A cult of idolatry has arisen around the figure of Walter Mignolo, notes literary critic and culture journalist Kavish Chetty. Here Chetty shares with us a handful of polemical rejoinders to Mignolo’s persistently influential “decoloniality” theory. He calls Mignolo out for “predatory equivocation”, an “undifferentiated” vision of the West which “borders on the conspiratorial”, “exoticisation of the precolonial Other”, “epistemicide”, a “catastrophically regressive view of human relationships”, and contributing to “the industrialisation of the humanities”.

Though Mignolo may create the impression that any critics of his must be inveterate Western triumphalists, Chetty insists that there are other traditions of intellectual decolonization. It is high time that we moved beyond decoloniality!

Chetty’s book review of Walter D. Mignolo’s The Politics of Decolonial Investigations can be found in Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies, vol. 49, no. 2 (special issue—‘Intellectual Decolonisation: Critical Perspectives’), pp. 386–388: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/....