A Decolonial Aura

Mignolo announces nothing less than a radical critique of modernity that seeks to situate it within what he calls “coloniality.” According to Mignolo, decoloniality involves generalizing the experiences of decolonization and anticolonial struggles in Asia, Africa, and Latin America into a new epistemic frame. The project of decoloniality therefore involves a double gesture: first, the re-embodiment and relocation of thought in order to unmask the limited situation of modern knowledges and their link to coloniality, and second, an-other thinking that calls for plurality and intercultural dialogue. I somehow find this project of decoloniality a little too ambitious. It can be problematized in various ways. So for example, de-linking/decoloniality can take place through what Mignolo refers to as “disciplinary knowledge making” that takes place through speaking the language of particular civilization. But the conundrum as he himself points out is that one can of course do sociology in Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Mandarin etc etc. But doing so puts us at a disadvantage to “mainstream disciplinary debates”. Thus there is a difference that remains between local versus European sociology whereby even when doing sociology in any of the European languages (English, French, German etc) will be localizing it, it will still be widely read and understood. As he himself points out “the inverse will not hold”.  As such any knowledge produced  in any language can be attested through translation into a European language only affirms the power of European knowledge system and problematizes translation. This is just one example. How is this then delinking? Also when we think of decoloniality how are we thinking of separating ourselves from the institutions of colonial knowledge production whose legacies resonate in every domain. More so, even if decoloniality as a project seeks to decenter Europe as one of the many centers of knowledge,  we need not ignore that indigenous languages are not inherently egalitarian or liberating just because they are non-European. Non-European languages can have hierarchical, conservative, or reactionary forms of address?