Radical Relational Individuality: Expansiveness and Freedom


Mónica Sánchez-Flores, Thompson Rivers University

Enlightenment ideas such as the notions of human individuality, human rights and cosmopolitanism conceal their coloniality in the name of a modern civilization that has become planetary. Maldonado-Torres (2007) defines coloniality as “long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations” (p. 243). Coloniality is rooted in the colonial history of Europeans kidnapping people from Africa to enslave them as they dispossessed and exploited Indigenous Peoples and racialized non-Europeans. People all over the world today experience coloniality within the colonial matrix of power (CMP) conceptualized by Quijano (1999). Decolonial scholars tell us that the notion of universal humanity conceals the dark side of the double reality and inseparable genesis of modernity/coloniality. This means that modernity’s impulse and major achievements rest and are dependent on the simultaneous and ongoing violence of colonialism and the invention of otherness in racial classifications for the purposes of destitution and exploitation. To this day, this coloniality influences approaches to human rights, social justice and cosmopolitanism in spite of their emancipatory potential. This makes it harder to respond to the needs of the most vulnerable relational subjects and conceals processes of racialization within modern social and political theories that rely on the traditional liberal notion of individuality. Walter Mignolo (2021) says that a “decolonial cosmopolitan localism” discloses a pluriverse of possibilities for being human. I argue that cosmopolitan localism can yield a viable approach to decolonial social and political justice when using the notion of a Radical Relational Individuality that is embedded/expansive and framed within radical relational theory (Powell 2013). In this pragmatic approach, I use John Dewey’s notions of trans-action, inter-action and self-action to conceptualize Radical Relational Individuality both as embedded in its environment (social and biological) as well as a substantive option that is morally expansive (see Sanchez-Flores 2010). Radical Relational Individuality allows for simultaneous recognition of people inserted in their specific human and natural environments and a compassionate and moral approach to their absolute uniqueness. In this presentation, I contrast modern hyper-individuality with a radically relational form of individuality that can access an expansive form of ethics and refuses to be anthropocentric. This expansiveness ideally encompass everybody and everything in the form of compassion and points to a type of freedom based on love (hooks) that is different from the liberal kind that is already an organizing principle in modern society. This approach considers that modernity is inextricably linked to the experience of coloniality and presents itself as the paradoxical relationship between the emancipatory energies of modernity and its colonial impulse to subjugation and exploitation. Radical Relational Individuality is aware of its relationships with other persons and with its natural environment and I discuss why these are two necessary milieus to make sense of a broader perspective on the non-anthropocentric ethical standing for decolonial lessons on globalization, knowledge production and shared humanity. This perspective ultimately opens up to an ethical commitment to humility in knowledge production and discovery and rejects universalistic approaches to knowledge as colonial. Because of this, it can be seen as congenial with the vast plurality of ways of knowing in the world today and can effectively embrace anti-oppression and a more genuine relational type of freedom.

This paper will be presented at the following session: