Who Decides? In Whose Name? For Whose Benefit? Decoloniality and Its Discontents

Abstract

The growing traction of decolonization as a discourse and practice within and beyond the context of academic scholarship has generated important spaces for critical, self-reflexive engagements with the role of systemic, historical, and ongoing colonial violence in the foundations of various scholarly fields. Although the overarching area of “decolonial critique” contains a considerable range of perspectives, both complementary and contradictory, overall these perspectives challenge the common assumption that colonialism is “over”, pointing instead to the ways that it has persisted and shapeshifted both in settler colonial countries (where the colonizing power never ‘left’), as well as in purportedly decolonized countries that are nonetheless characterized by “patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations”.