Abstract
Aníbal Quijano is one of the classics. He is among the sociological thinkers in Latin America who have achieved most global acclaim. Born in 1930 and briefly imprisoned as a member of the student movement in Lima as a young teacher, he later became one of the most well-known Peruvian sociologists and in the 1990s developed his conceptualization of the “coloniality of power,” which is widely cited and used. Quijano is also one of the central figures of the Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality group that emerged at the end of the 1990s. This volume brings together Aníbal Quijano’s seminal essays, some of which have been translated for earlier publication, such as “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America” (translated in 2000 for Nepantla), “Coloniality of Power and Social Classification” (published in 2000 as part of a volume for Immanuel Wallerstein), or the short “Questioning ‘Race’” (translated in 2007 for Socialism and Democracy). But it also translates for the first time lesser known writings and talks Quijano gave when he was already well-known.
The introduction, written by long-time colleagues of Quijano, Catherine E. Walsh, Walter Mignolo and Rita Segato who were similarly involved in the project of Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality, is comprised by three main sections each written by one of them. The first of these sections introduces four main ideas by Quijano that the volume makes accessible to a wider, non-Spanish speaking readership. It does this well, in a condensed, but readable manner. The first of these four central ideas in Quijano’s work is the notion of coloniality of power. This notion provides the red thread of the book, and many of the essays translated in the volume come back to it.
The second idea is the weight of coloniality on actual experiences. Quijano argues that colonial classifications lumped the very heterogeneous societies of the Americas together into one single category of inferiors that had to be fought through Christianity and “civilization” (i.e. p. 3). The actually existing racialized, dispossessed and objectified people in the Americas (and elsewhere) have constructed counter-narratives and engaged in collective resistance. However, as the editors write, “we are not speaking of the nostalgia for a golden age”; Quijano is not arguing for some “recoverable origin” (p. 26).
Quijano argued, and this is the third idea the introduction condenses, that coloniality is not a closed totality. It is, rather, subject to change and there is no such thing as the transition from one historic totality to another (i.e. feudalism to capitalism); change is more complex and heterogeneous than sometimes depicted:
This is not just about the fact that people change and may change their places and roles in a matrix of power but also the fact that the matrix, as such, is always at stake, given that people are constantly competing and that the resources, reasons, and needs of these conflicts are never the same at every moment of a long history. In other words, power is always in a state of conflict and in processes of sorting and resorting. (p. 118).
This conceptual openness allowed many other scholars, from the editors of the volume themselves to scholars like María Lugones (2008), to expand the notion of coloniality, work with it, and to complicate its implications in political thought without it being arbitrary. The fourth idea is arguably the emancipatory and hopeful outlook by Quijano who is adamant at recognizing social change and those who are agents of that change, beyond simplified ideas of revolutionary subjects.
The second introductory section focuses on Quijano’s epistemic shift, after briefly introducing some of his references, particularly Raúl Prébisch, who coined the notion of center-periphery, and Immanuel Wallerstein, who founded world systems theory. The introduction names the different lived experiences of Quijano and Wallerstein as reasons for their different conceptual trajectories, as Wallerstein was more influenced by North American debates and experiences. The section goes on to argue that the actual shift Quijano undertook “was to place the control of knowledge over the control of the economy” (p. 10). This is to argue that our understanding of something regulates what we do about it, and that actual decolonization in Quijano’s worldview necessitates epistemological decolonization (p. 11). Colonial power, and later, coloniality, was built on an epistemological element, that of basing social identities on race: The naturalization of the perception of people as “underdeveloped” or “uncivilised” v. “civilised” (see “Coloniality of Power and Social Classification,” pp. 95–131) legitimized the mode of rule established with the Spanish conquest. Such assignments of value to people became a global matrix, a virtually universal way of seeing people. There is, the introduction continues, a need for delinking from such “Western universality” and produce “decolonial pluriversality” (p. 18), while it recognizes that the idea of race has long lost any legitimacy it may have had.
The last section of the introduction stresses the relevance of bringing together a more comprehensive collection of Quijano’s work to enable English speakers a less fragmented use of his concepts and stresses how he saw his work as an approach rather than a neatly enclosed theory. He offers concepts, but does not assign every element a singular, static position in this theory—it is relational and contextual and does not predict what will happen. This section introduces three more terms used by Quijano, namely, the reorigination of history or the effort of re-narrating historical processes (i.e. in “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America,” pp. 256–302), the idea of an open horizon for a more emancipatory future (i.e. in “The Crisis of the Colonial/Modern/Eurocentred Horizon of Meaning,” pp. 331–345), and ideas of the future gleaned from Andean, cyclical conceptualizations of temporality.
Labor, Class, and Race
Quijano’s notion of coloniality is relevant both in theoretical terms, because it changes how socio-political power relations are conceptualized, and in concrete historical terms, because it stresses the core place the Americas hold for the emergence of the global “matrix of power.” This global matrix of power is the red thread of the book and many of the essays translated in the volume come back to it. During Spanish colonialism, Quijano explains, conquistadors framed the differences between them and the conquered as differences of “race,” and this framing became constitutive for legitimizing both their power within the Americas and the role Europe came to play in global trade. Controlling labor took on a new form in this colonial endeavor, as different labor regimes were articulated in producing materials and commodities for an emerging world market. This is why the centrality of race to maintain relations of domination was “not a specific problem in the Andes” (p. 12), but was of a global dimension. In this respect, in a long-term historical process of colonial/ethnicized rule, White Creole elites succeeded in letting their social classification become hegemonic:
Social relations founded on the category of race produce new historical social identities in America— Indians, Blacks and mestizos—and redefined others. Terms such as “Spanish” and “Portuguese” and, much later, “European,” which had until then indicated only geographic origin or country of origin, acquired from then on a racial connotation in reference to the new identities. Insofar as the social relations that were being configured were relations of domination, such identities were considered constitutive of hierarchies, places, and corresponding social roles (. . .). (p. 257)
It is this naturalization of supposedly lesser value that is attached to race, which Quijano stresses in his idea of a “racial division of labour” (see Chapter 5, “Coloniality of Power and Social Classification”). This assigned different people different social roles, demarcated and policed both under colonialism and in postcolonial Latin American societies, Quijano writes.
I would like to stress one strength of the book. What many that have not read Quijano in the original may be less aware of is that Quijano stands for a linkage between Neo-Marxist approaches and decolonial critique. Showing this is a merit of the new translations collected for this edited volume. This might be particularly interesting as Walter Mignolo, one of the editors of the volume and Quijano’s colleague in the modernity/decoloniality group, repeatedly named Marxism entirely as “occidental” or “western” thought, which points to a more radical distancing (see Mignolo 2011). 1 In response to the dominant focus on epistemology in the introduction, we can contend that materialists find a lot in Quijano to work on. The change of perspective that Quijano inspires us to take does not mean that his work was only about epistemologies. He was concerned with the historical conditions for contemporary power relations, making him a true historical sociologist. Readers will note that the three sections of the introduction contradict one another slightly when interpreting Quijano’s oeuvre (i.e., in their placement of Wallerstein or their use of “decolonization” as a notion), which may be due to their three different authors, but can be a little confusing for those less familiar with these debates. For instance, the introduction’s second part stresses the distinctions between Wallerstein’s “world-system” and Quijano’s “coloniality of power,” while the third section dwells on how both together wrote on “reordering history,” when they argued how “America” preceded “Europe” (and how modern historical writing tends to forget this) (Quijano and Wallerstein 1992).
Quijano’s thinking is deeply intimate with Marxist thought, and in contrast to other decolonial thinkers, it was not necessarily a radical distancing from Marxism that he sought to undertake with his decolonial writings. He wanted to critique, contextualize, and revise core terms. Part of his work speaks to historical materialists that would see class as the one and only category to analyze power in capitalism, and wage labor as the one indicator for capitalism. His critique of dogmatic tendencies in historical materialism and the political “bureaucratic despotism” these tendencies defended, are scathing (e.g., pp. 317–319). These arguments, seen from today, may seem to have been long overcome, but this is precisely because of his and other de- and postcolonial writers’ influence on such debates. Quijano historically substantiated how social relations went beyond such dualisms (based on either class or race; or constituting exclusively either feudalism or capitalism).
One of the pieces in this volume that shows both Quijano’s anchoring in and going beyond traditional readings of class, is the text titled simply, “Labour” (originally a lecture delivered in 1998 at the University of Puerto Rico and dedicated to the Confederation of Workers of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean). Quijano first talks about globalization, in the sense that it is often discussed, as the
means of communication and transportation, the means of producing and circulating information and knowledge—in short, the means of producing and circulating material and symbolic objects—(. . .) have transformed the way we perceive time and space as well as our own positions relative to time, space, and each other (p. 394).
However, he criticizes how our dominant imaginary of globalization “implies, first, that globalization takes place like natural phenomena, that is, without people being able to intervene in them to control them,” and “(i)t’s like a given, something about which you can do nothing but ask a few specific, factual questions” (p. 394). The image is “ahistoric” in the sense that history becomes something that “operates far above” people, instead of made by people (p. 395). Similarly, he argues, economists started presenting the rising global unemployment as a structural feature of the capitalist system, not something that we can change (p. 396). That seeming inevitability makes Quijano ask: is labor ending? When we think of work in capitalism only as paid labor, he says in 1998, this simply shows “the presence of the logic of capitalism in our way of thinking” (p. 397), and we should rethink this.
In fact, for Quijano, lots of different labor regimes exist alongside each other, modern enslavement was growing, servitude, reciprocal labor relations, informal work, all these were (and are) not a counterpoint to capitalist relations, but produced by the structural unemployment trend. Based on this, Quijano questions the idea that capitalism is conceptually based exclusively on the capitalism–wage labor relationship (pp. 398–399). He compels us to ask more concretely how different forms of labor control emerged and developed historically, i.e. in the colonial Americas, where enslaved people, wage laborers and even people in reciprocal work relationships would come to be articulated (p. 393)—not separated—in working for commodity production for the world market. The so-called encomiendas were usually not self-sufficient agriculture-based socioeconomic entities (in the way one might imagine feudal properties), but always already export-oriented, toward an emerging world market. So, this articulated heterogeneity is what makes Quijano reconsider the relation between capital and nonwage labor, and the role of nonwage laborers as social forces of transformation. In sum, social classification (for instance, through “race”) and exploitation of labor are tied together.
Land and Indigenous Movements
The introduction stresses Quijano’s reference to Juan Carlos Mariátegui, the Peruvian theorist and founder of the Peruvian Communist Party who first wrote clearly about how the intertwined topics of land and race were essential to understanding social relations in the country (Mariátegui [1928] 2007). These references by Quijano and his engagement with Mariátegui’s thought could be even more explicit in the volume, as it is at least partly Mariátegui’s “insistence on the essential place of the ‘Indigenous community’ in the trajectory of any socialist revolution in these lands,” and Mariátgui’s rupture with the Eurocentric (and dominant) strands of historical materialism of the time, “regarding the place of ‘race’” (p. 326), that propel Quijano to his major proposition of a modern/colonial world system, and the central role colonial social classifications continue to play in contemporary socio-political power relations.
Particularly in Chapter 10, “The ‘Indigenous Movement’ and Unresolved Questions in Latin America” (pp. 229–255), Quijano brings in much-needed historical perspective on indigenous communities, their differences across Latin America, and the way different waves of dispossession influenced their organizing processes, particularly after colonialism ended
2
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After the Spanish defeat, Bolívar decreed that throughout the former Viceroyalty of Peru, Indigenous community land was to be privatized and commercialized. Nonetheless, through most of the nineteenth century the Indigenous communities in the Andean republics kept control of most of the land they had been allotted under the viceroyalty. The plunder started up again at the end of the century as one of the consequences of the appropriation of mines, plantations, and haciendas by North American capital . . . (pp. 240–241)
Quijano distinguishes social relations in contexts as different as Mexico, Bolivia, or Ecuador. It is in Peru where he shows how in the twentieth century, the Indigenous communities were both the agents of change in rural areas after World War II and relocated to cities, shifting their own identities, but also becoming “the ones who formed the new contingent of urban industrial and commercial wage laborers,” central for emerging union organizing and forming a more diverse university movement in the 1970s (p. 242). In this inspiring text, Quijano asks why there are considerable Indigenous movements in some places and fewer in others. More precisely, he asks himself what role neoliberalization processes on the one, and collective authority on the other hand have played for different forms of organizing becoming dominant or being successful, and which different impacts the demands for either territorial autonomy or a plurinational state may have (pp. 243–348). It is a call for thinking global processes and specificities together and a crucial text for understanding Latin American debates of the early 2000s.
Not all texts are equally inspiring. In Chapter 17, “‘Bien Vivir’: Between ‘Development’ and the De/Coloniality of Power” (pp. 379–391), one of his late texts published in 2011, Quijano uses very broad strokes to explain twentieth century transformations. They are too broad to do justice to the actual processes and the text does not really introduce the debate on “buen/bien vivir” in a way that could be understood by those who are not already familiar. The book in general exclusively focuses on Quijano’s work after 1989. Even the preface to a new edition of Mariátegui’s “7 essays” is actually from 2007, not 1978. 3 This focus on Quijano’s later writings may be my biggest critique, as it allows to appreciate less the genealogy of his thought and his earlier work on nationalism, militarism or urbanization in Peru which, to my knowledge, have not been translated. The Spanish language collection of Quijano’s writings “Cuestiones y Horizontes,” published by CLACSO (Assis Clímaco, 2014), the Latin American Social Science Council in 2014, unites these different phases of his work. Nonetheless, this volume allows English-language readers to delve into Quijano’s thinking.
Globalization, the State, and Democracy
The volume also brings into focus another issue which is not yet very present in English-language discussions of coloniality, at least not as an object of study, which is the state. In Chapter 7, “Coloniality of Power, Globalization and Democracy” (originally published in 2001 in Utopías,—interestingly enough, this is the journal of the Spanish Communist Party), Quijano is concerned with the historically intertwined processes of emerging international trade, (forced) labor, racialization, and the postcolonial state.
Quijano first argues that the “modern nation-state” “has only been consolidated in a few spaces of state domination or countries” (p. 149)—with this, he doesn’t say the state does not function or fails in most places, but rather calls attention to the difference between a “hegemonic model” and “being practiced globally” (p. 149). He then questions the assumption that the form of the state “corresponding to capitalism is the modern nation-state” with specific features such as generalized citizenship, only mediated violence, and a presumed legal equality of all (which Quijano deconstructs as a problematic imaginary itself), “while all others are somehow ‘exceptions’ or ‘precapitalist’ or ‘in transition’” (p. 156). The nation-state that had consolidated in Europe cannot be understood outside of the colonial/capitalist matrix of power, and in Latin American contexts, formally independent in the early nineteenth century, the coloniality of power had “acted directly and immediately within the respective spaces of domination, impeding the processes geared toward the democratization of social relations and their national expression in society and the state” (p. 161).
Of course Quijano in 2001 is aware of the impacts of recent processes of concentration of global capitalism since the 1980s and puts them at the core of his analysis: These transformations in global capitalism go hand in hand with social polarizations, the renewed expansion of unpaid forms of labor control and thus processes of social reclassification and changing relations between capital and labor, and drastic changes in accumulation strategies linked to the dominance of financial capital (Quijano names Celso Furtado who first documented this trend for Latin America) (pp. 154–155). But he refuses to see the impacts these processes have on collective authority as simply eroding the “nation-state”—instead the types of public authority are various, and “globalization” processes that were now seen as new (such as the dependence on investments and loss of state control over production processes), were in fact well-known in contexts such as Latin America. It had always been “globalized.”
Quijano assesses that after 1945, where actual state transformation processes had taken place, they entailed not only formal decolonization, but a limited (!) redistribution of labor control, profit and income (i.e. by broadening employment and public services), some agrarian reform, and anticapitalist movements that succeeded in radicalizing political demands. These processes have been reversed. Looking back, we may not agree with his assessment that there would be something like control by an imperial bloc. But he links the actual historical processes of globalization and their different impacts to a deconstruction of our conceptualizations of political authority and domination; he puts the reproduction of authoritarian practices and renewed social hierarchies at the end of the twentieth century into a broader context of a critique of liberal democracy and the state. He also reminds us that these globalizing processes are not “natural” or simply “technical,” but are producing extreme levels of conflictivity, and the tensions he discerns, between capital groups and heterogeneous, fragmented groups of workers, between finance and paid laborers trying to survive, between different groups and states, with a high potential for violence, hold true for today’s violent contradictions. One example might be well-documented, selective violence in Colombia linked to land appropriation and the export of specific products that require large areas of land, which can be analyzed through the lens of coloniality (see Jenss 2023).
In conclusion, Quijano’s writings are not just “theory” at all; the texts published in the volume show how he is consistently concerned with analyzing the societies he was observing, their historical trajectories, and trying to explain them at a conceptual level that put emphasis on issues—like the category of race—that were previously neglected. The essays in the book illustrate some of that empirical depth, but also drive home how Quijano thought it essential to think conjunctures from both historical and global context. Coloniality brings in both dimensions conceptually, but reading his texts, Quijano stays true to this in the actual analyses. Including more of his earlier work would have helped showing his theoretical influences and trajectory within dependency theory, to situate the collected texts better and understand Quijano’s positioning in decolonial approaches, but the volume remains a worthwhile read.
