Decolonial Thinkers Research Articles

Disavowing history

If the secession of formerly colonized countries from large imperial units is a story of political hope, the central actors in Quinn Slobodian’s story perceive the opportunities provided by the proliferation of new jurisdictions following decolonization very differently. According to the “market radicals” of the late 20th and 21st centuries, the break-up of empire is not a story of the potential for the democratization of politics and history-writing. Their ideas do however offer critiques of modernity. In this commentary, I convene critics of modernity – anticolonial leaders, historians of decolonization and the aftermath of empire, Indigenous and tribal peoples and their historians, and decolonial thinkers – in conversation with the capitalist adventurers of Slobodian’s tale, via an exploration of the limits and possibilities of history-writing and the politics of historicist discourse.

Decolonially speaking, sensing, and thinking: Racialized tuition-based family therapists learning without teaching.

We address the ethical implications of training and becoming family therapists in the United States when considering the colonial control and management of knowledge by the westernized institutionalized university. We do so decolonially. Through the work of decolonial thinkers, doers, and sensers, we center our discussion on the heteropatriarchal Eurocentric institutionalization of knowledge linked to the development and sustainability of structures of family therapy training through racialization and monetization. We discuss a decolonial understanding of race in relation to the liberalized politics of diversity, equity, and inclusion and upward mobility of family therapy education. Most importantly, we reflect upon the possibilities of reexistence within family therapy, fissuring the colonial structures of training tuition-based family therapists. We locate those possibilities through practices of crack-making, epistemic insurgence, and mischief. Our discussions and reflections are developed throughout by thinking, sensing, and speaking decolonially, storying our racialized incarnated lives from the saberes, ज्ञान, rhythms, vapors, or tastes of our communities, displaced by the European cannon. We embrace a decolonial pedagogy of learning without teaching, positioning family therapy education as a site for sociopolitical struggle and action toward possibilities of reexistence.

Brazilian-Style Feminicide: Memorialistic Narratives as a Method in Colonial Heritage Data Collection

This paper presents the result of partial research that investigates how the colonial heritages present in Brazilian History and their structural reverberations impact the region context of feminicide in the State of Minas Gerais, outlining a Brazilian reality. Considering the existence of concrete difficulties to hear women who suffer feminicide attempts, based on the memorialistic narratives of women who suffered feminicide attempts, such as the lack of security due to death threats to which they are subjected, this sample counts with a number of fifteen women heard in the city of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil, appointed by a non-governmental organization that operates in the region, on the combat gender violence. As a data collection technique, it has been chosen the memorialistics narratives because they allow us a more careful way to approach traumatic scenes. In this article, specific, it was analyzed the cases of four of these women with the aim of demonstrate, through the interface between Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis and decolonial thinkers, that studies the Afro-Latin American feminism, how violence against these women reveals in their bodies (sometimes, Black) the emergence of a territory to be invade, explored, dominated, and annihilated. It is expected to demonstrate, in the cases presented and through the chosen methodology, the effects of the State´s transgeneratinality and impunity on the naturalization of violence and domination.

Toward an African Critical Orientation

ABSTRACT This essay proposes an African orientation to critical work. We begin by locating the need for postcolonial indigenous African bases for critical interventions in the idea of epistemic freedom articulated by African decolonial thinkers along with the postcolonial critique of Frankfurt School and Chicago circle critical theory. Next, we develop a basis for critical interventions in Bantu cosmology by drawing on Omedi Ochieng’s groundwork thesis and applied sociolinguistics. That basis, we argue, prioritizes relatedness and community wellbeing, and is therefore broader and distinct from the narrow focus on power and domination as they relate to individual subject envisioned in liberalism. We illustrate the heuristic potential of the African critical orientation for critical intercultural and critical rhetorical work by discussing the African Medical and Research Foundation’s (AMREF) Mukogodo community organizational development initiative and the #Rhodesmustfall protests of 2015–2016.

Revisiting political pragmatism and education

By placing John Dewey between John Rawls and Richard Bernstein, I argue for a socialist reading of Dewey’s takes on liberal democracy that moves away both from conservative readings of Dewey of those who claim that his democratic liberalism actually belongs to right-wing or center views, and from left-wing, communitarians who dismiss such views as irrelevant for socialist and radical variants of liberal democracy. Overall, it can be shown that Rawls and Dewey’s different takes on political liberalism could be ultimately reconciled, given their similar takes on democracy, pluralism, and the person. Rawls’ rehabilitation of Kant can itself be shown to be closely related to his reading of Dewey. Furthermore, as Bernstein argues, such a renewal of Dewey’s social and political philosophy in Rawls’s political constructivism and reflective equilibrium was decisive for the great pragmatist turn observed in the second, third, and fourth generations of critical theory, not only in the so-called Frankfurt School (especially Habermas, Honneth, Forst) but also in feminist and decolonial thinkers such as Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Rahel Jaeggi, and Amy Allen. Dewey’s pragmatist turn in political philosophy allows thus for a dynamic, robust correlation between radical democracy and public education, which could be implemented in emerging democracies like Brazil.

Stiftung dekolonisiert: Eine Lektüre von Merleau-Pontys Vorlesungen über Institution

Abstract This paper offers a close reading of Merleau-Ponty’s Institution Course Notes to reflect on the history of colonisation as both an event and a structure. On the one hand, colonial invasion is a singular cataclysmic event; on the other hand, it establishes legal, social, economic and psychic structures that seem increasingly inevitable the more they are repeated. Likewise, decolonisation may require a singular liberatory event, but it also calls for the (re)establishment of alternative traditions that issue a different “call to follow.” A critical interpretation of Merleau-Ponty in conversation with abolitionist and decolonial thinkers helps to clarify the temporal and political relation between event and structure, building bridges between phenomenology and radical politics.

‘The whitest guy in the room’: thoughts on decolonization and paideia in the South African university

ABSTRACT This paper will reflect on the possibility of epistemic decolonization, particularly in terms of curriculum, as a transformative educational process in the context of the South African university, and with respect to my own positionality. The argument will centre around two difficult interdependent positions. On the one hand I will argue for the university’s task as transformational, even offering, via Cornel West, the ‘salvific’ possibility that knowledge offers those who seek it. To develop this claim, I will draw on and develop the notion of paideia though the work of Plato and Heidegger. On the other hand, within the postcolonial African university, the question of decolonization in the tertiary space cannot be elided, particularly since the 2015 #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements. The university is a powerful colonial relic, and it can be used to reinforce and perpetuate epistemic violence through unreflective or unconscious pedagogical and curriculum decisions. Here I draw on decolonial thinkers such as Santos, Mignolo, Maldonado-Torres, and Mbembe: I argue for a reckoning with the forces of coloniality, and advocate for epistemic justice and criticality, as part of the decolonizing project. In conclusion, working with ideas from Cornel West, I argue to reconcile paideia, as the ‘turning of the soul’, with the decolonizing African university.

Disturbing a Discipline: Towards Pluriversal Peace and Conflict Studies

ABSTRACT This article examines the implications of race critical and decolonial theories for peace and conflict studies. It critiques dominant epistemological frames in the field that overlook coloniality and racial capitalist violence while emphasizing human rights and universalism. The detachment of human rights from racial history is explored to reveal the coloniality of peace. The concept of ‘disturbing the disciplinary peace' is introduced, drawing on Sara Ahmed's figure of the ‘feminist killjoy’, to disrupt Western liberal peace through racial justice movements. Insights from decolonial thinkers and Indigenous resistance in Aotearoa are explored, challenging liberal human rights and offering prospects for pluriversal peace.

Decolonial Metatextualities: Strategies of Resistance in Three Contemporary Novels of Oceania

Decolonial thinkers have stressed that to decolonise is not to reject the colonial legacy, but to deal with it, and to centre First Nations’ perspectives in its critique and in decolonising knowledge. As a critical relationship of a text – with itself, other texts, literature, and culture – metatextuality is a literary device operationalized in contemporary novels to resist persisting colonial powers. In this paper, we present three works of fiction by Indigenous writers of Oceania, and analyse their political use of metatextuality: L’île des rêves écrasés (Island of Shattered Dreams), by Tahitian author Chantal Spitz (1991); The Yield, by Aboriginal Wiradjuri novelist Tara June Winch (2019); and After Story, by Aboriginal Eualeyai/Kamillaroi writer Larissa Behrendt (2021). Centred on First Nations’ characters from Tahiti and Australia, these novels expose how they are racialised, marginalised, and constructed as inferior in postcolonising societies; and how, at the same time, these Indigenous characters are legitimate knowers and storytellers, reflecting on Western literature (often ironically), on their own marginality, and on their ancestral knowledges and languages. Borrowing from decolonial theorists Tlostanova and Mignolo’s (2012) ‘border thinking’, we propose that these novels deploy a ‘writing from the border’.

The Cannibal’s Antidote For Resentment: Diffracting Ressentiment Through Decolonial Thought

The purpose of this essay is to diffract ressentiment through decolonial theory. I would like to see what sort of light this sheds on the psychological undercurrents that impose barriers on colonial and decolonial thought, as well as on the conceptual dynamism of ressentiment. This essay is split into two different experiments in thought. The first will be to diffract ressentiment through the works of Gloria Anzaldúa, Édouard Glissant, and Gilles Deleuze. To this end, I will begin by providing an analysis of ressentiment as developed by Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morals and then supplement this with Deleuze’s analysis of ressentiment in Nietzsche & Philosophy. I will create a bridge with decolonial thought by interpreting Anzaldúa’s concept of the nopal de castilla and mestiza consciousness through the interpretive lens of ressentiment to show the affinity that exists between the work of Anzaldúa and Nietzsche. I will finish the first experiment by looking at ressentiment through some of the concepts Glissant offers us in the Poetics of Relation. In particular, I will argue that ressentiment resists the creolization of identity and culture, and that Glissant’s demand for the right to opacity for all is the sign of a thinking that has overcome ressentiment. The second experiment is to diffract ressentiment through Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics, beginning with an analysis of the most relevant points of that text for our discussion then putting our diffracted version of ressentiment in conversation with Amerindian perspectivism. However, this does not mean that I am aiming at a synthesis of ressentiment with Amerindian perspectivism. Rather, in the spirit of the Brazilian author’s post-structural anthropology, this essay sees only a disjunctive synthesis of the two: a ressentiment-becoming-Amerindian perspectivism and an Amerindian perspectivism-becoming-ressentiment (we will focus on developing the former). I hope that, by the end of this experiment, we may have a richer conceptual understanding of ressentiment by offering this concept an image of itself that only our decolonial thinkers and an Amerindian perspective can reveal.

We have to talk about whiteness: widening the decolonial gates*

ABSTRACT Recently, the Latin American decolonial perspective has been receiving growing attention, not only in academia, but also in other social, political, and cultural spaces, including in Brazil. Among other debates, decolonial thinkers have brought to light the continuity of coloniality in different dimensions (particularly, even if not only) of Latin American realities, long after the territorial colonization was over. Therefore, by highlighting, debating, and theorizing on the colonialities of power, knowledge and being from a decolonial perspective, scholars have been unmasking the vast, violent, and oppressive consequences of Western, Eurocentric, modern, colonial, capitalist, racist and patriarchal paradigms, which still (even if with adaptations) dominate our multiple realities. Race is at the center of the continuity of coloniality and colonial heritage, imposing ontological and epistemological hierarchies that have caused the never-ending racialization, marginalization and suffering of most Latin Americans for centuries. Still, some debates and dimensions related to race could (and, as I will argue, should) be further explored within the decolonial perspective. In this paper, I would like to present whiteness studies and scholars as potential contributors to these debates in Latin America, further widening the decolonial gates, allowing us to better comprehend and critically analyze the many forms of continued coloniality and their violent, oppressive, and terrible consequences.

:Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching

:<i>Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching</i>

Diversifying or Decolonising: How Do We Teach Black History?

ABSTRACT The teaching of Black history in England is not new. Beginning with the Supplementary School movement in the late 1960s, parents, teachers, and politicians have shaped how Black history is taught to school-aged children. However, 2020 ignited a new level of interest in how much Black history is taught in British schools and what we should be aiming for: a diversification or ‘decolonisation’ of the curriculum? The article argues that, despite this increased interest, there is still much progress to be made. Bringing experience from teaching in schools into conversation with Black and decolonial thinkers, I offer a potential way forward for the teaching of Black history, even in this fraught political landscape. By weaving Black history throughout the school curriculum, recognising the power of stories but not shying away for complex concepts such as race and empire, we can move closer to teaching the Black history that the nation's children deserve.

The enduring effects of colonialism on education: three praxes for decolonizing educational leadership

ABSTRACT After the resurgence of recent movements such as Why is my curriculum so White, Rhodes must fall and Black lives matter, educational decolonization has been a focus of scholarly discussion, but it is not clear from where decolonization of education should start and who should start it. Since educational policies have largely ignored the history of colonialism and racism, educational leaders, who are at the forefront in implementing them, are confronted with public desire expressed through decolonization movements and workplace realities they face in day-to-day basis. In this conceptual paper, drawing on some of the original decolonial thinkers mainly Fanon, Said and Mignolo, I conceptualize that political-economy, racial and epistemic dimensions of colonialism have continuously guided education system of the global South, which refers not only the developing countries but also the marginalized communities of the developed countries. By presenting a conceptual model, I discuss that educational leaders can contribute to the decolonization movement by using three leadership praxes: critical, antiracist and cosmopolitan.

“Emancipatory Circuits of Knowledge” for Urban Equality: Experiences From Havana, Freetown, and Asia

Feminist, Southern, and decolonial thinkers have long argued that epistemological questions about how knowledge is produced and whose knowledge is valued and actioned are crucial in addressing inequalities, and a key challenge for planning. This collaborative article interrogates how knowledge is mobilised in urban planning and practice, discussing three experiences which have actively centred often-excluded voices, as a way of disrupting knowledge hierarchies in planning. We term these “emancipatory circuits of knowledge”—processes whereby diverse, situated, and marginalised forms of knowledge are co-produced and mobilised across urban research and planning, to address inequalities. We discuss experiences from the Technological University José Antonio Echeverría (CUJAE), a university in Havana, Cuba, that privileges a fluid and collaborative understanding of universities as social actors; the Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre, a research institute in the city of Freetown, which curates collective and inclusive spaces for community action planning, to challenge the legacies of colonial-era planning; and the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights, a regional network across Asia, which facilitates processes of exchange and co-learning which are highly strategic and situated in context, to advance community-led development. Shared across these “emancipatory circuits” are three “sites of impact” through which these partners have generated changes: encouraging inclusive policy and planning outcomes; shifting the planning praxis of authorities, bureaucrats, and researchers; and nurturing collective trajectories through building solidarities. Examining these three sites and their challenges, we query how urban knowledge is produced and translated towards epistemic justice, examining the tensions and the possibilities for building pathways to urban equality.&lt;p&gt;Shared across these ‘emancipatory circuits’ are three layered ‘sites of impact’ through which these partners have generated changes: encouraging inclusive policy and planning outcomes; shifting the planning praxis of authorities, bureaucrats and researchers; and nurturing collective trajectories through processes of building solidarities. Examining these three sites and their challenges, we query the ways in which urban knowledge is produced and translated towards epistemic justice –examining the tensions and the possibilities for building pathways to urban equality.&lt;/p&gt;

Globalisation and the challenge of coloniality of power

ABSTRACT This article argues that coloniality of power poses a challenge for globalisation as a component of modernity. The challenge necessitates a programme of decoloniality for globalisation. The inherent potential of globalisation to elevate one culture as dominant and to residualise the rest is sufficient to warrant its problematisation despite its positive features. A review of the literature shows that some decolonial thinkers present globalisation as one of the phenomena associated with the coloniality of power. Indeed, as a form of global cultural hegemony, globalisation elevates one culture as an absolute while marginalising others. At the same time, globalisation has an inherent capacity to bring cultures into a conversation; potentially creating a less lopsided and more accommodating world. This article will discuss how the coloniality of power constitutes a problem for this more positive role for globalisation, and how this might be remedied.

Criticism on the Border and the Decolonization of Knowledge

AbstractStructures of hierarchy and domination are never represented in transborder literature as singular effects of social conditions. Instead, they arise from multiple historical factors. Unlike writings that assume a racial binary, literature on the border does not posit one kind of domination and hierarchy as barriers to creating a just, democratic society. In recent literary works from the transborder regions, the yearning for justice within the layered social systems on the border is central, even while its attainment through social transformation remains an attenuated hope. This essay outlines a paradigm for studying the relations between global and local areas of study, such as those in the transborder regions of the Americas. Invoking models for literary critical work in a globally bordered form, it posits the need for a larger view based on how knowledge is generated and human resources used, while acknowledging the reservoir of knowledge that exists beyond Europe and the US in the Global South. The function of the rebordered criticism described here is to respond to issues raised by African philosopher Achille Mbembe, Latin American sociologist Enrique Dussel and other decolonial thinkers concerning different ways of conceiving the achievement of an antiracist and socially just future.In the face of [the] compromised hopefulness [for justice on the border], what kind of criticism could best [respond to and] … help enact projects of social change?

Epistemological resistances and the search for alternatives to modernity in intellectual history

The violence of modernity has led to epistemological resistances around the world and the search for alternative ways of reconstructing philosophy. Among the Frankfurt School and early Kyoto School thinkers, for instance, the problem of modernity is framed as an excess of objective rationality, but among the decolonial thinkers of Latin America, the problem is conceptualized as the very myth of modernity itself that has legitimized the colonization and exclusion of non-Europeans. In the search for alternatives modernities, the Kyoto School and Latin American philosophy agree to a vision of inter-civilizational dialogue, which amounts to an engagement of alterity or differences, whereas with the Frankfurt School, albeit struggles to find consensus on how to overcome modernity, aims to merely preclude the problem of reproducing the impulses toward the domination of oneself and others. Nonetheless, all these paradigms have a theoretical point of convergence: that is, since we are all participants of modernity, we are both victims and executioners of its violence, and thus compelled to negate it. This article will discuss how the violence of modernity is experienced, theorized, and then challenged around different continents in order to make visible not just how the violence of modernity is reproduced in different ways but to force ourselves to engage in self-critique in the pursuit to make explicit our own assumptions that repeats the violence of modernity.

Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of Liberation

To highlight the significance of Freire’s pedagogy, this article draws from the work of decolonial thinkers in Latin American and Enrique Dussel’s philosophy in order to understand Freire’s pedagogy of liberation. Two concepts in Freire’s work, conscientização and praxis, are key to understanding how awakening the consciousness of teachers and learners can empower them in transforming an unjust world. For Freire, the collaboration between teachers and learners is essential to the self-transformation of leaners for their own liberation. This innovative and transformative pedagogy inspired literacy campaigns and social justice movements around the globe and constitutes Freire's legacy.

à prova de balas? necroinfâncias cariocas, violência de estado e filosofias da rua

This essay aims to reflect on the impacts of state violence upon black lives and childhoods. In the wanderings through the city of Rio de Janeiro and in the theoretical trails proposed by antiracist and decolonial thinkers, we discuss the impacts and challenges of racism in the formative and existential itineraries of racialized bodies, crossed by the public necropolitics that provides the premises of the pedagogical government of peripheral childhoods and adolescences in large Brazilian cities. From the bumping into M., 11 years old, who sells chewing gum in the surroundings of a train station in Rio de Janeiro, we problematize the vulnerabilities produced and the systematic violations of the black children’s human rights, which hinder racial justice in the country, in face of the permanent conversion of differences into inferiorized inequalities. The violence of this injustice, according to the argument developed in the text, culminates in the reinforcement of the vilification and naturalization of racial inequalities against populations historically inferiorized by the colonial wrath. It also points to the need to think about black childhoods from the territory, in order to problematize inequities and disparities that persist. We conclude, finally, that the capture and nullification of black childhoods is a State project, guided by criminalizing and stereotyping practices of subjectivation which brutalize bodies and dehumanize black lives.