The promises and pitfalls of decolonial thinking

The craze that once prevailed in academia over postcolonialism no longer seems to hover around there anymore. It is not that the questions it once raised have all been resolved; the school of decolonial thinking has somewhat taken over the academic 'glamour' that postcolonialism once held. Over the last few decades, decoloniality has re-engaged the colonial question with renewed intellectual interests. It has emerged as a dynamic critical tool that aims to unsettle the colonial hierarchies of knowledge and reestablish native and indigenous epistemologies.

Although both postcolonial and decolonial modes of thought are concerned with the lingering effects of Anglo-European colonialism, the two differ in terms of objectives and ambitions. Whereas postcoloniality primarily presents a critique of Anglo-European colonialism and the colonial modernity imposed on the colonised world, decoloniality besides critiquing colonial legacies aims at recuperating the epistemologies and world-making practices suppressed, distorted, and marginalised by colonialism. Decoloniality's goal is to reclaim and reestablish different native-indigenous modes of knowing and being, and legacies of care and creative world-making that predate colonial modernity. Decentering the Eurocentric universality, decoloniality aims to make a pluriversal and interversal world. It champions relationality that connects local histories and embodied knowledge across geopolitical locations and contests the authoritative totalising drive of Euromodernity.

Decolonial thinking is mostly practised within the conventions and logic of Western academia. It complies with the dominant practices like specific writing styles, citation guidelines, and publishing logic that make Western academia and its publication culture a hegemonic system.

Genealogically and philosophically, the idea of decoloniality has a distinct epistemological focus. It generally posits that modern civilisation and the current capitalist-imperialist world system is a definitive epistemic creation—the creation and hegemonic continuation of Eurocentric epistemology. Here, Eurocentrism is understood as the cultural expression of Euromodernity that puts Europe at the centre of human history and superiorises White European civilisation (and White North America as an extension) while inferiorising others. In decolonial thinking, epistemological decolonisation precedes material and political decolonisation, and ontology is thought to be created and articulated within the domain of epistemology. Decoloniality thus primarily focuses on unlearning the knowledge and assumptions that facilitate the continuation of colonial domination and relearning the histories and world views outside the Western geography of knowledge. Decolonial vision entails rewriting human history from multiple perspectives and recreating a pluriversal world to accommodate multiple world systems, ways of being and becoming, and ecologies of knowledge. Its political ambition is to dismantle the current Eurocentric political hegemony by abolishing the universalising authoritativeness of the Eurocentric epistemological system. However, decolonial thinking does not sweepingly negate or reject the Western knowledge system but situates it as a constituent part of the pluriversal world-making.

Speaking of literature specifically, the scope of decoloniality entails reclaiming and reestablishing the native and indigenous forms, styles, and genres of writing and narratives marginalised by their Euromodern counterparts. The pre-colonial and organic forms of art and literature have been rendered as 'underdeveloped' or often categorised as 'folk' forms by the aesthetic parameters of the Western canon. Besides retrieving the literature embedded in people's organic reality, decoloniality envisions flattening the hierarchy between colonial-European languages and local languages.

The ambitions of decolonial thinking are optimistic, no doubt. Colonialism as a system violently distorted native and indigenous ways of knowing and being, inferiorised cultures, displaced people from their lands, alienated them from the surrounding nature and environment, and deprived them of self-autonomy. People of the colonised world still carry on colonialism's burdens and legacies in their patterns of thinking and imagination, cultural and aesthetic being, economic and political life, and the administrative, penal, and education systems. Decolonial thinking aims to remove the traces of domination to create a pluriversal world connected in relationality by local ways of knowing and being. However, the epistemological primacy over the political and the material limits its scope and makes it an exclusively academic phenomenon bereft of significant progressive political implications.

The epistemic preoccupation of decolonial thinking has kept it mostly restricted within academia. Western academia itself is a hegemonic system that upholds Eurocentric epistemological supremacy and academia all around the world is colonised by its specific ecology. Decolonial thinking is mostly practised within the conventions and logic of Western academia. It complies with the dominant practices like specific writing styles, citation guidelines, and publishing logic that make Western academia and its publication culture a hegemonic system. As long as decolonial thinking remains subsumed within this hegemonic system, can it succeed in dismantling the Eurocentric epistemological hegemony? Or is it destined to remain an anecdotal reference to the history of Western academia that gives it some sense of redemption?

The overemphasis on the epistemic revolution has also distanced decolonial thinking from mainstream progressive politics. The way theories and intellectual movements like Marxism and feminism influenced progressive politics worldwide, decoloniality has not yet shown that kind of scope or ambition. Even most decolonial indigenous movements like the Zapatista uprising in Mexico and indigenous movements for reparative justice and autonomy in the Americas spring from the organic reality of resisting the oppressive dynamics, not as political translations of academic thoughts. Rather, decolonial thinkers theorise those movements retrospectively and write books afterward. Its poor translation in the realm of politics has already enabled the far-right and exclusionary forms of identity politics to weaponise decolonial rhetoric in many parts of the world.

Even the term 'decolonisation' in decolonial thinking carries a different connotation than it was used in the works of the likes of Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. For Fanon, decolonisation entailed a simultaneity of political, social, economic, epistemological, and cultural liberation. The drive for simultaneous decolonisation on multiple fronts was embedded in direct political action, not narrowed down to the primacy of epistemic liberation. Decoloniality's epistemological bias also turns the question away from the material. Any epistemology or system of knowledge is mediated by the dominant material condition of a society. Western epistemology is mediated by global capitalism and its production and market logic. Thus the question surfaces—can epistemic freedom be achieved without radical structural transformation of the global capitalist system? And how can it be achieved if not politically?

The university-centred practice of decolonial thinking will not transform the existing global order overnight. And decolonial thinkers do not make that claim either. A tenet of decoloniality is the idea of longue durée—the longer period during which social processes and structures unfold, develop, and evolve. Decoloniality considers both the process of colonisation and decolonisation as processes unfolding over the longue durée. A decolonised future is thus projected to be achieved through the cumulative effects of small acts of unlearning and relearning, questioning power and hierarchies, fostering practices of care, and building bridges of solidarity across geopolitical locations over a longer period. However, emphasising the longue durée, decoloniality should not overlook the possibility and necessity of revolutionary political and material transformation of the society.

Decolonial thinking as it exists today has its promises and pitfalls. Its promises will not be materialised if decolonisation remains an academic metaphor. Besides confronting Eurocentric epistemology it needs to address more overtly how global capitalism materially determines ways of knowing and being in the contemporary world. Decoloniality should have simultaneous engagement in the front of material/economic, political, cultural, and epistemological and have an interpenetrating rapport with mainstream progressive politics and movements of social justice worldwide if it no longer wants to remain an academic footnote.

Raihan Rahman is a PhD researcher in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.