Afterword: Decolonising Political Concepts

Decolonising Political Concepts joins a growing inter-disciplinary line of enquiry into the constitutive role of colonialism and empire in the making of the modern world. The onto-political concepts that compose the architecture of political modernity - sovereignty, democracy, freedom, the notion of the subject, and agency, among others - come under scrutiny here for the occlusion of the hidden transcripts of imperial and colonial violence that underpin modern liberal and heterodox political imaginaries. The fictions of a shared political horizon of autonomy, freedom, and justice, belied by the history and after-lives of slavery, capitalist extractive logics, and the fractal divisions of who counts or does not count as properly human are brought into sharp visibility in this collection. In alignment with the desire of the decolonial collective to call an end to the imperialism of categories that enable the dominance of “Western reason” and the denial of coevalness with other (i.e., non-Western) geographies of reason, this volume aims to decolonise political concepts from Euro-modernity’s enclosure of reason tout court. Defying the high priests of the Western canon of political thought mobilises a shared desire to recover modes of thinking in the hinterlands of modernity to acknowledge and build on subaltern political worldings. The recovery of suppressed knowledges holds out the promise of subverting one-world thinking, countering Hobbesian narratives of the civilising effects of war and state-making and Lockean claims of private property as the necessary predicate of sovereign subjectivity (both, incidentally, shareholders in colonial trade companies). In a neat reversal of stadial narratives of progress in which the direction of travel is only ever from the West to the East, Decolonising Political Concepts engages - and extends - Latin American Decolonial Theory to consider how non-European geo-epistemologies can replenish political thinking in the contemporary conjuncture. In the brief reflections that follow, I call attention to some of the more generative lines of thinking outlined in the book.