The problem of epistemological critique in contemporary Decolonial theory

Abstract

Decolonial theory argues that the coloniality of rational Western epistemology is the cause of all global crises, including violent patriarchy, racism and ecological destruction. Contemporary decolonial scholars consequently advocate de-linking from the colonial matrix of power which defines the modern world system. They promote a move towards an epistemologically pluriversal world, which they consider to be theoretically superior and a politically radical advance over postructuralism, postcolonialism and Marxism, which are denigrated as complicit iterations of Eurocentric coloniality. In this article, I critically respond to Decolonial theory’s reductive generalisations by demonstrating that its ostensibly constructivist articulation of geopolitics and standpoint theory amounts to a simplistic inversion of colonial stereotypes found in postcolonial analyses of colonial discourse. After establishing that Decolonial theory is unwittingly bound to a colonial, albeit inverted discourse of essentialist racialised morality, I exhibit that its stereotypical reduction of Western epistemology to a subject-object dualism misrepresents developments in Euro-American epistemology and continental philosophy of science, citing the case of French historical epistemology. I conclude by demonstrating that Decolonial theory is contradictory and self-defeating because it replicates metaphysical errors in Western philosophy and supports political values closer to the far right than leftist ideals of universality and a common world.