Coloniality, the decolonial, and creoleness... Critical reflections on concepts and on the question of Brazil

Abstract

This article has two origins: on the one hand, it is the product of a lecture given at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Brasília on April 4, 2025, at the invitation of Prof. Dr. Wilson Trajano Filho; on the other hand, it seeks to extend the discussion opened by the latter in a volume of the Anuário Antropológico in 2024 (49, no. 1): “Sobre a descolonização e seus correlatos” (On decolonization and its correlates).

The article therefore begins by reviewing concepts commonly used in postcolonial and decolonial approaches: anticolonial, postcolonial, decolonial, decolonization, independence, neocolonialism, colonial state; but above all, it confronts them with the historical realities described at various periods of the capitalist world-system. It challenges the Latinocentrism of many decolonial authors who consider “1492” to be the birth date of the world system, race, the nation-state, and even gender. He then describes the rapid “epistemocentric” deviation of the decolonial approach, which started out as a rather materialist approach linked to social and indigenous movements, but evolved towards an essentialization of an undefined ‘West’ and a homogenization of the “South,” actually forgetting the anti-capitalist struggle, leading some to take a pro-Russian stance in the war to “de-Westernize” Ukraine. However, the author does not reject the concept of coloniality, provided that it is considered as a total social fact, not limited to its epistemic aspects but as a social formation characterized both by its insertion into the capitalist world system and by the non-hegemony of the capitalist mode of production in its areas.

The article then takes up the debate opened by Wilson Trajano Filho on the subversive potential of creolization and its decolonizing capacity. Largely following the latter in his critique of post- and decolonial authors, he nevertheless rejects this interpretation of contemporary creolization. He points out that historical creolization is inseparable from coloniality as the formation of exogenous social milieus within conquered indigenous societies, milieus that are socially and racially hierarchical. He characterizes creolization as an identity cataclysm for its enslaved victims, even if it may ultimately have produced social milieus, or even entire societies, in the form of creoledom. But while creolization is a very specific social and identity-related process, once produced, creoledom are a form of ethnicity like any other, with no particular intrinsic qualities, no characteristics of openness, non-racism, or even decolonization.