Mignolo’s Epistemology of Coloniality

Abstract

Mignolo's Epistemology of Coloniality Linda Martín Alcoff Walter Mignolo's epistemological claims about subaltern knowledge owe much for their inspiration to the work of Michel Foucault. Thus it is little wonder that, in some important respects, Mignolo bears a similar relationship as Foucault to the discipline of philosophy, and to epistemology in particular. Even though the entirety of Foucault's theoretical writings concerned knowledge in the human sciences, the principal discussions in Anglo-American epistemology continue to ignore Foucault's work, an inattention considered justified on the grounds that Foucault's analyses of knowledge are taken to be a species of critical sociology, not normative epistemology. It is also largely believed that Foucault repudiated the very possibility of the normative goals of epistemology given the constitutive relationality between power and knowledge. Yet Foucault himself formulated that relationality as dyadic rather than reductive, insisting that knowledge is not reducible to power, even though cannot be properly understood as disassociated from power (Foucault [End Page 79] 1980; Alcoff 1996). Power operates not only in the spheres of application and discovery—the two spheres traditional epistemologists acknowledge as affected by "irrational" elements—but also in the spheres of justification and the delimitation of the "regime" (or sphere) of the truth, or what passes for truth. Foucault worked out these claims with detailed case studies that both supported them and elucidated their meaning. For those of us who found these arguments plausible, even persuasive, the normative implications are clear: epistemology needs to work with this better and more truthful description of how actually existing knowledges (as opposed to idealized reconstructions) emerge, and needs to incorporate not only an analysis of power in its analysis of knowledge but also a set of normative criteria for judging various relationships between power and knowledge. Foucault provided such criteria in his epistemic assessments of hegemony-seeking versus subjugated knowledges: subjugated or local knowledges always tend to do less violence to the local particulars and are also less likely to impose hierarchical structures of credibility based on universal claims about the proper procedures of justification that foreclose the contributions of many unconventional or lower-status knowers. Like Foucault, Mignolo has also spent a considerable amount of time analyzing knowledge in its relationship to power and presenting case studies of hegemony-seeking power-knowledges that arose in the context of European colonialism. For Mignolo, the epistemic effects of colonialism are among its most damaging, far-reaching, and least understood. Also like Foucault, Mignolo's critical project has produced new conceptual formulations in the attempt to explain and describe colonial knowledge practices and anti-colonial epistemic resistance. The question of how these new concepts fit with the existing problematics of epistemology has given rise to a similar cognitive dissonance, which it will be the project of this article to reduce. One of the main problems in Foucault's work was his own colonial unconscious, however, and here his influence on Mignolo comes to a striking end. Foucault characterized the formation of disciplinary power-knowledge regimes as originating within Europe, and he presented the development of the modern episteme in such a way that divorced it from its colonial context. New publications of Foucault's lectures from the 1970s reveal a sustained [End Page 80] discussion of race on his part, and a real attempt to understand the formative role that constructions of race have played in the processes of governmentality and especially in the development of bio-power. Yet in these lectures, he does not thematize race or colonialism in his analyses of knowledge.1 Many of Foucault's followers, however, seem untroubled by this approach. Perhaps they accept the common view that colonialism is related to power, to juridical forms of management and to evaluative conceptions of difference, and to conceptions of the human, but not necessarily to the European Enlightenment's theory of knowledge, which was, after all, openly anti-authoritarian. The Enlightenment took on as one of its main projects to critique the scholasticism and authoritarianism of the religious-based epistemologies of premodern Europe (Tiles 1993). How can such a project be supportive of colonialism? Further, how can an analysis of colonialism aid not only in...

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