Decolonial Critique of Sarah Jilani’s Proposal: Beyond Universalism and Economic Reductionism
What motivates me to write this text is to propose a critical response to Sarah Jilani’s article “The Trap of Catchalls”, published in ArtReview on May 16, 2025. I acknowledge the urgency of her argument: generic terms like “Global South” or “Global Majority” can indeed erase complex realities and serve a rhetoric that naturalizes exploitation. However, upon reading her proposal of the “neocolonized world” as an alternative, I see that her text, though well-intentioned, reproduces epistemological traps that decolonial theories have sought to dismantle for decades. This critique is not a dismissal of her concerns but a deepening of them, informed by thinkers such as Walter Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano, Maria Lugones, and Catherine Walsh, for whom decolonization demands more than terminological revision: it requires displacing the civilizational framework that sustains coloniality.
If Jilani warns us of the risks of vague language, my intervention warns of the risks of a critique that, in seeking precision, falls into universalisms, economic reductionisms, and simplifications of local struggles. This text, therefore, is an invitation to radicalize the debate, showing that decolonization is not an exercise in word substitution but a project of epistemic disobedience and political re-existence.
Jilani proposes replacing terms like “Global South” with “neocolonized world,” arguing that the latter better exposes the ongoing relations of exploitation. However, this substitution commits the same error she critiques: homogenization. For Walter Mignolo and Arturo Escobar, pluriversality is a decolonial pillar that rejects the idea of a “single world” under Western-modern narratives and values the coexistence of multiple epistemologies, cosmovisions, and political projects. By coining a universalizing category like “neocolonized world,” Jilani erases the cultural, historical, and political specificities of Indigenous, Afro-diasporic, and Asian peoples, among others.
As Aníbal Quijano reminds us, coloniality is not merely an economic system but a matrix of power that hierarchizes races, knowledges, and territories. A term that unifies all victims of neocolonialism under a single label repeats the epistemic violence of colonialism: the suppression of difference in the name of a totalizing narrative. For decolonial thinkers, resistance demands naming particularities—whether the Mapuche struggle for territory in Chile, the epistemic disobedience of Quilombola movements in Brazil, or Andean cosmopolitics—because only then can the monocultural logic of capital/colonialism be dismantled.
Jilani centers her critique on economic exploitation—debt, resource extraction, local elites—but ignores the core of coloniality: the destruction of knowledge and the racialization of bodies. Maria Lugones warns that the coloniality of power operates through the racial-sexual division that subordinates Black, Indigenous, and non-white women, structuring not only labor but social and affective life. By focusing solely on material plunder, Jilani leaves untouched the epistemic dimension of domination, such as the erasure of Indigenous languages, the coercive medicalization of racialized bodies, or Eurocentric education.
For Catherine Walsh, decolonization requires critical interculturality—a horizontal dialogue between marginalized and hegemonic knowledges. By failing to problematize how the “neocolonized world” internalizes Western epistemology (e.g., through NGOs imposing paternalistic “development”), Jilani overlooks that material liberation is inseparable from the recovery of subalternized cosmovisions. Coloniality is not a “past” or an “economic system”: it is an open wound that bleeds through identities, memories, and ways of knowing.
By denouncing local elites as accomplices of neocolonialism, Jilani reduces internal dynamics to a binary logic (“oppressors vs. oppressed”), ignoring the complexity of local resistance. Boaventura de Sousa Santos argues that the “South” is not geographic but metaphorical: it represents people silenced by global capitalism, including within the “North.” Movements like Zapatismo in Mexico or community feminism in Bolivia show that decolonial struggle is not limited to combating “external imperialisms” but also dismantling internal patriarchal, racist, and classist structures—often embodied by local elites.
Ramón Grosfoguel cautions that coloniality creates perverse hybridities: non-white elites may reproduce colonial logics (e.g., Indigenous politicians co-opted by neoliberal agendas), but there are also elites allied with decolonial projects (e.g., intellectuals funding autonomous schools). By reducing elites to “accomplices,” Jilani oversimplifies these relations, erasing the agency of subaltern groups resisting both neocolonialism and internal oppressions. Decolonization, as Frantz Fanon reminds us, is a disorderly and contradictory process, not a moral equation.
Jilani rejects the term “Global South” for its generic nature but fails to recognize its value as a strategic tool for transnational mobilization. For thinkers like Angela Davis and Gayatri Spivak, the “Global South” is not a descriptive category but a political signifier enabling alliances among antiracist, antipatriarchal, and anticapitalist struggles on a planetary scale. When Palestinian, Kurdish, and Sahrawi movements identify as part of the “Global South,” they construct a geopolitics of solidarity transcending national borders.
Jilani’s rejection of this term reflects a post-political vision prioritizing conceptual precision over the pragmatics of struggle. As Eve Tuck asserts, decolonization is not a metaphor: it is a collective project requiring imperfect coalitions. The “Global South,” however problematic, allows Brazilian rural workers, South African Black feminists, and Uyghur dissidents in China to identify a common enemy: coloniality in its multiple forms. Abandoning this category for theoretical purism weakens political articulation.
Jilani’s proposal, though well-intentioned, reproduces three vices of modernity-coloniality:
- Universalism: By replacing one generic term with another, it denies pluriversality and repeats the colonizer’s monocultural logic.
- Reductionist materialism: It ignores that coloniality is an integral power system encompassing epistemicide, racism, and heteropatriarchy.
- Simplification of local dynamics: It erases the complexity of resistance and the agency of subaltern peoples.
Decolonial theories teach us that liberation will not come from totalizing categories but from situated praxis that articulates economic critique, epistemic disobedience, and the reorganization of power relations. If we truly want to “know where to direct our political energies,” as Jilani demands, we must listen to the people already charting these paths—in the words of Zapata, “everything for everyone, nothing for us.” Decolonization is not a semantic exercise but an earthquake shaking the structures of being, knowing, and power.