Postcolonial Studies

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Decolonial learnings, askings and musings

Catherine E. Walsh

To cite this article: Catherine E. Walsh (2020) Decolonial learnings, askings and musings,
Postcolonial Studies, 23:4, 604-611, DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2020.1751437
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POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES
2020, VOL. 23, NO. 4, 604–611
https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2020.1751437

CRITICAL DIALOGUES

Decolonial learnings, askings and musings

Catherine E. Walsh
Department of Literature and Cultural Studies, Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Quito, Ecuador

The sounds of helicopters day and night, police-mounted horses stampeding, the cries of
children, youth, and women and men of all ages, and gas bombs exploding still ring in my
ears, now three months after Ecuador’s October 2019 uprising and awakening.1 The
images of state-led violence and repression, never before seen in this country – mine
for the last 25 years – are inscribed in my mind (Figure 1) My being-body-spirit (as
one) still struggles to heal el susto, a healing that does not mean to forget or move
beyond but to learn from. That is to make that lived an integral part of the learnings,
unlearnings, and relearnings that decoloniality in/as praxis necessitates and commands.
Without a doubt, these ongoing and emergent learnings, unlearnings, and relearnings –
about coloniality’s operation, about resistance, about varied forms of political solidarity,
alliance, fissure, and struggle – deepen and further complicate the arguments and perspec-
tives that I shared in On Decoloniality. They also give new urgency and form to the ques-
tion of the ‘hows’, my questions and those posed in explicit and implicit ways by the five
thoughtful reviewers.
Given the current political contexts not only in Ecuador, but also in Chile, Bolivia,
Colombia, Brazil and, broadly, throughout Latin America and the globe, how are we to
think about, describe, and comprehend the new, emergent, and shifting nature, practice,
and configuration of the colonial matrix of power, its ‘radical incompletion’ in Morgan
Ndlovu words, and its continual and constant making, assemblage, (re)formation and
(re)formulation? How to interrogate its present-day hydra-like qualities, its targeted racia-
lised, feminised, territorialised, and religious violences, its complex heteropatriarchal
workings (e.g. in government, religion, education, health, and in rural and urban commu-
nities, among other spheres), its machinery of cooptation, capture, and elimination of
social leaders, and its intricate knots of complicity, alliance, and corporativisation most
especially with and in that which we call ‘state’?2 How to recognise and reflect on the
ways this matrix is situated in herstories, histories, and transtories, in subjectivities, and
in location – in kinships, landscapes, seascapes, and skyscapes as Katerina Teaiwa so
powerfully says – and at the same time, in connections and relations that cross the
globe? How to struggle against? And, possibly more crucially, how to create and construct,
plant and cultivate possibilities of a decolonial for in these present times, asking at the same
time about its seeds, sense, and horizon of hope and thought, and about its concretion in
practice? And in all of this, how to comprehend what is (and what is not) decoloniality?
As I suggest in part one of On Decoloniality, to ask about the ‘how(s)’ is to push the
importance of situated practice and praxis. It is not to posture a singular method,

CONTACT Catherine E. Walsh catherine.walsh@uasb.edu.ec

© 2020 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies
 POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 605

Figure 1. October 2019 Uprising in Quito, Ecuador. Photograph by Iván Castaneira.

‘apply’ an approach, or seek a global (or globalising) solution or cure: the accomplishment
of ‘global decoloniality’ and the ‘removal of colonial legacies’ that Ming Dong Gu calls for
in his review. While we may critique, disobey, defy, disrupt, and de-link from coloniality,
coloniality cannot be totally removed or globally overcome. To assume so is to negate its
ongoing hydra-like nature and force. And it is to presume that decoloniality is coloniality’s
logical and lineal replacement, a presumption that seems in consonance with Ming’s asser-
tion that decoloniality should mean ‘conditions of existence free from coloniality’ precisely
because of the prefix ‘de’. In response to Ming but also for the readers here, it may be useful
to divert a bit and explain how, when, and why we (Walter and myself, and those associ-
ated with the modernity/coloniality project) began to use the term ‘decoloniality’.
As I have explained elsewhere,3 it was at one of our intense and intensive discussion
sessions in 2004, this time held at Duke, that we began to articulate a shared interest
and concern directly tied not just to the lived condition of coloniality, but also to that
which occurs in its outsides, margins, and borders. This is what some of us began to
term de-coloniality, (de)coloniality, or simply decoloniality. For us, the concept and
word implied (implies) a grounding, in large part, in the problem of dehumanisation –
the sense of non-existence present in the coloniality of power, knowledge, being, and
nature – and its relation to the existence-based struggles of peoples historically subalter-
nised by race, gender, and geopolitical location, struggles that over the last 500+ years,
have always included the construction of radically distinct ways of knowing, being, and
living. With de-coloniality we assumed an attitude (a decolonial attitude in Nelson Mal-
donado-Torres’ terms) and a stance that challenged coloniality’s assumption of total
control and hold, a perspective that endeavored to think from and with social, political,
epistemic, and existence-based practices, logics, and constructions aimed toward re-
606 C. E. WALSH

humanisation and re-existence (in non-anthropocentric terms), in the creation of radically

distinct conditions of life and living, and of being and knowing that could contribute to the
making of different social worlds. Cognisant of the etymological significance of the prefix
‘de’, we played with different linguistic forms (e.g. the use of a hyphen, of parenthesis, and
the grammatically disobedient ‘de’ instead of ‘des’ in Spanish), seeking to disrupt and
always arguing that decoloniality does not mean the absence or overcoming of coloniality.
Rather it references and marks the postures, positionings, horizons, projects, and practices
of being, thinking, sensing, and doing that resist and re-exist, that transgress and interrupt
the colonial matrix of power, and that resurge and in-surge from the borders, margins, and
what I refer to today as the fissures or cracks, building possibilities of what we have come
to understand as a decolonial otherwise.
In this sense, and now returning to the discussion begun above, decoloniality in/as
praxis necessitates, in my view, ongoing processes of thought-analysis-reflection-action,
processes that encourage a theorising from practice and a practicing of theory. Of
course, such processes can and do take place in a variety of critical, political, social, and
epistemic contexts, many distant from the perspective and project of decoloniality.
What then makes praxis decolonial or decolonising you may ask, a question suggested
in Julian Yates’ detailed reflection-review, but also in some of the other responses. I
think of the two collective volumes on decolonial pedagogies in which activists, intellectual
militants, academics, and de-institutionalised scholars from throughout the Americas
detail, from a myriad of contexts and processes, the insurgent practices in which they
are engaged, and the ways such practices, contexts, and processes build what they under-
stand as decolonial pedagogies and praxis.4 I think of the land-centred praxis of Glenn
Coulthard and Leanne Simpson in the Dechinta Center for Learning in the Dene territory
of the Canadian Northwest which, in Coulthard’s words, ‘is generating politics, autonomy,
and decolonial theory on the land’.5 And I think of my own decolonial praxis constructed
over the course of almost 20 years with activist, militant, and critical intellectuals from
throughout Latin America in a doctoral programme based in Quito, Ecuador.6
All of these examples defy prescription and reducibility to a singular descriptive
approach, practice, context, or method. They also make evident, and following Ndlovu’s
reading of our text, that ‘decoloniality is irreducible to any singular authoritative
meaning’. However, and thinking now in broad strokes, decoloniality in/as praxis does
have a shared base of fundamental comprehensions and concerns, including about the
racialised, gendered, territorialised, and heteropatriarchal operations of power, about
the lived urgency to resist and re-exist: to plant, cultivate and nurture other possible
modes of being, thinking, knowing, doing, and living that weave relation, correlation,
and interrelation. These comprehensions and concerns give a directedness or orientation
to decolonial (and decolonising) theorisations, analyses, and praxis and a significance and
sense to decoloniality’s project and meaning.
In a basic sense, this orientation or directedness is three-fold. First, it pushes consider-
ations about how the colonial matrix of power is situated and lived; how it works in the
here-in-now, in concrete spaces and places. In their 2015 seedbed and exchange of
thought, the Zapatistas argued that such explorations and understandings are imperative,
not for ‘reconstructing the complete puzzle, but some of its pieces’, pieces which, in turn,
provoke and urge analysis and thought about the modes and methods of present-day
struggle.7 Secondly, it urges interrogation about how this colonial matrix of power is
 POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 607

contested, interrupted, or undone; that is, the myriad of ways that individuals, groups,
communities, and collectives challenge the matrix and interrupt its operation as a singular
universal. Thirdly, this orientation of directedness of praxis, theorisation and analysis
raises reflection on how the decolonial is sown, cultivated, and grown most often
despite the colonial matrix or machine; how it is generated individually and collectively
and takes form on the ground, in real-life contexts, territories, spaces, places, and practice.
For me, these three aspects give foundation, significance, and sense to decoloniality’s lived
project and its meaning.
This takes me back to Ndlovu’s concerns about irreducibility and its risks, including the
idea that decoloniality ‘stands for everything and nothing’, or its ‘appropriation by colonial
“sophists” and “tricksters” who deploy “decoloniality” as a cover up for colonial ideas and
practices that sustain the very power structure of coloniality in which they are the primary
beneficiaries’. Julian Yates raises somewhat similar concerns with respect to de-linkings,
re-linkings, and ‘blind’ complicities in the reproduction of power dynamics and forms
of oppression. I am in agreement with both. This is all part of what I refer to in the
book as ‘decolonial dangers’ (see pp 81–82). My response, in part, is above; that is, deco-
loniality has a directedness of process, project, analysis, theorisation, and practice/action.
Making this directedness evident and clear not simply in argument but also through per-
spectives, expressions, thoughts, struggles, processes and practices from diverse geopoliti-
cal locations and subjectivities of colonial difference is a labour that invokes and convokes
us all. In fact, it is the project of our series ‘On Decoloniality’ which this book opens and
introduces.
All this necessarily points to the urgency of conversations and considerations that
weave connections among the situated strategies and expressions of decolonial struggle,
resistance, and re-existence, what Leanne Simpson calls ‘living with the purpose of gener-
ating more life’ and a ‘radical decolonial presence’.8 These are the conversations and con-
siderations that Teaiwa begins to knit from the Pan-Pacific. ‘Pacific resistance movements
are led by women, keepers of the land and peace, historically less compromised by offers of
wealth in exchange for land and power … to male leaders.’ As I read Teaiwa, I see the
similar threads in Latin America: the women-led force of resistance, and the problem of
male leaders who continue in their patriarchal exaltation and their compromise. More-
over, by connecting the struggles to guard and protect both the Amazon rainforest and
river systems, and the waters and environment that are existence in the Oceania Pacific,
Teaiwa helps us see the weave taking form of differently coloured threads, the fluidity
and flows of waters that always connect. Is this not part of what Ndlovu refers to as ‘pla-
netary coalitions … capable of dealing a blow to the global power structure of coloniality’?
And are these conversations, considerations, and coalitions not part of the ongoing deco-
lonial work to be done?
Yet as Julian Yates queries: ‘what happens when potential decolonial praxis does not
reject, and indeed perhaps accommodates modernity/coloniality?’ Here, the interrogation
is not about Ndlovu’s ‘sophists and tricksters’, but about the complicated and complex rea-
lities present in the living world that simply refuse the binaries of against/for and either/or.
What to do when the disavowed who are building re-emergence are simultaneously
embracing Western epistemologies and … relational animist ontologies, Yates asks. And
how to think decolonially about ‘the messy, contradictory space where multiple epistem-
ologies, analytics, and praxis collide?’ For Yates, these questions are not speculative; this is
608 C. E. WALSH

the reality of the Andean community context in which he is engaged in Peru, a reality also
present in most (if not all) Indigenous communities in Ecuador.
Thinking with Yates, I recall David Slater’s reflections on the dialectic tension between
the inside and outside of social movements.9 I similarly recall Quijano’s proposition of an
‘inside-outside-against’ posed with respect to Ecuador’s Indigenous movements and its
relation with the state and understood as a continuous flow, filtration, or articulation of
subject positions.10 Now, and after almost two decades of Indigenous movement experi-
ences of ‘inside-outside-against’ (in Ecuador but also in Bolivia), many (including myself)
argue that state is not the vehicle for social change, worse yet, for decolonial shifts and
movement.11 Moreover, the state, its institutions, apparatus, and allies, have enabled the
fragmentation, breakdown, and breakup of the Indigenous movements, movements that
at the close of the past century and the beginning of the present, gave reason and substance
to transformation and another logic of co-existence, relation, knowledge, and life. Today
there are all too many examples of ‘leaders’ who ‘uphold the colonial matrix of power’, to
use Yates’ words. Corruption, collusion with capital and its industries of extraction, and
patriarchal alliances that worsen the violences against women and girls, are only a few
of the many manifestations.
Yet Yates’ concern is different. It is not with state nor is it with movements per se,
although his second query does have to do with the kinds of politics and practice that
support and maintain coloniality. However, it is in Yates’ third question-reflection
about the possible co-existence of diverse knowledges and forms of praxis, that I find par-
ticular resonance. Certainly, and for the vast majority of Andean and Amazonian peoples,
fluidity between and among westernised and ancestral ways of thinking, knowing, and
being is part of the practice and praxis of everyday life. I suspect this is so as well in
the Pan-Pacific from which Teaiwa speaks, in Ndlovu’s context of South Africa, and in
the many territories, places, and spaces of Native, tribal, and African-origin peoples
throughout the globe. The questions then are not about whether such relation exists
but how it exists, co-exists, and inter-exists, how relationality is engaged, and with what
horizon and project of life: To perpetuate and enable the control of authority, labour, sub-
jectivity, and knowledge (Quijano’s original description of coloniality), to advance capital
and its interests, to further the violences of racialisation, feminisation, and heteropatriar-
chy, and to enable pillage and dispossession of land-as-existence? To embrace (now think-
ing with Sarah Radcliffe) the modern precept of citizenship, of development as progress
away from tradition, and individual rights as state policy as solution which, in turn,
implies the higher authority and relation of state?12 Or, from a radically distinct
posture, to survive, exist, and even re-exist in the community’s own terms, which may
mean, as seems to be the case with the kamayoq that Yates studies, strategically using
the knowledge and know-how of modernity and the West in ways that both complement
and engage with traditional knowledges, creating in practice a kind of epistemic plurality,
utility, and ‘partial connection’. I wonder if the latter is not part of a kind of decolonial
astuteness that ruptures the binaries of either/or, for/against, and modernity/tradition,
demonstrating the serpentinian movement that I refer to in the book; an astuteness and
movement seldom if ever witnessed in the white-mestizo populations. If so, Yates call
for deeper attention to what he terms these ‘decolonial problem spaces’ (or what we
might instead name as spaces of decolonial strategy and possibility), is certainly relevant
as we – Walter, myself, and the many engaged in decolonial thinking and doing
 POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 609

Figure 2. Life in the cracks, Photograph by Catherine Walsh, 2013.

throughout the world – grapple with the complexities and fluidities of decoloniality as
(simultaneously) concept, analytic, praxis.
I close here returning to my own situated place and space, to the indignation and
despair, to the small hopes that enable me to continue to learn, ask and walk, and to
the fissures or cracks – and the crack making – which remain central to my praxis.
For me the cracks are not simply a spatial metaphor, as Radcliffe seems to suggest.
They are part of my everyday surroundings. After awakening one day a number of
years ago to a bright yellow flower blooming in a crack in one of my stone steps, I
began to shift my gaze from the totality (in this case of the cement and stone) to the
fissures all around me (Figure 2). Attention to these cracks and fissures have been
part of my learning to unlearn to relearn. They have taught me to see what before I
did not see, to think not from the totality but from the pieces that make it and the
cracks that break it; to sense, perceive, and grasp the light and life that appear
despite the solidity of the (system’s) wall, and to think of my own work, including in
the university, as not just within the cracks but part of the crack-making. While I
share Radcliffe’s concerns regarding the problematics, partiality, and simplifications of
socio-spatial metaphors, including the ways ‘spatial metaphors close down understand-
ings of how the “world” is made in intersecting, interfering flows, and processes’, I
cannot overlook the sensibilities and tangible realities that, to paraphrase Ann Stoler,
the cracks (as real and as a conceptual-spatial metaphor) express;13 the cracks not as
solution but as strategy, process, and practice, and as a radically different way to
think about the intersections of worlds.

Notes
1. See Catherine Walsh, ‘The October Awakening(s) and the Condor. Notes from Ecuador and
the Región’, Blog of the APA. Black Issues in Philosophy, November 2019. Available at: https://
blog.apaonline.org/2019/11/28/on-the-october-awakenings-and-the-condor-notes-from-
ecuador-and-the-region/.
610 C. E. WALSH

2. By ‘corporativization’ I refer to what the intellectual Añu y Wayu Ángel Quintero Weir
describes as the liquidation of the nation-state and its transformation into corporate-states
whose political-military control is not subject to any particular ideology, and in which an
amalgam of legal and illegal entities, corporations, and industries forces (e.g. big business,
extractivist industries and corporations, narcotrafficking, etc.) make ‘state’. See Ángel Quin-
tero Weir, ‘La emergencia del Nosotros’, Pueblos en Camino, 18 January 2019. Available at:
https://pueblosencamino.org/?p=6988.
3. See Catherine Walsh, ‘(Re)pensamiento crítico y (de)colonialidad’, in Catherine Walsh (ed),
Pensamiento crítico y matriz (de)colonial. Reflexiones latinoamericanas, Quito: Universidad
Andina Simón Bolívar, 2005, pp 13–35.
4. See Pedagogías decoloniales. Prácticas insurgentes de resistor, (re)existir y (re)vivir, volumes 1
and 2, Catherine Walsh (ed), Quito: Ediciones Abya-Yala, 2013 and 2017. Available free from
the publisher in pdf.
5. Comments made in the Plenary Panel at the Conference Imagined Borders, Epistemic Free-
doms: The challenge of social imaginaries in media, religion and decoloniality, University of
Colorado, Boulder, 10 January 2020.
6. This experience is briefly described in On Decoloniality. For a more detailed description see
Catherine Walsh, ‘The Politics of Naming: (Inter)cultural Studies in De-Colonial Code’, Cul-
tural Studies, 25(4–5), 2011. Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/
09502386.2012.642598?src=recsys&journalCode=rcus20.
7. SupGaleano in El pensamiento crítico frente a la hidra capitalista I, Comisión de la Sexta del
EZLN, Chiapas: EZLN, 2015, p 15.
8. Comments made in the Plenary Panel at the Conference Imagined Borders, Epistemic Free-
doms: The challenge of social imaginaries in media, religion and decoloniality, University of
Colorado, Boulder, 10 January 2020.
9. David Slater, ‘Spatial Politics/Social Movement. Questions of (B)orders and Resistance in
Global Times’, in Steve Pile and Michael Keith (eds), Geographies of Resistance, London:
Routledge, 1997, pp 258–276.
10. See Catherine Walsh, ‘La (re)articulación de subjetividades políticas y diferencia colonial en
Ecuador: Reflexiones sobre el capitalism y las geopolíticas del conocimiento’, in Catherine
Walsh, Freya Schiwy and Santiago Castro-Gómez (eds), Indisciplinar las ciencias sociales.
Geopolíticas del conocimiento y colonialidad del poder. Perspectivas desde lo andino, Univer-
sidad Andina Simón Bolívar y Ediciones Abya-Yala, 2002, pp 175–214.
11. Similar arguments are made by Coulthard with respect to Canada. See Glenn Coultard, Red
Skin, White Masks. Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, Minneapolis: University of
Minneapolis Press, 2014.
12. Brought to mind here is the argument of the Kichwa lawyer, intellectual and several time pre-
sident of Ecuador’s national indigenous confederation-CONAIE, Luis Macas:
Citizenship is not what we are struggling for or defending. … To think that we are not
Indigenous peoples but citizens, is to individualize communities and peoples, to ignore
the concepts of reciprocity, complementarity, and solidarity, ignoring as well the
internal rights of each people. In our communities, we resolve things collectively
and this is what we should continue to do. Citizenship is the relation of the state
with the individual. It does not consider nationalities, peoples, or future generations.
This relation deepens individualism. (my translation).
Luis Macas, ‘El movimiento indígena en el Ecuador’, Ojarasca, 2011. Available at: https://
www.jornada.com.mx/2011/10/08/oja-indigena.html.
13. Ann Stoler, ‘Colonial Toxicities in a Recursive Mode’, Postcolonial Studies, 21(4), 2018, pp
542–547.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
 POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 611

Notes on contributor
Catherine E. Walsh is a militant intellectual long involved in the struggles for social justice, first in
the US, and over the last 25 years in Ecuador and Latin America. She is director of the international
doctoral programme in Latin American (Inter)Cultural Studies at the Universidad Andina Simón
Bolívar in Quito. In addition to On Decoloniality, her recent publications include ‘Lewis R. Gordon:
Existential Incantations that Cross Borders and Move Us Forward’, in D. Davis (ed), Black Existen-
tialism. Essays on the Transformative Thought of Lewis R. Gordon (NY: Rowman and Littlefield,
2019), and ‘Decolonial Notes to Paulo Freire Walking and Asking’, in R Aman and T Ireland
(eds), Educational Alternatives in Latin America: New Modes of Counter Hegemonic Learning
(London: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2019). In 2019, she was awarded the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achieve-
ment Award by the Caribbean Philosophical Association.