ‘alternative
thinking of alternatives’ (Santos, 2007:20) instead of an continuing process of identification
and generation of alternatives that end up reproducing the radical divisions between the
dominant and the subaltern. Again, my proposal is not one of denying the resistance against

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global injustices, but one of moving towards inquiry that focus on the production of those
lines between local and global, modern and anti-modern, western and anti-western, etc. The
‘way out’ is ultimately the way through these demarcations.
Alternative understandings of ‘decolonization’ of knowledge that does not fall into the
modern mechanisms of demarcation, identification and exclusion of places and people entail
an all-encompassing ontology in which any or each rule of exclusion may be suspended and
scrutinized. The notion of ‘ecology of knowledges’ may provide a fruitful new imaginary, but
only to the extent it resists localizing dominance and/or resistance. We need to fully embrace
the idea that comes with the concept of ‘ecology’ that there is no unity of knowledge or unity
of ignorance (Santos, 2007:25). As Santos (2006:20) highlights, “the ecology of knowledges
permits one not only to overcome the monoculture of scientific knowledge but also the idea
that the non-scientific knowledges are alternatives to scientific knowledge”. Santos also adds
that “the ecology of knowledges focuses on concrete relationships between knowledges
and on the hierarchies and powers that are generated by them” (Santos, 2006:21). In this
sense, our task is not one of discriminating, but one of looking closer to the existing and
potential mechanisms of discrimination, the mechanisms of power that keeps reproducing
the hierarchization of difference. In the next section, I briefly discuss the concept of power
in decolonial thinking and the implications for the decolonial ‘option’ of thinking power
negatively.

A coloniality of power

By enclosing the space for critique, decolonial thinkers are also enclosing the space for the
future. The understanding of an alternative to imperial globality that must unfold from the
border, or from an embodied particular – the colonial, seems to carry the assumption that
both the colonial and the imperial are ‘things’ that can be recognized and defined, instead
of processes and relations. In this last section, I argue that, besides the problems that
emerge with the reproduction by decolonial thinkers of the dichotomies global/local and
modern/colonial at the epistemological and ontological levels, it is particularly problematic
and limiting for the decolonial project to reject critiques of modernity because they do not
come from an appropriate subaltern subjectivity. Decolonizing may indeed require an effort
to destabilize the logic through which peoples are marginalized, measured and ranked.
However, destabilizing the coloniality of power may require a better problematization of
relations power and other dominant forces, whether Western, modern, or global.
For Mignolo (2000:53), “coloniality of power underlines the geo-economic organization of
the planet which articulates the modern/colonial world system and manages the colonial
difference”. Coloniality of power is described as an all-encompassing force that controls and
organizes life. The way out of the matrix of power involves ‘delinking’, as explained in the
previous sections. By this, Mignolo (2011b:183) also means, among other things, “building

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future paths in which life will be primary and institutions at its service rather than the other
way around”. The scenario of the future world dis/order depends on unlearning and then
relearning “how to turn the dominant civilization of death toward a civilization of life”
(Mignolo, 2011b:185).
By associating the dominant civilization with death and the alternative to domination with
life, Mignolo seems to reproduce a notion of dominant power as one that suppresses, forbids,
manages, and excludes. I would argue that it is only possible for the decolonial thinkers to
discuss a decolonial option that involves ‘delinking’ and a ‘way out’ when they assume power
to be a negative force to which one may be opposed and that may only repress individual
bodies. But what if the face of power is as seductive to coloniality as it is to modernity? How
does one recognize the power that needs to be opposed or rejected when it presents itself
not as a force that excludes and eliminates, but as a force that renders visible what was in the
shadows and makes intelligible what was incomprehensible or unconceivable?
In History of Sexuality, Foucault proposes that:

All these negative elements - defenses, censorships, denials - which the

repressive hypothesis groups together in one great central mechanism
destined to say no, are doubtless only component parts that have a local
and tactical role to play in a transformation into discourse, a technology
of power, and a will to knowledge that are far from being reducible to the
former (Foucault, 1978:12).

Foucault introduces a conception of power that may matter because it is not meant to be
opposed and because it does not present itself as a repressive authority. The machinery of
power that Foucault saw emerge in and with modern society, instead of suppressing its object
of control, “[gave] it an analytical, visible, and permanent reality: it [is] implanted in bodies,
slipped in beneath modes of conduct, made into a principle of classification and intelligibility,
established as a raison d’etre and a natural order of disorder” (Foucault, 1978:44). By
separating the decolonial option, from what is understood as imperial globality, one does
not necessarily destabilize the dominant systems of classification and intelligibility. To what
extent empowerment could actually be prevented by ‘decolonial’ scholarly intervention in
identifying the subaltern places and bodies and shedding light on their struggles?
It would be easier to stop or reverse the coloniality of power if it consisted simply of a source
of repression and suffering. The problem is that ‘imperial globality’ turns out to be a seductive
possibility for many who would not recognize the difference between inclusion and cooption.
As Foucault (1978:48) asserts, “pleasure and power do not cancel or turn back against one
another; they seek out, overlap, and reinforce one another. They are linked together by
complex mechanisms and devices of excitation and incitement”. The politics of place blinds
us to the fact that we are dealing with relations of power that are constitutive of an abstract

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space that rewards those who gets there. The pervasiveness of ‘imperial globality’ may lie
in the fact that it does not turn its legible face to us, perhaps, and most possibly, because it
does not have a single face.

Conclusion

This paper analyzed the limitations that the geographical imagination imposes on projects
that aim to propose alternatives to dominant and ‘colonizing’ forms of thinking, being,
and doing. I argued that ontological and epistemological decolonization requires a better
problematization of the relationship between space, representation and power. As Susan
Schulten (2001:241) reminds us, “we can never [...] reach beyond geography, for it is
impossible to imagine the world outside of its imperative conventions. But we can ask how
geography has mediated the world for us, and how it has concretized the abstract”.
In order to transcend the duality modernity/coloniality, we need to rethink the way we have
been ‘mapping’ resistance and ‘placing’ the alternative. My critique has intended to expose
the limitations that ‘imperative conventions’ impose on projects that aim to overcome them.
The limitations emerge from the same urgency that is largely associated with modernity to
put everything in its appropriate place, to label, and to classify them. This leaves us with at
least two options: (1) resistance may indeed be in ‘delinking’ from traditional rationalities,
but, in this case, successful resistance would be necessarily at the level of the unintelligible
or the invisible, where the alternative has historically been; or (2) for the new epistemic
positions to be seen as legitimate alternatives, it must become visible. But then we should
not assume that all that can be rationalized is already contained and incorporated within the
matrix of power.

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