Globalisation, Societies and Education

ISSN: 1476-7724 (Print) 1476-7732 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cgse20

Decoloniality as inversion: decentring the west in

emancipatory theory and pedagogy

Noah De Lissovoy

To cite this article: Noah De Lissovoy (2019) Decoloniality as inversion: decentring the west in
emancipatory theory and pedagogy, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 17:4, 419-431, DOI:
10.1080/14767724.2019.1577719

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2019.1577719

Published online: 13 Feb 2019.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 124

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cgse20
GLOBALISATION, SOCIETIES AND EDUCATION
2019, VOL. 17, NO. 4, 419–431
https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2019.1577719

Decoloniality as inversion: decentring the west in emancipatory

theory and pedagogy
Noah De Lissovoy
Curriculum and Instruction, University of Texas at Austin, Austin United States

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This study starts from contemporary scholarship in decolonial theory as Received 4 November 2018
well as from the seventeenth century political thinker Guaman Poma de Accepted 26 January 2019
Ayala, whose critique of colonial society in Peru enacted an
KEYWORDS
epistemological displacement of colonial authority in its own method Critical theory; decoloniality;
and perspective. On this theoretical basis, and by means of a contrast emancipation; epistemology;
with the accumulative drive that has partly characterised both capitalism pedagogy
and Western critical theory, I argue that interrogating the Eurocentric
architecture of emancipatory praxis from a decolonial standpoint
necessarily involves a project of inversion that disrupts modernity’s
developmentalist imaginary, and that restores historical agency to the
marginalised while exposing the corruption of power’s supposed virtue.
Extrapolating from Guaman Poma and contemporary theorists of
decolonisation, the paper argues that rather than a dialectical process of
progression, emancipatory theory and practice must be thought of first
of all as a process of unwinding, in which the catastrophe of colonialism
is reckoned with and what has been taken is restored. In education,
both on the terrain of curriculum proper as well as in the process of
subject formation in schools, this means a radical reconstitution of the
values underwriting canon, rationality, and ways of being – as they are
lived within the school and in its relationship to the communities
around it.

In this theoretical study, I start from the contemporary tradition of decolonial theory (e.g., Dussel
2008; Escobar 2008; Mignolo 2011; Quijano 2008; Santos 2014; Walsh 2010; Wynter 2006), much
of which has by now made its way into scholarship in the field of education. The construct of colo-
niality, elaborated by a range of thinkers from the starting point of Quijano’s (2008) crucial formu-
lation ‘coloniality of power,’ allows us to analyse material conquest and exploitation together with
epistemological, ontological, cultural, and psychic imposition and erasure. The notion of coloniality
evokes the range and depth of European conquest, which extends beyond the terrain of colonialism
proper (as a political and geographic process) to shape modernity globally – up to and including the
present moment. Importantly, work in decolonial theory – for example, that of Maldonado-Torres
(2007) and Wynter (2006) – investigates the implication of coloniality even in the ways of being of
societies and communities. For educators, this suggests the importance of understanding struggles
around curriculum and pedagogy as more than simply ideological. Thus, to engage in such struggles
means more than elaborating a critique; it means engaging mind and spirit in a process of decolo-
nisation. Indeed, decolonial thought has exposed the implication even of Western critical traditions
in modernity’s project of epistemological expansionism and imposition (Santos 2014). This does not

CONTACT Noah De Lissovoy delissovoy@austin.utexas.edu University of Texas at Austin, Curriculum and Instruction,
Austin, USA
This article has been republished with minor change. This change do not impact the academic content of the article.
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
420 N. DE LISSOVOY

mean that we should reject critical theory, but rather that we should carefully interrogate it within a
concern for what it constitutively excludes. In the context of the coloniality of Western thought,
which has often repeated on the terrain of epistemology the extended annexation that critics of set-
tler-colonialism like Alfred (2009) and Grande (2004) have described (whose work I also draw on in
the course of my argument), we need to think past familiar conceptions of resistance and emancipa-
tion. In short, starting from the exteriority of the totality of the West (Dussel 1985), we need to refuse
and overturn the given epistemological rules of engagement.
Building from the account in decolonial theory of the way that coloniality works through Western
philosophy, including in part through the dialectical method of critical theory, I am particularly con-
cerned to elaborate an analysis of decolonisation in terms of the contrasting figures of displacement,
substitution, and inversion. I argue that to confront the colonial condition of material and epistemo-
logical imposition, emancipatory projects must undertake a crucial inversion or unwinding of pro-
cesses of violation and annexation. The question of inversion is central to the foundational work of
Frantz Fanon (1963), whom I partly draw on here. Most importantly, I ground my investigation in
the analysis offered by seventeenth century Quechua political thinker Felipe Guaman Poma de
Ayala. Guaman Poma’s (1615/2006) critique of colonial society in Peru exposed the violence visited
upon the Indigenous population by the Spanish while also enacting an epistemological displacement
of Western philosophical authority in its own method and perspective. Guaman Poma’s reversals of
Eurocentric political science offer a model for thinking, acting and teaching in the constrained con-
ditions of occupation, and offer an instructive example of the logic of inversion that I outline in this
paper.
In what follows, after first investigating critical theory as a process of epistemological accumu-
lation, I develop an account of the problematic of inversion in decolonial theory and in Guaman
Poma’s work that interrogates and challenges the progressivist and accumulative impulse in Western
thought. On this basis, I then take up the problem of emancipation as a political and pedagogical
process, and consider how this process might be rethought from a decolonial standpoint. Turning
to the field of education, I examine the terrain of curriculum proper as well as the process of subject
formation in schools, and I argue for the necessity of a radical inversion of the Eurocentric values
underwriting canon, rationality, and ways of being. Only this irruption and interruption can create
the conditions for the elaboration of a different universality and ‘Human Project’ (Wynter 2006) that
would escape the dominative determination of Eurocentric humanism.

Beyond the accumulation of criticality

Western emancipatory and critical thought is marked, in spite of itself, by an accumulative impulse.
This impulse seeks, in the moment of critique, a transition toward a higher understanding or being.
Thus, in Hegel’s dialectic, negation preserves the traces of that which is negated, but now spiritua-
lised and repurposed within a higher or more completely realised moment. Likewise, even for Marx,
capitalism is perversely progressive, creating the conditions of its own overcoming at the same that it
seeks to consolidate and universalise its truth. For its part, Marxian critical theory contemplates a
kind of theoretical development that mirrors that of capitalism, even if the latter is only conceptu-
alised as a movement toward the increasing complexity of a system of contradictions. Thus, the
accumulation of surplus value that Marx exposes as the fundamental imperative of capitalism is
arguably reflected in a different kind of accumulation belonging to the critical imagination: an
accumulation of epistemological privilege, scientificity, and criticality (see Althusser 2009).
In describing this accumulative impulse, I do not suggest that all forms or tendencies in Western
thought are the same. Across and within different historical moments, there have been different and
competing knowledge projects within the West. Indeed, the struggle among them has been intense
and consequential. And perhaps most importantly, Marxism has offered a powerful alternative phil-
osophy that is opposed to the dominant bourgeois standpoint and science. In fact, Marxism has pro-
vided an indispensable foundation for practical and theoretical struggles against colonialism globally,
 GLOBALISATION, SOCIETIES AND EDUCATION 421

and in the work of some of its major theorists (from Marx to Lenin to Marcuse) has centred the pro-
ject of anticolonial struggle. Furthermore, contemporary Marxist interventions have exposed the
deep imbrication of capitalist exploitation and (neo-) colonial dispossession, whether in the form
of a predatory ‘accumulation by dispossession’ as a response to the crisis of overaccumulation in
the metropole (Harvey 2003) or in the form of a ‘global apartheid’ in which capitalism’s constitutive
antagonisms work through mediations of race and culture (Hardt and Negri 2004). In this context,
rather than rejecting Marxist theory, we ought to build on the work of thinkers both within and out-
side of the West to advance a decolonial Marxism (De Lissovoy 2018).
At the same time, however, without collapsing diverse knowledge projects to a single expression, it
is important to recognise that the broad range of Western intellectual traditions participate in a
shared cultural and epistemological matrix. Dussel (1985) describes this in terms of a shared cultural
‘proyecto,’ or civilizational self-projection into the future. This matrix importantly inflects each of
these theoretical moments, even if it does not determine them. Thus, while Althusser (2009) rejects
the methodology of bourgeois philosophy, and even indicts those aspects in Marx’s thought that in
his view are still too close to this philosophy, Althusser’s own formulation of Marxist theoretical
science insists on its privileged status and even exceptionality. While the ‘objectivity without parenth-
eses’ (Maturana’s term for the unique access to the truth claimed by Western thought, as cited in
Mignolo [2011]) proposed by positivism differs from the kinds of validity centred in critical theory,
the latter has also articulated accounts that claim to uniquely comprehend totality. And it is precisely
the break and transition to the critical from the conventional, which is repeated in subsequent phi-
losophical departures and self-overcomings, that is taken to produce an accumulation of understand-
ing (Lukács 1923/1971). In this way, even as varieties of critical thought have posed a profound
ideological threat to bourgeois society and theory, they have participated in an epistemological excep-
tionalism and productivism that has been shared among diverse Western intellectual traditions.
For criticalists who are explicitly concerned with emancipatory projects, the ‘surplus’ that attaches
to the dialectic of liberation is essential. Thus, for Paulo Freire (1970/2007), the process of overcom-
ing oppression is at the same time a reorganisation of society and subjectivity. The denunciation of
oppression is at the same time an invitation to the oppressor, in being pried from power and privi-
lege, to become something different and more – to become fully human. Freire distinguishes this pro-
cess from a simple reversal of roles; rather, transformation in this critical narrative is a process in
which society as a whole gains, in a historical, ethical, and spiritual sense. Similarly, for feminist
standpoint theorists, building on the insights of Lukács (1923/1971), reflexivity regarding the histori-
cal and cultural location of knowledge as well as a commitment to social justice are hallmarks not
simply of more careful science, but of a better and more objective one (Harding 1993). In moving
from mainstream androcentric science to feminist science, intellectuals do not erase an opposing
position but rather surpass it toward a different and more powerful knowledge project (Hartsock
1983). In short, there is an accumulation here of what we might call epistemological power.
In this way, even as they have exposed key processes of exploitation and the ideologies that
accompany them, varieties of critical theory in the West have at the same time pursued a kind of
accumulation in their own arguments – an accumulation of being and understanding. It may be,
in fact, that the figure of accumulation points to a common ground between the surplus generated
in the circulation of capital and that produced in the transgressive movement of critique. If so, then
in order to truly challenge exploitation and domination globally it is necessary to challenge, at the
level of epistemology and ontology, the form of modernity that has underwritten both capitalism
and Western critical theory, as decolonial theorists have described (Grande 2004; Mignolo 2011;
Santos 2014). Extending this insight, I argue here that interrogating the Eurocentric architecture
of critical and emancipatory theory and pedagogy from a decolonial standpoint necessarily involves
a project of inversion that disrupts modernity’s accumulative drive and developmentalist imaginary.
Inverting the system of values that lives within colonial modernity, decolonising projects restore his-
torical agency and right to the marginalised while exposing the corruption of power’s supposed vir-
tue. Within such projects, the marginalised decisively interrupt, and irrupt within, the space of the
422 N. DE LISSOVOY

dominant (Dussel 1985; Walsh 2010). At the same time, this irruption opens the possibility for gen-
uine dialogue across difference.

Decolonisation and the figure of inversion

The idea and process of decolonisation are deeply connected to, but also distinct from, familiar criti-
cal conceptions of emancipation. First, decolonisation refers back to the trauma of colonisation itself,
as originary catastrophe, rather than simply to an undifferentiated process of oppression. This does
not mean that this catastrophe is located solely in the past; colonialism is an ongoing set of social
relationships – ‘a structure rather than an event’ (Wolfe 2006, 390). But it does mean that the notion
of decolonisation implies recognising and reversing a fundamental imposition, before we can look
forward to some larger process of transformation. A hasty embrace of a revolutionary programme
that does not reckon with the specificities of the colonial situation risks carrying forward the cultural
habits and investments of coloniality even as it denounces oppression in more general terms.
In this way, in contrast to the dialectical logic of Western critical traditions, decolonisation and
decoloniality (the extension of the material process of decolonisation into the ontological, psychic,
and epistemological dimensions [Mignolo 2011]) are governed in the first instance by a seemingly
cruder logic of reversal. Rather than a negation and sublation of oppression, which moves the step-
wise progress of the dialectic forward, decolonisation demands first of all a process of unwinding, in
which the catastrophe of colonialism is reckoned with and what has been taken is restored, within a
‘repatriation process’ that is ‘fundamental to the healing of the community’ (LaDuke 2005, 85). Colo-
nialism and coloniality are material and immaterial processes of violation and plunder; interrupting
the crime of colonialism requires a process of restitution. Folding decolonisation into a more univer-
sal revolutionary project ignores the specificity and the political determinativeness of coloniality, and
therefore betrays a properly decolonial process of emancipation (Tuck and Yang 2012).
However, the logic of reversal and restitution associated with decolonisation is not a simple one.
Just as Marxism describes communist revolution as starting from the contradictions and antagonists
produced by capitalism, similarly decolonisation initially needs to work partly from the conditions
and categories of coloniality. If capitalism is an arrangement of exploitation mediated by a relation of
exchange, colonialism is an ontological hierarchy linked to a material process of dispossession (Mal-
donado-Torres 2007). In this regard, the reversal that is involved in decolonisation is a fundamental
one, in which the very being of the coloniser and colonised are reordered. The fantasy of the colo-
nised, of violently occupying the settler’s position and property, as described by Fanon (1963), is not
simply the result of a poisonous resentment, but rather indispensably ‘expresses his dreams of pos-
session’ and a desire to ‘sit at the settler’s table’ (p. 39). This fantasy (and logic) of inversion, which
appears to be already caught in the symbolic economy of colonialism even as it seeks to overcome it,
is necessary in order for the colonised to refuse their pathologization and abjection.
The work of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala offers a crucial theorisation of this terrain. Writing in
the aftermath of the conquest of Tawantinsuyu (the Inca Empire), Guaman Poma criticises Spanish
aggression and corruption in terms that might appear surprising to a contemporary reader. He
denounces the evil of the unjust interlopers, while describing the Indians as the true Christians.
‘The Spaniards still kill each other and skin the poor Indians over gold and silver’ (1615/2006,
104), he writes, while the Indians have maintained God’s law:
Look, Christian reader; look at these people, the third men, who went so far with the ancient laws and com-
mandments of God the Creator, even though they were not taught. They kept the ten Commandments and
the good works of pity, alms, and charity among themselves … Look, Christian reader, and learn from these
barbarous people that the shadowy understanding they had of the Creator was no small thing. And so, be
sure to involve yourselves with the law of God, in his holy service. (Guaman Poma 1615/2006, 28)

It would be a mistake to read this characterisation simply as a sign of the overwhelming ideological
force of the Church. Rather, working within the vocabulary of the colonial situation, Guaman Poma
 GLOBALISATION, SOCIETIES AND EDUCATION 423

at the same time inverts its moral order – claiming for the Indigenous people of Tawantinsuyu the
righteousness (and even the Biblical lineage) that the colonisers had claimed exclusively for them-
selves. This is in part the philosophical foundation for an indictment of the violence of arrogant enco-
menderos, clergy, and other Spanish officials. But I argue that it can also be seen as a moment in a
larger process of repossession – of being, history, and value. Compared to a polemic grounded in a
discourse of universal humanism, Guaman Poma’s critique is in fact more audacious and revolution-
ary: he claims for the Indians precisely the divine right that the Spanish imagined as their exclusive
possession. In this way, the Manicheanism of colonialism – which splits the world into good and evil
– requires first of all a ‘revaluation of all values’ (to repurpose Nietzsche’s formulation) within which,
we might say, virtue and evil trade places.
Recent work in decolonial theory argues that as we reject the exceptionalism of so much of
Western epistemology, we should recognise and affirm other knowledges (Santos 2014) and even
alternatives to modernity itself (Escobar 2008), and look beyond the zero-sum logic of the West’s
imperious ‘objectivity.’ On the one hand, this kind of opening to the outside is exactly what we
can see in Guaman Poma’s divergent portrayal of history and ethics. On the other hand, he also
seems to suggest a quite different inflection of the ‘decolonial option’ (Mignolo 2011) – one that
does not so much exit the philosophical space of European modernity as radically reverse it.
Thus, in one of the illustrations in his book, a map of the Pontifical Mundo (1615/2006, 18), Guaman
Poma (who was also an artist), places the ‘Indies of Peru’ directly above Spain, offering a spatial ren-
dering that also suggests a moral cartography. Likewise, describing the conquistadors as corrupt to
the point of appearing to ‘eat’ gold (p. 103), and contrasting the virtue of the saints to the greed of the
Spanish priests, Guaman Poma anticipates the revolutionary critiques offered later by liberation
theology: ‘The priests and padres, who stand in for God and his saints … do not do as those blessed
souls did. Instead, they tend towards greed for silver, clothes, the things of the world, the sins of the
flesh’ (p. 208). However, Guaman Poma’s critique is grounded in Inca history, within which Chris-
tian precepts and prophecies are appropriated by Tawantinsuyu and the Americas.
The figure of reversal or inversion reappears in later anticolonial writing – most notably in the com-
plex account of decolonisation provided by Frantz Fanon. For Fanon (1963), the violence of decolo-
nisation refers back to and unravels the constitutive violence of colonialism itself. Colonialism is
political, but it is also psychic and somatic, and so decolonisation has to involve a release of the ‘mus-
cular tension’ (p. 54) that colonial violence has produced in its twisted ordering of society. Similarly,
Walter Rodney (1972/2011) shows how the economic development of the West necessarily depended
on and produced the underdevelopment of Africa. His analysis indicts the epistemological order of
political economy, and demonstrates that the effective meaning of ‘development’ is domination and
exploitation. From this perspective, even as the ‘enlightened’ West seeks to conceal its inner bloodlust
and cupidity, the latter remain the disavowed content of ‘progress.’ What is necessary, then, is not
simply a shift in standpoint, as critical theorists like Lukács (1923/1971) describe, but rather a radical
epistemological reversal that centres the marginalised knowledges that power has sought to erase.
The work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos demonstrates the necessity of the process of epistemo-
logical inversion that I have described. As Santos (2014) shows, Western thought works not just to
repress colonial territories but rather to make them invisible. In this ‘abyssal thinking,’ the world
beyond the West is ‘produced as nonexistent’ (p. 118). The latter is not so much constructed as
behind within the civilizational race of modernity, but rather as outside the dialectic of history
altogether. In these conditions, as Santos describes, we need a ‘sociology of absences’ that starts
from the ‘nonexistent’ sites beyond the familiar content of positivistic sociology – that is, from
the ‘impossible’ forms of being and knowing of the colonised. Inquiring into the specific structure
of this impossibility, such a sociology inverts the categories of presence and absence, pointing para-
doxically to the ultimate dependence of the West’s abyssal thinking on the very knowledge – in its
constructed nonexistence – that the West systematically refuses. In their challenge to these dynamics,
decolonial projects scramble the coordinates of conventional understandings of modernity. Thus, as
Santos (2014) explains, recent initiatives in Latin America that work past orthodox frames for law
424 N. DE LISSOVOY

and policy (for instance, the Ecuadorian effort to preserve the country’s natural wealth as the inviol-
able heritage of humankind) might appear, from the perspective of colonial reason, as at once pro-
gressive (as an innovation in policy) and regressive (as a return to Indigenous conceptions of the
rights of nature). In initiatives like this, there is a reversal within which the ‘old’ becomes suddenly
‘new,’ and which demands, in place of vanguardist critical theory, a ‘rearguard construction’ (Santos
2014, 33) that is sensitive to the interpenetration of presence and absence.
In this way, decoloniality as inversion refuses the epistemological and ontological accumulation
contemplated by Western critical discourses. Rather than leapfrogging, by means of the scaffolding
of the dialectic or the science of theory, from the flattened space of oppression to the dimensional
space of liberation, decolonisation involves a complex and difficult confrontation that cannot magi-
cally transcend the coordinates of coloniality. Thus, Guaman Poma insistently exposes the abuses of
the Spanish against the Incas; the route to emancipation for him has to move through a comprehen-
sive registering of these offenses, since colonialism is both an original violence and a sanctification of
this violence. ‘There is no justice in this kingdom of the Indies,’ writes Guaman Poma, ‘there is noth-
ing but sorrow for the poor Indians, punishment and shaming’ (1615/2006, 222). If Western critical
theory has so often sought to look past crisis to the founding of a new history, decolonisation works
to wrench the tentacles of coloniality from the mind and soul, to take back being and history, and to
reconstruct them beyond the dominative linearity of colonial reason.

Rethinking emancipation from the standpoint of decoloniality

From the starting point of this theoretical foundation, we can begin to reconceptualize the notion of
emancipation that anchors work in contemporary critical education. Just as I signalled in the intro-
duction with regard to Western critical theory broadly, the idea of liberation in educational theory in
particular has been closely connected to notions of growth and development. This connection can be
seen in the work of John Dewey (1944/1997), for whom a proliferation of social relationships and
broadening of experience is closely connected to the possibility of freedom and democracy: ‘Every
expansive era in the history of mankind [sic] has coincided with the operation of factors which
have tended to eliminate distance between peoples and classes’ (p. 88). Likewise, in Freire’s (1970/
2007) work, the enlargement of the subject in the course of dialogical education is essential to the
revolutionary transformation of society as a whole. And similarly, the idea of freedom in Maxine
Greene’s (1995) writing is connected to the project of breaking through the limits of the given
and expanding possibilities of experience, knowledge, and being in order to answer ‘a summons
… to reach for wholeness’ (p. 26).
There is an important difference between these theorists’ complex notions of growth and the
flattened model of cognitive development that often prevails in educational research. However,
even the most sophisticated progressive theory retains an emphasis on a complex figure of develop-
ment, which is linked to senses of agency in students. It is this underlying figure which the difficult
logic of decolonisation challenges. Historically speaking, it is precisely the Western impulse toward
growth and expansion which has resulted in the dispossession of Indigenous peoples globally (Smith
1999), including in North America. At the cultural level, in contrast to the ostensible dynamism and
creativity of the settler (valorised not only by straightforward apologists for imperialism but also by
early progressives like Counts [1932] and Dewey [1944/1997]), Native peoples have often been por-
trayed as backward or stagnant. However, from the other side, the emphasis on growth and freedom
in Western theory and education looks different. From the perspective of the colonised, rather than
celebrating a universal development and empowerment (which has in fact historically meant despo-
liation and dispossession for Indigenous people), it is necessary to demand an immobilisation of the
West’s colonial imaginary.
Scholars of settler-colonialism have explored these dynamics in relation to the idea of emancipa-
tion. Nichols (2014) shows that the political enfranchisement of Indigenous peoples in Canada,
which liberals understood as a progressive step against exclusionary discrimination that denied
 GLOBALISATION, SOCIETIES AND EDUCATION 425

them full citizenship rights, actually meant forced detribalisation and cultural assimilation – in short,
violation of Native sovereignty in the name of freedom. Likewise, Grande (2004) describes the assim-
ilative potential of Marxism’s discourse of emancipation in relation to Indigenous peoples, to the
extent that it substitutes a homogenising conception of universality and democracy in place of intel-
lectual and cultural autonomy. In this context, against the alienating political rationality of the West,
Alfred (2009) argues that Indigenous communities should return to traditional forms and theories of
governance. Similarly, Smith (1999) shows that a radical pedagogy against colonialism should
emphasize the processes of remembering and retelling – against the colonial fetishism of the new
and ‘uncharted.’ Models of emancipatory pedagogy too often imagine learning within a colonial
frame – that is, as a striking out and claiming of new spaces and capacities.
For colonised peoples, the lofty rhetoric of freedom, democracy, and rights attached to Western
liberalism has been a ruse; more precisely, this liberal universality is sustained by the vicious excep-
tions at its periphery. This is clear in the earliest expressions of this vision. For instance, even though
the Pope recognised on paper the humanity of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, this did not
trouble in practice their absolute exploitation by the European encomenderos (Galeano 1973).
Indeed, the official mercy and broad-mindedness of the Church was taken to demonstrate the super-
iority of European rule and served as roundabout justification for the subjection of the first inhabi-
tants of the Americas. In this context, we should counter the metaphysics of the West in relation to
the human soul and universal progress by insisting on the concrete phenomenology of conquest. In
the words of Césaire (1955/2000):
I hear the storm. They talk to me about progress, about “achievements,” diseases cured, improved standards of
living.

I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined,
lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities
wiped out. (pp. 42–43)

A liberatory project that recognises this destruction has to reckon with partition, exclusion, and assault
as fundamental historical conditions of emancipatory struggle. Before there can be freedom as a part-
nership in a privileged universality, there has to first be a defeat of annexation and violation, and a shut-
ting down of the easy sweep of the colonising imagination that makes occupation into a virtue and a
necessity within the frame of what Dussel (1985) has called a ‘legality of perversion’ (p. 57).
It might appear that there is a tension between emphasizing sovereignty and autonomy for Indi-
genous peoples on the one hand (Grande), and on the other hand the call by some decolonial the-
orists for a new and reimagined humanism – what Wynter (2006) calls a new ‘Human Project’
(p. 163). Similarly, there might seem to be a contradiction between a call for reclaiming and retelling
as crucial modes of decolonisation by some theorists (Smith 1999), and an emphasis on the need to
look to for new and alternative philosophical and political foundations (see Dussel 1985). It is per-
haps no accident that Latin American and Caribbean theorists have often articulated an idea of deco-
loniality as a movement beyond and outside of the West, while Indigenous scholars in North
America have focused on sovereignty. However, I believe that the idea of inversion can operate use-
fully between these two conceptions of decoloniality. After all, the new humanism proposed by Wyn-
ter (2006) is not simply announced, but rather emerges in the course of an unwinding of the
dominative logic of Eurocentrism, an unwinding which seeks ‘to create now our own Word, by sep-
arating discursively as well as institutionally, the notion of the human from the notion of Man’
(p. 161). Only this difficult reversal of political and philosophical reason allows for the horizon of
liberation to reappear. On the other hand, the concrete inversion proposed by critics of settler-colo-
nialism, which aims at evicting the settler imagination from Indigenous spaces, arguably then clears
the ground for an eventual if difficult dialogue and solidarity between autonomous subjects. In this
way, as Santos (2014) describes, decolonial reason works beyond the oppositions of Western
thought, finding a new ground for familiar categories (e.g., humanism) outside of the epistemological
boundaries within which they have been restricted.
426 N. DE LISSOVOY

Guaman Poma gives us a powerful statement of this complicated synthesis. His work is both a
catalogue of injuries against the Indigenous people of Peru and a revindication of their rights, on
the one hand, and a broad vision of a new and just society on the other. To begin with, he indicts
the greed of the Spanish:
See here, you poor, foolish, and incompetent Spaniards, who are as proud as Lucifer: Luzbel became Lucifer, the
great devil. You are the same as he … You yearn to be more than what God decreed you should be. If you are
not kings, why do you yearn to be kings? (1615/2006, 144)

Guaman Poma exposes the material plunder at the heart of colonial society, and his system of buen
gobierno (good government) is articulated through an extensive series of recommendations (which
in fact constitute a programme of decolonisation) that he makes regarding the crimes and injustices
of the Spanish invaders. And yet, he aims to do more than elaborate of a list of offenses. Juxtaposing
the actually existing outrages of the colonial period to the history of Inca governance, and reterritor-
ializing the Christian faith and narrative on the ground of an Indigenous standpoint within which
the Inca kings were ‘offspring of Noah and of the first people’ (1615/2006, 31), Guaman Poma out-
lines the horizon of a new set of universals, repudiating the European monopoly on philosophy.
In this way, Guaman Poma’s work suggests another way to frame the basic question of emanci-
pation – namely, if the notion of emancipation is based on at least a provisional notion of humanism
and universalism, then whose humanism and universalism do we start from? It is crucial to recognise
that there are diverse humanisms, universalisms, and emancipations, associated with different geo-
cultural itineraries (Castro-Klaren 2008). The alternative gestured toward by Guaman Poma (and by
Wynter and Fanon much later) differs from European humanism not only in its refusal of coloniality
and racism, but also in its locus of enunciation and immediate frame of reference – which is that of
the colonised. For a contemporary example of this alternative universality we might look to the con-
cept of Abya Yala, which has been taken up as a name for the entire geographic stretch of the Amer-
icas. As a decolonial and emancipatory universal, this concept encompasses the full extent of a
landmass that Europe broke into two continents and many nations, but it does so from a revolution-
ary pan-Indigenous standpoint that refuses Eurocentric modernity’s political partitions (Third Con-
tinental Summit 2011). Its reference is expansive – transnational and transcontinental – but this
expansiveness, signified through an Indigenous frame, is at the same time situated on the land.
Abya Yala epistemologically inverts the very categories of universality and emancipation – which
in heading outward at the same time return to the specificity of the earth.

Educational irruptions
Critical education generally thinks about change in terms of the dialectical figure of transformation
(e.g., Freire 1970/2007). Building from my discussion so far, I argue for the value of a project of
decolonial pedagogy as epistemological inversion. The notion of inversion evokes the irruptive
and immanent character of decolonisation, which alone makes possible any eventual solidarity.
Furthermore, rather than understanding emancipatory education mainly in terms of the emergence
of new political or ideological horizons (as critical pedagogy often does), the inversion of decolo-
niality takes place at the level of knowledge itself, within whose frame ideas and identities become
possible (Mignolo 2011; Smith 1999). I argue that a radical vision of emancipatory education can
only be fulfilled by change at this level, and that this vision must start not from the privileged
understandings of a critical vanguard but rather from the vantage point of those who have been
excluded and made invisible.

Curriculum from the other side of the colonial wound

Conservative critics are alarmed by contemporary efforts to challenge the curricular canon, seeing in
such efforts a subversive plan of cultural replacement – as for instance in recent debates over the
 GLOBALISATION, SOCIETIES AND EDUCATION 427

Mexican America Studies program in Tucson, Arizona (Keyes 2010). Progressives often respond that
such conservative claims are paranoid refusals to make a modest space for difference. However, there
is a certain truth in the conservative charge – a truth that should be defended, not apologised for.
Thus, contemporary efforts to introduce ethnic studies courses into schools, and to reorganise
required university humanities courses away from their Eurocentric foundations, aim – or should
aim – at a basic paradigm shift rather than an adjustment. For example, recent changes to the
required curriculum for English majors at Yale University have crucially come in response to an
effort by students to push the university to explicitly decolonise the curriculum (Treisman 2017).
Paradigmatic shifts in curriculum do not preclude dialogue between traditions; in fact, they poten-
tially deepen this dialogue. However, in the first instance, they do involve a substitution that centres
that which has been excluded, and that gives a turn at the margins to that which has been central for
so long. Furthermore, in entering the space of the official curriculum in schools and higher edu-
cation, non-Western texts and perspectives, subaltern and oppressed voices, and Indigenous knowl-
edges and literatures call into question basic epistemological frames that have organised the
intelligibility of education as an institution. In this regard, what is important is less the inclusion
of a specific content and more the irruption of an alternative and marginalised standpoint across
the divide of the colonial wound (Mignolo 2005).
From this perspective, the more basic mistake in conservative responses to change in curriculum
is in their misreading of the reality of knowledge itself, which has always been diverse and complex.
Even those knowledges that have been excluded from the academic canon have always been histori-
cally consequential, sustained, and sustaining. This is true both of community-based knowledge and
cultural practices, such as the saberes that are transmitted in Indigenous educational communities of
practice (Urrieta 2013), as well as literary and artistic productions from outside Europe and North
America (for instance the incomparable traditions of revolutionary literature in Africa and Latin
America). In his diagnosis of the failures of Eurocentric critical traditions, Santos (2014) argues
for a ‘sociology of absences’ that inquires into those histories and understandings that have been
refused, and which reclaims their redemptive potential against the bankruptcy of the dominant.
Not surprisingly, when knowledge which has been invisible from the perspective of the powerful
suddenly asserts itself, it appears as a menace to those at the centre. But if this assertion forces a trau-
matic recognition on the part of the privileged, it is also a belated recognition – of a diversity which
has always been present.
It is useful to return to the work of Guaman Poma (1615/2006) here, this time within the frame of
curriculum. In the first place, his project was a radical critique of hegemonic understandings and
practices that refused the humanity of Indigenous people, and this critique echoes down through
history as a challenge from the margins to the dominant colonial framework that has set the par-
ameters of knowledge in schools and universities. At the same time, to give Guaman Poma his proper
due as a foundational political and cultural theorist is to reorganise the canon itself, and to place
Indigenous knowledge and cultural critique at the centre of literary history in the Americas. Such
a move recapitulates his own assertion of the world-historical centrality of Inca history and identity,
as against the corruption of the Spanish elites in Peru. As we recognise in curricula and reading lists
the power of the work of Guaman Poma and that of others in the past and present who have spoken
from the other side of the colonial wound, we reconfigure the very meanings of history, theory, and
philosophy. On the one hand, these disciplines must now comprise a diversity of epistemological
starting points, and on the other hand they have to admit the situatedness of all knowledge,
which arises in the context of and in confrontation with history.

Subject formation from the outside in

While struggles over the official curriculum have received a fair amount of attention in public debate,
there has been less discussion of the implications of decolonial approaches for the more diffuse work
of subject formation, ‘citizenship’ education, and moral pedagogy that schools undertake. In this
428 N. DE LISSOVOY

context, the political and conceptual inversion that I have described in this essay reorganises taken-
for-granted critical schemas in difficult if potentially useful ways.
Opposing instrumentalist views of education, critics from Dewey (1944/1997) to Giroux (2003)
have argued that education has a democratising mission and an ethical responsibility to young
people. From this perspective, the critical imagination should look beyond the temporality of emer-
gency that makes us incapable of thinking in anything but the short-term and its crises; instead, we
should hold to an emancipatory vision of the future, and enact a pedagogy in support of that
vision. A decolonial perspective, however, takes this responsibility to the future one step further,
arguing for fundamental and epochal social change (Santos 2014). For instance, in the case of eco-
logical crisis, rather than simply arguing for a pedagogy of citizenship that urges students to take
responsibility for the global environment, a decolonial pedagogy might reframe the question as one
regarding the rights of nature itself. As Santos points out, such reframings scramble the familiar
opposition of short-term and long-term, since the long-term is now transformed into a much
longer term – that is, a truly epochal, planetary temporality – and at the same time, this planetary
perspective corresponds to a deeper urgency in the present to transform our relationship to the
earth.
Contemporary neoliberal schooling frames education in individualistic terms: student success,
we are told, depends upon individual internalisation of rules and norms, and on personal deter-
mination. Critical theorists rightly point to the absence of agency and solidarity in this perspective
on education (Giroux 2003). But we also need to ask: Whose agency? Whose solidarity? The key
difference in the decolonial universality that Guaman Poma and Fanon outline is in their rejection
of the abjection of the Other that has secured the community of the human in the Western tra-
dition. What would it look like to enact a solidarity and community in schools that starts from
those whose exclusion has grounded familiar senses of solidarity? What would it look like to
begin, in the socialisation that education undertakes, from an ethics that interrupts privileged
ways of being? Rather than depending on a dialectical logic that incorporates differences into
an unfolding order of development, this radical ethics might start from an ‘analectical’ logic, in
Dussel’s (1985) terms, which recognises the gaze of the excluded Other, a recognition that upsets
the ‘master morality’ (Maldonado-Torres 2008) and dominative order of the given. This ethics
ultimately lays the groundwork for deeper dialogues across difference, but it does so first of all
through a radical irruption and interruption, an irruption that is painful to power. Humanism
may not have to be abandoned in this process, but it does have to be inverted in its starting
point and priorities: rather than radiating out from a magnanimous centre, it is built painstak-
ingly from the outside in.
Some recent educational initiatives, while incomplete in themselves, are potential starting points
for more radical efforts in this vein. For instance, restorative justice projects have increasingly found
a place in schools, and have been used with some success to circumvent traditional discipline pro-
cedures that criminalise students, especially students of colour, even if these efforts have been
unevenly applied (Payne and Welch 2015). However, a decolonial articulation of this practice
would engage the whole school in acknowledging the historical violences affecting oppressed commu-
nities. In these circles, the voices of Indigenous students and students of colour would be systema-
tically centred, and participants would be invited to respond to processes of social violence working
through schools but also extending beyond them. This dialogue would necessarily challenge basic
institutional policies, processes, and norms (rather than simply reframing disciplinary practices).
Similarly, the growth in school garden projects that strive to connect students to the environment
and local food sources, while also serving as an entry point for community members to participate
in school life, is a hopeful sign, especially where these efforts challenge neoliberal framings of
environmental education (Pierce 2015). However, the epistemological foundation of these efforts
is crucial; can alternative and community knowledges come to ground such projects, within an
ethical demand for recognition and responsibility from the school toward the human and more-
than-human worlds that constitute the ‘natural’ environments with which students interact
 GLOBALISATION, SOCIETIES AND EDUCATION 429

(Nxumalo 2015)? Rearticulated in this way, these social justice projects would begin difficult inter-
rogations that would seek to displace the dominant standpoint in favour of the epistemological and
ontological exteriority (Dussel 1985) that the dominant has always refused.

Conclusion
It is essential to preserve the idea and practice of emancipation, especially against the flattened
historical horizon currently insisted on by neoliberals (De Lissovoy 2015). However, emancipa-
tion and criticality more broadly need to be reconceptualized within a decolonial framework in
order to be meaningful and in order to respond to the world-historical challenge raised by glo-
bal movements of decolonisation – a challenge that is both political and epistemological. This
means recognising the shift in standpoint that will need to ground radical projects in education
and cultural work. In addition, we need to be faithful to the particular emancipatory logic that
decolonial philosophies of liberation, from Guaman Poma to Fanon and beyond, propose and
enact in their own exposition. In this regard, as I have described, a crucial figure of reversal has
to mark the project of liberation, an inversion that stretches this project beyond the bounds of
familiar Western models, including the radical variant that is expressed in critical theory. This
inversion repudiates the easy expansionism of familiar ideas of emancipation, and fundamen-
tally reorients the universalism inherent in conceptions of emancipation – from the vantage
point of the excluded. On this basis, we can then begin in education to propose curricular dis-
placements and reconfigurations of identity and community on non-dominative and decolonial
terms.
Without a fundamental and wrenching displacement of Western epistemological hegemony,
there can be no ‘progress,’ democracy, or humanism. An inversion that centres that which has
been refused and erased, and which undertakes a radical revaluation of values, is the essential con-
dition for a reconceptualized emancipation (Santos 2014). Only on this basis can we imagine an ethi-
cal global solidarity and realise dialogue across the difference of the colonial wound (Mignolo 2005).
Education is a crucial battleground in this struggle, and in our knowledge work in curriculum and
pedagogy as educators, we need to take a side in it – even if we aim ultimately for a condition of
learning and knowing that is not organised on the basis of partition. To begin to create the conditions
for a genuine and difficult solidarity, as opposed to the impetuous announcement of it, educators
need to confront the violations of coloniality, and open space for those who have been dispossessed
to reclaim that which has been taken, denied, and erased.

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

References
Alfred, T. 2009. Peace, Power, Righteousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Althusser, L. 2009. “The Object of Capital.” In Reading Capital, by L. Althusser, and E. Balibar, 77–230. London: Verso.
Castro-Klaren, S. 2008. “Posting Letters: Writing in the Andes and the Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Debate.” In
Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, edited by M. Moraña, E. Dussel, and C. A.
Jáuregui, 130–157. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Césaire, A. 1955/2000. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by J. Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Counts, G. S. 1932. Dare the School Build a New Social Order. New York: John Day.
De Ayala, G. P. 1615/2006. The First New Chronicle and Good Government. Translated by D. Frye. Indianapolis, IN:
Hackett Publishing.
De Lissovoy, N. 2015. Education and Emancipation in the Neoliberal Era: Being, Teaching, and Power. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
De Lissovoy, N. 2018. “Value and Violation: Toward a Decolonial Analytic of Capital.” Radical Philosophy Review 21
(2): 249–270.
430 N. DE LISSOVOY

Dewey, J. 1944/1997. Democracy and Education. New York: The Free Press.
Dussel, E. 1985. Philosophy of Liberation. Translated by A. Martinez and C. Morkovsky. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock
Publishers.
Dussel, E. 2008. Twenty Theses on Politics. Translated by G. Ciccariello-Maher. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Escobar, A. 2008. Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Fanon, F. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by C. Farrington. New York: Grove Press.
Freire, P. 1970/2007. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by M. B. Ramos. New York: Continuum.
Galeano, E. 1973. Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. New York: Monthly Review
Press.
Giroux, H. A. 2003. The Abandoned Generation: Democracy Beyond the Culture of Fear. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Grande, S. 2004. Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Greene, M. 1995. Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change. San Francisco: Jossey-
Bass.
Harding, S. 1993. “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What is ‘Strong Objectivity’?” In Feminist Epistemologies, edi-
ted by L. Alcoff, and E. Potter, 49–82. New York: Routledge.
Hardt, M., and A. Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Press.
Hartsock, N. 1983. “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical
Materialism.” In Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and
Philosophy of Science, edited by S. Harding, and M. B. Hintikka, 283–310. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing
Company.
Harvey, D. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Keyes, A. 2010. “New Arizona Law Targets ‘Ethnic Studies’ Programs.” National Public Radio, May 13. https://www.
npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126797959.
LaDuke, W. 2005. Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
Lukács, G. 1923/1971. History and Class Consciousness. Translated by R. Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Maldonado-Torres, N. 2007. “On the Coloniality of Being.” Cultural Studies 21 (2): 240–270.
Maldonado-Torres, N. 2008. Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Mignolo, W. D. 2005. The Idea of Latin America. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Mignolo, W. D. 2011. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Nichols, R. 2014. “Contract and Usurpation: Enfranchisement and Racial Governance in Settler-Colonial
Contexts.” In Theorizing Native Studies, edited by A. Simpson, and A. Smith, 99–121. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Nxumalo, F. 2015. “Forest Stories: Restorying Encounters with ‘Natural’ Places in Early Childhood Education.” In
Unsettling the Colonial Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education, edited by Pacini-Ketchabaw and A.
Taylor, 21–42. New York: Routledge.
Payne, A. A., and K. Welch. 2015. “Restorative Justice in Schools: The Influence of Race on Restorative Discipline.”
Youth & Society 47 (4): 539–564.
Pierce, C. 2015. “Against Neoliberal Pedagogies of Plants and People: Mapping Actor Networks of Biocapital in
Learning Gardens.” Environmental Education Research 21 (3): 460–477.
Quijano, A. 2008. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” In Coloniality at Large: Latin America and
the Postcolonial Debate, edited by M. Moraña, E. Dussel, and C. A. Jáuregui, 181–224. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Rodney, W. 1972/2011. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press.
Santos, B. d. S. 2014. Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. New York: Routledge.
Smith, L. T. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books/University of
Otago Press.
Third Continental Summit of Indigenous Nations and Pueblos of Abya Yala. 2011. In The Guatemala Reader: History,
Culture, Politics, edited by G. Grandin, D. T. Levenson, and E. Oglesby, 541–544. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Treisman, R. 2017. “Faculty Vote to Diversify English Major Curriculum.” Yale Daily News, March 30. https://
yaledailynews.com/blog/2017/03/30/faculty-vote-to-diversify-english-major-curriculum/.
Tuck, Eve, and Wayne K. Yang. 2012. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and
Society 1 (1): 1–40.
Urrieta Jr., L. 2013. “Familia and Comunidad-Based Saberes: Learning in an Indigenous Heritage Community.”
Anthropology and Education Quarterly 44 (3): 320–335.
Walsh, Catherine. 2010. “Political-Epistemic Insurgency, Social Movements and the Refounding of the State.” In
Rethinking Intellectuals in Latin America, edited by Moraña Mabel, and Gustafson Bret, 199–211. Frankfurt:
Iberoamericana.
 GLOBALISATION, SOCIETIES AND EDUCATION 431

Wolfe, P. 2006. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8 (4): 387–409.
Wynter, S. 2006. “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable
Wrongness of Being, of Désètre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project.” In Not Only the Master’s Tools: African-
American Studies in Theory and Practice, edited by L. R. Gordon, and J. A. Gordon, 107–169. Boulder, CO:
Paradigm Publishers.