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26 November 2021

Varieties of Decolonisation

Intellectual decolonisation is an imperative necessity. But it is also a profoundly complex political project. Professor Gopalan Balachandran outlines the resulting challenge and offers some suggestive pointers for navigating it.

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 other British and US universities. Black Lives Matter has lent fresh momentum to such campaigns and propelled them beyond the walls of academia. 

Scholars have likewise long been aware of the parochial character of the social sciences and the humanities. The epistemic inequalities they embody and reproduce through their disciplinary and institutional configurations are equally well-known. 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 the struggles around the world for freedom and equality, particularly since the 1950s.

It is a useful lesson to bear in mind for navigating the currents of intellectual decolonisation at a time when the air seems so thick with it. 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. 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 unarguably 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. 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 usually 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. 

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 two-fold 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 suggest 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 adaptability and dynamism. 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’ intellectual traditions is bound to challenge disciplinary boundaries and methods, and revive thorny questions about meaning, commensurability, and the nature and scales of the universal.

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 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 to dupe unsuspecting theorists of “decoloniality”. 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.

This article was published in the latest edition of Globe, the Graduate Institute Review, and on the occasion of Diversity Month at the Institute organised by the Gender, Diversity and Inclusion initiative.