A Questionnaire on Decolonization 73

NELSON MALDONADO-TORRES

We are going through a moment when terms such as colonization and decolo-
nization, as well as coloniality and decoloniality, are becoming prevalent in an increas-
ing number of spaces in the arts, letters, and sciences. Based on my observations as
someone who has worked on these themes for more than two decades and who
has occupied positions of leadership in professional organizations and universities,
I would say that this landscape is probably as full of honest discovery as of, painful-
ly, opportunism, posturing, resentment, and immaturity, all of which can be taken
as signs of decadence.1
Opportunism and posturing become evident in those who approach decolo-
niality as mainly a professional career, or purely as a scholarly endeavor.
Resentment becomes obvious when the investment on minimizing and criticizing
“the decolonial” seems higher than commitment to critiquing and dismantling the
structures that do hold discursive and institutional power in the modern/colonial
university. There is much superficiality and cynicism too, as it becomes obvious in
the practice of those who embrace decolonial discourse while counting the days
for another such recognizable grammar of analysis to get notoriety, at which point
we can expect their preferred terms of analysis to change.
What makes immaturity unique in this context is that it can get to define the
attitudes of those who more genuinely seek to contribute to decolonial thinking
and action. In the academy, immaturity often takes the form of a certain enchant-
ment with scholarly recognition and everything academic to the detriment of the
cultivation of profound relationships with agents of decoloniality, most of whom
work out of the academy. Immaturity of this kind prevents attunement to the
rhythms of decolonial artistic, social, and intellectual movements that enrich each
other through multiple forms of decolonial border thinking. In this scenario, the
temporality of academic production and participation in academic spaces trumps
the possibility of meaningful connections and relationships with decolonial knowl-
edge producers and creators outside the academy.
I wished that honest discovery and serious engagement had a better chance
to succeed and proliferate in this complicated scenario, but the modern/colonial
university was not designed and is generally not prepared to serve as a fertile
ground for the cultivation of decolonial consciousness. One can only hope that

1. Following Aimé Césaire, decadence can be understood as the inability of an institution or pro-
ject to solve the problems that they create. This can take the form of a “collective hypocrisy that cleverly
misrepresents problems, the better to legitimize the hateful solutions provided for them”—see Aimé
Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), pp. 31–32.
For more recent accounts of decadence, see Lewis R. Gordon’s work, particularly Disciplinary Decadence:
Living Thought in Trying Times (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press, 2006), and “Shifting the Geography of
Reason in an Age of Disciplinary Decadence,” Transmodernity 1 (2), pp. 95–103. It is also important to
note that Césaire’s account of decadence is remarkably different from the more widely known account
by Oswald Spengler. For a discussion of this point, see Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “El Caribe, la colo-
nialidad, y el giro decolonial,” Latin American Research Review 55, no. 3 (2020), pp. 1–14.

Nelson Maldonado-Torres's response to A Questionnaire on Decolonization, in

October 174, Fall 2020, pp. 73-78. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00410
74 OCTOBER

academics, curators, and others who are jumping onto the bandwagon of scholar-
ship on colonization and decolonization discover the deep significance of these
themes and the need to break away from their confinement within liberal institu-
tions of higher learning and spaces dedicated to exhibiting historical or artistic
artifacts. At stake, however, is a profound redefinition of their roles as academics
or curators, which entails a deep transformation of the institutions in which they
work too. This is relevant as much to those who currently occupy these positions as
to those in training—graduate students particularly. The decolonial turn involves
the end of detached professionalism as well as resignation from the established sys-
tems of professional recognition and expertise.2 These are central components of
what I am calling here decolonial maturity.
The term maturity may sound elitist to some, or an echo of Immanuel Kant’s
view of Enlightenment to others. However, neither Western ageism nor develop-
mentalism captures the most profound sense of “maturity.” Also, no single body of
work, including “the West,” has a monopoly on the definition or assertion of its
meaning and significance. I have found decolonial maturity increasingly relevant
in my engagement with agents of decoloniality inside and outside the academy. I
did not know how significant the category of “maturity” would become for me
when I heard it many years ago in the context of discussing Black liberation from a
former teacher and longtime interlocutor, Lewis R. Gordon, who has written
about it in various contexts.3 As time has gone by, I have also learned about this
topic from the work of Vine Deloria Jr., as well as from conversations with friends
and collaborators such as Catherine Walsh, Zandisiwe Radebe, Walter Altino, and
Mireille Fanon-Mendès-France, among others.4 Equally important has been the

2. There are some lines in the “Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality” that
speak directly to this meaning of resignation and that inform some of the analysis in this reflection:
“the decolonial turn involves a resignation from the order of validation of modernity/coloniality and
a declaration of war against naturalized war. Through this process the damnés transition from isolat-
ed self-hating subjects to decolonizing agents and bridges who serve as connectors between them-
selves and many others. It is in this process that true love and understanding—philosophy in the
most abstract but also the most concrete of senses—can flourish” (Nelson Maldonado-Torres,
“Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality,” Frantz Fanon Foundation: http://fonda-
tion-frantzfanon.com/outline-of-ten-theses-on-coloniality-and-decoloniality/). An example of resig-
nation that informs this analysis is Frantz Fanon’s “Letter to the Resident Minister (1956),” in Toward
the African Revolution: Political Essays (New York: Grove Press, 1988), pp. 52–54. For a brilliant analysis
of this letter and a thematization of the idea of “hopeful resignation” as “noncompliance” vis-à-vis
submission, see Carolyn Ureña, “Fanon’s Idealism: Hopeful Resignation, Violence, and Healing,”
Bandung 6 (2019), pp. 233–51.
3. See Lewis R. Gordon, Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought (New York:
Routledge, 2000); “Grown Folks’ Business: The Problem of Maturity in Hip Hop,” in Hip Hop and
Philosophy: Rhyme 2 Reason, ed. Derrick Darby and Tommie Shelby (Peru, IL: Open Court Publishing,
2005), pp. 105–16; “Theory in Black: Teleological Suspensions in Philosophy of Culture,” Qui Parle 18,
no. 2 (2010), pp. 193–214.
4. See Vine Deloria Jr., The Metaphysics of Modern Existence (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979);
and “Perceptions of Maturity: Reflections on Feyerabend’s Point of View,” in Spirit and Reason: The Vine
Deloria, Jr., Reader, ed. Barbara Deloria, Kristen Foehner, and Sam Scinta (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1999),
A Questionnaire on Decolonization 75

experience that I have obtained navigating the halls of academia in different posi-
tions as well as training undergraduate and graduate students.

Facing Anxiety, Fear, and Decadence

Decolonial maturity includes the realization that the exploration of colo-
nialism, decolonization, and related terms often provokes anxiety and fear.5 This
is particularly the case in spaces and institutions that support and promote the
production, stability, and reproduction of normative subjectivities and the nor-
mative order in its conservative, liberal, and neoliberal iterations and combina-
tions. They include museums, courts, the media, schools, and universities,
among a wide variety of sites within and outside nation-states that are part of
prominent archipelagoes of domination, disciplining, and control in the global-
ized modern/colonial world.
Like the terms colonization and decolonization, bodies of color also provoke
anxiety and fear—as well as desire, as Frantz Fanon and others have explained.
Anxiety and fear multiply the more such bodies appear, and the more one or
more of them “misbehaves” by engaging in actions that put in question the legiti-
macy of the established order. These actions can consist of movements, gestures,
and utterances, among other forms.
When challenging words, symbols, sounds, and movements, on the one
hand, and bodies that are perceived as threatening, on the other, combine, the
levels of anxiety and fear increase. The strategies to minimize the impact of
those words, symbols, sounds, movements, and bodies multiply and become
more violent too. Bodies of color that/who utter or gesture toward words such as
colonialism and decolonization tend to appear as threatening and excessive in this
context because they are perceived as getting too close to generating not only
words but also discourses and practices that can invoke and/or cultivate memo-
ries of defiance as well as claim unsettled debts.6 These bodies announce the
possibility of open opposition, reveal desire for change, and point to the search
for accountability. Each such body appears as an aggregate of blood, flesh, and
bones that is willing to continually enunciate such terms, make those sounds,

pp. 3–16. Catherine Walsh has been an ongoing interlocutor, teacher, and example of decolonial maturi-
ty. Her pedagogical practice, her teaching, and her involvement with community leaders, organizers, and
collectives that seek decolonization can be taken as a pedagogy of decolonial maturity that is relevant to
keep in mind in this context. I develop this idea in the upcoming “En la búsqueda de la madurez decolo-
nial: Una carta a Catherine Walsh,” requested by Kattya Hernández and Alicia Ortega for a volume dedi-
cated to the work of Catherine Walsh. For more on Walsh’s work, visit: http://catherine-
walsh.blogspot.com. See also, in particular, the first part of Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh, On
Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), pp. 1–104.
5. The first thesis in Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Outline of Ten Theses,” reads, “Colonialism,
decolonization, and related concepts generate anxiety and fear” (p. 8).
6. I refer to bodies of color as that/who, or who/that, to make explicit that a living human
body is never purely a “this” or “that.”
76 OCTOBER

produce those images, and engage in such movements so as to avoid forgetful-

ness; each body, each person, each life also resisting losing its memories and
potentially willing to bleed for the sake of restoring dignity and justice to its
community and its ancestors.
In short, the connection between words that challenge the dominant order
and bodies that generate anxiety announces the possibility of counter-catastrophic
acts—actions against the catastrophe of modernity/coloniality.7 In the face of the
various layers of anxiety and fear provoked by the sound of certain words and the
appearance of certain bodies, the institutions that produce, reproduce, and culti-
vate modernity/coloniality aim to minimize the possibility that the wrong bodies
that/who are aligned with the wrong words, sounds, symbols, and movements con-
trol the terms that can generate oppositional discourses and practices. This is not
to say that such bodies represent projects of decolonial maturity, though. A body
of color that/who utters the “wrong” words but that/who does not know how to
generate a consistent discourse and a practice of decolonization is as much a dan-
ger to a liberal institution as to movements for decolonization.
Without a doubt, liberal institutions prefer bodies of color who utter the
“correct” words and who relativize, minimize, domesticate, and potentially eradi-
cate or keep at bay the wrong ones. A second-best option is the recruitment of
bodies who could utter, write, and publish works with the “wrong” words but who
engage in the “right” practice and general orientation. The list can include “diver-
sity and inclusion” officials who comfortably embrace the liberal ethos of their
institutions as well as critical theorists who make a career out of simply criticizing
it. In short, bodies of different colors, gender self-descriptions, and sexual prefer-
ences as well as self-avowed “critics” of the system are often recruited, and some-
times are motivated, to do the work of domestication and eradication. Here we are
dealing not only with white anxiety and fear but also with multicolor decadence
and the lack of decolonial maturity. Decadence and immaturity cross many lines:
the color line, the gender line, the class line, and the political-discourse line. Fear,
anxiety, and decadence combine to perpetuate catastrophe and avoid decolonial
turnings that unsettle the academic space or museum and that empower decolo-
nial agents inside and outside their walls.

7. For a more ample development of the concepts of coloniality as catastrophe and decoloniali-
ty as counter-catastrophe, see Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Outline of Ten Theses”; Nelson Maldonado-
Torres, “On Metaphysical Catastrophe, Post-Continental Thought, and the Decolonial Turn,” in
Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, edited by Tatiana Flores and
Michelle A. Stephens (Los Angeles: Museum of Latin American Art, 2017), pp. 247–59; and Nelson
Maldonado-Torres, “Afterword: Critique and Decoloniality in the Face of Crisis, Disaster, and
Catastrophe,” in Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After María (Chicago: Haymarket Books,
2019), pp. 332–42.
A Questionnaire on Decolonization 77

Toward Decolonial Maturity

Decolonial maturity in institutions of higher learning and museums is forced
to emerge in a massive context of fear, anxiety, decadence, and vast immaturity. It
is not an easy environment to navigate: the multiple expressions of fear, anxiety,
and decadence provoke as much disgust as disorientation, particularly when the
institutions insist on their fundamental goodness and excellence in spite of their
very substantial and serious complicities with coloniality. Disgust and disorienta-
tion cannot but produce an overwhelming feeling of nausea for anyone who has
gone through any kind of decolonial turn.8 Indeed, decoloniality as an attitude
and project emerges when decolonial love and decolonial rage are able to over-
come nausea, along with cynicism, skepticism, bitterness, and the enchantment
with immature and constant critique.9
One set of possibilities for decolonial change, and a path toward decolonial
maturity in this context, lies in the efforts to connect the “wrong” words, images,
and bodies that begin to appear in dominant spaces with related words, images,
bodies, and practices outside of these spaces, where the struggle against colo-
nization has been more pronounced and consistent. The potential actions
include the proliferation of border zones of decolonial activity that generate
vital connections among agents of decoloniality inside and outside the spaces of
power. This can involve an expansion of the epistemological “cracks” and inter-
nal contradictions of hegemonic discourses such as liberalism and
neoliberalism.10 Most importantly, they include the creation of times and spaces
for those committed to the unfinished project of decolonization to think,
dream, be, and do together.

8. Nausea is a major concept in existential phenomenology. Here I draw from Fanon’s under-
standing of it as found in Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Wilcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008).
9. I develop further the relationship between decolonial love and decolonial rage in “Outline
of Ten Theses.”
10. On the ideas and significance of cracks and decolonial cracks, see Gloria Anzaldúa and
Andrea Lunsford, “Toward a Mestiza Rhetoric: An Interview with Andrea Lunsford (1996),” in
Interviews/Entrevistas, ed. AnaLouise Keating (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 251–80; Gloria
Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2015); Catherine Walsh, “Pedagogical Notes from Decolonial Cracks,” emisférica 11,
no. 1 (2014): https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/emisferica-11-1-decolonial-gesture/11-1-
dossier/pedagogical-notes-from-the-decolonial-cracks.html; and Catherine Walsh, “Decolonial
Pedagogies Walking and Asking: Notes to Paulo Freire from Abya Yala,” International Journal of
Lifelong Education 34, no. 1 (2015), pp. 9–21. For a further analysis about predominant social and
existential condition of people of color and the possibilities of critique by exploring the internal con-
tradiction of hegemonic modern/colonial systems, see W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk:
Authoritative Text. Contexts. Criticisms, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver (New York:
Norton, 1999); Paget Henry, “Africana Phenomenology: Its Philosophical Implications,” C.L.R. James
Journal 11, no. 1 (2005), pp. 79–112; Jane Anna Gordon, “Legitimacy from Modernity’s Underside:
Potentiated Double Consciousness,” World and Knowledges Otherwise 1, no. 3 (2006), https://global-
studies.trinity.duke.edu/projects/wko-post-continental; Lewis R. Gordon, Existentia Africana; Lewis R.
Gordon, “French- and Francophone-Influenced Africana and Black Existentialism,” Yale French
Studies 135/136 (2019), pp. 119–33.
78 OCTOBER

The creation of border zones of decolonial activity is crucial to advance com-

mon projects, as well as to obtain the critical and constructive insight needed to
minimize errors and potential complicities with the hegemonic discourses, insti-
tutions, and practices. Learning how to live in border zones of decolonial activi-
ty, to make them one’s home, as Gloria Anzaldúa might say, requires something
much more difficult to attain than conservative patriotism, liberal tolerance,
neoliberal efficiency, or the performance of critique and criticism. It requires
decolonial maturity.
Contemporary examples of decolonial maturity today include important ini-
tiatives by groups such as the Blackhouse Kollective in South Africa, the Colectiva
Feminista en Construcción in Puerto Rico, the Frantz Fanon Foundation, and the
facilitators of Decolonize This Place in New York City, among many others in the
Global South—including the souths in the North. I do not have the space to do
justice to this claim here. I can surely anticipate reactions from critics of these
movements inside and outside of the academy. To them I would indicate that
maturity does not mean perfection, and that the search for perfection, or even the
desire to exercise relative power by judging others who are risking more than
them in any given struggle, is, more than a mark of immaturity, a sign of deca-
dence—a continued failure to reach decolonial maturity in modern/colonial
times.11 There are ways in which decolonial maturity involves critique, but a key
part of maturity is to learn how, when, and what, exactly, to critique as well as who
deserves to be taken as a valuable interlocutor in its exercise. I myself have found
every leading figure in each of these collectives worthy of engagement, or, to be
honest, more worthy than some of my most valuable interlocutors and colleagues
in the academy. In light of the conversations and collaborations with them, the
modern research university, this much-celebrated product of the era of European
Enlightenment, appears to me more and more as a home of sometimes sophisti-
cated and useful, yet very often problematic and immature, when not outright col-
onizing and, yes, racist, thinking.

NELSON MALDONADO-TORRES is a professor in the Department of Latino and

Caribbean Studies and the Comparative Literature Program at Rutgers University.
11. Relevant here is what Vanesa Contreras has referred to as the “colonialidad de la lucha”
[“coloniality of the struggle”]. See Vanesa Contreras, “Colonialidad de la lucha,” 80 grados, Sept. 6,
2019, https://www.80grados.net/colonialidad-de-la-lucha/.