Global coloniality and the Asian century

The idea of this special issue originated during Walter Mignolo’s visiting scholarship (January–June 2012) at the Advanced Center for Cross-Disciplinary Studies at the City University of Hong Kong. To implement the idea a workshop was organized during the first week of June under the umbrella title we are using for this special issue. The Center was created by Gregory B. Lee and inaugurated in January of 2011. The occasion was prompted during Walter’s visit which was related to one of Center’s research topics: “Negotiating the Past: Coloniality and Its Epistemic and Political Consequences.” Unfortunately, Gregory B. Lee, founder and director of the Center, resigned and the Advanced Institute was discontinued. We, the editors, take pride in inscribing some of the memories of 2 years of productive work around the theme noted above.

The topic of the workshop emerged at the crossroads of, on the one hand, the return of Asia and the irreversible shift to the Eastern Hemisphere and, on the other hand, the announcement by US Former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, in November of 2011, in Honolulu that “the twenty-first century will be the American Pacific century.” All the signs indicate that while in the 16th century global forces moved from the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the land connection through the Silk Road to the Atlantic, the 21st century is moving back to the Pacific as a center stage. This move did not originate among Western developed countries (the core of the European Union and the United States), but was forced by the return of Asia. Hillary Clinton’s declaration was nothing but the recognition that the United States is losing its world leadership that began during the second half of the 20th century, and that the planet is in the process of a re-distribution of capital and knowledge.

In presenting this collection of essays, the co-editors hope to offer a platform for continuous dialogues and engagement with critical thoughts about the current global order. Participants were invited to contribute position statements that would steer away from conventional “objective” scholarly papers on a given state of affairs (i.e. the “description cum explanation” model). More than what things “are” with respect to the theme of the Special Issue, we were more interested in what the invitees “think about how things are.” Our goal was, following the lead of Sayid Farid Alatas, to underline that the return of Asia is not just economic but epistemological. Eurocentrism is an epistemological issue consisting in disavowing and neglecting ideas that originate from non-European local histories, needs, sensibilities, and conceptions of the world. But also, Eurocentrism carries an ontological dimension by which Eurocentric forms of life are being posited as a global model of life (Alatas, 2011).

Reports by Western scholars and media “about” what is going on in East and South East Asia are necessary but hardly sufficient. For that reason, we placed the accent on what scholars and media “think” not only about East and South Asia but also about “the West.” The time when a neutral observer hiding his or her locatedness and assuming to be speaking on behalf of the universal house of knowledge from where the rest of the world can be observed and what people think can be magically discovered is over. Therefore, this Special Issue is intended to be a small contribution to shifting the geographies of sensing, reasoning, and believing.

Beng-Lan Goh and Daniel P.S. Goh reflect on the Asian Century from the existential and scholarly perspective of South East Asia and Singapore, respectively. Meera Ashar moves our attention to India, British India, and revamps the decolonial legacies of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. On her part, Madina Tlostanova reminds us that Asia is also EurAsia and that while India has been mapped by colonial differences, Russia, like China though not colonized, did not escape coloniality, having been mapped through imperial differences. Liang Hongling and IP Iam-chong place themselves within China’s cultural and political debates. Hongling brings up in a different context the issue of geopolitical epistemic differential: the assumptions, even by those in Hong Kong and Mainland China of valuing local Western over local Chinese knowledge. Iam-chong takes on the New Left and brings forward differing political views in Mainland China and Hong Kong.

Zhang Longxi closes the essay section showing the various layers of knowledge “about” China among Western scholars and Chinese understanding of their own history already influenced by Western scholarship. His contribution also addresses the differential epistemic clout between local knowledges, Western and Chinese.

Why “coloniality”? Colonialism in its earlier form (since the 16th century) basically ended, but “coloniality” remains, alive and well. Although colonies in the modern strictest sense of the word no longer exist today, different colonial experiences have resulted in diverse (post) colonial situations and decolonial options. China was never fully colonized by a single power. The Opium War and the subsequent carving up of China by Western powers were not only military enterprises but also political, economic, and epistemological ones. China was portrayed as behind history, an expression we today also use to describe Russia sending military troops to the borders of Crimea. He who said that someone else is out of or behind history assumes not only that history is on his or her side in his or her present but also that what he or she thinks is where history is and where it goes. This way of thinking was crucial in disavowing non-Western ideas taken as myth, tokens of local tradition, treasures from the past, but definitively out of any dimension of history.

The rise of Asia doesn’t mean the end of coloniality but that coloniality is no longer only managed by Western imperial states and institutions (United States, England, France, Germany, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank). Coloniality is a short hand for the “colonial matrix of power.” And by colonial matrix of power, we mean a structure of management and control that emerged in the 16th century when Western Christians (i.e. West of Jerusalem) and European monarchies expanded their domain over the Atlantic and the conquest and colonization of the New World. Coloniality is not (yet?) a concept that you would find in a social sciences and humanities textbook. You would find colonization (a specific historical configuration between a particular state and its colonies or ex-colonies) but not coloniality. Coloniality is the invisible underlying logic of colonialism (Quijano, 2007 [1990]).

Today, coloniality exists as a structure of management at all levels in much the same way as it did in the past: epistemic (Christian theology offered the overarching structure of knowledge), political (Viceroyalties were created in the New World to displace the structure of government among co-existing civilizations, Aztecs, Mayas, Incas). Economic (massive appropriation of lands and massive exploitation of labor prompted a new type of economy in which surplus was reinvested to produce more and a global market began to emerge); the management and control of gender and sexuality through the image of the Christian family and the regulation of heteronormativity, and the classification and ranking of the population that engendered the modern/colonial concept of race and racism. Coloniality is the darker side of Western modernity, the hidden agenda of modernity constantly being disguised under the rhetoric of salvation, civilization, progress, development, market democracy, and just wars. But, above all, what the colonial matrix of power does is to legitimize the control of knowledge through which all the other spheres could be managed and all kinds of violence justified.

Today, China and BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) countries, as well as several Islamic countries are disputing the Western control of the colonial matrix at all levels: economic, political, epistemic, racial, gender and sexuality, and, above all, the control of subjectivity: the racial imaginary built upon the Western assumption of the inferiority of non-Western peoples and regions (e.g. underdeveloped or emerging countries, “Third World,” “Second World,” all hierarchical classifications of peoples and regions). Neologisms, such as the BRICS and the MINT countries (referring to Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Turkey), were anonymously created by Fidelity Investment, an American multinational financial service corporation. Credit regularly goes to Jim O’Neil from Goldman and Sachs, who popularized these terms. Then, it was appropriated by the states named as such to constitute themselves as a politico-economic powerhouse. Most likely, the states identified as the first group of powerful emerging economies knew very well who they were and did not need Fidelity and O’Neil to tell them who they were and what they are. All of this is part of the dispute for the control of the colonial matrix of power. The bottom line is that the Western Atlantic imperial states that built, transformed, and managed the colonial matrix of power can no longer do it. It is being disputed by BRICS and MINT countries, as well as by smaller ones like Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador.

The “rise of Asia” is part of the mutating global scenario prompted by the dispute for the control of coloniality. The dispute is changing not only the content but also the rules of the game and the terms of the conversation. We do not believe that the return of Asia is merely “capitalism with a different face.” We believe that we, on the planet, are in the middle of a change of epoch, and the change of epoch is prompted by two co-existing trajectories: dewesternization (which means the dispute of the colonial matrix of power by non-European states, people of color, and non-Christian religions) and decoloniality (which means the attempt to delink from the colonial matrix of power toward a new type of human and social relations based on harmony, the plenitude of life, cooperation rather than competition, selfish success, and the promotion of death—of the environment, which means, humans and all organic life—to benefit the irrational belief that growth means happiness for all).

Now it should be clear that the dispute for the control of the colonial matrix means that coloniality continues to “rule” and influence the behavior of actors ruling state and private institutions in the emerging economies of East and South East Asia. And of course, it is also influencing the behavior of actors ruling Western states and private institutions because they know that there is no longer one manager in town who can pose and dispose of coloniality at his or her will. Perhaps the Reagan/Thatcher and Bush/Blair eras closed the curtain of Western domination. But this certainly does not mean the end of capitalism or Western civilization.

Capitalism is not dead and not in crisis. It is doing well. Doing well in the sense that capitalism is not concerned with the increase of poverty and the deterioration of the environment. Capitalism is embodied in a psychology of increasing wealth at all costs, at the cost of poverty and the deterioration of the environment. What is in crisis, deep crisis, is “democracy.” The “crisis” we are experiencing due to the dispute for the control of the colonial matrix, that is to say, for who calls the shots, doesn’t mean that capitalism is over but that capitalism is expanding. Without economic growth and the concomitant growth of confidence, dispute for the control of coloniality would not arise. There would continue to be one manager and, therefore, capitalism and coloniality would have continued to be con-fused, ¹ that is, taken as equivalents. Now it is clear that capitalism and coloniality are not synonymous. Capitalism, in liberal and Marxist vocabularies, is one sphere of coloniality, the economic sphere. As important as it is, the economic sphere cannot be taken as the totality of the colonial matrix. The economic sphere needs the political and the epistemic/hermeneutic (knowledge and understanding) spheres so that the populations of the world can be “sorted out” by ethnicity, gender, and sexual preferences. It needs people to believe that “nature” is something outside of themselves and that they can kill to multiply economic gains to make them “happy.”

Thus, we believe that one of the most enduring myths of the 20th century is that the dissolution of colonial administrations has resulted in decolonization on a global scale. This belief has led to yet another myth—that of a “postcolonial world.” In spite of the fact that numerous colonial administrations have disappeared, dominant colonial forms remain, forms which were produced by cultures and structures within the modern/colonial capitalist world-system. In short, colonialism may have ended but not coloniality. Based on this understanding, an emerging trend within social sciences and humanities research has been shifting away from the analysis of global colonialism to global coloniality, which allows for an understanding of “colonial situations” and “coloniality without colonies” in the present era.

Appearing in tandem with the staggering growth of the Asian economies are numerous contemporary discourses about the “Asian Century.” However, this “Asian Century” should be understood as “the return” rather than “the rise” of Asia. At the same time, it is vital to note that this “return” should not be viewed as Asia now replacing twentieth-century Western forms of hegemony. It is not a race for control, but rather a move toward a more balanced world that is no longer based on unilateral decisions with immediately negative consequences for certain percentages of the population. Rethinking global coloniality within the looming “Asian Century” is both challenging and necessary, as it invites us to re-conceptualize the past (i.e. existing and hegemonic narratives of the past) in the present and the implementation of global futures beyond coloniality.

We propose with this issue to continue and keep alive explorations initiated at the workshop to join efforts with other institutions and scholars pursuing research that illuminate our understanding of the change of epoch that we are experiencing and, above all, research that is ethically and politically engaged. That is, research that responds not only to the what (subject matter) and the how (method) but also, and above all, to the why (why such research is necessary in relation to the larger picture described above) and the what for (what is the destination of such research, who will benefit from it). We believe that while good disciplinary work is necessary and excellence imperative, they are hardly sufficient. Disciplinary excellence doesn’t necessarily mean that such excellence will have relevance beyond self-congratulations among the “disciplinary club” members.