Decolonizing Knowledge

If the titular aspect of the colonial and racial-imperial enterprise is the elimination of possibilities, specifically a deliberate obliteration of competing and alternate forms of understanding the world, then Gloria Anzaldua’s decolonization of knowledge seeks to subvert that notion and expresses how the future will depend on the creation of a “new mythos-that is a change in the way we perceive reality". The accomplishment of this new mestiza (mixed European and Indigenous American ancestry) consciousness is Anzaldua’s central objective and the apotheosis of her decolonizing mission. Said consciousness is the outcome of a resolution of competing cultural identities and value systems within the self, what Anzaldua calls a “tolerance for ambiguity” that inspires allows for said identities and “phenomenon” to clash. The synthesis of these identities is achieved through the new mestiza consciousness which derives its energies from the continual breaking down of what Anzaldua calls “unitary paradigms”. In this essay, I will elaborate on how Anzaldua seeks to achieve the decolonization of knowledge through the development of a new mestiza consciousness.

A key obstacle to developing the new consciousness and decolonizing knowledge is the acceptance of “white rationality”. Anzaldua discusses how she dismissed her psychic experiences, her experience of the imagery of the lore and didactic tales she had grown up listening to, as “pagan superstition”. She refers to being forced to the official reality, the reality of “rationality”, which in actuality was the reality of dualism. The dualism that Anzaldua refers to is the dualism of spirit and body or even the soul and the mind. This split for Anzaldua is the root of all violence and is one of the dichotomies that the new consciousness must overcome. In other words, colonized knowledge made it such that “other mode of consciousness”, one which moves beyond instrumental rationality, is deemed "fiction" when in reality the spiritual world is no less real than that of the physical world and one cannot be divorced from another and in creating this dichotomy between the spiritual and the rational, the colonizer’s objective knowledge has simply made objects out of individuals. The soul is that part of the psyche that does not speak, that “communicates in images and symbols which are the faces of feelings” and it is the representation of felt experience. To demonstrate this point further and to highlight the necessity of overcoming this dichotomy, Anzaldua states that being Mexican has nothing to do with which country one lives in but is rather being Mexican is a “state of soul”, not one of mind or citizenship. And to divorce body from soul, to enforce Anglicization upon those who have the felt experience of being someone else (as Anzaldua describes was done to students speaking English with an accent), is to enforce a dualism that can only reproduce violence.

The paradigm of language and Anzaldua’s concerns with linguistic terrorism exemplifies how the new consciousness toward which we must move entails a resolution and tolerance of ambiguities and plurality. She discusses the simultaneous fears of speaking Chicano Spanish and being mocked for its status as an inferior Spanish and of being labeled as “agringadas” (white foreigners) for speaking not being Chicano enough. This demonstrates another aspect of the colonial regime of knowledge, namely, the essentialization of experience and identity. To decolonize this mindset is to embrace that there exists no unitary paradigm of experience, no unitary paradigm of language, and therein no unitary sense of identity. Anzaldua refers to 5 languages that she holds close to heart and in which she converses with her family. Her experience mirrors my own as I consider the variability of my own speech and the numerous accents I have. Some of them, as Anzaldua said, such as a particularly desi English accent have been looked down upon in my schooling and so a dedicated effort is expended to have the right accent. And yet all of these are diverse extensions of my own being and my own experiences. As Andaluza says “Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate…. as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate.” The new mestiza consciousness is thus about embracing the borderland as a psychological condition and resolving by accepting unapologetically that there is no fixed paradigm and there is illegitimate experience. Only by embracing such a consciousness and privileging real felt experience over “rational” abstractions can knowledge be divorced from power and finally decolonized.