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This introductory chapter aims to move subjugated knowledge to the limits of the colonial difference where subjugated become subaltern knowledges in the structure of coloniality of power. It conceives subaltern knowledges in tandem with Occidentalism as the overarching imaginary of the modern/colonial world system: Occidentalism is the visible face in the building of the modern world, whereas subaltern knowledges are its darker side, the colonial side of modernity. This very notion of subaltern knowledges makes visible the colonial difference between anthropologists in the First World “studying” the Third World and “anthropologians” in the Third World reflecting on their own geohistorical and colonial conditions.

This afterword extends the observations from previous chapters, which distinguished postmodern from post-Occidental thinking as a critique of modernity from the interior borders (postmodernism) and from the exterior borders of the modern/colonial world (post-Occidentalism), to deconstruction and to world system analysis. Postmodern criticism of modernity as well as world system analysis is generated from the interior borders of the system—that is, they provide a Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism. The colonial epistemic difference is located some place else, not in the interiority of modernity defined by its imperial conflicts and self-critiqued from a postmodern perspective. On the contrary, the epistemic colonial difference emerges in the exteriority of the modern/colonial world, and in that particular form of exteriority that comprises the Chicano/as and Latino/as in United States—a consequence of the national conflicts between Mexico and the United States in 1848 and of the imperial conflicts between the United States and Spain in 1898.

This chapter brings border thinking into conversation with postcoloniality through the colonial difference. Postcoloniality, and its equivalents—beyond Eurocentrism and Occidentalism—is both a critical discourse that brings to the foreground the colonial side of the “modern world system” and the coloniality of power imbedded in modernity itself, as well as a discourse that relocates the ratio between geohistorical locations and knowledge production. The reordering of the geopolitics of knowledge manifests itself in two different but complementary directions. The first is the critique of the subalternization from the perspective of subaltern knowledges. The second is the emergence of border thinking as a new epistemological modality at the intersection of Western and the diversity of categories that were suppressed under Occidentalism, Orientalism, and area studies.

This chapter explores the implications of national ideologies in the domain of languages and literatures intermixed with the colonial difference. It looks at the Haitian Revolution, wherein language was intrinsically related to community formation and to geopolitical configurations. Indeed, the Haitian Revolution is crucial for envisioning a new scenario of geopolitical configurations and for understanding the function of languages for political interventions and for building communities. “An other tongue” is the necessary condition for “an other thinking” and for the possibility of moving beyond the defense of national languages and national ideologies—both of which have been operating in complicity with imperial powers and imperial conflicts.

This chapter concludes the book and recaps its key arguments. It argues that imperial courts were central to the construction and contestation of colonial difference as well as to the subsequent management of tensions between native exceptionalism and imperial universalism. The adjudication of imperial difference inevitably manifested the contradictions of British law. Imperial Appeal Courts operating beyond the direct influence of provincial colonial officialdom served as alternate locales for debates revolving around questions of inclusion and exclusion, power and restraint. The chapter draws parallels between historical and contemporary trends in supranational adjudication and the globalization of legal culture.

This chapter examines British imperial rule of law and its relationship to colonial difference. The ideal of impartial legality within the British Empire was embodied in a supreme right of appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, a right continues in force even in a few locations today. During its more active periods, the Privy Council saw itself as the instantiation of the idea of rule of law across the empire, and therefore as a profound force toward world-spanning legality and social order. Yet this universal aspiration toward the rule of law did not lead toward simple assertions that all peoples throughout the empire should immediately adopt British social forms. Instead, the judges sought to assimilate existing patterns of social life to a shared juridical order. Theirs was a universalism that did not insist upon the same rights for everyone, regardless of who and where they might be, but rather emphasized the submersion of all local legal orders to the rule of the empire’s central court. As Ibhawoh notes, many of the questions that occupied the Privy Council continue to matter today as developing systems of international law replay many similar, difficult debates.

This chapter extends the meaning of the abyss by giving it a concrete and contextualized shape. The chapter probes complex crossings that take place at the intersection of the mystical and the political by investigating the colonial impasse from which the Afro-Caribbean decolonial imagination of the (post)negritude movement emerges. In the writings of the Caribbean thinkers one witnesses an extended notion of identity based on relational ontology; the story of the shattered other shapes the very contours of the collective history from which the traumatized self emerges. It is, then, in this very middle, the groundless site lying between the traumatizing past and the dumbfounded present, between fragmentation and reconstruction, and between suffering and redemption, where one begins to reflect upon the possibility of passage, of beginning after trauma. The possibility of the reconstruction of the traumatized self is reconsidered in the extended notion of identity based on relational ontology found in the writings of the Afro-Caribbean thinkers. A comparative reading of Glissant and contemporary continental philosophers (Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Rosi Braidotti) molds the contour of colonial difference emerging in Glissant’s decolonial vision.

This text challenges one of the most compelling historical fictions: that Western rule secularized the non-West. It confronts this idea by demonstrating how the sustained involvement of missionaries in the expansion of modern education ultimately reinforced, rather than weakened, the place of religion and religious identity in the development of Indian modernity. This chapter questions the conclusions drawn by theorists of historical and contemporary imperialism who describe the missionary role as a “self-consciously” modernizing project. It reveals the paradox that the pursuit and adaptation of modern educational techniques and institutions, mainly exported to the colonies by Protestant missionaries, opened up new ways for Hindu and Muslim leaders and the colonial state to reformulate ideas of community along religious lines. It demonstrates the centrality of vernacular education as a space in which missionaries and native leaders could theorize and ultimately propagate the practices and norms required of a properly modern society. It reveals the ways the materials and institutions of vernacular education became a means to argue for a vision of community and identity based on religious affiliation.

The second chapter investigates the link between Christian thought and the historical matrix decolonial thinkers have theorized as the coloniality of power. In light of the historical theory of coloniality and Christian theology’s entanglement in coloniality, this chapter opens up options for what decolonization might look like within theological reflection. This chapter begins with the task of considering the place of Christian theology within the coloniality of power. It then moves to offering possibilities for decolonizing descriptive statements of the human person, ways of knowing, and eschatological imaginations, and introduces the concept of decolonial love by engaging the way Chela Sandoval has used this term. Introducing these options leads to a threshold question for thinking from a Christian theological perspective within a decolonial project: Can members of communities that have been rendered nonpersons through various manifestations of the coloniality of power think and speak theologically on their own terms?

This chapter examines how the idea of a special republican mission to civilize the “primitive” people of the earth provided the ideological framework for France's colonial empire in the modern era. While its antecedents stretched back to the Enlightenment and Revolution, this claim reached its apogee under the secular Third Republic, as it embarked upon its greatest attempt ever to sell the idea of the mission civilisatrice to the larger French public. In the aftermath of Vichy's humiliating collaboration with Germany, the Fourth Republic reinvented the terms of imperial governance, and with it the notion of France's imperial mission to civilize. As for de Gaulle's Fifth Republic, it remains an open question whether or not the “civilizing mission” has survived the formal end of the French empire.