Culture, Theory and Critique

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rctc20

The politics of positionality: the difference

between post-, anti-, and de-colonial methods

Benjamin P. Davis & Jason Walsh

To cite this article: Benjamin P. Davis & Jason Walsh (2020): The politics of positionality: the
difference between post-, anti-, and de-colonial methods, Culture, Theory and Critique, DOI:
10.1080/14735784.2020.1808801

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2020.1808801

Published online: 26 Aug 2020.

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CULTURE, THEORY AND CRITIQUE
https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2020.1808801

The politics of positionality: the difference between post-,

anti-, and de-colonial methods
Benjamin P. Davisa and Jason Walshb
a
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto, Toronto Canada; bPhilosophy, Emory University, Atlanta United
States

ABSTRACT
This essay works at the intersection of two trends, one longstanding
and one relatively more recent. First, it takes place against the
background of the overwhelming influence that the category of
‘identity’ exercises on both contemporary knowledge production
and political practice. Second, it responds to what has been called
the ‘decolonial turn’ in theory. We compare the work of Gayatri
Spivak, Aijaz Ahmad, and Walter Mignolo in terms of the following
question: What kind of reflexive method do they deploy in
response to their recognition of the politics of knowledge
production, that is, the existence of a relationship between social
position and epistemic position? We then develop a novel
distinction between post-colonial, anti-colonial, and de-colonial
perspectives, one based not on backward-looking intellectual
genealogies but on forward-looking political practices.

I am committed to the idea of a politics of location. This does not mean all thought is necess-
arily limited and self-interested because of where it comes from, or anything like that. I mean
something rather looser—that all thought is shaped by where it comes from, that knowledge
is always to some degree ‘positional’. One can never escape the way in which one’s formation
lays a kind of imprint on or template over what one is interested in, what kind of take one
would have on any topic, what linkages one wants to make, and so on.
—Stuart Hall, ‘Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life’

Introduction
This essay works at the intersection of two trends, one longstanding and one relatively
more recent. First, it takes place against the background of the overwhelming influence
that the category of ‘identity’ exercises on both contemporary knowledge production
and political practice. The intellectual genealogies of this trend are multiple and overlap-
ping: we might start from Nancy Hartsock’s standpoint epistemology or the Hegelian-
Marxist interpretation of class consciousness that inspires it. We might consider Michel
Foucault’s epoch-making juxtaposition of ‘power/knowledge’ or the Nietzschean suspi-
cion that underwrites it. Or we could set out from the Combahee River Collective’s defini-
tive articulation of ‘identity politics’. We might also begin from the end of the story: spend

CONTACT Benjamin P. Davis bpdavi3@emory.edu

© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 B. P. DAVIS AND J. WALSH

fifteen minutes browsing social media and one is almost assured to find multiple instan-
tiations of the thesis that social position determines epistemic position. As a broad claim,
this much is undeniable. To deny it is to risk (if not guarantee) a return to the unreflective,
presumptive ‘neutrality’ of the universal and transcendental subject, and so to undo the
work of decades of feminist, anti-racist, disability, and queer theory and practice. Unfor-
tunately, however, the agreement stops almost as soon as we go beyond the broad thesis
that there is some relationship between social position and epistemic position. The nature
of this relationship – deterministically causal? Multi-directional? Dialectical? An empirical
correlation? – and its implications for both theory and political practice continue to be
vigorously contested. This is captured in the epigraph from Stuart Hall, particularly his
vague but essential qualification ‘something rather looser’. It is precisely this ‘something’
that is in need of clarification.
The second, relatively more recent trend that this essay responds to is the ‘decolonial
turn’ in theory.1 Because this turn occurs in a context where post-colonial and anti-colo-
nial theory have already been established, we aim to clarify the differences between these
fields as well as what is at stake in such a demarcation. The boundaries (or lack thereof)
between these traditions have been debated before and there are some well-established
dividing lines: intellectual influences (e.g., post-structuralism for post-colonial theory,
Marxism for anti-colonial theory, world-systems analysis for de-colonial theory), geo-
graphical origin and focus (the Middle East and South Asia for post-colonial theory,
Latin America for de-colonial theory), periodisation (the nineteenth and twentieth
century for post-colonial theory, 1492 and onward for de-colonial theory), and object
of analysis (literary and cultural representations for post-colonial theory, economic and
historical processes for anti-colonial and de-colonial theory).2 In this essay, we compare
the work of Gayatri Spivak, Aijaz Ahmad, and Walter Mignolo across a different axis.
We ask: What kind of reflexive method do they deploy in response to their recognition
of the politics of knowledge production, that is, the existence of a relationship between
social position and epistemic position? We develop a novel distinction between post-colo-
nial, anti-colonial, and de-colonial perspectives, one not based on intellectual genealogies
or areas of investigation but rather on each thinker’s response to the problems of position-
ality and what that response implies going forward.
Taking Spivak as a representative of post-colonial theory, Ahmad of anti-colonial
theory, and Mignolo of de-colonial theory, we thus argue that a careful examination of
the methods that these figures employ is a productive way both to distinguish between
these traditions of thought and to think through today’s pressing questions of identity
and knowledge production. In the first section, we consider Spivak’s development of ‘com-
plicity’ and ‘productive undoing’; in the second section, we turn to Ahmad’s theory of
‘objective determination’ and his call for activism and consciousness-raising; and in the
third section, we consider Mignolo’s notions of the ‘locus of enunciation’ and ‘de-

1
An exhaustive history of the influence of decolonial theory, or of the linguistic trope ‘decolonizing x’ more broadly, is
beyond our scope here, and would have to account for the differential impact of ‘decolonial theory’ at different
times, in different disciplines and fields, and in sites of popular discourse, such as social media. In accepting the
premise that there has been something like a ‘decolonial turn’ within the last decade or two, we follow Nelson Maldo-
nado-Torres. See Maldonado-Torres 2011.
2
Each of these ways of making the distinction could and probably would be objected to from all camps; such objections
reinforce the fact that there is a need for clarification of the issues at stake. For a recent contribution that draws the
distinctions in these and other ways, see Bhambra 2014.
 CULTURE, THEORY AND CRITIQUE 3

linking’. Each of these positions represents a distinct response to the problem of position-
ality. Spivak insists that theorists acknowledge their own complicity, Ahmad wants theor-
ists to move toward political engagement, and Mignolo’s programme of de-linking gives a
specific vision of what such political engagement might look like. By considering these as
‘methods’, we do not take ‘method’ in the sense of formal or rigid procedures that could be
followed step by step, but rather we understand ‘method’ in its broader etymological sense
of the path that one walks. The aim of this essay, then, is to present the tendencies and
trajectories of different theorists and theories, and thus to clarify different potential
paths that challenge persistent inequities rooted in colonial projects and our own positions
within them.

Spivak’s complicity and productive undoing

In this section, we take Spivak’s work as representative of tendencies in post-colonial
theory. We start by outlining her notion of ‘complicity’ and its relationship to deconstruc-
tion and generalised metaphors of reading. We then show how complicity is related to
Spivak’s famous problematization of subaltern speech and the necessity of particularizing
and locating the figure of ‘the intellectual’. Finally, we demonstrate how two central
aspects of a Spivakian politics follow from the notion of complicity: a commitment to
pedagogy as a central form of political practice and a critique of Marxism and other pol-
itical programmes that rely on grand narratives.
Spivak asks the theorist to acknowledge their complicity in what they aim to critique,
and she frames this practice through a metaphor of reading. She is particularly concerned
with how the theorist can and should position themselves with respect to canonical Euro-
pean philosophical figures such as Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, or Karl Marx. In her
1999 Critique of Postcolonial Reason, she writes in the ‘Preface’: ‘It is my belief that a train-
ing in a literary habit of reading the world can attempt to put a curb on such superpower
triumphalism only if it does not perceive acknowledgement of complicity as an inconve-
nience’ (Spivak 1999: xii). ‘Only if … ’ – that is, acknowledging complicity is required to
critically engage the present. The point, however, is not to lament one’s position but to
leverage it. To put this differently, Spivak asks her readers to read strategically with her,
‘hoping that some readers may then discover a constructive rather than disabling compli-
city between our own position and theirs, for there often seems no choice between excuses
and accusations, the muddy stream and mudslinging’ (Spivak 1999: 3–4). If ‘constructive
complicity’ names Spivak’s method, we take such a method to involve an honest reckoning
with the limitations of canonical figures while foregrounding an emphasis on reading for
productive purposes in the present.
This method of constructive complicity aims to avoid at least two problematic ways of
reading canonical figures and texts. On the one hand, Spivak is not interested in excuses of
the familiar sort: ‘Well, yes, Kant said some racist things, but he was only a man of his
time, after all who isn’t, and anyway the real Kant lies in his timeless contribution to
human rights and dignity and justice’. On the other hand, Spivak is not interested in accu-
sations: ‘Given their racism, no one should ever read Kant, or Hegel, or Marx, again!’ At
the very least, these sorts of accusations are baldly ahistorical and non-materialist for
Spivak, as if ignoring an author’s texts could ignore the parts of our world informed by,
or at least reflective of, those authors and texts. Surely we learn more about European
4 B. P. DAVIS AND J. WALSH

modernity by reading Kant than by ignoring Kant. But the question, of course, is precisely
how we read Kant, and it is this question that constructive complicity attempts to answer.
This methodological question is answered in looking to the relationship between construc-
tive complicity, deconstruction, and generalised metaphors of reading.3 One facet of this
dismantling-from-inside she calls ‘ab-using’, a kind of use that lacks fidelity to original
intention and instead employs a method for its own purposes. As one recognises the
binds of the globalised present – that is, as one learns ‘to live with contradictory instruc-
tions’ – one must work productively from within these complications (Spivak 2012: 3).
Spivak’s focus on complicity emerges from and is informed by her take on deconstruc-
tion. Deconstructive reading aims precisely to reveal complicity: ‘One task of deconstruc-
tion might be a persistent attempt to displace the reversal, to show the complicity between
native hegemony and the axiomatics of imperialism … there is something Eurocentric
about assuming that imperialism began with Europe’ (Spivak 1999: 37). Like Mignolo
in The Darker Side of Western Modernity, as we will see, Spivak worries about reversal
– simply attending more to non-canonical work instead of to Kant, for instance – as a
method. She notes this in regard to reading together the Gitā and Hegel: ‘It is my hope
that to notice such a structural complicity of dominant texts from two different cultural
inscriptions can be a gesture against some of the too-easy West-and-the-rest polarizations
sometimes rampant in colonial and postcolonial discourse studies. To my mind, such a
polarisation is too much a legitimation-by-reversal of the colonial attitude itself’ (Spivak
1999: 37). To take texts as representative of two parts of the world – the move to polarise
– misses the complexities of each of those terms, including and especially how they con-
stitute each other. Better instead to notice the complications of each text, what they are
invested in as well as what they exclude. Just as she aims to avoid any too-simple
excuse or accusation of the canonical European text, so Spivak wants to avoid any too-
simple valorisation of the post-colonial text, a simple reversal of the way that the uncritical
Eurocentric reader reads Kant.
The method of beginning from complicity, of staying constructively with the tensions
of the text as much as calling into question one’s own positioning (always with a view
toward use and not guilt, for Spivak), eschews speaking for those oppressed under con-
ditions of colonialism. She presents a poignant example of the one-way flow of cultural
imposition, what is sometimes referred to euphemistically as ‘soft power’, in her 2003
Death of a Discipline: ‘In spite of the fact that the effects of globalisation can be felt all
over the world, that there are satellite dishes in Nepalese villages, the opposite is never
true. The everyday cultural detail, condition and effect of sedimented cultural idiom,
does not come up into satellite country’ (Spivak 2003: 16). How is the intellectual’s
method analogous to satellite TV, and how is this related to complicity? Western metro-
politan academic discourse, as Spivak famously pointed out in ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’,
prefers to take others as objects of knowledge or as places in need of education rather than
to learn from the knowledge production of other places or to interrogate its own knowl-
edge production. Part of Spivak’s insight here comes from her take on deconstruction as a
method of noting and making explicit exclusions that are always already present, if hidden.

3
Consider how Mark Sanders frames his review of Critique of Postcolonial Reason: ‘Critique has given its reader to work out
more than an agenda, an itinerary of agency in complicity. It has also blazed an intricate trajectory on reading. The latter
is what my essay endeavors to work out’; and Sanders concludes the review: ‘Postcoloniality urges a training of the agent
as reader in the literary’ (See Sanders 1999).
 CULTURE, THEORY AND CRITIQUE 5

When theoretical attention is turned from speaking for another to speaking about one’s
own position, one realises how looking outward masks unstated norms. In this instance,
we can see how ‘the intellectual’ itself breaks down.
Claims to ‘the theorist’ or ‘the intellectual’ exemplify that ‘there is at work there the figure
of an intellectual who seems not to be production-specific at all’ (Spivak 1990: 3). By starting
from complicity and the exclusions inherent in theoretical production, Spivak aims to turn
the question around: ‘the first question—the first task of intellectuals, as indeed we are—as
to who asks the question about the intellectual and the specific intellectual, the universal
intellectual, is to see that the specific intellectual is being defined in reaction to the universal
intellectual who seems to have no particular nation-state provenance’ (Spivak 1990: 3). She
says, in a nice summary line, ‘I need an adjective before academics’ (Spivak 1990: 103). Thus,
if the acknowledgment of complicity is intended to caution the intellectual about speaking
for others, is it also intended to force an acknowledgment of particularity and location of ‘the
intellectual’ who is speaking, no matter what about.
Two important political consequences follow from Spivak’s method of acknowledged
complicity: it informs both her account of pedagogy as a site of political practice and
her relationship to Marxism. In regard to the former, she has noted that ‘I see my
charge as teaching post-structural theory’ (Spivak 1990: 70). To what extent is this to
say that theory bears out in pedagogical practice? In responding to a question about the
political relevance of her writing, she has said, ‘I cannot get a hold on what is meant by
a direct pragmatic political usefulness which might be unrelated to the classroom’; as
we might by now expect, she nevertheless attends to the limits of this position as she
raises it: ‘In America some people say their pedagogy is their politics—I think it can be
a kind of alibi’ (Spivak 1990: 71). Despite this important warning – and no doubt one
of Spivak’s strengths is her ability to point out the persistence of alibis – much more
recently she has continued to emphasize the university as a site of politics, saying for
instance in a lecture: ‘[Y]ou may have noticed that everything I say turns around learning
and teaching’ and ‘Higher education in the humanities should be strengthened so that the
literary imagination can continue to de-transcendentalize the nation and shore up the
redistributive power of the regionalist state in the face of global priorities’ (Spivak 2015:
48, 56). The reliance on the metaphor of reading makes the classroom a site of practice.4
There is an analogy between working within the most important, canonical texts in the
Western tradition in order to ab-use and undo them and working within the most power-
ful city in the West in order to suggest a different path. Spivak herself, however, worries
that the result of such practice advances and does not challenge global priorities: ‘I
teach in New York in the most powerful university in what some call the most powerful
city in the world … The students, undergraduates in my class, go on to Silicon Valley or
become powerful in politics or, these days, want to help the world—human rights’ (Spivak
2015: 70). The empirical results of learning – what students actually end up doing in the
world – must be taken seriously if and when professors cite their pedagogy as political.
The second consequence of Spivak’s method is a continual interrogation of grand nar-
ratives, including Marxism. She has specifically said that an actor cannot found a politics

4
Namita Goswami concludes a nuanced reading of Spivak’s Critique by raising questions of the academy and epistemology
(and not, say, of politics directly): ‘Can a postcolonial pedagogy be developed within the humanities in the US? If we read
Spivak carefully, she seems to prefigure a contemporary global epistemology’ (Goswami 2014: 73).
6 B. P. DAVIS AND J. WALSH

on deconstruction (see Spivak 1990: 104). The deconstructive question is always about
what is left out or excluded by grand narratives. While she sees this approach as possibly
compatible with Marxism, she also warns about going ‘in the direction of a Unification
Church … creating global solutions that are coherent’ (Spivak 1990: 15). For her, this is
a colonial move. Instead, she writes, ‘We must know the limits of narratives, rather
than establish the narratives as solutions for the future, for the arrival of social justice,
so that to an extent they’re working within an understanding of what they cannot do’
(Spivak 1990: 15). Her response to a question about the ‘modes of production narrative’
summarises both of these political consequences of her method: ‘I really believe that
given our historical position we have to learn to negotiate with structures of violence,
rather than taking the impossible elitist position of turning our backs on everything … I
have to learn myself and teach my students to negotiate with colonialism itself’ (Spivak
1990: 101). Aijaz Ahmad, to whom we now turn, agrees with Spivak that the post-colonial
theorist is complicit, but he sees the combination of acknowledging and staying with this
fact as a vice rather than a virtue.

Ahmad’s objective determination and activism

In this section, we examine Ahmad’s relentless criticism of post-structuralist theory and its
influence on post-colonial theory. Ahmad is particularly concerned with how Jean-Fran-
cois Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and others following in their wake (includ-
ing, prominently, Edward Said and Spivak) have challenged claims to grand narratives and
normative progress. We will see that Ahmad rejects what we described above as two con-
sequences of Spivak’s deconstructive approach, namely, its site of practice and its relation
to Marx(ism). Deconstruction – what Spivak calls ‘critical moments in Marx that would
open up his texts to something other than simply a programme set down by these meta-
physical presuppositions’ – is not, for Ahmad, a fruitful approach to Marx’s texts (Spivak
1990: 101).5
Ahmad aims not so much to open up Marx’s texts as to apply them. In his reading of
The Communist Manifesto, in an essay with a title that reveals a claim to continued appli-
cation – ‘The Communist Manifesto In Its Own Time, And In Ours’ – Ahmad positions
himself in explicit opposition to post-colonial theory. For him, the Manifesto realises phil-
osophy through a ‘double movement’: ‘a theory of history which makes concrete the intel-
lectual project of philosophy by explaining the fundamental motion of the material world
in its generality – what postmodernism these days dismisses as a “modes of production
narrative”’ coupled with a demand ‘from philosophy that its ethical project be materialised
as the praxis of a revolutionary transformation of an ethically intolerable world – what
postmodernism now dismisses as “the myth of Progress”’ (Ahmad 1999: 17). While
Ahmad explicitly names ‘postmodernism’ as his object of critique here, the intellectual
lineage of post-colonial theory as well as Ahmad’s writing elsewhere make it clear that
he intends his critique to apply to post-colonial theory as well.6 We can thus already
5
For Ahmad, deconstruction is itself a specialist’s procedure: at the expense of the political potential of the radical student
movements of 1968, ‘deconstructionist close reading became a fully fledged technology requiring specialist training’
(Ahmad 1992: 55).
6
Leela Gandhi, writing about Foucault (via Said) and Derrida (via Spivak), notes why we can read Ahmad’s critique of ‘post-
modernism’ as a critique of postcolonial theory, even if in this passage Ahmad doesn’t name Said or Spivak: ‘[I]t is through
 CULTURE, THEORY AND CRITIQUE 7

begin to see how Ahmad envisions a relationship between academic reader and text quite
different from Spivak’s acknowledged complicity. Ahmad is not interested in a decon-
structive approach whereby we illuminate the internal tensions and contradictions and
implicit exclusions of a text; rather, he wants to extract generalisable claims about empiri-
cal reality and its potential transformation from the text and then render those claims
available to non-academic readers – an approach of consciousness-raising and practical
action.
Ahmad develops this argument at length in In Theory (1992), his classic critique of
post-colonial theory. Of particular relevance to our essay is Ahmad’s contention that
post-colonial theory’s obsession with metaphors of reading has severely limited its
understanding of political practice, and indeed that post-colonial theory’s theoretical
commitments militate in practice against its professed political and ethical goals. In
making this argument, Ahmad highlights what he sees as a key historical shift from
an ‘activist culture’ to a ‘textual culture’ (Ahmad 1992: 1–2). This shift, of which
post-structuralist and post-colonial theory are a part, resulted in ‘greatly extending
the centrality of reading as the appropriate form of politics’ (Ahmad 1992: 3).
Indeed, Ahmad claims that strands within what is sometimes simply referred to as
‘theory’ in the U.S. academy ‘have been mobilised to domesticate, in institutional
ways, the very forms of political dissent which those movements [of the 1960s] had
sought to foreground’ (Ahmad 1992: 1). To domesticate and tame, Ahmad claims,
has meant ‘to displace an activist culture with a textual culture, to combat the more
uncompromising critiques of existing cultures of the literary profession with a new mys-
tique of leftish professionalism, and to reformulate in a postmodernist direction ques-
tions which had previously been associated with a broadly Marxist politics’ (Ahmad
1992: 1–2).
Ahmad contends that the generalisation of the metaphor of reading has undermined
anti-colonial political practice in two key ways. First, ‘in privileging the figure of the
reader, the critic, the theorist, as the guardian of the texts of this world, where everything
becomes a text’, the theoretical position of poststructuralism and by extension postcolonial
theory inadvertently ‘recoups the main cultural tropes of bourgeois humanism’ (Ahmad
1992: 3–4, 36). In other words, despite post-colonial theory’s claims to radicality, it
implicitly positions the critical reader as the gatekeeper to culture and the arbiter of
meaning, reaffirming the power differential between educated and uneducated, coloniser
and colonised. Second, Ahmad claims that ‘the well-known postructuralist skepticism
about the possibility of rational knowledge impels that same “individual” to maintain
only an ironic relation with the world and its intelligibility’ (Ahmad 1992: 36). Ahmad
sums up this point in his own ironic tone: ‘Very affluent people may come to believe
that they have broken free of imperialism through acts of reading, writing, lecturing,
and so forth’ (Ahmad 1992: 11). In other words, Ahmad argues that an ironic or skeptical
attitude towards the possibility of rational knowledge of the empirical world and its trans-
formation can only lead to a retreat into the proliferation of different readings of texts – to
the conference and not the coalition.

poststructuralism and postmodernism—and their deeply fraught and ambivalent relationship with Marxism’, Gandhi
writes, ‘that postcolonialism starts to distill its particular provenance’ (Gandhi 2019: 25).
8 B. P. DAVIS AND J. WALSH

Ahmad’s claim in response to his observations and indictments is that a Marxist analy-
sis does not miss these institutional aspects of theorising. ‘[I]t would be hard to think of a
Marxism which would not foreground’, he writes,
the issue of the institutional sites from which that theory emanates; the actual class practices
and concrete social locations, in systems of power and powerlessness, of the agents who
produce it; the circuits through which it circulates and the class fractions who endow it
with whatever power it gains; hence the objective determination of the theory itself by
these material co-ordinates of its production, regardless of the individual agent’s personal
stance toward these locations and co-ordinates. (Ahmad 1992: 5–6)

Accordingly, no syllabus, no pedagogy, no conference presentation, no book can by itself

overcome social location; situation is always greater than stance, in Ahmad’s equation.
This is a radical way of understanding how to consider the politics of theory. Reading
what the theory says may tell you less about it than looking first to its ‘material co-ordi-
nates’ – how it was produced, with whom it was articulated and which audience it had in
mind, how it circulates, who reads it. The strength of the language is noteworthy: it is not
that theory is conditioned by its position. Rather it is determined objectively. If theory is
thus determined, then what is Ahmad calling for in terms of theoretical production? If
Ahmad would be skeptical of Spivak’s method – the academic’s acknowledgement of com-
plicity and productive undoing in turn – what does he propose in its place?
We suggest that Ahmad is looking more for activistic connections than textual compli-
cations, and thus a return to an ‘activist culture’ rather than a ‘textual culture’. This is not
Marx after Derrida, in Spivak’s formulation, so much as a question of what Marx himself
offers the present – Marxism ‘in its own time, and in ours’, as Ahmad put it in the subtitle
of his aforementioned 1999 essay on the present relevance of the Manifesto. In addition to
the implicit call for on-the-ground engagement and return to an activist culture that runs
through In Theory, it is in this 1999 essay that we get a better sense of the path Ahmad
suggests for the intellectual. Ahmad sticks to the traditional modes of production narra-
tive. The question for him is how to turn class struggle over the economic means of pro-
duction into a political struggle capable of overthrowing capitalist hegemony. The point of
an anti-colonial Marxism is to respond to the difficulties and complications presented to
this classical project by the novel conditions of globalisation. ‘The more diverse the popu-
lations that get proletarianised, the more diverse will have to be the forms designed to
bring about that unity’ (Ahmad 1999: 47). Political struggle is more complex, now requir-
ing attention even to aesthetic and religious forms. ‘One bitter lesson we have learned in
the course of this process’, Ahmad concludes, ‘is that the fact of immiseration itself does
not produce a unity of class consciousness. For that, the domain of consciousness has to be
addressed in the very forms in which it experiences the world, and those forms are social
and ideological in nature’ (Ahmad 1999: 47). The role of the intellectual, as opposed to the
mere academic, is to politicise (not textualise) the struggle. The point is to clarify more
than to complicate – to raise consciousness across increasingly variegated lines.7 Walter

7
In her defense, Spivak acknowledges Ahmad’s critique and aligns with it to some extent. ‘[A]lthough both Aijaz Ahmad
and I criticize metropolitan postcolonialism, I hope my position is less locationist, more nuanced with a productive
acknowledgment of complicity’ (Spivak 1999: xii). We understand these points of separation between Spivak and
Ahmad – ’less locationist’ and ‘more nuanced’ as follows: with the former, Spivak is challenging Ahmad’s claim to ‘objec-
tive determination’, the way in which the geographical and institutional location of the post-colonial intellectual often
belies their commitments to radical political praxis. Her jab about nuance suggests both (1) her practices of extremely
 CULTURE, THEORY AND CRITIQUE 9

Mignolo will endorse, to some extent, Ahmad’s politicisation; he will disagree, however, on
the methodological move to Marxism. Instead, he seeks to subsume Marxism under a
broader, ‘de-colonial’ path.

Mignolo’s locus of enunciation and de-Linking

In this section, we present Mignolo’s terms for the theorist’s position (‘locus of enunci-
ation’) as well as his preferred path (‘de-linking’). We draw attention to how he developed
these concepts over time and in dialogue with both post-colonial theory and anti-colonial
Marxism.
The ‘locus of enunciation’ is a concept that Mignolo articulated early in his career and
has maintained to the present (Mignolo 1995: vii).8 His claim is that the meaning of aca-
demic work is determined not only by its subject matter and audience, but also by ‘the
locus of enunciation from which one “speaks” and, by speaking, contributes to changing
or maintaining systems of values and beliefs’ (Mignolo 1995: 5). The locus of enunciation
is first, then, a position – the ‘from which one speaks’. It is also suggestive of a position in a
second sense, namely, the position one takes on an issue, by which one can attempt to
change or to maintain the predominant norms and practices.9 What Mignolo is attempt-
ing to do with this concept is to draw attention to the speaking act itself – to the saying
more than to the said, which was the structuralist emphasis. In this way, the locus of enun-
ciation, at least in its early articulation, is aligned with post-structuralist theory.10
But Mignolo soon departs from post-structural angles, directing his comments specifi-
cally at Spivak and post-colonial readers:
Loci of enunciation are only partially related to the physical domiciles and academic affilia-
tion of speaking and writing subjects. They are constructed by both joining and detaching
oneself from previous performances. There is no reason to limit the question whether the
subaltern can speak to the nonacademic world. One can witness every day in academic life
a certain subalternity disguised under the label of ‘minorities,’ or the way in which the pub-
lications are filtered out and fellowships are administered and awarded. (Mignolo 1995: 313)

‘close reading’, staying with the texts themselves and the original languages much more closely than Ahmad and (2) a
focus on the complications that underlie any claim to grand narratives, such as the progress of societies.
8
In The Darker Side of the Renaissance, Mignolo does not yet articulate his work as de-colonial, exactly; rather, he notes on
the very first page that he is participating in ‘postcolonial theorizing’ (Mignolo 1995: vii).
9
Thus, Mignolo’s early articulation of the locus of enunciation to some extent prefigures his later presentation of the ‘deco-
lonial option’ – not a mission but a choice to conduct scholarship in certain ways.
10
More specifically, there is an ‘indirect’ relationship between the locus of enunciation and Foucault. Given the importance
of this early articulation to the evolution of the concept, and given the importance of tracing conceptual provenance, we
quote at length from the 1995 Darker Side of the Renaissance: ‘For Foucault, the locus enuntiationis (mode d’enonciation in
his terminology) was one of the four components of the discursive formations he conceived in terms of social roles and
institutional functions … It was not in his horizon to raise questions about the locus of enunciation in colonial situations.
Thus, from the perspective of the locus of enunciation, understanding the past cannot be detached from speaking the
present, just as the disciplinary (or epistemological) subject cannot be detached from the nondisciplinary (or hermeneu-
tical) one. It follows, then, that the need to speak the present originates at the same time from a research program that
needs to debunk, refurbish, or celebrate previous disciplinary findings, and from the subject’s nondisciplinary (gender,
class, race, nation) confrontation with social urgencies’ (Mignolo 1995: 5–6). The modifier ‘his’ on horizon is important.
In emphasizing the inherent connection of the personal and the disciplinary, Mignolo teaches us that there is not simply
a, much less the, horizon of thought – as some would hold in regard to an objective or neutral discipline. Discipline, we
might say given the invocation of Foucault, entails punishment, or exclusion; traditionally, what is excluded is precisely
the non-disciplinary confrontation, which in fact informs one’s horizon. Mignolo’s attention to the individual struggles of
the theorist strengthens his concept of ‘locus of enunciation’ insofar as it attends to theory as it is actually lived – precisely
in ‘confrontation with social urgencies’, the pulls and pressures one faces while thinking.
10 B. P. DAVIS AND J. WALSH

Leaving aside the question of whether Spivak herself limits the question of the subaltern’s
speaking, we can witness just how slowly Mignolo is asking us to move if we are to think
along the path he traces, just how subtly and basically we need to be thinking. ‘Joining’
includes asking safe research questions, seeking prestigious sources of recognition, and
including marginal discourses mostly or only to advance one’s professional standing.
‘Detaching’ – which Mignolo elaborates upon in his later concept of ‘de-linking’ –
might look like posing polemical research questions and working with others as co-
researchers and not as objects of one’s research. This focus on knowledge production is
central to the concept of the locus of enunciation.
Mignolo’s more recent The Darker Side of Western Modernity (2011) continues his
work to shift the sites of knowledge production. Here again he maintains the locus of
enunciation as a key term, arguing from the beginning that such a shift is different
from inclusion or assimilation:
Inclusion is a one-way street and not a reciprocal right. In a world governed by a colonial
matrix of power, he who includes and she who is welcomed to be included stand in
codified power relations. The locus of enunciation from which inclusion is established is
always a locus of holding the control of knowledge and the power of decision across
gender and racial lines, across political orientations and economic regulations. (Mignolo
2011: xv)

This is in part a move to provincialise, to debunk the false universality of Western epis-
temology. Mignolo has summarised his concept of the locus of enunciation in the nice
phrase ‘I am where I think’, which serves to show that location is constitutive of
thought (Mignolo 2009a). We can think of this in terms of tradition as much as geography:
a robust or rigorous sense of a ‘where’ here involves the fact that part of socialisation is
induction into a ready-made thought-world. In other words, in a comparison he
employs, there is no ‘zero point’ epistemology; loci of enunciation are constructed and
located: ‘Loci of enunciation are constituted at the intersection of epistemology and the
politics of location’ (Mignolo 2009a: 238).
We now turn to the political implications of Mignolo’s concept of ‘locus of enunci-
ation’. It is our sense that more emphasis has been placed on the epistemological impli-
cations of this concept: reconfigured syllabuses, more panels on ‘de-colonizing topic x’,
and so on. Our claim is not that there are not political ramifications to epistemological
shifts, but we do suggest that the implications of the political or institutional side of the
‘locus of enunciation’ require more difficult practices, practices that cut against a reformist
grain. Decolonising the university involves not only efforts of diversity and inclusion, but
also the interrogation of material conditions for a given university position.11 And as we
outlined above, Ahmad emphasized this point, noting that in the way of post-structuralist
theory ‘the individual practitioner of academic radicalism comes to occupy so beleaguered
a space that any critical engagement with the limitations of one’s own intellectual and pol-
itical formation becomes difficult’ (Ahmad 1992: 65).12

11
See also Maldonado-Torres et al 2018.
In Mignolo’s writings in Spanish on this concept, the term he uses is ‘lugar de enunciacion’. While ‘locus’ is an esoteric
12

word in English, ‘lugar’ is an exoteric word in Spanish. It is helpful to think the translations together to gain both the
abstract sense of positionality and the quotidian sense of place – the subject position and the seminar room, we
could say. Some have criticized Mignolo’s lugar de enunciación for positing ‘an intrinsic link between thought and
place’ and thus falling into an ‘epistemological determinism that is not in a position to consider the political and
 CULTURE, THEORY AND CRITIQUE 11

Mignolo articulates his response to the academic’s traditionally institutional locus of

enunciation through his concept of ‘delinking’. ‘De-linking’ is a translation of Aníbal Qui-
jano’s desprendimiento (from his 1992 ‘Colonialidad y modernidad-racionalidad’), which
could also be translated as an act of detachment, separation, or the slightly poetic ‘unpin-
ning’. The ‘de-’ prefix of ‘de-linking’, however, resonates with the ‘de-’ of ‘de-colonial’, and
is therefore our preferred translation. Like the locus of enunciation, de-linking is both an
epistemological and a political practice. If this is to hold, de-linking needs to address not
only the theoretical or epistemological edifice, but also the practical edifices of coloniality.
Mignolo has included a social and political dimension to de-linking in addition to his epis-
temological focus: ‘In de-colonial thinking, peace, a peaceful world, a peaceful society,
requires two main conditions: 1) To de-link from capitalist economy, organised societies,
nationally and internationally; 2) To accept (even if for the ruling minority it will be
difficult) that indeed the vast majority of marginal human beings are human as well as
the privileged economic and political elites, nationally and internationally’ (Mignolo
2009b: 23). He elaborates:
De-linking, civil dis-obedience and a reversal of the way production and distribution of food
is conceived are all aspects of de-colonization at large. De-linking, once again, implies work at
the fringes, at the border between hegemonic and dominant forms of knowledge, of econ-
omic practices, of political demands. Using the system but doing something else, moving
in different directions. (Mignolo 2007b: 160)

This point about opposition to capitalism and hegemony while using or leveraging the
system requires clarification; comparing Mignolo’s presentation to Marxism and post-
colonial theory brings his approach into relief.
Mignolo has consistently considered his work around the locus of enunciation and
delinking to be separate from Marxist theory and practice, going as far as including
Marxism in his most damning list, as seen in the 2003 Afterword to The Darker Side of
the Renaissance: ‘ … the totalising macronarratives of modernity (Christianity, liberalism,
and Marxism)’ (Mignolo 1995: 457). In other places, he suggests a kind of extended
Marxism: this is his point in the 2007 ‘Delinking’, echoing Frantz Fanon: ‘In the colonies
the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are
rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich. This is why Marxist analysis
should always be slightly stretched every time we have to deal with the colonial problem’
(Mignolo 2007a: 488). In the final instance, for Mignolo, Marxism is not sufficient: ‘early
de-linking projects … were not radical de-linking but rather radical emancipation within
the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of coloniality. In other words, de-linking could
hardly be thought out from a Marxist perspective, because Marxism offers a different
content but not a different logic’ (Mignolo 2007a: 462). He notes that he is still often
asked about ‘the distinctions between the decolonial and the Left, that is, the Marxist-

mediated character of the production of knowledge, and that ends up circumscribing all thought to its respective place
[lugar] of origin’ (Pimmer 2017: 199, 200, translation ours). We would disagree with this claim: it misses the second, more
abstract sense of ‘locus’, which depends less on place than on style, form, method (Foucault’s mode d’enonciation). Our
claim is more in line, then, with those who claim that the locus of enunciation, even in its Spanish lugar de enunciación,
allows for possibilities more than constrains into determinism. This is seen, for instance, in Silvia Tieffemberg’s claim that
‘[a]ddressing the ideas of the “mestizo” from its lugar de enunciación permits restoring the implied social, political, and
cultural context as well as to apprehend it [the idea] not as a fact of the past but rather as an unfinished process that
begins with the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese to America, and that until the present demonstrates a notable
activity’ (Tieffemberg 2013–2014: 273, translation ours).
12 B. P. DAVIS AND J. WALSH

oriented Left’ (Mignolo 2011: xviii). He summarises his answer as follows: ‘Marxism and
de-colonial projects point toward the same direction, but each has quite different agendas.
De-colonial projects CANNOT be subsumed under Marxism ideology; Marxism should
be subsumed under de-colonial projects’ (Mignolo 2007b: 164).
More recently, Mignolo has also separated de-linking and de-colonial theory from post-
colonial theory. As we noted above, in some of his work Mignolo has described himself as
a post-colonial theorist, writing, for instance, ‘postcolonial literature and postcolonial the-
ories are constructing a new concept of reason as differential loci of enunciation’ (Mignolo
2012: 116). But as Mignolo articulates ‘de-linking’, we see his shift of prefix in full relief. He
does not see himself working amidst ‘the post-colonial canon: Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak
and Homi Bhabha’; rather, he sees two different shifts at play (Mignolo 2007a: 452). ‘The
de-colonial shift, in other words, is a project of de-linking while post-colonial criticism and
theory is a project of scholarly transformation within the academy’ (Mignolo 2007a: 452).
He adds: ‘Postcolonial “studies” and “theories,” as institutionalised through the U.S.
academy and in ex-Western empires, fell back into the epistemic frame of Eurocentered
modernity: the distinction between the subject/known object is implied in both the
notion of “study” and in the notion of “theory”’ (Mignolo and Tslostanova 2008: 120).
This subject/object distinction, as we have seen, carries with it historical patterns: Eur-
opeans are producers of knowledge; non-Europeans are objects of the Western gaze.
While Mignolo sets up his work as different from post-colonial theory, then, he does
not mean to subsume or reject such theory. Indeed, to differentiate a position it is not
necessary to reject other positions. In fact, as this essay takes as its premise, differentiation
can clarify different angles of mutually informing efforts. Mignolo’s framing of the ‘deco-
lonial option’ is important. It is an option and not a mission, a choice and not a projection.
He states this explicitly: ‘I do not see decoloniality and postcoloniality campaigning for
election to win the voting competition that decides which is the best, but as complemen-
tary trajectories with similar goals of social transformation. Both projects strive to unveil
colonial strategies promoting the reproduction of subjects whose aims and goals are to
control and to possess’ (Mignolo 2011: xxvi).

Conclusion
To conclude, we return to our introductory discussion of identity and method. There are
two equally unpalatable options that must be avoided: the denialist claim that social iden-
tity has no bearing on an agent’s epistemic, ethical, or political positions, and the reduc-
tionist claim that the former strictly determines the latter. While strict determinism is a
position that few would avowedly hold, we can see its influence in some of the debates
over how to distinguish between post-colonial and de-colonial theory. In The Darker
Side of Western Modernity, Mignolo writes about the push-back he gets when describing
the origins of de- and post-colonial thinking:
[W]hen I say decoloniality and postcoloniality did not originate in Europe but in the Third
World, I am reminded that Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, for instance, were in France
when they wrote their influential books. Fanon was actually in Algeria when he wrote The
Wretched of the Earth (1961). The point, however, is not where you reside but where you
dwell. Césaire and Fanon, both Martinican, dwelled in the history of the Middle Passage,
of the plantations, of slavery and of the runaway slaves. (Mignolo 2011: xiii)
 CULTURE, THEORY AND CRITIQUE 13

We would also have to say that Fanon dwelled in Sartre’s existentialism and Hegel’s pres-
entation of lordship and bondage, and, in Wretched, with Marxist analysis. That Mignolo’s
early presentation of the locus of enunciation draws on Foucault and that Fanon studied
Hegel and Sartre do not by any means dismiss the de-colonial effort of de-linking. Instead,
this shows that drawing clear lines around theories based only on filiation ignores how
such theories emerged and how they continue to circulate. So, while many theorists
argue that the difference between post-colonial and de-colonial theory lies in genealogy
– Foucault, Gramsci, Derrida, and Lacan for post-colonial theory; Mariátegui, Gandhi,
Cabral, Césaire, Fanon, and Du Bois for de-colonial theory – such a claim quickly slips
into a kind of pseudo-filiation. Given how these figures themselves are foundational
across lines (e.g., Mignolo himself reads Foucault; Spivak draws on Du Bois) and how
Fanon (from Martinique) and Derrida (from Algeria) were both responding in different
ways to Hegel and were both educated in France, such pseudo-filiation does not hold.
To take a more contemporary example, in the pages of Cultural Studies we see that
Nelson Maldonado-Torres, writing from a decidedly de-colonial position, cites Martin
Heidegger to make a point not only about existential phenomenology but also to articulate
what he calls, following Mignolo, ‘the coloniality of being’ (Maldonado-Torres 2007).
Heidegger, of course, deeply influenced both Derrida (who influenced Spivak) and Fou-
cault (who influenced Said). Genealogy is always complicated. We make this extended
point not to suggest that post-colonial theory and de-colonial theory are really Eurocentric
after all, but to suggest that we need better ways of adjudicating that very question. In sum,
we have argued that Spivak, Ahmad, and Mignolo offer three different methods or paths to
follow and that these paths avoid the dangers of denial or reduction. In this way, we have
developed a novel distinction between post-colonial, anti-colonial, and de-colonial per-
spectives, one not based on intellectual genealogies or areas of investigation but rather
on each thinker’s response to the problems of positionality.
Spivak’s articulation of complicity insists that we cannot simply reject problematic
elements of tradition, nor can we reject conditions that we deem contaminated for an
exterior, pure realm; no such realm exists, especially in an age of globalisation. Fore-
grounding complicity calls into question the ethics of extending or projecting operative
norms. The post-colonial approach is to challenge those norms through an immanent cri-
tique, which challenges any clean narrative of ‘development’ in our ‘humanitarian present’
(Weizman 2011: 4). A strong first step to the problem of complicity is to implicate our-
selves from the beginning, and then challenge our own traditions and norms instead of
speaking for those whom our traditions and norms marginalise and oppress. In sum,
Spivak’s rhetoric of complicity, metaphors of reading, and presentation of undoing and
ab-using certain texts highlight the importance of academic, or theoretical, study in this
critical effort.
Ahmad insists that we must go beyond the acknowledgment of complicity. ‘Even more
than the search for more texts and more coherent narratives of their production’, Ahmad
writes, ‘we need far greater clarity about the theoretical methods and political purposes of
our reading’ (Ahmad 1992: 185). If post-colonial theory asks us to interrogate rigorously
our theoretical inheritance, anti-colonial theory calls into question the situation from
which we perform such an interrogation and demands that our political purposes be
embodied in political praxis. This emphasis and demand can reveal how utterly discon-
nected we are, even in our interrogation, from the social movements we claim to be
14 B. P. DAVIS AND J. WALSH

advancing in our theory. To modify a common chant at recent street protests in the U.S.,
the anti-colonial position says, ‘Out of your classrooms and into the streets’.
De-colonial theory, following Mignolo, has a term for the material situation of the the-
orist to which Ahmad draws our attention: the locus of enunciation. Mignolo argues,
however, that Marxism, even anti-colonial Marxism, remains within the logic of European
modernity. Even if Marxism changes the content of thinking – even if it poses problems in
ways different from liberal and neoliberal positions – it nevertheless avoids the risks of de-
linking, including looking beyond European frames. The path Mignolo wants justice-
oriented actors to take is one of epistemic and institutional disobedience with a view
toward the preservation and cultivation of alternative sites of knowledge production.
Faced with the recognition of the problem of positionality, Spivak, Ahmad, and
Mignolo each offer distinct methods or paths forward. We might be tempted to integrate
their methods as complementary or as providing successive steps of increasing concretion.
First we acknowledge our complicity with Spivak, then we make the turn towards practical
engagement with Ahmad, and then we give that practical engagement the specific content
of de-linking with Mignolo. This would almost certainly be too quick of an answer,
however, and we can potentially learn more from the objections that each thinker
would raise toward the other. Ahmad makes us wary that the acknowledgement of com-
plicity can become a kind a self-stultifying exercise that inhibits action, but Spivak would
be rightfully suspicious that the rush to engage can reproduce colonial patterns in and of
itself. Mignolo’s project of de-linking runs the risk of essentializing the ‘exterior’ in a way
that both Spivak and Ahmad would warn us about. Spivak would doubt the existence of an
untainted outside from which justice-oriented actors would rebuild social life, and Ahmad
sees no reason to go ‘beyond’ the emancipatory project of Marxism in the first place. Ulti-
mately, whether these methods are competing or complementary – and which is appro-
priate in a given situation – is not a question to be answered in general, that is, in
theory, but one that can only be left open to the contextual judgment of situated agents
as they challenge ongoing colonial projects in collective actions.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors
Benjamin P. Davis is the Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethics at the University of Toronto, Centre for
Ethics. His research focuses on Édouard Glissant, human rights, and an ethics of responsibility.
His writing can be found on his website https://benjaminpdavis.com.
Jason Walsh is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Emory University. His
research draws on multiple traditions of social and political philosophy in order to investigate ques-
tions in the history and logic of capitalism.

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