Decolonial Option Research Articles

Suicide and the Coloniality of the Senses, Time, and Being: The Aesthetics of Death Desires

We engage the decolonial option from Abya Yala, el Caribe, and Eastern Europe with an interest in suicide from our struggles as racialized people and our dehumanization, whereby, for many of us, suicide is not an act of autonomy or resistance but the reaffirmation of death as an ongoing state of living. This is the permanent reality of existence concocted by coloniality and its constitutive effect on lived experience. We depart from the assumption that suicide materializes according to someone’s thinking about the world and of a particular philosophy. Thus, predominantly, suicide is the universal name someone’s knowledge has given to an experience; and whose experience is named as such is consequently universally configured as a suicidal being. Here, we discuss suicide from understandings that come from non-discursive domains, and from a different genealogy than western Europe’s; the coloniality of the senses, time and being. We attempt to story what violence does in relation to an already violent circumstance, suicide, therapists and hotline workers, and undocumented lives in the U.S., when singularly imposing one way of the world. We are interested in adding visibility to the legacy of erasure and violence that the epistemologies and ontologies of suicide, suicide assessments, and therapists’ clinical judgements perpetuate; further sustaining dehumanization and the imposition of death as a constant in life. We discuss a crisis suicide call as the lay of the land of modernity’s suicide assessments, constructed as an assemblage from our shared memories on many stories we have heard in our work. We annotate it as it unfolds, reflecting upon our expected practices in institutionalized settings, under the control of modernity/coloniality that discriminates against pluriversal temporalities, sensings, and relationalities.

Moving Memories: Shifting the Locus of Enunciation in Choreographic Composition

ABSTRACT This article proposes a decolonial choreographic process rupturing the historical locus of enunciation in a dance program at a tertiary institution in South Africa. This locus in choreographic composition curricula in such universities reflects Western modernity, resulting in epistemological hegemony that creates epistemic othering that, we argue, affects students’ ontological positioning. We view decoloniality as centered on rupturing the historical locus of enunciation through epistemic disobedience and delinking from coloniality/modernity. We argue that one pedagogical approach in a choreographic composition curriculum is through using embodied, autobiographical memories toward decolonial storying. We discuss the ways this decolonial option shaped the choreographic process toward the performance of Memoryscapes (2022). We conclude by demonstrating how this option surfaced the participants as the loci of enunciation(s), by drawing from their identities, subjective lived experiences, and autobiographical memories in the process of embodied decolonial storying.

Decolonial option in Mathematics Education

This article aims to present reflections on the constitution of the decolonial option in Mathematics Education. As theoretical assumptions, it is based on references based on the Ethnomathematics Program, decolonial studies, discussions woven in the interface between Mathematics Education and Decoloniality, in addition to reflections arising from the dialogue between Mathematics Education and affirmative actions. It is understood that Mathematics, in its historical process of constitution, participated in several colonization processes and still reproduces several of its effects via coloniality(ies), making invisible, silencing and denying various forms of knowledge(s), as well as its connoisseurs. In this way, it is proposed that the decolonial option in Mathematics Education enables dialogical spaces between the different ways of reading and interpreting the world from the very world in which we live.

Exploring standardized tests washback from the decolonial option: implications for rural teachers and students

Exploring standardized tests washback from the decolonial option: implications for rural teachers and students

An alternative planetary future? Digital sovereignty frameworks and the decolonial option

The frameworks of cyber, technology and data sovereignty have become some of the most influential alternative technological imaginaries. Developed by states and civil society groups, such frameworks are seducing a broad range of actors seeking to reassert their autonomy and self-determination in relation to digital technology and infrastructure. Against this backdrop, this article interrogates the alleged transformative character of digital sovereignty. Do these frameworks support alternative planetary futures, or do they involve a mere change in the actors who are privileging from the technological status quo? To answer this question, I examine the rhetoric and realisation of digital sovereignty frameworks by the Chinese state, the European Union (EU) and Latin American civil society in light of Walter Mignolo's decolonial option. The decolonial option gets inspiration from decolonial praxis and aims at enabling polycentric, noncapitalist and nonanthropocentric planetary futures. As I show, there is some degree of alignment between digital sovereignty frameworks and the decolonial option in the sphere of international politics, but less so in the world economy and the environment. While in some areas the formulations by the Chinese state and the EU can exacerbate coloniality, the Latin American civil society one constitutes a promising attempt at appropriating digital sovereignty from below and promoting peaceful forms of coexistence with the environment although needs further development.

Decolonizing US Latinx Students’ Language: El Sur in the Schools of El Norte

Abstract This article considers how the racialized bilingual Latinx students in El Norte live in an epistemological Sur where their knowledge systems, which include their language and cultural practices are discounted. Centring the schooling experience of two US Latinas today, the article theorizes the differences between perceiving their language and bilingualism from the external perspective of dominant schooling institutions of the Global North, and from the inside perspective of racialized speakers. Bringing to bear thinking from an epistemological Sur (Santos 2009), revealed through a decolonizing sociolinguistic approach and Latinx decolonizing research sensibility, the article discusses how tools external to the Latinx experience—academic language and additive bilingualism—have contributed to the subjugation and failure of Latinx students. It ends by proposing translanguaging as a tool that has emerged from Latinx own experience and how its use in their education may open a decolonial option.

Decolonising EU Trade Relations with the Global Souths?

That the European Union’s common commercial relations with ex-colonies and more broadly the ‘tiers monde’ now rest variously on benevolence, depoliticised practices, equal partnerships and values fuels reigning foundational myths about the EU in global politics. Efforts to disrupt these received presuppositions have come from interpretivist, postcolonial, post-development, post-structuralist and other heterodox research traditions. Yet the academy has been largely impervious to knowledges that genuinely question and subvert, in both theory and praxis, Eurocentric ways of seeing the world and understanding the EU as a ‘benevolent’ trade actor on the world stage. In dialogue with existing heterodox approaches, this article asks how we might puncture the coloniality of dominant knowledge regimes about EU trade relations vis-à-vis the global souths, i.e., peoples and places that the EU deems peripheral and, as such, in need of trade-related interventions in the name of development. To this end, we propose different ‘subject-positions’ with which to unthink and rethink our ways of knowing EU trade policy and the Eurocentrism lurking behind it by turning to decolonial thought. We borrow heavily from the work of Meera Sabaratnam whose ‘decolonising strategies’ in studying world politics we attempt to exemplify through a critical interrogation of the canonical scholarship around three distinct ‘policy worlds’ of EU external trade relations: Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs), Generalised Scheme of Preferences (GSP) and Trade and Sustainable Development (TSD) chapters in free trade agreements. Finally, we think reflexively about the decolonial option and the ruptures it triggers as to what EU trade policy is and the colonial logics sustaining ‘normative’ and ‘geopolitical’ narratives on/by the EU as a trade power.

Islamic Liberation Theology and Decolonial Studies: The Case of Hindutva Extractivism

Decolonial studies define the coloniality of power as a complex assemblage of dominance and hegemony that emerged during the modern era or the era of colonialism, which stretches from the conquest of the Americas to the present. This article argues that, as part of the critical dialogue between decolonial studies and Islamic liberation theology, the latter should position itself in a decolonial political praxis around the preferential option for the poor that takes both a decolonial turn and a decolonial option seriously. There is a tendency to appropriate certain brands of decolonial studies to engage with forms of nationalism, such as Hindutva, to build a “decolonial option” in the global South by undermining the key insights of the “decolonial turn”. This article specifically engages with the claims of “decolonial Hindutva” to critique the nationalist appropriation in decolonial studies, thereby marking its divergence from decolonial Islamic liberation theology.

Imag(in)ing Decolonial Ecology: Exploring Tropical Eco-Graphic Narratives

Decoloniality is a critical approach that seeks to dismantle the hegemonic and oppressive structures of Eurocentric epistemologies. It promotes reflection on how texts and knowledge production perpetuate othering and oppression. Imag(in)ing decoloniality along with ecocritical thinking, this paper envisions tropical ecology as transcending the constraints of dominant discourses and explores how graphic narrative aids in reconfiguring the boundaries between human subjectivity and decolonial-ecocritical aesthetics. The article emphasises the potential of multimodality to proffer novel approaches for considering the connections between human/non-human, nature/culture and the tropical/temperate, and advocates a decanonisation of literary genres to decentralise the power of logocentric discourse. More specifically, the paper examines three eco-graphic narratives—Martina and the Bridge of Time (2020), Dengue (2015), and Bhimayana (2011)—to demonstrate their capacity in articulating coloniality in the tropical environment to highlight the importance of addressing historical and cultural wounds. This intersection of decoloniality, ecocriticism, and graphic narrative, along with the notion of tropicality, allows us to witness the evolution of the fields in an exciting and complex way. In sum, we examine how graphic narrative can act as a decolonial option for the tropics.

Neoliberalizing Subjects through Global ELT Programs

AbstractA recent surge in textbooks studies has revealed a closer link with neoliberalism and the way they construct neoliberal subjects. This paper uses Foucauldian governmentality as the conceptual lens to analyze the neoliberal discourses in EFL textbooks used in English Access Microscholarship (EAM)—one of the US‐aided global ELT programs in Pakistan. English language learners' views on course outcomes and textbooks were also examined. The study shows that among others, English as a neoliberal life skill, celebrity culture, consumerism, entrepreneurship, and individual and corporate social responsibility dominate textbooks. It is thus found that textbooks play an important role in neoliberalizing learners. Moreover, English language learners perceive English as a key to economic success. They also value consumerism, branding, and personal responsibility. In light of the study findings, we suggest a decolonial option, reflective activism, and post‐method pedagogy as possible alternatives at the micro‐, meso‐, and macro‐levels to resist the discourses of neoliberalism and colonial power patterns entrenched in a postcolonial society like Pakistan.

Intensive English programme ecology: decolonizing ‘within the cracks’

AbstractIntensive English programmes (IEPs) are college and university units that provide international students with academic English instruction for the purpose of admission to the host institution. IEPs are colonial endeavours: they commodify and promote a language with a traceable colonial history that is reinforced through modern structures of knowledge distribution within higher education. Reliance on colonial architectures limits creativity and enforces hegemonic structures upon a field that tends to manifest more social justice orientations. This article argues that the position of IEPs allows them to contest their colonial nature through conscientious, incremental change. It considers the core activities of the IEP ecology (i.e. instruction, discipline, profession, business, and service), looking at how each facet may be utilized to enact a decolonial option. These interventions lend themselves to goals of decolonial projects by reducing bias and hegemony in how IEPs approach language and are positioned within the field and their host institution.

Re-envisioning professional development for English medium instruction: a decolonial option

ABSTRACT This article offers a decolonial reading of professional development for English-medium instruction (EMI). The article zooms into the context of Taiwan, where the promotion of EMI has intensified since the 2030 Bilingual Policy was introduced. It is unclear, however, what constitutes EMI professional development, and to what extent the conceptualizations of EMI in existing courses and programmes improve or exacerbate colonial divides. By drawing on literature that look into the intersections of language, education, and de/coloniality, this article explores what a decolonial lens can tell us about professional development for EMI, and how this lens may provide new ways to rethink and remake it. From a website analysis of 66 Taiwanese universities that have received government funding under the Bilingual Policy, 15 professional development courses and programmes were identified and closely examined. The findings highlight three themes related to language, pedagogy, and context. To better support EMI faculty, this article argues that contextual questions should be foregrounded as they afford alternative perspectives in understanding the construction and communication of knowledge in teaching. Specifically, directing the focus to context means to acknowledge existing multilingualisms in EMI settings, and to work towards opening up spaces for linguistic, pedagogic, and epistemic diversity.

Decolonising social norms change: from ‘grandmother-exclusionary bias’ to ‘grandmother-inclusive’ approaches

This paper contributes to decolonising global health and development by exposing how coloniality in knowledge production informs dominant approaches to shifting social norms underpinning female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) and child marriage. Major organisations in this field demonstrate systemic grandmother-exclusionary bias, namely sidelining grandmothers as change agents compared to adolescent girls, women of reproductive age, men and boys, and religious leaders. Grandmother-exclusionary bias stems from two assumptions: grandmothers do not influence FGM/C or child marriage; grandmothers only exert harmful influence and cannot change their views. These assumptions reflect Eurocentric constructions of modernity, and limited understanding of cultural contexts where seniority confers authority on female elders in relation to sexual and reproductive health (SRH). Grandmother-exclusionary bias goes against evidence that grandmothers wield authority over these practices; insights from meta-evaluations and systems/socioecological approaches that social norms change requires engaging people who wield authority over those norms; and proof that grandmothers can lead change if engaged respectfully. Instead, I present the ‘grandmother-inclusive’ Girls Holistic Development programme in Senegal, developed by the non-governmental organisation The Grandmother Project, as a decolonial option. It uses cultural renewal and participatory intergenerational dialogue to support grandmothers in shifting SRH-related norms and healing the damage Western modernity has inflicted on their communities.

Understanding Chinese international students in the U.S. in Times of the COVID-19 crisis: from a Chinese discourse studies perspective

ABSTRACT Using the Chinese Discourse Studies (CNDS) as a theoretical framework, this study seeks to challenge the cultural essentialism and uncritical roots of existing literature, with an aim to expose long-standing patterns of Western totalizing discourse in the field of international education research. This exploratory article explores how Chinese international students as cultural agents respond to the global pandemic and pandemic-related stereotypes. Through a critical analysis of 21 Chinese students’ narratives, this article identifies three culturally specific characteristics that pervade Chinese normative dialogues: (1) Chinese dialectics, (2) Chinese harmony, and (3) Chinese self-criticism. They are often employed to emphasize Chinese optimistic attitudes in times of crisis, avoidance of confrontation for harmonious communication, and moral character of self-introspection to conform to the social norm. This article offers new empirical evidence for the reconstruction of the Chinese paradigm of discourse studies and reveals the inappropriateness of Western scholarship for understanding non-Western linguistic and communicative events and practices. In sum, this article demonstrates that Chinese discourse studies can be a potential decolonial option to depart from deep-seated scholarship in Western intellectual supremacy and a visionary framework to advance multicultural discourses about international education against the backdrop of geopolitical tensions and anti-Asian racism.

Writing Toward a Decolonial Option: A Bilingual Student’s Multimodal Composing as a Site of Translingual Activism and Justice

Drawing on discussions of (de)coloniality and translanguaging, this article reports findings from a classroom-based ethnographic study, focusing on how a self-identified Latina bilingual student resists colonial constructs of language and literacies in her multimodal project. Based on an analysis of the student’s multimodal composition, other classroom writings, and a semistructured interview, I examine how she creatively and critically draws on her entire language and literacy repertoire in her multimodal composing. More specifically, I demonstrate how she draws from and builds on her lived experiences of linguistic injustices and racialization and transforms such experiences into embodied knowledge making and sharing through her multimodal composing. I argue that students’ engagement with multimodality can and should be cultivated, sustained, and amplified as a site of translingual activism and justice with decolonial potential, and I suggest, further, that such a shift requires a change in approaching, reading, and valuing students’ multimodal meaning making.

Decolonizing business English: exploring classroom ideologies

Abstract The inherent coloniality of ELT, as both driver and product of Anglophone political power, poses particular challenges for ELT teachers and learners looking to engage with decolonizing agendas. With only scant evidence of these agendas translating into ELT practice, I explored decolonial options, counter-hegemonic actions, with my undergraduate business English learners, adopting a form of practitioner research known as exploratory practice, and centring enquiry on our use of business news articles for a key course component. My learners revealed the potential of decolonial options, and the reflective, exploratory process exposed our language ideologies, with a vocal minority of students resisting any end to the established English-only policy. Suggestions are offered for fellow ELT teachers working in similar settings and who are interested in exploring their own use of authentic materials through a decolonizing lens.

Succession to Kingship in the Bapedi Ethnic Group – Cultural Intricacies of Post-conquest South Africa and the Impact of the Constitution

African kingdoms have existed for centuries predating colonialism and continue to be significant despite assertions that they are autocracies. These claims stem from the fact that kings do not ascend to power through Western democratic means such as elections. Democracy, however, exists in African kingdoms, because communities are afforded opportunities to participate in decision-making. Furthermore, African kingships are often accused of patriarchy since women are not always allowed to ascend to royal thrones. This critique of African kingships is rather hypocritical, because Europe is the bedrock of patriarchy, but this is ignored when accusations are levelled at African kingdoms. The biggest problem that kingdoms in South Africa experience today is that they do not enjoy the separate and independent identity that they enjoyed in the past since they are now subject to the Constitution as the supreme law of the land. This state of affairs is problematic as it denies South Africa a decolonial option and does not achieve restorative justice. The move to a constitutional democracy has led to considerable changes in South Africa, such as the dissipation of important roles that African-style courts used to fulfil, and the powers enjoyed by kings may also wane because of a lack of title to sovereignty over their kingdoms. This article discusses the right of succession to kingship in the light of the Bapedi Kingdom succession dispute, where the Commission on Traditional Leadership Disputes and Claims and courts recognised the descendants of Kgosi Sekhukhune as the rightful successors to the Bapedi throne. This ruling was important because the usurpation of the throne through bloodshed, although not common, was recognised as a legitimate way to usurp kingship.

Speculative fiction as “decolonial option”: Towards a “vulnerable reading” of Ali Mirdrekvandi’s No Heaven for Gunga Din (1965)

ABSTRACT Ali Mirdrekvandi’s No Heaven for Gunga Din (1965) is an Iranian novel in English, a speculative fiction written during the Allied occupation of Iran in World War II. In it, Mirdrekvandi, a migrant labourer who served a platoon of British and American soldiers stationed in Tehran, depicts the aftermath of World War III in the year 2084, when a regiment of Anglo American soldiers, followed by their servant Gunga Din, searches for Heaven across the Milky Way. Mirdrekvandi’s speculative vision, and deconstructive mode of anglophone writing, envision an alternative to the coloniality of being. Following Mignolo’s conception of the “decolonial option”, and Singh’s method of “vulnerable reading”, this article argues that Mirdrekvandi’s title-character assumes a self-reflective position of precarity – ultimately, in Hell – as a marginal vantage point through which to unlearn the language of post/colonial mastery in the imagined, as well as the real, world of the narrative.

About the Artist

The cover art for this issue is drawn from the 2021 Johannesburg exhibition conditions by Zambian/South African artist Nolan Oswald Dennis. Like much of Dennis's interdisciplinary practice, both of the featured pieces employ the model as a key form and method for reimagining the world. Together, model for theia and model for an endless column (suspended) are training objects for what the artist calls “a black consciousness of space,” which is to say the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization itself.Although Dennis's work ranges from diagrammatic drawings to digital essay games, it is unified by his enduring interest in the politics of space and time as seen from Africa, and specifically by the never-ending task of “making space by saying things differently, making time by seeing things otherwise” (Dennis n.d.). The model serves this project because of its special relationship to knowledge. Models are often overlooked in favor of what they represent, as if they have no qualities or properties of their own. However, being at once itself and something else, an artifact and a hypothesis (Dennis 2018), the model materializes the entanglement of matter and meaning, expressing the simultaneity of what is and how it is understood. Just as importantly, models hold open the gap between known, unknown, and not known yet where so much is still possible. Hence, training objects: the preparation for a use that may be unimaginable now.In conditions, Dennis revisits the globe as an idealized figure in Western cosmology that masquerades as a neutral description. He exposes that figure as a historically specific process of colonial world-making for which competing narratives and counter-diagrams can/do/must exist. If the goal of the globe is to present the planet as a seamless, enclosed, and knowable unity, Dennis's interventions carve out the space for it to become something else, without insisting in advance on what that something else might be. By transforming the planet's surface and altering its shape through distortion and multiplication, the artist thus enacts a deep commitment to what Walter Mignolo describes as decolonial options, or coexisting universes of meaning, over any single universal truth.This is a vision of a world in which, as the Zapatistas put it, many worlds might fit (Dennis 2018).Nolan Oswald Dennis was born in Lusaka, Zambia, and lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. He holds a bachelor's degree in architecture from the University of the Witwatersrand and a master of science in art, culture, and technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With Tabita Rezaire and Bogosi Sekhukhuni, he is a founding member of the decolonial healing agency NTU, dedicated to exploring the spiritual futures of technology from the vantage point of African knowledge systems. Dennis is currently artist in residence at the Delfina Foundation in London.

Going Back to the Roots

Given growing human influence on the earth system's functioning, caring for nature has never been this critical. However, whether for economic interests or ‘wilderness’ preservation, attempts to save nature have been grounded on a Western scientific philosophy of separating it from people's ways of living, especially through ‘protected areas'. Under the banner ‘convivial conservation', which advocates socio-ecological justice and structural transformations in the global economic system, an alternative idea called ‘promoted areas’ has been proposed, advocating for conservation which promotes nature for, to, and by humans. Here, we argue that ‘promoted areas’ are best fitted with decolonial thinking in conservation science and practice. In southern Africa, one available ‘decolonial option’ is Ubuntu philosophy, which is anchored on the ethical principle of promoting life through mutual caring and sharing between and among humans and nonhumans. Ubuntu disengages from western ways of knowing about human–environment interactions, as it is predicated on promoting the many links between humans and nonhumans. From this, we argue that instituted through Ubuntu, ‘promoted areas’ re-initiate a harmony between human beings and physical nature, as practices of individualistic, excessive extractions of nonhuman nature are discouraged, and human–nonhuman relationships based on respect, solidarity, and collaboration are celebrated.