Project Of Decolonization Research Articles

Decolonial research methodology: an assessment of the challenge to established practice

ABSTRACT The decolonization project challenges the hegemony of Western knowledge and colonial ways of thinking. This article explores this challenge specifically in relation to research methodology. It notes how decolonization focuses on exposing the inappropriate use of positivistic/modernist/universalist approaches by Western researchers, and how it proposes alternative approaches that better protect the interests of indigenous and ‘Other’ minority groups. These alternative approaches are generally based on constructivist principles, and typically involve the use of qualitative methods such as participatory action research within a transformational paradigm. The degree to which these represent a new and/or distinct challenge to Western research methodology is discussed noting, in particular, the challenge posed by research involving Indigenous communities.

Decolonizing Regional Politics in Oceania: Re-examining the Historical Record

ABSTRACT Contemporary scholarship on the decolonization of regional organizations in Oceania has emphasized the agency of Indigenous leaders and the extent to which they led the charge to both decolonize the South Pacific Commission and to set up a new regional organization, namely, the South Pacific Forum, in which political issues could freely be discussed. In doing so, there has been a tendency to treat the colonial powers as a homogeneous group all reading from the same imperial script while Pacific Island leaders are often portrayed as a largely unified ensemble of players whose own agendas naturally harmonized around the project of decolonization. In re-examining the historical record, this article highlights the diversity of approaches evinced by actors on the regional stage leading up to the formation of the South Pacific Forum in 1971, showing that there are many more nuances to the story.

Actualizing decolonization: a case for anticolonizing and Indigenizing the curriculum

Abstract Calls to decolonize education systems cannot be removed from broader social struggles. Scholars have engaged in theoretical discussions on what decolonization entails, emphasizing the need for transforming thoughts, beliefs, and practices. However, the lack of sustained engagement and widespread resistance to decolonizing the curriculum remain evident, underscoring the urgency to envision new futures and explore relationalities between educators and students. In this article, we delve into the evolving terminologies surrounding decolonization, anticolonization, and Indigenization, emphasizing their pivotal roles in the broader project of educational decolonization. We argue that a reassertion of Indigenous resistance and futurity in higher education forms the cornerstone of this transformative process. Through an examination and understanding of these terminologies, we aim to contribute to the ongoing dialogue surrounding educational decolonization and envision inclusive, equitable, and anticolonial learning environments that centre on Indigenous knowledge and perspectives.

Can theorising epistemic injustice help us decolonise?

ABSTRACT The paper argues that some tools from the epistemic injustice literature can be fruitfully applied to the debate on epistemic decolonisation. The first step for such a project is to defuse recent misgivings about the liberatory potential of epistemic injustice scholarship. I group these misgivings under the slogan ‘Epistemic injustice is white-people stuff’, or ‘the WPS challenge’, for short, and use them to set desiderata for good theorising with epistemic injustice tools. I then look at three such tools – epistemic oppression, white ignorance, and contributory injustice – and argue that they advance theorising epistemic decolonisation while meeting the three desiderata. If the argument works, its implications for the topic of this special issue are that we don’t need to decolonise epistemic injustice; we can instead use the tools of the epistemic injustice literature to advance the decolonisation project.

Decolonization in South African universities: storytelling as subversion and reclamation

Abstract Underscoring recurrent calls for the decolonization of university curricula in South Africa are underexplored presumptions that by only disrupting theoretical content, universities might release themselves from a colonialist grasp, that continues to dominate and distort higher education discourse. While it might be the case that certain theories hold enormous authoritative, ‘truthful’ sway, as propagated through Western interpretations and norms, there are inherent problems in exclusively approaching the decolonization project as a content-based hurdle, removed from the subjectivities of students’ social, lived, and learning realities. The argument advanced in this article is that until the epistemic harm of colonialism and apartheid are afforded careful recognition and attention—as in focusing on the lived experiences, realities, and stories of individuals—the hard work of delegitimizing coloniality, and its implicit structures of hegemonies and binaries cannot unfold. In addressing these harms, I commence by describing some of the contexts of epistemic harm, promulgated through colonialism and apartheid. This is followed by a consideration of decolonization, both as theory and practice-within-context. Here, I also foreground the #Rhodesmustfall campaign, as a particular moment of painful clarity about why decolonization, as well as transformation, has faltered in higher education in South Africa. In the second half, I focus on the necessity of prioritizing storytelling as a deep manifestation of decolonization. Stories, I maintain, provide access into unknown lives, and can subvert the invisible, normative framings, which dictate how we live in this world. As a manifestation of decolonization, students’ stories hold profound implications for the recognition and affirmation of pluralist identities, histories, knowledge, values, and world-views.

On Anti-colonial Time: Encountering Archival Traces in a Haunted Present

This article explores anticolonial memory and anticolonial archiving as entry points into broader questions of time, temporality, and the politics of the present. Thinking with Egypt's project of decolonization in the mid-twentieth century, it demonstrates the varying ways in which anticolonial pasts express themselves in the present, and what this might suggest about the future. It thinks through two forms of anticolonial memory: one fleeting and fragmented, the other institutionalized and material, and asks how these different forms of memory constitute different types of anticolonial archives. Both forms of memory and practices of archiving appear in the present, albeit in vastly differing ways. The first form is a series of vignettes around Gamal Abdel Nasser and Patrice Lumumba, and the connections between them, their families, and anticolonial Egypt and anticolonial Congo during the 1950s and 1960s. The second form is the practice of economic nationalization that was a central pillar of Nasser's project in Egypt throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Through these two forms, the article demonstrates both the urgency of the past and the present in Egypt, as well as the ways in which the crisis of the anticolonial past has structured the crisis of the postcolonial present.

Miss Chief and the Art of Decolonial Tease

This discussion posits that the work of the Cree artist Kent Monkman offers a unique and potent contribution to the project of decolonisation rooted in an Indigenised context. Focusing on the parodic, art historical interventions of his artistic alter ego Miss Chief, it explores his art in view of ‘transmotion’, a crucial but often overlooked aspect of postindian tricksterism outlined by the Anishinaabe author Gerald Vizenor, as well as the postindian approach to translation. His approach will be considered against the foil of the project of decolonising proposed by the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, framed in terms of a post-abyssal ecology of knowledges, with a focus on the notion of intercultural translation and the motion of the swerve he proposes. The discussion concludes by positing the Vizenorian figure of the mixedblood, urban earthdiver as figurehead for a decolonial era of the future, supplanting the urban flâneur of modernity.

On epistemic freedom and epistemic injustice

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between epistemic freedom, and epistemic injustice and epistemic oppression. I situate epistemic freedom within the larger project of epistemic decolonisation and argue that epistemic freedom is central to both its positive and negative programme. Through exploring the intersections of the notion of epistemic freedom and the scholarship on epistemic injustice and oppression, I argue that one can think of epistemic injustices and oppression as infringements on epistemic freedom. I identify shared themes between the theorisation of epistemic freedom and the literature on epistemic injustice and epistemic oppression, including silencing, active ignorance, and epistemic exploitation. I briefly explore each of these themes, identifying both intersections and divergences. Lastly, I draw on the literature on epistemic injustice and oppression to sharpen Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s (2018. Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization. London: Routledge) general conception of epistemic freedom and develop a tripartite structure for what substantial epistemic freedom entails. I argue that being epistemically free entails being able to choose one’s epistemic endeavours, having the means to pursue them, as well as being able to meaningfully partake in the shared endeavours of the epistemic communities that one belongs to.

Decolonial Dilemmas: The Deception of a “Global Knowledge Commonwealth” and the Tragedian Entrapment of an African Scholar

There are multiple initiatives and efforts to grant African scholars “global visibility” – as part of the decolonisation agenda. These efforts have included aiding and enabling African scholars to publish in journals of international renown, speaking or curating courses at Ivy League universities, and being experts on issues about Africa in international media. Other efforts include collaborations and citations in discourses about Africa. While these efforts and opportunities are intellectually and practically irresistible to a scholar from the subaltern world – as are to those offering and facilitating them – they are actually counterproductive to a decolonisation project. The positive energy they generate obscures the histories and power dynamics that govern so-called global spaces and audiences of knowledge production. Problematically presented as benign and benevolent spaces for participation in the “global knowledge commonwealth,” from which mutual understanding grows, and racism and exploitation could be ended, global spaces/audiences, rather grow out, and are core parts of the revolving doors and constantly mutating infrastructures of colonialist hegemony and control.

Radical Left Culture and Heritage, the Politics of Preservation and Memorialisation, and the Promise of the Metaverse

Radical left culture and heritage—understood as incarnations of leftist artefacts and praxis both past and present—have taken risks in challenging hegemonic machinations often when it is unpopular to do so. To the ire of hegemons, leftist projects across the globe have marshalled places, spaces, and technologies into sites of empowerment and struggle utilising ‘small’ and ‘big’ acts of resistance and critical interventions to champion social justice—sometimes successfully, and at other times, less so. However, the preservation of projects’ artefacts, praxis, and memory work has been anything but straightforward, owing primarily to institutional politics and infrastructural and resourcing issues. Taking The Freedom Archives (FA) as a case study, this article explores how FA is preserving the distinctive political education programme that underpinned the iconic liberation struggle in Guinea-Bissau that kickstarted the seismic, global decolonisation project in the late 1950s. The article argues that FA could substantially enhance the preservation and memorialisation of that programme in the Metaverse—if this materialises as a fully open, interoperable, and highly immersive space (1) unfettered by hegemonic regulation, and (2) characterised by ‘strategic witnessing’, ‘radical recordkeeping’, and user agency. In doing so, FA would serve as an exemplar for leftist projects globally.

Decolonization Projects

Decolonization Projects

Intellectual decolonisation and the danger of epistemic closure: the need for a critical decolonial theory

ABSTRACT This paper draws from the paradigm of Critical Theory (CT) and Decolonial Theory to engage in an introductory discussion on the need for a new methodological paradigm, namely a Critical Decolonial Theory. This is put forward in order to both argue for the imperative of introducing multiple narratives to the philosophical practice of contemporary social critique in South Africa, as well as to provide a cautionary note relating to how the decolonisation narrative itself could become a determinative ideology if it engages in what Lewis Gordon terms “epistemic closure.” While operating from within the framework and ideals of traditional CT and Amy Allen’s subsequent contribution to decolonising CT, we draw specifically from black practitioners of this critical philosophical tradition, namely Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Frantz Fanon, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Paulin Hountondji, and Achille Mbembe, in order to localise and ground our discussion of the need to problematise (i.e., consider both vindicatory and subversive aspects of) the decolonisation project.

Occupied Joy: The Politics of Skateboarding in Palestine

Abstract: The tangible project of decolonization requires revolutionary hope to sustain it. Quite often, studies surrounding oppressed populations largely tend to theorize from a point of death, contributing to a culture of hopelessness and pessimism. This essay explores what happens when we theorize from a point of life and joy, specifically theorizing Palestinian resistance and place-claiming through the embodied sport of skateboarding—not in hopes of erasing death, but in hopes of providing a fuller view, and looking for ruptures wherein quotidian life seeps through coloniality as a form of resistance itself. Thinking through skateboarding as a subculture, I analyze a nonprofit organization, SkatePal and its media presence, using my theory and analytic: occupied joy. I argue that the skate scene in Palestine functions as a site of quotidian anticolonial and anti-imperialist resistance through reclaiming freedom of movement, resisting multiple effects of military occupation, and unsettling trauma spectacle through the play and joy associated with the immediate act of skating. In theorizing from life and bearing witness to the sense of agency that skateboarding restores in Palestinian youth, there is hope that the theory of occupied joy can do the same for other oppressed peoples, bringing us all tangibly closer to a more liberated world.

A Critique of Wiredu’s Project of Conceptual Decolonization of African Philosophy

Abstract To liberate African philosophy from the remnants of the colonial style of thought, Kwesi Wiredu promotes the idea of the conceptual decolonization of African philosophy. He argues that, to accomplish this project, African philosophers must theorize in African vernaculars. This article attempts to show that the project of the conceptual decolonization of African philosophy by recourse to theorizing in African vernaculars is challenging. It examines a particular strategy that Wiredu deploys in “Conceptual Decolonization as an Imperative in Contemporary African Philosophy,” in which he hopes to demonstrate that the Akan conception of mind is superior to the Cartesian conception of mind. It demonstrates that Wiredu’s attempt to show the superiority of the Akan conception of mind is unsuccessful and that his project of conceptual decolonization fails. Nevertheless, it concludes that Wiredu’s conceptual decolonization project still shows promise even in light of our criticisms.

African identity and curriculum transformation at universities in South Africa

This paper argues for the notion of African identity to be placed at the centre of creating a new African university as part of the education decolonisation project. Defining the African university does not mean a total negation of Western ideas and epistemologies, but rather the foregrounding of African identity, traditions and culture. The paper recognises that Africa is part of a global economy, hence African university curricula must (among other phenomena) be responsive to the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), pandemics and climate change. Drawing on recent African identity-driven curriculum transformation developments at four South African universities, the paper recognises differences in institutional initiatives, some with detailed curriculum transformation plans and others with no clear plans. Based on a literature review and document analysis methods, the results suggest that progress in curriculum transformation is mediated by context and history, as well as differences in institutional commitment to the decolonisation education project. The authors suggest that – with support from government and policymakers – a clear and detailed programme of curriculum transformation is needed, underpinned by a moral imperative to foreground African identity in the transition to the new African university.

Decolonisation, knowledge construction, and legitimation at African universities in the 21st century: Relevance of François Lyotard

The Fallist movement in South Africa, among other points, called into question the relevance of maintaining aspects of colonial heritage, especially as they relate to knowledge construction at South African higher education institutions. The issues of transformation and knowledge decolonisation also came into the limelight with some students calling for the decolonisation/Africanisation of science as a system of knowledge, hence #ScienceMustFall. These issues can be placed in the wider context of the argument that African centres of learning are founded on colonial epistemologies and forms of education. It is notably a reality that impedes the project of proper transformation and decolonisation at African centres of learning. Utilising desktop methods, this article engages the debate on knowledge decolonisation at African universities in the 21st century. Based on Francois Lyotard's postmodern views, the article theorises a possible philosophical grounding for knowledge decolonisation. It argues for openness to subjectivity in the enterprise of knowledge construction, and for the integration and mainstreaming of African knowledge systems at African universities.

“Internal Frontiers”: Whiteness, Intimacy, and the Expatriate Home in Britain's African Colonies during the Postwar Period

AbstractUsing archival oral history interviews with ex-colonial officers from the Scottish Decolonisation Project and the British Empire and Commonwealth Collection, this article examines the intimate lives and domestic spaces of white expatriates in Britain's African colonies during the postwar period, often described as the “people's empire.” In doing so, it seeks to better understand the socio-historical construction of imperial whiteness. It argues that the boundaries of the expatriate home acted as the “internal frontiers” of whiteness, insofar as racial difference was constructed through habitual bodily and domestic discipline concerning cleanliness, child-rearing, social interactions, and sex, which was monitored and enforced within expatriate social circles. Oral testimonies from white expatriates who lived and worked in colonial Africa highlight the contradictory nature of the discursive construction of whiteness, as both culturally distant from the African peoples over which it claimed racial superiority and dependent on operations of care and nurture provided by indigenous Africans. This article explores the ways in which Africans forged relationships with white expatriates as servants, lovers, and friends in order to examine how these ambivalent intimacies coexisted with, and were constitutive of, unequal racial hierarchies.

Working Through the Politics of Indigeneity: Decolonising Psychology by Way of a Dialectical Approach

Our particular concern here is with how decolonising psychology is interpreted (or misinterpreted) as well as its implications for making our discipline a truly liberating enterprise. We make three related arguments here: first, colonialism was a joint project between the colonisers and the colonised instead of being a one-way imposition of the worldviews of just the colonisers. Second, the constellation of the values of the colonised societies (before their colonisation) that facilitated the fruition of colonialism continues to be a part of the culture of these societies even after their freedom from colonial rule. Third, a version of indigenous psychology that is based on simplistic binaries such as Indigenous vs Western, Local vs Global, or Self vs Other is bound to fail in achieving the goal of substantive decolonisation. Moreover, there is a politics of indigeneity too as Edward Said in his classic Orientalism (1978) has argued that the concept of the orient itself was a construction of the West for an ideological purpose. Therefore, it is ultimately argued that the project of true or substantive decolonisation can be accomplished only by attaining a proper understanding of self and culture and this goal can be achieved by collaborating with others. Further, the culture of a society may be viewed as a set of disparate, often contradictory values which help to keep a check on the excesses of certain cultural tendencies by offering an internal critique of it. This way of looking at culture calls for viewing it as a dynamic process and necessitates a dialectical approach to examine the nature of the relationship between contradictory values of a culture. In this effort, the methodology of critical cultural psychoanalysis helps us to recognise the dialectical relation between the conscious and the unconscious/repressed aspect of the culture of the societies of the coloniser and the colonised and work through them to expand their consciousness by recovering/owning the repressed/disavowed aspect of their self. Finally, it is argued that like colonisation, substantive decolonisation will also involve a collaborative process between the colonisers and the colonised whereby they can recognise and own their selves in entirety.

From “limited sovereignty” to decolonization in Ukraine

This article takes up the loaded topic of “Russia in the world of Ukraine.” Now an object of official Russia’s aggressive attention, contemporary Ukraine presents a pressing case for reconsidering colonialism which, I propose, requires reconceptualizing sovereignty. I compare descriptions of sovereignty resting on two different genealogies, “limited sovereignty” as described by Russian expert Igor Gretskiy and “creative sovereignty” from Ukrainian scholar Oleksandr Merezhko, and bring them into conversation with Ukrainian Semyon Gluzman’s argument that thinking about colonialism in Ukraine implicates temporality, reflexivity, and subjectivity. Beyond “center” and “periphery,” beyond mapping control, suffering, production, and exploitation onto topographies of sovereign power and rural subjectivity, can we imagine sovereignty beyond territoriality? Can we decolonize the present from the past? The essay concludes with a suggestion to expand consideration of colonialism from a spatial to a temporal frame, the lexicon of colonialism beyond spatial deictics, and the project of decolonization to ourselves.

The unfinished project of decolonisation: a revisionist reading of Pakistan at 75

ABSTRACT For much of its history, Pakistan has been analysed through binaries that suggest an existential conflict between liberal democrats and illiberal theocrats. In fact, ideological polarisation has always existed within Pakistan’s militarised structure of power. This article proposes a revisionist reading of Pakistan’s history prefacing foundational logics of class, ethnic-national and state power. It is only by explicating such underlying structural logics that one can make sense of persistent palace intrigues as well as the dialectic of local political economies and regional/global geo-politics. Rehabilitating the normative horizon of decolonisation can animate a meaningful transformative politics in our time.