On Decoloniality

“By virtue of its synoptic character, uniqueness, and the authors' extensive discussion of praxis and movements, On Decoloniality stands out as a benchmark text.” - Eduardo Mendieta, editor of Maps for a Fiesta: A Latina/o Perspective on Knowledge and the Global Crisis

“Highlighting the decolonial option as the ‘interrelated processes of healing colonial wounds that originate in all of us,’ Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh are at the height of their exploratory and explanatory powers in convincing all of us to engage with pluriversal decoloniality. Sweeping in its geopolitical reach, evacuating the theory-practice hierarchy in favor of thinking-doing and doing-thinking, On Decoloniality productively and imaginatively focuses on the what, why, with whom, and how of decoloniality.” - Gloria Wekker, author of White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race

"As the first book in the Decoloniality series, it sets the tone and terms; it opens the conversation on decoloniality that is relevant globally as the Right rises and the colonial matrix of power is only strengthened through global capitalism. On Decoloniality brings important insights to the fore from locations not as well-known by English-reading theorists who might not concentrate on colonial language areas other than English." - Laura Marie de Vos, Transmotion

"On Decoloniality reflects on what it means to think, live and act decolonially in our present moment: what is at stake when we seek a decolonial perspective in both theory and praxis. This is not a compilation of the latest literature or a comprehensive introduction to decolonial thought, but rather an invitation to think dialectically about the decolonial praxis(es) and decolonial analytics." - Rosa M. O'Connor Acevedo, Radical Philosophy Review

"Although divided into two distinct parts authored under individual signatures, this is a book, which like a piano concert for two hands, displays a high degree of interplay and collaboration between Mignolo and Walsh. . . . For all readers and doers a major challenge and invitation is issued in the pages of On Decoloniality for learning how to think relationality will make serious demands of all imaginaries and modes of thinking we have thus far inherited and developed. This carefully thought-out book is not only a necessary intervention in the annals of 'theory' but a felicitous achievement in collaboration and in bringing together the task of presenting concepts, analytics and praxis under one single treatise." - Sara Castro-Klarén, MLN

"In the current climate of trying to rethink everything in order to find a way out of the contemporary morass of bankrupt and destructive epistemologies that are destroying the planet, [this] book is a timely intervention. It succinctly offers the reasons to find new concepts as well as providing incremental steps that do not simply reproduce what we 'know' already." - Sneja Gunew, Postcolonial Text

"Recalling Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang's critique that reminds us that decolonisation is more than a metaphor for Indigenous peoples, the participants in this forum grapple with the colonial matrix of power and modernity/coloniality/decoloniality analytics to unbuild violence and imagine worlds of hope and freedom through alliances that recognise settler guilt." - Michele Lobo, Postcolonial Studies

"The fable of modernity was the unifying arc of this aggressive universalism, and Mignolo’s principal argument is that any variety of Marxist argument that focuses primarily on capitalism, class, and material exploitation misses the forms of power that came through this cultural and epistemological domination. To resist and replace it with another epistemological worldview, Walsh and Mignolo recommend decoloniality, an outlook that embraces Indigenous modes of thinking and rejects those Western expressions of modernity imposed on much of the world through colonialism and empire." - Arjun Appadurai, The Nation

"An un-disciplinary read, challenging the foundational logic of Western knowledge production." - Kirsten Mundt, Cultural Studies

"The very act of reading and engaging with this book is intended to invite readers into the spirit of decoloniality, into thinking and doing at the same time, as well as doing and thinking." - Ulrich Teucher, British Journal of Psychology

"What is striking about the book is the clarity with which.the known history and its hidden shadow are put in relation to one another, highlighting their mutual correlations and consequences. The invention of America and the genocides of other civilizations, the massive slave trade, and the appropriation of lands, defined a new pattern of labor management in Europe and non-European countries: this shaped the emergence of the colonial economy, coloniality of knowledge, and the subjectivities of the conqueror and the conquered." - Laura Bourocco, Kronos