(De)Colonial(izing) Matrix of Power, Coloniality of Being, and Pluriversality: Exploring Militarized/Epistemic/Memorial (De)humanization and decolonial (re)humanization in Afterlives

Abstract

Positioned within the evolving landscape of decolonial theoretical inquiry, this paper examines the enduring impact of the colonial matrix of power on colonized subjects in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives. Drawing on the framework of decoloniality, it foregrounds the ways in which colonial ideological structures continue to reproduce themselves through interlocking mechanisms of institutional authority, militarization, economic exploitation, epistemic domination, cosmological stratification, and the regulation of gender and subjectivity. Pluriversality, as a decolonial concept, emerges in opposition to Eurocentric universality, affirming a multiplicity of civilizations and ontologies coexisting within a singular, contested world. The characters Ilyas, Hamza, and Afiya remain ensnared within the colonial condition, experiencing disruptions to their lived realities, knowledge systems, and ontological coherence—resulting in identity fractures, displacement, and metaphysical violence. Hamza and Afiya, in particular, embody the coloniality of being through experiences of sexual violence, bodily commodification, and dehumanization. Their strategic engagement with sexual manipulation and corporeal surrender functions as a form of resistance, enabling a partial delinking from the colonial matrix and a reorientation toward a polycentric existence. The paper argues for the dismantling of Eurocentric epistemologies and the embrace of pluriversal knowledges/ modes of being as essential to rehumanizing colonized subjects and reimagining a decolonial future.