The Past, Present, and Future Entangled: Memory-Work as Decolonial Praxis (original) (raw)

2022, The Decolonial Enactments of Community Psychology

The Past as Decolonial Battleground "Colonialism", Frantz Fanon wrote in the Wretched of the Earth (Fanon, 1963, p. 209), "is not simply content to impose its rule upon the present and the future of a dominated country. Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native's brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts it, disfigures and destroys it." Colonial representations , repression, and erasure of the colonised's past are a form of "epistemic violence" that has been instrumental in creating and upholding the coloniality of knowledge, being, and power that divides the world's population into "degrees of being human" (Adams et al., 2015; Maldonado-Torres, 2016, p. 11; Mignolo, 2018). In this global racial/ethnic hierarchy, some bodies are in the "zone of being" who are accorded their civil and human rights, while others are relegated to the "zone of nonbeing," who are regarded as subhuman and are thus administered through war and oppression (Fanon, 1967 in Grosfoguel et al., 2014). Relatedly, European epistemologies are treated as universal while non-European epistemologies are devalued and debased (Quijano, 2007). This categorisation of peoples, which undergirds the coloniality of power, continues to structure contemporary racial, gender, and class stratifications, as well as informs the violence and oppression inflicted on certain bodies and populations (Maldonado-Torres, 2016; Quijano, 2007). Thus, the ways in which representations of the past are mired in coloniality is a key battleground in decoloniality. Recovering and surfacing other pasts is part of a pluriversal project of valuing subjugated knowledges and histories that have been silenced by coloniality's logics, power, and agents (Grosfoguel, 2010). It is also a project of counter-ontology that asserts and redefines what