WM: Thinking along the lines of Guamán Poma de Ayala already answers your question because he was not only subalternized in terms of his decolonial political approach, but was also racialized. I’d answer your question by saying that what we’re engaged in at present is precisely the task of reincorporating. It's not a recovery because they’re already there, there’s no need to recover anything, but rather subalternity made them disappear or relegated them to a corner, as curiosities. Decolonial work involves reincorporating those practices into contemporary debate, because the decolonial option needs to construct genealogies of thought and practices: if we don’t build genealogies of thought and practices, on what are we going to base the decolonial approach? The idea of pluriversality as a universal project is the horizon of this work. In this case I always say there’s something to be learned from Europe, something that Europe did absolutely fantastically, and the issue is not to imitate what it did, what it produced, the buildings, the image or theory it produced, but focus on what Europe actually did to produce all that. What Europe did to produce all that was to create its own genealogy from Greece to Rome, and deny everything else. This is what we have to imitate in order to shape non-Eurocentric futures. Build our own genealogies, because without that we don’t have a foundation; as Rodolfo Kusch says, we just drift and constantly depend on the technology or the ideas that reach us from Europe or the US, which do have a foundation: hence the pressing need, as Quijano has said, to build that decolonial foundation. We need to put that option on the table, a genealogy of thought, a history of the decolonial practices that started appearing as of the outset of the sixteenth century, as of the foundation of the modern/colonial world.

MFC: This is a question that has been on our minds: bearing in mind the criticism leveled at the essentialist role of the subaltern subject, we’ve been asking ourselves what the possibilities of a symbolic practice becoming decolonial. In other words, how does an image become decolonial? Or rather, who defines the meaning of liberating symbolic practices?

WM: First of all, it’s not about wondering whether an image is decolonial or not. We need to ask ourselves what decolonization implies. In the first place it implies dismantling the naturalization of the colonial power matrix that governs all our current forms of behavior and also defines what we have to do.

So I would answer that with another question: who defines what is neo-liberal? And who defines what globalization is? What defines what is neo-liberal are the practices of a political-economic plan itself. There’s a political-economic plan; I don’t know if it was defined first as being neo-liberal, or whether the plan itself came first, but it was a plan to liberalize markets and this is linked to globalization, so who defines neo-liberalism and liberal globalization? Those who engage in globalization. In other words, globalization is not a global historical phenomenon, but more globalism: a political and economic plan to control the planet, i.e., globalism is a redefining of coloniality. By that I mean that there isn’t a Superior Being who can tell us that this is decolonial, this is not decolonial, etc. A symbolic practice does not become decolonial but it is conceived as such from the beginning, decoloniality is part of it, but for it to exist there has to be a project, a discourse, a theory as it were, that shapes and places the decolonial option on the table. For example, on writing the decolonial option, a manifesto, I’m defining what the decolonial is, not because I invented it on the spur of the moment, but because there’s a history, a decolonial course followed since the Cold War, when the word decolonization first came up, entered the debate as it were. The meaning of the word "decolonial" is different today, but Algeria’s decolonization plan wasn’t defined by France, it was defined by Algerians: France can define the colonization project, but not the decolonization process. So nobody can define what is decolonial: it’s part of the debate. That is to say it’s part of the debate of those of us who take an interest in the decolonial project, because someone who is not involved in the decolonial project, like a Marxist, or a sociologist, or a historian who are involved in other projects, can’t come to us and say we call this decolonial. So the definition takes place as part of the processes themselves. The processes are never standard: other people in the project can say to me: “look, this doesn’t sound decolonial to me”, but we’re both engaged in a discussion in that we’re trying to move a project along, so we criticize each other, but in-house: people outside the project can’t say anything. The project gradually defines itself and whoever defines, is developing the project.

There’s no supreme judge sitting on a hill at point zero who can tell me what the decolonial is. It would mean repeating Derrida’s outlook. On defining Grammatology, Derrida says: “La gramatologie est une pratique vigilante”. Watched over by whom? The police who are watching me? Do I need a French philosopher to come and watch over me as well? When we talk about pluriversality, things are discussed one way in-house and another out-of-house. If I argue with a Marxist, the Marxist is not going to define what is decolonial to me, and I can’t define what is Marxist to him. What I can discuss with a Marxist is whether we want a just society. I don’t know about a socialist one, but at least a just and fair society: you think you’re going to do it one way, I think it should be done in another: we’ll see between the two of us, how these two courses complement each other, but it’s an out-of-house discussion. I think these concepts of in-house and out-of-house, which - as far as I know - were introduced by Juan Garcí­a (and which could not be introduced by liberals or Marxists) and are theoretical concepts that wield enormous epistemic power, since we’re using them here, clarifying things that we couldn’t have cleared up previously. This is an example of the verbal, of how concepts that come from the Afro (and other sectors that were subalternized - i.e., nothing is subaltern per se, what exists is subalternization, in the same way there are no slaves, there is slavery, which means capture but also the concept that legitimizes it), are creating an epistemology that helps us to think about them, not to study them, but as though we were thinking together and they’re helping us to think, in the same way we can help them to think, which is a good way to end.

Walter Mignolo: William H. Wannamaker Distinguished Professor of Romance Studies and Professor of Literature and Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. Author of The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization; Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking, and The Idea of Latin America.

La Tronkal: Working Group on Geopolitics and Symbolic Practices, an interdisciplinary collective based in Ecuador, active between march 2009 and November 2010, was made up of artists, researchers, theoreticians and critics focusing on dialogues based on decolonial theories.

Interview originally conducted on August 13, 2008 in Quito, Ecuador.