Decolonial Medievalism? Exploring the Endurance of Modernity’s Founding Fiction

This paper examines three perspectives on decolonial thought by Aníbal Quijano,¹ María Lugones,² and Walter Mignolo,³ whose works address the colonial and racial capitalist violences of modernity. My main aim is to interrogate Quijano, Lugones, and Mignolo’s accounts of modernity and whether they question modernity’s own claim to exclusivity in relation to its immediate past, the Middle Ages. Colonial modernity, as they term it, uniquely structured racial, gendered, and economic hierarchies intertwined in a matrix of power and knowledge. This began in 1492 with the Spanish conquest of the so-called New World. If, as these decolonial thinkers argue, Europe’s colonial projects birthed, constitute, and are inseparable from modernity, are colonial matrices of power bound to modernity? What would happen if decolonial theorists began to question how “modern” modernity truly is?

According to Quijano, Lugones, and Mignolo, the colonial matrix of power uniquely defines modernity. Should matrices of power employed in the Middle Ages be considered in these conversations? If scholars uncovering the violences of colonial modernity fail to question an exceptionalist “modern” account of the Middle Ages, then we may end up perpetuating the same medievalism at the very center of its exclusive claims, especially modernity’s claim to exclusive knowledge. Medievalism, as such, relies on fictive narratives with little to no connection to the Middle Ages⁴ —are we keeping these fictions alive, or should we engage with the substance of the Middle Ages and its possible connection to colonial modernity? My aim is to explore how medievalist and medieval scholarship may inform the deconstruction of colonial modernity as myth.