Ambiguity, Contingency, and Dominance: Decolonizing Theories of Modernity

Abstract

Abstract Focusing on the work of Johann P. Arnason and Peter Wagner, this article examines in its first part recent sociological, non-linear and contingency-sensitive ways of engagement with modernity, which refer to different levels of socio-historical configuration (civilization analysis vs. world sociology) and attribute different significance to normative questions. While both authors acknowledge the entanglement of European and non-European cultural worlds as well as its power dynamics, they still fail to fully grasp and theorize the devastating role of colonialism, which today is still felt in the marginalisation and even erasure of knowledge, perspectives, ideas and experiences from the ‘non-West’. Their approaches also lack a serious engagement with post- and decolonial scholarship. The second part of this contribution presents decolonial thinking as a theoretical and normative-political project. Theorising modernity from ‘beyond’ invites us to ‘break the Western code’ (Mignolo) and engage with modernity from a perspective that is grounded in different epistemologies, philosophies and social imaginaries, ultimately questioning autonomy and mastery (over humans and nature) as basic premises or axioms of Western modernity. As a normative-political project decoloniality is future-oriented and, focusing on the temporally, spatially and socially contextualized acting subjects and collectives, aims to rebuild a polycentric world and establishes ‘pluriversality as a universal project’ (Mignolo). The Zapatista movement in Chiapas (Mexico), representing a new understanding of the revolutionary subject and the revolutionary praxis, illustrates how indigenous groups and (urban) Marxists can come together as equals, learn from each other and negotiate how to change the world in discourse and practice.