Decoloniality distinguishes itself from counter-coloniality by means of an emphasis: decoloniality (Quijano, Mignolo, Walsh) focuses on power, knowledge, and being as colonial structures that persist after political independence; counter-coloniality, in turn, insists on the historical agency of colonised peoples before and during the process of decolonisation — not as reaction, but as parallel creation, as a possible world already under construction. In the Antropocênica, both concepts are urgent. The Anthropocene, as narrated by the Global North, is a false name: the ecological catastrophe began with European colonisation, with extractivism and slavery, long before the steam engine. Therefore, to decarbonise without decolonising is merely to change the type of oppression. Counter-coloniality demands that the aggressor be named: not "humanity", but empire. It demands that relational epistemologies be recovered — knowledges that intermingle without hierarchising, that do not separate nature from culture, knowledge from spirituality. To practise counter-coloniality is, for example, to refuse that the climate crisis be spoken only in the languages of the Global North, or that solutions always come from the centres of economic power. It is to restore centrality to those who have historically been treated as nature rather than as culture. This is not a simple inversion (the colonised in the place of the coloniser), but a radical disobedience to the linearity of progress and to the violence of separation — opening space for multiple worlds within the single world we have.
Odair Barros-Varela