Journal of Commonwealth & Postcolonial Studies, 2018

During the 1990s, various disciplinary debates took place within Latin Americanist circles regarding whether Latin America indeed falls under the category of the postcolonial. Many argue that Latin America, being a former Spanish colony, has, ultimately, very little in common with the conditions and legacies of colonization as elaborated by British and French postcolonial critics and theorists. These discussions went on for years, and in many ways have never ceased. As a result of these rather unresolved debates Latin America never fully obtained critically as a site of postcolonial inquiry. Instead, the field came to see what is now known as decolonial theory, and not postcolonial thought, emerge over the past twenty years as an increasingly prominent analytic approach for the study of Latin America's colonial legacies. Defined in opposition to postcolonialism, which many Latin Americanist critics found to be still too imbedded within the Western critical tradition, "Decoloniality" or the "decolonial option" came to serve as the name for a theoretico-political paradigm promoting indigenous, aboriginal, or other previously colonized and relegated modes of knowledge as a means to challenge Western Reason's claim to universality. Walter Mignolo differentiates between the two in the following way, "decolonial thinking is differentiated from postcolonial theory or postcolonial studies in that the genealogy of these are located in French post-structuralism more than in the dense history of planetary decolonial thinking ("Epistemic Disobedience" 46). While this distinction is carried out somewhat tautologically, the point made is that while postcolonial theory continues to rely heavily on certain strands of post-structural thought, decoloniality claims not to. Through concepts such as border thinking, delinking (Walter Mignolo), transm odernity (Enrique Dussel), and the coloniality of pow er (Anibal Quijano) decoloniality positions itself as a uniquely non-eurocentric critical tradition that diverges from and aims to surpass other prominent theoretical models such as Marxism, deconstruction, as well as postcolonial theory itself. Within various fields and disciplines, ranging from literary and cultural studies to history and anthropology, the decolonial option has become established as a methodological platform and has been heralded by some as a revolutionary paradigm for the cultural and political emancipation of formerly colonized cultures from western modes of knowledge and power.

Postcolonial Studies, 2022

In the last decade, the terms ‘decolonial’ and ‘decoloniality’ have been deployed in an expansive manner and have gained increasing traction across many theoretical and political domains. Therefore, a critical assessment of the specific decolonial vocabulary is both timely and necessary. The relationship between the decolonial and the postcolonial especially requires more critical scrutiny than it has received so far. This special issue takes a step in this direction by staging critical dialogues between postcolonial and decolonial approaches on different terrains. While decolonial theory tends to operate as an expansive and centripetal force, pulling within its orbit a variety of other theoretical and political formation, our focus is on the original formulation of ‘decoloniality’ – or the ‘decolonial option’ – within the Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality (MCD) group. In this introduction, we outline some of the main objections that decolonial critics have formulated against postcolonial theory, and we argue that these critiques have been instrumental in defining the decolonial option itself. While advocates of decoloniality have been very vocal in their critiques of postcolonial theory, we note among postcolonial critics – with some exceptions – a predominant tendency either not to respond to these charges or to downplay them in favour of reconciliatory moves. As an alternative to this tendency, we stress the value of a postcolonial critical response to the decolonial intervention. We argue that postcolonial theories still have something to offer to a critique of the present and the past. In the face of the decolonial claim to have radicalized or surpassed postcolonial theory, we suggest that the postcolonial must speak back and reclaim the value of its critical apparatus in the context of the unfinished struggle for decolonizing knowledge and the social unconscious of postcoloniality.

Studies in Social and Political Thought, 2011

This class is an advanced introduction to the broad topic of coloniality and decoloniality. It is an interdisciplinary class in nature, with a heavy focus on historical, theoretical, sociological and anthropological readings. The class starts with an introduction of some key concepts on coloniality and decoloniality, such as the colonial and the post-colonial and the de-colonial, as well as the meaning and the nature of the colonial structure and the centrality of race in the colonial project. The class is divided into four parts. The first part is examining some examples from different historical waves of colonialisms such as the colonialism of the "new" world, and the scramble for Africa, with a brief examination of some selected cases. The second part is the study of some of the key approaches to study colonialism and imperialism, such as the Marxist approaches, post-colonial theory, indigenous perspectives, the black radical tradition and sociological approaches. The third part is an examination of the key types of colonialisms such as settler-colonialism, and imperialisms/new imperialism, as well as some of the key problematics in the field as the relationship between the state and the colonial project and the gendered nature of colonialism and imperialism. The class concludes with the study of decoloniality as a theoretical approach and as a praxis.

Interfere, 2022

Occupying weapons factories to prevent the production of arms and generate radical theory as part of guerrilla activist research supporting Palestine. Subverting Brahminical Hindu supremacy which co-opts the language of decolonising to justify attacking and criminalising minorities, activists, and scholars in present-day South Asia and the diaspora. Understanding rap music as a generative epistemic site for counter-publics which resist policing and co-option. Engaging with the camera as a way of processing and documenting histories of oppression. Poetically resisting Irish epistemicide. Recovering political spirituality. Demanding material interventions from the University to generate praxes of pedagogical solidarity.

Journal of Latin American Studies, 2021

Patterns of Prejudice, 2022

2011

A special section of Studies in Social and Political Thought. The submissions, received from four continents, were remarkable in the diversity of perspectives, issues, concepts and approaches they represented and the intriguing and novel insights they offered. Each of the section’s articles represent contributions to the debates and discourses surrounding one of the key challenges facing social and political thought today: namely, how to reconcile core concepts and ideas from canonical authors which, though universal in their claims, are undeniably European in their origins.

On Education: Journal for Research and Debate, 2020

The growing traction of decolonization as a discourse and practice within and beyond the context of academic scholarship has generated important spaces for critical, self-reflexive engagements with the role of systemic, historical, and ongoing colonial violence in the foundations of various scholarly fields. Although the overarching area of “decolonial critique” contains a considerable range of perspectives, both complementary and contradictory, overall these perspectives challenge the common assumption that colonialism is “over”, pointing instead to the ways that it has persisted and shapeshifted both in settler colonial countries (where the colonizing power never ‘left’), as well as in purportedly decolonized countries that are nonetheless characterized by “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” (Maldonado-Torres, 2007, p. 243). In addition to denaturalizing and historicizing the colonial present – that is, the ways that colonial relations continue to organize everyday contemporary life – decolonial critiques also gesture toward alternative possibilities for knowing, being, and relating. These alternatives are not sanctioned by, and in fact are often ignored or actively suppressed within, mainstream institutions and discourses. While decolonial critique has been around for a long time, arguably since the onset of European colonialism in the 15th century, its recent growing popularity has prompted many critical responses. These responses range from Indigenous scholars who express frustration with how decolonization has been conflated with other social justice projects premised on representation, recognition, and redistribution within a reformed but still-colonial system (Tuck & Yang, 2012), to the vitriolic backlash of right-wing groups who warn that decolonial critiques are nefarious efforts to eradicate white, western ways of life. Yet beyond these two highly visible perspectives are perhaps the more common responses from researchers who question claims about the enduring character of colonialism and challenge the legitimacy of decolonial critiques in more subtle ways. Rather than dismissing them outright, they offer seemingly reasoned engagements with decolonial critiques that nonetheless ultimately conclude that the critiques are premised on scholarship that does not hold up to careful scrutiny, nor meet accepted (Eurocentric) standards of academic rigour, rationality, and social impact. Although these approaches are much less direct in their dismissal than those that attack decolonial critique on principle, ultimately, they tend to come to a similar conclusion that suggests these critiques are of little social or scholarly value. Because these engagements are articulated within the standard discourse and political orientation of mainstream scholarly critique, they tend to carry significant weight both within and beyond higher education institutions, and thus, they warrant a response. This is what we offer here.