Decolonial Philosopher/Theorist María Lugones, Now Among the Ancestors

I lit a candle in memory of María Lugones, who joined the ancestors last week on July 14^th.  She is correctly memorialized as a giant in her areas of expertise, as attested to in her obituary in Web24News (among others) and her having been featured over the years on websites such as Global Social Theory. She was to be celebrated in St. Croix as this year’s winner of the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award,  but the conference was canceled and the ceremony postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lugones achieved prominence as early as 1983 with her article, co-authored with Elisabeth Spelman, entitled “Have We Got a Theory for You!” As with all great intellectuals, that groundbreaking work was only a beginning.

Several of her obituaries list Lugones as an Associate Professor at Binghamton University, but she was actually promoted to the rank of Professor before she passed away. I had the privilege and honor of formally evaluating her scholarship in that regard. I here share some of my reflections on her contributions over the past two decades in the hope that other generations could understand why so many of us are grateful for what she gave us and continue to lament her no longer being among us.

Professor María Lugones’s work problematizes the forms of practices and concepts through which oppression is nourished. To this end, she integrates resources from poststructuralism, decolonial theory/philosophy, feminist theory/philosophy, and Indigenous thought/philosophy and, in doing so, offers her own form of theorizing/philosophizing of metatheory/philosophy. 

I place so many slashes in my description of her work because of the complicated argument of the relation between theory and philosophy. The normative elements of Lugones’s thought, for instance, would suggest “philosophy” but for the fact that her point is to make a critique of philosophy as normative.  If I placed “theory” by itself, a similar problem would occur.  Extending this argument leads to the decolonial approach to theory, of which she was as an adherent, since the coloniality of philosophy includes that of theory.

Lugones’s books include Pilgrimages/ Peregrinajes: Essays in Coalition against Multiple Oppressions, which has a translation into Spanish already under preparation for Editorial El Signo in Spain. The book outlines much of the theoretical/philosophical work for which what could be called the second stage of Lugones’s work is known. We could call the final, explicitly decolonial theory/philosophy the third stage. In that book, Lugones imaginatively interweaved concepts that have earned her standing in her areas of specialization and beyond.  For instance, her first chapter examines communication in the flesh—speaking face to face—and its racial dynamics; her second, problems of agency and structure; and other themes such as her ideas on pluralism, loving perception, purity, impurity, separation, and the use of allegory and storytelling as practices of theorizing/philosophizing. 

Lugones’s talents as a writer of journal articles and essays were legendary. She took on, in her article “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System,” published in Hypatia in 2006, the pressing genealogical problem of the production or generation of identity in the Euromodern age through offering a wonderfully creative task not simply of critique, but also re-reading. In this regard, she offered a viable response to what I call theodicy of the text. This is where the authors and the texts are treated as so sacred they become idols. The achievement of such leads to forms of “reading over,” or avoidance, of textual infelicities. The consequence is a failure to read because of theodicean commitments. This is the secularization of theological notions of the incompatibility of gods with evil/injustice, where the integrity and ontological status of the deity or deities requires the elimination of what contradicts the conflation of their normativity and being. In effect, theodicean reading is a form of failure to read. The response, which requires acknowledging the indiscretions endemic to the texts and their authors, requires actually reading them. A similar argument with a different nuance was advanced by the Japanese philosopher Keiji Nishitani in his critique of Western metaphysics as an obsession with being/Being at the price of reality.  Being, he argued in his magnum opus Religion and Nothingness, covers over reality.  

Though not building on these two perspectives, Lugones joined that line of argumentation through pointing out how the relations between colonizer and colonialism in Euromodernity is in effect an effort at nonrelationality by which the intimate and endemic dimensions of gender, race, and sexuality are covered over in the practices of Euromodern colonialism and its systemic regime of capitalism. The efforts to achieve an ontological status of such a system extend beyond those relations into those of ecology, economics, governmental ordering, and epistemic systems along binaries of production (as we see in biogenerative sex or, for now, heterosexuality). “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System” immediately created a distinct place for Lugones in what is known today as decolonial thought, although at the time she formulated her analysis in terms of world systems theory. The latter connects with debates in dependency theory and was the basis of the important interventions of Aníbal Quijano. Lugones, however, brought to the fore the complexity of talking about gender, race, and sexuality in the face of what could be called substance-based metaphysical models (“beings”) instead of, as structuralists would put it, relations, systems of rules, practices, and intelligibility.   

The sequel to “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System” was  “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” published in Hypatia in 2010. That brought metacritique to bear on feminist theory/philosophy in line with analysis from varieties of women of color feminist thought/philosophy through bringing the problem of coloniality to the fore. In the earlier article, Lugones said the argument of decolonization was a necessary but insufficient condition for addressing the problematic world built by colonialism. The underlying logic of that world is coloniality, and it is possible for coloniality to persist in the wake of decolonization. In the language of genealogical poststructuralism, the power/knowledge produced by colonialism is coloniality, and its persistence also takes the forms of colonial subjectivities. 

Lugones pointed to the grammar of a form of feminist theory that maintains the logic of coloniality in relation to subordinated subjects of Euromodernity. Those gendered-raced-sexualities are not necessarily absorbable into the non-color-coded hegemonic feminisms in which “women” became ontologically basic. The problem, then, is one of a form of colonial feminism or coloniality of feminism. This problem, as with coloniality, requires a decolonial antidote or practice. She concluded the article by evoking the inimitable Sojourner Truth’s critical plea for a critical understanding of the word “we” when referring to women. In effect, the conception of women offered in colonial models of feminism are locked in that of beings/Being, which in effect requires a call for an understanding of reality beyond those covered over by such, which, in concert with her fellow Argentinian and decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo, she called “the colonial difference.” A great possibility for future research would be for this and the earlier article to be placed directly into conversation with East Asian and African critical work on the imposition of Being and what is involved in transcending it. What is already great is that Lugones placed them in similar conversations with Indigenous thought/philosophy in Abya Yala (aka the Americas).

The preceding two articles offer the core ideas through which Lugones read and re-read the philosophical anthropology of Euromodernity and capitalism. The classic models from Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim focus on class, Protestant individualism, and bourgeois family structures. Yet there has always been another tradition from below, so to speak, as offered by Anténor Firmin in Haiti, W.E.B. Du Bois in the USA, Frantz Fanon in Martinique and Algeria, Grace Lee Boggs in the USA, Sylvia Marcos in Mexico, and so many others on through to Lugones. 

Instead of centering the bourgeois abstract individual subject (in Cartesian and Hobbesian forms of substance) theirs is relational and nonreductive. In other words, instead of seeking a “purity” that is ontologically basic, the idea is to understand that one is already in a relation with what is to be studied, which adulterates purity and requires a critique of the idea of a fixed, ontologically basic point. This insight is elaborated in some of her other articles such as “Coloniality of Gender,” in World Knowledges Otherwise (2008); “Methodological Notes towards a Decolonial Feminism,” in Decolonizing Epistemologies (2012); “Subjetividad Esclava, colonialidad de género, marginalidad, y opresiones multiples,” in Pensando los Feminismos en Bolivia, Patricia Montes (2012); “Interseccionalidad y Feminismo Decolonial,” in Lugares descoloniales (2012); and “Gender and Universality in Colonial Methodology,” in Philosophy of Race (2018).

Professor Lugones’s range was wide.  She also wrote on communicology, enslavement, and pedagogy. Her heart, too, was open. She reached out to many communities across the globe. I met her in the early 1990s, first through her work and then at meetings of the Radical Philosophy Association (RPA), The Society for Phenomenological and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), the American Philosophical Association (APA), and in meetings on decoloniality and Latin American Philosophy in California and at the Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA) over the past decade. She was a striking figure despite her short height. She often wore black suspenders and a white shirt. She always looked you in the eye, and her charming smile always called for others to speak. In fact, despite her many writings and public lectures, she was above all a great listener. I suspect that’s why she was also a great teacher.

I love teaching her work because of the critical consciousness she brings to students and the challenge she poses, like her smile, for them to think beyond her thought. I use her work in my own research not only because of her thought on critical pedagogy and raced indigeneity but also because of her metatheoretical ideas on decoloniality. Her wonderful intervention, shared by intellectuals such as Sandy Grande, Nkiru Nzegwu, Sylvia Marcos, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyèwùmí, and Catherine Walsh, is to point out that decolonial theory/philosophy is not simply negative critique but also the striving for practices of dignity and freedom once covered over or obstructed by coloniality. While struggling with the illness that stopped her breath, she took time to check in on others to make sure that we continue to breathe. Thank you, María Lugones, for the oxygen of your thought that will sustain and nurture generations to come. The candle burnt out a week ago, but the fire, born of your brilliant mind and compassionate spirit, continues.

Lewis Gordon

Lewis R. Gordon is Chairperson of the Awards Committee of the Caribbean Philosophical Association and Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Global Affairs and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He is also Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies and Distinguished Scholar at The Most Honourable PJ Patterson Centre for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy at The University of the West Indies, Mona. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, 2021);  Fear of Black Consciousness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the USA, and Penguin-UK 2022); Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge: Writings of Lewis R. Gordon, edited by Rozena Maart and Sayan Dey (Bloomsbury, 2023); and “Not Bad for an N—, No?”/ «Pas mal pour un N—, n'est-ce pas? » (Daraja Press, 2023).