Description
This paper argues that the “coloniality of power” provides a materially grounded approach to the pluriverse in contrast to its deployment as a metaphor for the pervasiveness and relevance of epistemic and cultural difference. While the pluriverse is often invoked as “a world of many worlds,” it risks becoming a merely discursive project if not anchored in the racialised conditions of capitalist production at the global level. By focusing on the interplay of racial hierarchies, the global division of labour and epistemic domination, Aníbal Quijano has theorised coloniality and capitalist structures as historically co-constitutive projects. The coloniality of power thus not only challenges the violent imposition of Eurocentric categories, but also the extractive logics of imperialism based on the exploitation of colonised peoples and territories. It is from this platform that the pluriverse turns out to be more than a metaphor for difference. It becomes a global project rooted in material struggles over land relations, racialised bodies, and ways of knowing and being.
To substantiate this argument, the article proceeds as follows. The first section reconstructs the argument that pluriversality fetishises the pervasiveness and relevance of cultural and epistemic difference by ignoring or at least downplaying the structures of imperialism. The second section engages with Aníbal Quijano’s concept of “the coloniality of power” as a twofold critique of conceptions of historical materialism and the dependency of Latin America. The last section explores how the pluriverse can thus activate global projects of resistance across difference rather than on homogenising categories.
