In recent years, abiding urgencies of calls to decolonize have been accompanied by unproductive ambiguities surrounding the decolonial. How are we to understand such contrariety? Can the terms and textures of decolonize/decolonization and decolonial/decoloniality be rendered as critical optics and prudent provocations unto knowledge and politics in the present?
Animated by #Rhodes Must Fall, #BLM, #NativeLivesMatter, and intersecting immediacies, decolonial claims acquired poignancy during the long 2010s, stretching across diverse academic and activist arenas. Authoritarian populisms, intolerant nations, and predatory capitalisms were confronted with afterlives of slavery and apartheid, formations of settler colonialisms and national settlements, and jumbles of indigenous identities and sexual alterities—all entwined with common injuries of gender-race-caste-class. Compounding these scenarios are living specters of migrants and minorities, aggrandizing capital and climate change, and pervasive precarities and pandemics.
Credit: Savindra Sawarkar: Untitled
Amidst such churnings and yearnings, the proliferations of D-terms, as it were, have appeared as crisscrossing the exigencies of corporate academe. Invocations to decolonize announce progressive impulses to expand the Western canon, making more inclusive mainstream human sciences. Decolonial considerations also intimate a rethinking of slavery and race, colony and empire as shaping modern knowledges. Such endeavors to rework disciplinary domains and redress abiding asymmetries can rest upon principally programmatic manifestos toward impeccable decolonial transformation. Yet other exercises yoke principle unto practice, empirical-cum-conceptual, whether or not they fly decolonizing banners. At the same time, the sanitized multiculturalism of the neoliberal university has accommodated decolonial doodahs as profitable pathways to appease alterity. Meanwhile, abiding incitements to compulsively publish in scholarly markets have impelled, at once, varied usages of D-schemas as seeking disciplinary distinction and sharp rebuttals of decolonial excesses.
Unsurprisingly, on offer today are unhelpful abundances and unbalanced ambivalences of the decolonial. On the one hand, the presence of a dozen self-certified meanings of decolonize, from dense philosophical reflections through to New Age self-help endeavors. Among these connotations, especially influential have been decolonial designs out of Latin America, which seek the widest epistemological and social, cultural and moral makeovers through the pure force, a priori ethic, and unshakeable truth of transformative knowledge(s). None of these schemes are likely to simply disappear. On the other hand, in the early 2020s, with the decolonization metaphor stretched to its limits, the enthusiasm for decoloniality seems to be slowly waning, even wilting, including among its fellow travelers. Yet dismissive critiques of decolonizing desires frequently mirror the totalizing casts of the object of their derision, overlooking thereby the many meanings and pressing politics that inform uncertain yet insistent pleas to decolonize.
Rather more than the inexorable passing of a fashionable phantasm, under issue are formative decolonial tensions and their equally impatient contestations. Exactly for these reasons, our own rapidly melting present might be an especially apposite moment to stay with and think through decolonization and its dissonance: their apprehensions and aggrandizements, saliences and silences, and habitations and horizons.
At stake are formidable implications and mutual entailments of discipline and difference. These are contained in contending conceptions. On the one hand, always-prior “universals,” commanding “origins” that severally announce the West as conquering and/or salvaging the primitive, the savage, the backward, the native, the non- and anti-modern. On the other hand, already-a priori alterities, counter epistemes, that innately subvert or/and subtend the colonial, the modern, the West, the North, the dominant, and other such dystopian categories-entities. Ahead indeed are competing claims yet common connections.
Concerning discipline, might we approach the non-nomothetic human sciences as critically registering the worldly intimacies, material implications, and archival tracks of institutionalized enquiries? That is, can such knowledges be apprehended not only as modern disciplines but as disciplines of modernity? I am pointing to formations of modernity and its particular disciplines as contradictory and contending procedures of meaning and power. Consider the framings of anthropology, history, and sociology as institutionalized enquiries from the latter half of the nineteenth century. These disciplines emerge out of sustained interchanges between race and reason, imperial cultures and progressivist imaginaries, the colonial and the native, Enlightenment and Romanticism, developmental narratives and redemptive nations, the analytical and the hermeneutical, and “autonomy” and “excess.”
Turning to difference, we are legitimately troubled by demonizing and infantilizing images of “other” peoples. Yet, what of implicit assumptions of the innate innocence of such subjects in radical-liberal understandings, including decolonial perspectives? What might explain the seductions of immaculate alterity as axiomatically exceeding dystopian power? Are we stuck with parables of scholarly transcendence, where an ethically enchanted alterity, a return of the repressed, serves just comeuppance to a ruthlessly disenchanted dominance?
To address such issues is to think through singular story lines, unframing rather distinct purification(s) and diverse worlding(s) across the planet of idealized oppositions between tradition and modernity, custom and rationality, myth and history, magic and the modern, East and West, and emotion and reason. To be untangled also are constitutively reciprocal yet already incompatible copulas between power and difference, authority and alterity. Arguably an outcome of jagged intersections of (Weberian) bureaucratic-rationalizing logics, modernization theories, and post-foundational presumptions, these copulas have been imbued with varied outcomes, especially amidst the impelling im-mediations today of social media that abound. Indeed, with their ineliminable tensions as sown into the social, the embodied, and the affective—of being made of the world—such oppositions issue other invitations.
A single provocation turning on the constitutive contentions of modern thought need suffice. How might we hold together David Hume’s far-reaching querying of an abstract reason and the racial framings integral to the developmentalism upholding his thought? If the former reveals the formative not-oneness of the European Enlightenment, does not the latter highlight that Hume’s radical skepticism was yet unable to enter the deep, dark recesses of progressivist premises? Are at play acute intersections and critical contentions of reason and race in the institutionalization of the human sciences?
In these makeovers of modernity, rather than ready resolutions of difference and discipline, it is crucial to modestly admit and carefully revisit the mix-up and murk, contention and creativity, passion and pathos, and dignity and drudgery of heterogeneous subjects, human and more-than-human. Here are to be found the mutual begetting of discipline and difference—as coming together, falling apart, and issuing other intimations—not via immaculate terms of Gnostic revelations but through tangled textures of earthly conceptions.
At the end, to ask what is at stake in the surfeit today of decolonial claims and their contestations is to track the unstated assumptions, formative heterogeneities, unexpected insights, and distinct registers of these terrains. These have wide implications. First, to overlook unfamiliar decolonial pathways and their challenges can be to ignore the imagining of the unimaginable in routine worlds. Second, pervasive presumptions of their innate innovativeness that characterize certified decoloniality are now revealed as common conceits, insinuating the business-as-usual of academic arenas, at large. Finally, foregrounded forthwith are the restless seductions of scholarly entitlement, professorial privilege, epistemic practice, and their intricate interweaving—in the corporate university and at its many margins.
Decolonial dissonance bears discrete disclosures.
These issues are elaborated in a co-authored book-in-progress, Decolonize: Three Enquiries in Discipline and Difference.
Saurabh Dube is distinguished professor of history at El Colegio de México, Mexico City. He was a visiting fellow of IWM in 2022.
