The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house: decolonising intercultural communication

Abstract

The issue of representation has polarised public discourse and in recent years the decolonisation of research methodologies has entered the field of interculturality. However, universalistic discourses of dialogue and tolerance can be harnessed to silence certain voices by construing them as ‘other'. With this paper I confront this conceptual knot of representation and I recognise the role of epistemic violence in speaking for ‘the other’. I employ the idea of minor literature to counteract non-perfomative and tokenistic displays of diversity that appropriate the word intercultural and use it as a form of currency in neo-liberal academia.