On the problematique of decolonisation as a post-colonial endeavour (original) (raw)

(De)coloniality through Indigeneity: Deconstructing Calls to Decolonise in the South African and Canadian University Contexts. Education As Change, 22 (1), 1-24.

Education As Change, 2018

The ways in which Africanisation and decolonisation in the South African academy have been framed and carried out have been called into question over the past several years, most notably in relation to modes of silencing and epistemic negation, which have been explicitly challenged through the student actions. In a similar vein, Canada's commitments to decolonising its university spaces and pedagogies have been the subject of extensive critique, informed by (still unmet) claims to land, space, knowledge, and identity. Despite extensive critique, policies and practices in both South African and Canadian academic spaces remain largely unchanged, yet continue to stand as evidence that decolonisation is underway. In our paper, we begin to carefully articulate an understanding of decolonisation in the academy as one which continues to carry out historical relations of colonialism and race. Following the work of Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang (2012), we begin the process of " de-mythologising " decolonisation, by first exposing and tracing how decolonising claims both reinforce and recite the racial and colonial terms under which Indigeneity and Blackness are " integrated " in the academy. From our respective contexts, we trace how white, western ownership of space and knowledge in the academy is reaffirmed through processes of invitation, commodification, and erasure of Indigenous/Black bodies and identities. However, we also suggest that the invitation and presence of Indigenous and Black bodies and identities in both academic contexts are necessary to the reproduction and survival of decolonising claims, which allows us to begin to interrogate how, why, and under what terms bodies and identities come to be " included " in the academy. We conclude by proposing that the efficacy of decoloniality lies in paradigmatic and epistemic shifts which begin to unearth and then unsettle white supremacy in both contexts, in order to proceed with aims of reconciliation and reclamation.

(De)coloniality through Indigeneity:Deconstructing Calls to Decolonise in the South African and Canadian University Contexts

Education as Change, 2018

The ways in which Africanisation and decolonisation in the South African academy have been framed and carried out have been called into question over the past several years, most notably in relation to modes of silencing and epistemic negation, which have been explicitly challenged through the student actions. In a similar vein, Canada’s commitments to decolonising its university spaces and pedagogies have been the subject of extensive critique, informed by (still unmet) claims to land, space, knowledge, and identity. Despite extensive critique, policies and practices in both South African and Canadian academic spaces remain largely unchanged, yet continue to stand as evidence that decolonisation is underway. In our paper, we begin to carefully articulate an understanding of decolonisation in the academy as one which continues to carry out historical relations of colonialism and race. Following the work of Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang (2012), we begin the process of “de-mythologising...

Editorial Decoloniality and Decolonial Education: South Africa and the World

Alternation, 2020

The decision to put together this collection began as an initiative to engage with presenters and participants of the UNISA Decolonial Summer School of 2019 beyond the content that was presented. UNISA, referring to the University of South Africa, was established in 1873 and is South Africa's foremost distance learning university. UNISA is situated in Pretoria in the province of Gauteng, which is one of South Africa's three capital cities where the executive branch of government is located, with over 400,000 registered students, including its international student population that come from 130 countries around the world. UNISA's Decolonial Summer School commenced in 2013 for the first time, under the direction of the School of Humanities, and has thus far run every year except for 2021, due to the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. This collection is composed of an introduction, seventeen articles by eighteen authors, two opinion pieces, two roundtables by eight authors, two of whom have articles in the collection, three interviews and three book reviews, and as such contain the work of twenty-eight contributors. Critiques of racism, definitions of decolonisation and decoloniality, histories of enslavement, colonisercolonised relations, the coloniality of language, the colonial teaching practices of empire colonies, Black and racialised bodies as sites of racism and colonisation in the afterlife of apartheid, the recolonised economy, and the European colonial curricula that continue to support such practices, especially in law schools in South Africa, run between and among the work in this collection. Not only are we confronted with the overwhelming critique of colonial pedagogies, we are also confronted with an ongoing critique of teaching and learning practices within the university system that almost all of the contributors draw attention to. Some authors utilise the terms, Black and White when referring to racialised identity, with capitalisation, and some do notthose who write Afrika in its newly adopted form within the

INTRODUCTION. DECOLONIALITY AND DECOLONIAL EDUCATION: SOUTH AFRICA AND THE WORLD

ALTERNATION, 2020

Any unpacking of the terms employed in the title, such as ‘decoloniality’ and ‘decolonial education’ requires an understanding of how these terms have been employed, what we understand as their meaning, how we carry out the work in their name, and to which purpose. Decolonial education is always in the present, and as such, our concern is then with the moment of insurgence, interrogation, and resistance to colonisation – the act that is in the moment of, that moment of execution, an in-progress process that is constantly unravel- ling, a process that involves the undoing of colonisation in the flesh, through thoughts and ideas enacted through the body of the subject(s) who under- stands and identifies the features of colonialism that hamper the continuity of a dignified lived experience – the subject acts, entrenches its decolonial position, enforces it, breaks with coloniality despite the shunning, the punish- ment the colonial threatens to inflict, despite the cunning coercion of compli- city disguised as collegial congeniality. This in-the-moment process, is also an in-the-present one, a warding off of persistent, vigilant coloniality that has many tentacles, even if it hides under the rubric of democracy, such as in contemporary South Africa where the agents of coloniality draw from a bottomless pit of historical White privilege to refuel their attacks.

Special Issue (Alternations Journal): Decoloniality and Decolonial Education: South Africa and the World

Alternations Journal, UKZN, 2021

This collection, edited by Rozena Maart from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, is composed of an introduction, seventeen articles by eighteen authors, two opinion pieces, two roundtables by eight authors, two of whom have articles in the collection, three interviews and three book reviews, and as such contain the work of twenty-eight contributors. Critiques of racism, definitions of decolonisation and decoloniality, histories of enslavement, coloniser – colonised relations, the coloniality of language, the colonial teaching practices of empire colonies, Black and racialised bodies as sites of racism and colonisation in the afterlife of apartheid, the recolonised economy, and the European colonial curricula that continue to support such practices, especially in law schools in South Africa, run between and among the work in this collection.

'Free, decolonised education': a lesson from the South African student struggle

This commentary places British geography within transnational currents of student-focused decolonisation movements. In October 2015, the author travelled to South Africa for the first time, visiting Witwatersrand University (Johannesburg), University of Cape Town (UCT) and Rhodes University in Grahamstown. This paper draws on historical accounts of the British colonisation of what is now South Africa, contextualising both the domestic and global inequalities which it's students are currently challenging. British imperial history also provides a basis for understanding the roots of British geography, offering the campaigns to decolonise the South African university as an opportunity to critically reflect on how our own discipline produces knowledge. The commentary asks this timely question: as geographers, particularly those based in the old centre of Empire, how can our work be used to dismantle the colonialism our discipline has been implicated in since its formal inception?

Decolonizing Higher Education in a Global Post-Colonial Era. #RhodesMustFall from Cape Town to Oxford

2019

Considering globalization as intimately tied to a post-colonial conjuncture, the examination of actual and concrete initiatives of re-, de- or post-colonization becomes essential for the understanding of globalization as such. Recently, a global movement for the decolonization of higher education has played a great role for such initiatives. Here, the #RhodesMustFall-movement can be seen as particularly important. Starting at the University of Cape Town and eventually spreading to Oxford University, the movement initially protested statues of Cecil Rhodes present at both sites, eventually expanding to a larger politics of decolonization. Given the global spread of the movement, a comparative study on the two movement formations enables an examination of the partially similar, partially differing, conditions and characteristics of decolonial politics in contemporary post-colonial globality. Departing from collective identity theory and discourse theory, social movements are understood here as articulatory interventions into tensions and oppositions appearing throughout modernity. Methodologically, this entails a focus on movement texts (500 pages of posts, articles, essays and manifestoes) submitted to discourse analysis and contextualized in relation to intertwined local, national and global settings. Here I argue that the #RhodesMustFall-movements become stakeholders in the constitution of a global Fanonian field of decolonial politics in which coloniality is attacked as a foundational structure unreachable through reformism. However, movement discourse is necessarily transformed in relation to specific contextual situations, thus rendering the global Fanonian field of decolonial politics partially differentiated: the primary characteristic of the UCT-formation’s discourse is its construction of a black majority populus, constitutive of a broad hegemonic discourse of decolonization; in contrast to this, the Oxford formation’s discourse is largely shaped by the diasporic situation of formerly colonized peoples within ex-metropolis, thus putting the focus of movement discourse on constructing multiple plural subjectivities and recovering issues of race and coloniality from political margins.