This week, regular BILD member Yecid Ortega is joined by guest blogger Andrés Valencia, an assistant professor at the Escuela de Ciencias del Lenguaje, Universidad del Valle (Cali), Colombia. Andrés holds a MA in Language and Literacies Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), at the University of Toronto. As a language teacher educator, his interests lie in the intersections among anti-colonial theory and practices, critical pedagogy, queer pedagogies, multiliteracies pedagogy, gender, and ethnic-racial categories in language teacher education. 

Decoloniality is a fashion. Postcoloniality is a desire. Anti-coloniality is a daily and permanent struggle.

(Rivera Cusicanqui, October 15,  2018)

This blog post includes a linked audio file. Just click on the link below if you would like to hear the post read aloud. Scroll down to read the text.

Work along the lines of decolonization has been gaining ground in the last decade. In fact, a quick search on Proquest between January 1, 2010 – April 1, 2021, hit around 7000 academic papers worldwide with this topic in the contents or title. Yecid, one of the authors of this essay reflection, visited La Paz (Bolivia) in the summer of 2021 and had the chance to talk to community organizers and scholars, including the well-known Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Atawallpa Oviedo Freire. They shared their concerns about the recent trend in White(ned) Western(ized) universities of engaging decolonial thought and research. We were not surprised to learn this, as we have been very critical of this trend in the academic and non-academic world.

We can see entrepreneurs “trying” to do their part to “help” but what they do is the opposite: to harm and disinform. In an effort to do “good,” to revitalize and strengthen Indigenous cultures, what they do is to contribute to the “appropriation and commercialization of Indigeneity” (Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013, 79) further commodifying hurting Indigenous peoples by capitalizing on their cultural productions.

From the academic point of view, decolonization has been mobilized in different disciplines, namely: language teaching (Macedo, 2019), bilingual education (Walsh, 2010), social work (Hetherington et al., 2013), public policy (Okafor, 2020), anthropology (Hammoudi, 2021; Harrison, 1997), social sciences (Reiter, 2020), among others.

In order to make the case against this trend, we asked ourselves, Why is decolonization, as a concept and practice, becoming a trend/fashion in the Western world? Whose ends does it serve? We wonder, what is and is not decolonization in general and in the academy in particular? Or, what happened to the ideas of returning the land to Indigenous communities and acknowledging their sovereignty? For some, decolonization is about dismantling the systems that we currently have and paying retribution to Indigenous peoples for the harm done in the past 500 years, as well as the ongoing processes of handing over the instruments of governance, involving the bureaucratic, cultural, linguistic, technological, and psychological divesting of colonial power (Smith, 1999)

However, as Tuck and Yang (2012) have observed, decolonization is not a staple to be put on other things to either improve society or to mean something else, as if these were synonyms of being Feminist, Anti-patriarchal, Anti-State, Anti-capitalist, Anti-racist, Anti-binary, and other Anti-something practices to critique or subvert any colonial structure in contemporary societies. Without falling into a binary trap, we encourage scholars/researchers to call processes by their name: if there is advocacy for gender equality, then one must label it as feminism, but not as decolonization.

We ask ourselves: if we critique the problems of naming anything “decolonizing,” then, the remaining question is, what alternatives should people use to (naming) decolonization? We argue that it is not a matter of what else to choose or what label to affix, but more about actively working towards dismantling the current socioeconomic and politico-cultural structures that have been in place since colonization. Indeed, we argue that no theoretical, epistemological, or empirical attempts for decolonization should be taken lightly, nor become the product of a trend whereby white/whitened scholars appropriate Indigenous and Black peoples’ knowledge, replacing Indigenous and Black bodies in the academy (Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013).

The current problem is that scholars, academics, researchers and even the market are taking decolonial processes as a fad, without questioning or problematizing how sustainable these processes would be and how they would benefit (or not) Indigenous communities or the most marginalized communities in society. Research projects are being drafted from the ivory towers of academic institutions for the sake of getting a few pennies (millions) to boost researchers’ egos, but they never question what they really do with the knowledge created. Some never set a foot on Indigenous communities nor have relationships with them, yet hope to get some money and “help them” for a specific period of time, do their research, publish, and put outcomes on shelves. This is none other than the tokenistic ideologies of self-centred individuals who perform intellectual and epistemic extractivism for the sake of “intellectual masturbation” (Rodríguez, 2018). Today, it’s the decolonial wagon, what’s next? Epistemologies of the South? Epistemicide? El Buen Vivir? Sentipensante? Feminismos de adentro y del sur? Epistemologies of las abuelas? Ubuntu futurities? What else is on the menu?

Some may claim that it’s not a “bad idea” that these knowledges become available. But why?—if, after all, Eurocentric knowledges have invaded us for 500 years. Is it time to really revitalize theknowledges of the South? If so, who is up for the task? Is it institutions from the North? The academy? Recently, scholars have been using ideas from the South to make northern statements and manifestos (García et al., 2021) that do not necessarily resonate with those in the Global South.  All of a sudden, these become a trend, as if they were not known before by scholars from the South. Finally, the South has been taken seriously, just because the North has spoken? All of a sudden names such as Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Enrique Dussel, Ramón Grosfogel, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Walter Mignolo, Anibal Quijano, Rita Laura Segato, Donaldo Macedo, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and others have become famous while these have been rejected by the North in the past. Why this sudden change? 

Some may claim that it’s not a “bad idea” that these knowledges become available. But why?— if after all, Eurocentric knowledges have invaded us for 500 years. Is it time to really revitalize the knowledges of the South? If so, who is up for the task? Is it institutions from the North? The academy? We are glad to know that, recently, scholars from the Global North have been using ideas from the South to help us connect these knowledges in forms that might resonate with racialized communities (García et al., 2021). However, we also suggest being careful, so that these tactics do not become a cosmetic trend that makes it sound as if the South has finally been taken seriously, just because the North has spoken. We have been concerned that, “suddenly”, names such as Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Enrique Dussel, Ramón Grosfogel, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Walter Mignolo, Anibal Quijano, Rita Laura Segato, Donaldo Macedo, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and others have occupied spaces within North American and European academia and their voices have been lifted — Why this sudden change?  

In the end, we are not against decolonization or decolonial scholars. What we want is for others to problematize the cosmetic, superficial and universalistic forms in which the concept has been taken — lightly. In other words, we encourage folks to walk the talk, turn the tables, and, before attempting to speak about decolonization, ask themselves: “How I am decolonizing myself, my being, my (phallo-logo-verbocentric [after Valencia et al. 2020]) practices, and how I am contributing to the emancipation/dignification of Indigenous peoples and other marginalized communities with my personal and professional actions?”

This would be in contrast to the example we provided above, in which folks use the idea/concept/term decolonization to make a profit while pretending they are actually helping. Some see decolonization as a global revolution and others as local empowerment to support Indigenous peoples and their communities. Like us, some others have already questioned the global movement of decolonization. So in the end, it’s not about being against, but rather of coming to terms with what needs to be done to truly decolonize.

References

García, O., Flores, N., Seltzer, K., Wei, L., Otheguy, R., & Rosa, J. (2021). Rejecting abyssal thinking in the language and education of racialized bilinguals: A manifesto. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 0(0), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/15427587.2021.1935957

Hetherington, D. T., Coates, P. J., Gray, P. M., & Bird, P. M. Y. (2013). Decolonizing Social Work. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Hammoudi, A. (2021). Decolonizing anthropology at a distance: Some thoughts. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 11(1), 281–290. https://doi.org/10.1086/713740

Harrison, F. V. (1997). Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further Toward an Anthropology of Liberation. Association of Black Anthropologists, American Anthropological Association.

Macedo, D. (2019). Decolonizing foreign language education: The misteaching of English and other colonial languages. Routledge.

Okafor, S. O. (2020). Decolonization of policy process and not the policy of decolonization. CUJHSS, 14(1), 126–137.

Reiter, B. (2020). Fuzzy epistemology: Decolonizing the social sciences. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 50(1), 103–118. https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12229

Rivera Cusicanqui, S. [Martín López Gallegos] (2018, October 15). Conversatorio Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui y Silvia Federici. FIL Zócalo Feria Internacional del Libro en el Zócalo de la Ciudad de México, Parte 1. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujiSiDEBaFQ.

Rodríguez, C. O. (2018). Decolonizing Academia: Poverty, Oppression and Pain. Fernwood Publishing.

Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples. Zed Books.

Tuck, E., & Gaztambide-Fernández, R. A. (2013). Curriculum, replacement, and settler futurity. Journal of curriculum theorizing, 29(1).

Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40.

Valencia, A., Arenas, C., Arredondo, C., Buriticá, D. (2020) Epilogue: A Glossary of Queer by The Criscadian Collective. In M. Pérez & G. Trujillo-Barbadillo (Eds.), Queer epistemologies in education. Luso-Hispanic dialogues and shared horizons (pp. 217-239). Palgrave Macmillan.