Abstract
This essay surveys the work of Aníbal Quijano Obregón (1930–2018), Peruvian social theorist of Latin America, on the occasion of the publication of a collection of his essays under the title On the Coloniality of Power (hereafter OCP), edited by Walter D. Mignolo, Rita Segato, and Catherine E. Walsh (2024). Quijano’s oeuvre is both relentlessly historical—often tracing important developments over centuries—and insistently relational, positing that modern Latin America is not intelligible independent of its relationship to Europe (and the U.S.). Many of his essays are stunningly penetrating and dazzlingly synthetic. OCP compiles Quijano’s later work. None of his important earlier work already available in English (e.g., Quijano [1970] 1974, [1977] 1983; Quijano and Wallerstein 1992) is republished here, but much of his later English-language work is (e.g., OCP, chapter 16 [1999]; chapter 5 [2000]). The volume also includes new translations. If OCP is consumed in conjunction with his earlier work already available in English, it is sure to satisfy intellectually hungry Anglophones.
Confronted with features of Latin America that were present in Peru in exaggerated form, Quijano made several important contributions to social theory. While his earliest work referenced modernization theory and dabbled in historical structuralism, his middle years were dedicated to a sustained engagement with dependency theory. His main contribution was to develop the idea of marginality as a product of the “marginal pole” of the worldwide capitalist system. Implicit to this conceptualization is a certain way of viewing racial domination. Accordingly, racism represents not a lack of integration but rather a specific form of integration into the worldwide capitalist system. In his later work, covered in OCP, Quijano synthesized these insights while zooming out to focus mostly on the history of social knowledge and the Eurocentric bias inherent to prevailing epistemologies. The overall result is a penetrating theoretical alternative to both stagist historical materialism and lingering modernization theory, including its sphere theory offshoots, with racial domination at its core. As such, Quijano’s work could help recalibrate contemporary social theory, especially as currently configured in the United States, making it more historical and global in orientation and, on this basis, better able to capture racism.
In what follows, I start by situating Quijano in his immediate social context, outlining some of the similarities and differences between Peru and the rest of Latin America. I argue that by studying Peru and Latin America more generally, Quijano made important contributions to dependency theory—a branch of Marxism that emphasizes heterogeneity and thus reserves conceptual space for racial difference—especially with his theorization of marginality. I suggest that these contributions implicitly put him in dialogue with racial capitalism studies and provide a possible point of departure for conceptualizing contemporary racist politics. In Quijano’s intellectual biography, they also fed into his conceptualization of coloniality, which, as I discuss and as OCP discusses at length, involves racial blinders implicit to the contemporary structure of knowledge.
The Context
Quijano’s life circumstances probably influenced his intellectual production. After migrating from the Andean village of Yanama, he lived most of his life in Lima, the capital of Peru. Perhaps the most striking feature of modern Peru is the continuity dating to the colonial period, some maintaining there was no developmental rupture over the four centuries spanning from Spanish colonization to the 1970s (Cotler 2005:47). Peru is perhaps the most extreme country in Latin America in this regard, but the entire region was profoundly shaped by the colonial system.
Peru had three fundamental structural features. First, its economy was based on the exportation of natural resources. In exchange for converting natives to Christianity, the Spanish crown allowed Europeans to use Indigenous people in forced-labor schemes (encomiendas). After Spaniards and their creole descendants worked millions of natives to death, much of the remaining native population was gathered into resettlement camps (reducciones), leaving creoles (those of European descent) free to lay hold of large estates (latifundios and haciendas). Some of these estates were isolated and self-sufficient, but others produced primary commodities for distant export markets.
Second, Lima, the seat of political authority, was located at the geographic edge of these productive relations. This made Peru politically and socially unique. Peru and Mexico were the two seats of the Spanish empire starting in the sixteenth century. But the conquest and then colonial governance shaped them very differently. Whereas in Mexico, the conquerors established the main colonial city on the same exact location as the capital of the prehispanic Aztec civilization (Tenochtitlán/Mexico City), in Peru, the European conquerors opted not to build their capital atop the capital of the Incas (Cuzco). They instead chose a stretch of the coast that supported easy exit and had no powerful prehispanic civilization. In contrast with Mexico, where colonial and precolonial people intermingled, Peru was therefore characterized by a bipolarity between the people of Lima and those of the interior.
Third, partially as a result, the country was racially polarized, with descendants of Spanish colonists on the one side and Indigenous people on the other—though there were also “mixed-race” (mestizo or misti) people in between. Natives, and especially mestizos, initially participated in colonial administration, holding important posts. But since the colonization process was genocidal for the Indigenous people, it left creoles with the vast majority of positions of importance and relegated natives even more completely to their inferior status position.
These structural features persisted for centuries. In the eighteenth century, the Spanish had to make concessions to the British empire, whose merchants focused on the Atlantic region, leaving Spain’s Pacific colonies (including Peru) less affected. Independence did little to change social structures. Part of the reason is that Peru’s creole elites benefited from the arrangement and did not want things to change. Colonial Peru’s creole elites were not even necessarily republicans; pro-independence creole elites elsewhere in the region nevertheless thrust independence upon Peru’s, making them foster parents of the republic, as opposed to founding fathers (Cotler 2005:33–34). Thereafter, they ruled what Quijano would call “independent states of colonial societies” (OCP, chapter 11 [2000]:288).
Observers like José Carlos Mariátegui had been able to catch glimpses of this configuration (Fuenzalida 2009:147–148), but a theory of the colonial legacy only really took shape in the late-twentieth century, due largely to the work of dependency theorists, including Quijano. Ironically, this theory, which emphasizes continuity across centuries, was developed at precisely the time when Peruvian society (as with most of the rest of Latin America) underwent its most profound postcolonial-era changes. The country recovered its precolonial population size by 1940 and then experienced a massive wave of provincial migration to Lima—part of Latin America’s “Great Migration.” The capital’s population grew almost three times faster than Peru’s in the 1940s and 1950s (Matos Mar 2012:61), and by 1961 almost half of its population was comprised of migrants from the interior. Quijano registered these profound changes, first in work that bears the mark of modernization theory and then in his first blockbuster essay (Quijano 1968), where he argues that this demographic change stemmed from global capitalist relations penetrating deep into the hinterland. The result, given a tight labor market, was the emergence of a massive “marginal” stratum of urban poor people (discussed further below).
Dependency Theory
In Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, there was a vibrant social-theoretical debate centered around Marxian dependency theory, many of whose themes were later reworked into world systems analysis (see Kay 2020; Svampa 2016: 193–266). Quijano’s first major social-theoretical contributions were to this debate. None are included in OCP. 1
Broadly, dependency theory developed from a critique of stagist Marxism and modernization theory, both of which proposed that individual countries pass through ascending levels of modernization. Two distinct streams of dependency theory challenged this idea. First, a “structuralist” theory of dependence emphasized the economic history of colonial and postcolonial Latin America, arguing that Europe and other advanced economies relied on the export of primary commodities from Latin America and other less-advanced regions, that the price of these commodities tended to diminish with time, and that, as a result, dependent countries fell further and further behind the advanced countries to which they exported. A second stream contended that development in the European metropolises came at the expense of underdevelopment of the colonial and neocolonial world; in other words, the reason dependent or “peripheral” countries did not resemble advanced ones was not a lack of modernization, but the result of the presence of development elsewhere, in what they called the advanced “core.”
The latter strand of dependency theory self-consciously engaged Marxist theory but broke sharply with Second International stagism (the idea that societies progress through a series of predetermined stages: feudalism, capitalism, then socialism). These authors took a very long view of history and developed a set of theoretical insights about how global-level “external” capitalist relations, in which the “core” countries dominated, shaped local-level “internal” relations in the dependent, “peripheral” countries. (This sets dependency theory apart from analyses of colonial domination which focus on the extraction of wealth from the colony for use in the metropole [e.g., Bhambra 2022].) The class of industrial entrepreneurs that elsewhere pursued industrialization did not even exist in the periphery; in their stead were other groups and classes. One was intermediaries—especially large landholders or “oligarchs,” a class which secured its position in the colonial period—many of whom hawked raw materials to core-country industrialists. Whereas stagist Marxists thought the oligarchic class was a relic of feudalism, Marxist dependency theorists thought these intermediaries were a product of global capitalism. For them, such neopatrimonialism in the periphery and “development” in the core were the twin products of capitalist modernization.
Dependency theorists acknowledged that some industrialization had occurred. But whereas structuralist dependency theorists viewed this as the product of a fledgling national bourgeoisie, their Marxian counterparts argued that, because they were able to avail themselves of the currencies needed to purchase advanced production technology, foreign capital tended to gain control of domestic industry in peripheral societies. Foreign capital also tended to gain control of agricultural and mineral export platforms, or enclaves, leaving despotic managers in charge of overseeing extraction. The dominant elite was thus not a bourgeoisie in the mold of Europe. And Marxist dependency theorists were quick to point to political implications: rather than a bourgeois-democratic revolution, something else, perhaps socialist revolution (as the Cuban revolution seemed to suggest), was on the agenda.
Quijano (1974) contributed to this strand of dependency theory. In Crisis imperialista y clase obrera en América Latina, 2 he draws from Marx’s value theory and the view that under capitalism there is a tendency for the rate of profit to decline, along with the associated Leninist idea that circuits of capital accumulation tend to expand to compensate, leading to a worldwide chain of capital accumulation. He examines how the penetration of imperialist capital affected the class structure in the Latin American periphery, arguing that it led to alliances between backward parts of the export-oriented oligarchy and foreign capital, and also gave rise to new classes of agrarian workers and miners who were sometimes mistakenly viewed as traditional peasants. And he elaborates the Trotskyist idea that this combined-and-uneven developmental pattern still allowed for the emergence of a more advanced urban bourgeoisie, to a greater or lesser extent depending on the country, along with an urban proletariat. The class structure was thus highly variegated. Like the work of other Marxist dependency theorists, this represented a major revision of Marx’s view that capitalism tends to simplify the class structure. Quijano and others pointed instead to the thesis that capitalism makes society heterogeneous.
Quijano argues that the region’s governments mediated between imperialist capital and national-level elites, growing relatively autonomous on this basis. But they also became imperialist capital’s on-the-ground partners, tasked functionally with containing the workers’ movement. How they did so varied across the region, with a variety of effects. In the Peruvian case, the Juan Velasco government’s agrarian reform undermined the traditional oligarchy; by purging a backward part of the elite, this homogenized the bourgeoisie. But the relative underdevelopment of the economy left the lower classes very heterogeneous, presenting a series of problems for the socialist movement. Initially, in addition to opposing the small urban-industrial bourgeoisie, the workers’ movement had to confront backward parts of the oligarchy. After the agrarian reform, it had to confront the government itself, as an agent newly dedicated to promoting modern capitalism and intent on securing a corresponding form of industrial relations. And, perhaps most difficult, they would have had to avoid succumbing to populist appeals which essentially proposed a multiclass alliance for a bourgeois-democratic revolution against the oligarchy that the government targeted in the agrarian reform. Quijano came to these conclusions by developing Marxian dependency theory in conjunction with the Peruvian case.
His foremost contribution to dependency theory was to conceptualize marginality. Much as the dominant class was not, for the most part, an industrial bourgeoisie, nor did the bulk of society gradually assimilate to the industrial working class, as Marx predicted of Europe. A relatively small proletariat did emerge. But alongside its advent was what Quijano ([1970] 1974:422) described as a marginal mass, a “‘sub-class’ within the proletariat.” This conceptualization helped trigger a long and fruitful debate (see Svampa 2016:216–229). Unlike Marx’s industrial reserve army, Quijano argues, the marginal stratum is never absorbed into the core sector of the industrial economy during economic booms. Instead, it is permanently relegated to the underdeveloped part of the economy because the marginal pole of the economy is articulated to (essentially required by) the most advanced economies in the world. The marginal mass also distorts the worldwide wage structure in favor of the imperialist countries; the same job fetches lower wages in the periphery than in the core (Quijano [1977] 1983). The marginal pole is part of the global economy, but one that is structurally subordinated within it. And this status is an effect of the system per se.
There are at least two ways of appreciating Quijano’s interventions into dependency theory. One would be to identify the conceptual inputs that helped him articulate his contributions, from historical structuralism to articulation theory, to chains of capital accumulation, to combined and uneven development. 3 But it seems clear Quijano draw upon whatever conceptual resources he found useful to make his own interventions. He clearly thought Marxism provided better theoretical resources than structural functionalism, but he viewed both stagist historical materialism and modernization theory as inadequate to his object of inquiry. It was on this basis that he, along with others in dependency theory, provided a major third alternative. This points to the second way of appreciating Quijano’s contributions to dependency theory, which is to ask and answer the question, how good is this alternative? While there are many ways to answer this question, let us consider it in connection with the rise of racist right-wing “populism” in the contemporary period.
Capitalism has structured our world profoundly, but not in a way that stagist historical materialism or modernization theory captures. The dependency theory alternative does considerably better because it accounts for the growth of social phenomena that other major theories would view as bizarre and atavistic. By offering the outlines of an explanation for the growth of neopatrimonial political elites (today’s “oligarchs”), one has resources with which to conceptualize an aspect of recent political trends in elite politics: the likes of Narendra Modi, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and so on. And if we also take up the idea of marginality in the way Quijano developed it—as an integral part of the global capitalist system that divides the working class into superior and inferior groups—it appears far more intelligible why these elites’ programs feature racial domination centrally, seemingly taking it for granted. Whereas for stagist historical materialism and modernization theory the result may seem puzzling (why do neopatrimonial elites have such broad support?), to someone in the dependency theory tradition following in Quijano’s footsteps, this is precisely what one would expect (global capitalism structures society in precisely this way).
Racial Domination and Knowledge: Toward “Coloniality” Theory
The heyday of dependency theory, at least in its Latin Americanist form, was the 1970s. In part it was a victim of its own success and in part it was absorbed by world systems analysis. But it also suffered from what some consider a lack of theoretical rigor and languished in the intellectual environment of the 1980s and 1990s, when formal democracy and liberal political science grew in prestige at the expense of political economy and critical sociology (Svampa 2016:243–255). Still, Quijano kept himself intellectually busy for many more years. For a time, he drew from the positions he had laid down in dependency theory debates. He also became more interested in racial domination and knowledge.
Quijano had implicitly been interested in racial domination in his argument about how the capitalist system created a heterogeneous proletariat in the form of marginality: in the Peruvian case, the class grew heterogeneous in racial terms, comprised not only of poor creoles but, increasingly, of mestizos and Indigenous people. That Quijano began to theorize racial domination in conjunction with the use of Marxian concepts (Quijano 1980:14–15) also puts his earlier work in incipient dialogue with the broader theoretical movement of racial capitalism studies. Much as the racial capitalism literature argues that Marxist theory needs to be modified to better appreciate the form of racism stemming from chattel slavery and its aftermath, so too Quijano insinuates that an appreciation of the form of Indigenous domination stemming from colonialism requires analogous revisions.
But positioning Quijano amid racial capitalism studies also points to differences in the type of explanation offered. For instance, whereas Robinson ([1983] 2000) develops a diffusion theory, arguing that racism was innovated in the Iberian Peninsula and then exported to Latin America with the conquest, Quijano develops a systemic theory. Since this theory is necessary to capture marginality, it is, by implication, also the necessary point of departure to theorize aspects of racial domination. The corollary is that racial domination exists in virtue of the development of a marginal place in the social structure, not marginalization from it. (The category of “marginality” is wholly internal to the capitalist social totality for Quijano, not at all denoting a separation.) The implication is that racial integration cannot serve as an antidote to racial domination; instead, it is a cause of it. While this conclusion remains implicit, it does suggest that only systemic change holds the possibility of fundamentally altering or abolishing racism (see Quijano 1977:76–77, 85, 99–100).
Quijano also addressed racial domination as a cultural phenomenon. In Dominación y cultura: Lo cholo y el conflicto cultural en el Perú (Quijano 1980), 4 his main goal is to conceptualize the difference between Latin American and especially Peruvian culture, on the one hand, and the European scenario, on the other, which he characterizes as one in which there was a dominant culture emanating from the dominant class. In the Americas, he conquest destroyed the Indigenous culture, unlike in Asia, where Indigenous cultures persisted through European domination and colonization. So when these cultures (re)asserted themselves, they did not resemble anything like their original form. The result was a spectrum of cultural hybridization: dependency gave rise to cultural heterogeneity. A series of subcultures and countercultures sat uneasily alongside, and even challenged, the local instantiations of Europe’s dominant cultures.
Most of the essays collected in OCP represent the next phase of Quijano’s thinking, when he developed the concept of coloniality. Some of this work reflects the cynicism prevailing in Marxian circles post-1989 (e.g., OCP, chapter 3 [1992]). This is especially marked in Quijano’s theorizations of culture and knowledge. Whereas earlier, when socialism seemed to have a future, he had argued that dependency led to cultural hybridity and heterogeneity, harboring anti-hegemonic potential, now, when it did not seem to have a future, he argued that it led to an all-pervasive knowledge system, akin to Foucault’s conception of the modern episteme. Quijano’s twist is to argue that this knowledge system’s basic assumptions (the individual knowing subject knows known objects) resemble the structure of bourgeois property (the individual owner owns objects). These assumptions meant Latin American knowledge was never recognized as such, the entire region being relegated to the category of the known “object.” Thus, whereas earlier, he had been inspired to hybridize Marxian categories with Indigenous studies, in some of his later formulations, he identifies no redeemable European thought.
But Quijano displays a more measured tone in most of his coloniality-era work, connecting the term coloniality to the themes of his earlier work (e.g., Quijano and Wallerstein 1992; OCP, chapter 16 [1999], chapter 11 [2000]). This points to a question: What does coloniality represent? While some emphasize this phase of Quijano’s work at the expense of his dependency theory-era work, I think on balance it represents something of a grand synthesis of all his work, with the addition of a few more features. In essence, it connects European domination of the worldwide capitalist system since the conquest of the Americas to both a social structure, with relations of exploitation, racial oppression, and even gender domination as essential features, and an epistemic structure mystifying this reality by refusing to countenance other viewpoints, including native American thought. In sum, it represents a further refinement of an alternative to other quasi-paradigmatic theories: stagist historical materialism, on the one hand, and structural functionalism, on the other hand (especially OCP, chapter 5 [2000]).
The concept of coloniality also points to underexplored questions, especially when understood as an alternative to adjacent concepts. One such concept is Edward Said’s orientalism. Whereas orientalism theory sustains the idea that (Asian) culture is recognized but always coded as inferior, coloniality theory posits that (native American) culture is not even recognized. Abstracting from the particulars, one could ask which theory best captures a given case. Take the U.S.-backed Israeli war in Gaza currently raging. Does this level of brutality result from an aggressor deeming the victim culture inferior (orientalist animosity), or from not even recognizing it (colonialist amnesia)? Whereas the orientalism perspective might say Palestine is recognized but only as inferior, and deemed a worthy target of denigration unless and until something changes in the Euro-American relationship toward West Asia, the coloniality perspective might say it is not even recognized, and cannot be recognized unless and until the worldwide capitalist system changes.
