Varieties of Decolonisation

It was never any secret that many of the most renowned institutions of higher learning, particularly in Britain and the United States, owe their existence to slaving and colonial fortunes. Nor that the public figures they celebrate in stone, brick and metal, and in a dozen other ways, had owned and traded in slaves, colonised continents, presided over genocidal colonial policies, or been guided by white supremacist beliefs. Yet the Rhodes Must Fall movement that broke through this silence did not erupt in the West, but at the University of Cape Town in 2015, whence it spread to Oxford, thanks largely to South African students connected to the Cape Town protests, before inspiring similar movements at other British and US universities. Black Lives Matter lent fresh momentum to such campaigns and propelled them beyond the walls of academia.

Removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes from the campus of the University of Cape Town on 9 April 2015.

Scholars have likewise long been aware of the parochial nature of the social sciences and the humanities, which offer little unpoliced space for the sensibilities and perspectives of the vast majority of the planet’s inhabitants. The epistemic inequalities they embody and reproduce through their disciplinary and institutional configurations are equally well-known. Inequalities also deform the academic body, which tends especially at the more renowned and better-resourced institutions to be predominantly white, male, and upper-class. Yet no reckoning with the racial, colonial, gender and other forms of bias and discrimination in academia would have been possible, as Black Lives Matter freshly reminds us, without twentieth-century struggles around the world for equality and their growing intensity since the 1950s in the wake of anticolonial movements and the onset of decolonisation.

There is a twofold lesson here. Political struggles and social mobilisations profoundly shape what we study and how. Few influences do more to expand our horizons, and those of our disciplines, than struggles by marginalised and disadvantaged groups for equality, rights and freedoms.Fissures and fractures in postcolonial world-making have a direct bearing on projects for decolonising the world of ideas 

This lesson can be useful for navigating the currents of intellectual decolonisation at a time when the air seems so thick with it. It is well to remember at the outset that anticolonial projects and aspirations to decolonise have a long history. Two of the three landmark historical events that arguably ushered in the modern political era, namely the US Declaration of Independence and the Haitian Revolution, were anticolonial. Historians of the late eighteenth-century revolutionary Atlantic continue to bring to light the many ways in which the two revolutions were braided. Yet their starkly contrasting trajectories and fortunes, not to mention the seeming paradox of how relations between Haiti and the United States unfolded over the next two centuries, encapsulate the complex history of anticolonialism and decolonisation.

Anticolonial struggles and decolonisation movements have unquestionably transformed the world. They have, even in their failures, continued to fire our imaginations. Their dreams inspire awe. Yet bracketing the United States and Haiti serves to draw attention to the breadth of anticolonial movements, and the range of experiences, perspectives and agendas they can mobilise or represent. This breadth is what gives anticolonial movements their power and their poetry. However, one consequence of such breadth is that while the possibilities may appear boundless at particular moments, the actual outcomes often reflect a grimmer reality of conflicts within anticolonial movements. Rarely are these conflicts only internal. The colonial power looms large over them, fostering, deepening or leveraging such conflicts to cement alliances with “moderate” anticolonialists, prolong its own influence and embed itself more deeply within postcolonial structures and dispensations. When such conflicts turn violent, the poetry of anticolonialism can yield to an oppressive prose of postcolonial state-making that absorbs and reproduces the “bifurcations” of its colonial progenitor whilst continuing to speak in the tongues of the anticolonial revolution.

Fissures and fractures in postcolonial world-making have a direct bearing on projects for decolonising the world of ideas, academia in particular. Intellectual decolonisation presents a double challenge, on the one hand subjecting white, Western, colonial or other exclusionary knowledge traditions and modes of knowing to critical scrutiny, and on the other recovering and revaluing knowledge traditions and modes of apprehending the world suppressed by colonialism and other forms of domination. Though the former remains daunting, critical approaches developed in the last few decades do at least map some ways to navigate this challenge.

The second challenge is deeper and more complex. There is much greater awareness now of lively knowledge traditions beyond the West, and their inherent dynamism and malleability. While Western interest in the study of indigenous philosophies is far from new, the growing interest of indigenous (i.e. non-Western) scholars in their own societies’ philosophical and intellectual traditions is likely to pose exciting new challenges to disciplinary boundaries and methods. It is also bound to revive thorny questions about meaning, commensurability, and the nature and scales of the universal.Who speaks for (and as) the decolonising subject will be pivotal to democratic struggles for intellectual decolonisation 

There are few easy answers to such questions. A partial clue may lie, however, in the domain of representation, which remains in any case an indispensable benchmark for social knowledge. The project to decolonise the world of ideas will be self-defeating if it is not democratic, since it otherwise risks producing new despotisms of thought and belief. Western colonialism was not the first power to suppress other systems of thought and belief, nor is it likely to be the last. India, for instance, has a long history of Brahminical campaigns to erase or absorb resistant belief systems of communities on the margins of the caste or varna order. All major world religions and religions aspiring to that status share similar histories. Yoke them, or other similarly powerful ethnocentric beliefs, to ethno- or religious nationalism and the nation-state, and frame the resulting claims into an anticolonial narrative. Presto, you would have repackaged an exclusionary, majoritarian political ideology as a decolonised belief system well enough, in one recent instance, to dupe an Argentine-American champion of “decoloniality” evidently ignorant of the colonial genealogies of the purportedly countercolonial system of “Indic” knowledge. The moral? Who speaks for (and as) the decolonising subject will be pivotal to democratic struggles for intellectual decolonisation. They will in turn be our best hope for negotiating questions of meaning, commensurability and universality in a respectful spirit in any future democratic republic of ideas.