Returning the Anti-Colonial to Philosophy

Postcolonial Directions in Education, 2012

In teaching and dialoguing with students and colleagues we have on a number of occasions had to grapple with questions such as: What is the 'anti-colonial'? How is this different from a 'post-colonial' approach? And how are we to articulate an anti-colonial prism as a way of thinking and making sense of current colonial relations and procedures of colonization? These are tough questions complicated by the apparent mainstream privileging and intellectual affection for the "post-colonial" over "anti-colonial". This paper is purposively written to provoke a debate as a contestation of ideas of the current 'post' context. We are calling for a nuanced reading of what constitutes an intellectual subversive politics in the ongoing project of decolonization for both colonized and dominant bodies. We ask our readers to consider the possibilities of a counter theoretical narrative or conception of the present in ways that make theoretical sense of the everyday world of the colonized, racialized, oppressed and the Indigene. We bring a politicized reading to the present as a moment of practice, to claim and reclaim our understandings of identity in the present with implications for how we theorise a Diasporic identity. We challenge the intellectual seduction to equally flatten notions of identity and relations as simply fluid, in flux or something to be complicated/contested. We believe there is something that must not be lost in reclaiming past powerful notions regarding particularly the marginalized understandings of their identities for the present. Thus we revive anti-colonial discourse, building on early anticolonial thinking and practice. We are bringing a particular reading of the 'colonial' that is relevant to the present in which both nations, states and communities, as well as bodies and identities are engaged as still colonized and resisting the colonial encounter.

Journal of Commonwealth & Postcolonial Studies, 2018

During the 1990s, various disciplinary debates took place within Latin Americanist circles regarding whether Latin America indeed falls under the category of the postcolonial. Many argue that Latin America, being a former Spanish colony, has, ultimately, very little in common with the conditions and legacies of colonization as elaborated by British and French postcolonial critics and theorists. These discussions went on for years, and in many ways have never ceased. As a result of these rather unresolved debates Latin America never fully obtained critically as a site of postcolonial inquiry. Instead, the field came to see what is now known as decolonial theory, and not postcolonial thought, emerge over the past twenty years as an increasingly prominent analytic approach for the study of Latin America's colonial legacies. Defined in opposition to postcolonialism, which many Latin Americanist critics found to be still too imbedded within the Western critical tradition, "Decoloniality" or the "decolonial option" came to serve as the name for a theoretico-political paradigm promoting indigenous, aboriginal, or other previously colonized and relegated modes of knowledge as a means to challenge Western Reason's claim to universality. Walter Mignolo differentiates between the two in the following way, "decolonial thinking is differentiated from postcolonial theory or postcolonial studies in that the genealogy of these are located in French post-structuralism more than in the dense history of planetary decolonial thinking ("Epistemic Disobedience" 46). While this distinction is carried out somewhat tautologically, the point made is that while postcolonial theory continues to rely heavily on certain strands of post-structural thought, decoloniality claims not to. Through concepts such as border thinking, delinking (Walter Mignolo), transm odernity (Enrique Dussel), and the coloniality of pow er (Anibal Quijano) decoloniality positions itself as a uniquely non-eurocentric critical tradition that diverges from and aims to surpass other prominent theoretical models such as Marxism, deconstruction, as well as postcolonial theory itself. Within various fields and disciplines, ranging from literary and cultural studies to history and anthropology, the decolonial option has become established as a methodological platform and has been heralded by some as a revolutionary paradigm for the cultural and political emancipation of formerly colonized cultures from western modes of knowledge and power.

Kunapipi, 1987

As George Lamming once remarked, over three quarters of the contemporary world has been directly and profoundly affected by imperialism and colonialism. Although it is clear just how profound an effect this has had on the social and political structures of the twentieth century and on the relations which exist between nations in our age, it has until recently been less clear how profoundly this has influenced the perceptive frameworks of the majority of people alive now. The day to day realities of colonized peoples were in large part generated for them by the impact of European discourses. But the contemporary art, philosophies and literature produced by post-colonial societies are not simply continuations or adaptations of European models. The processes of artistic and literary colonization have involved a radical dis/mantling of European codes and a post-colonial subversion and appropriation of the dominant European discourses. This has frequently been accompanied by the demand for an entirely new or wholly recovered 'reality', free of all colonial taint. Given the nature of the relationship between colonizer and colonized, with its pandemic brutalities and its cultural denigration, such a demand is desirable and inevitable. But as the contradictions inherent in a project such as Chinweizu, Jemie and Madubuike's The Decolonization of African Literature demonstrate,' such pre-colonial cultural purity can never be fully recovered.

Historicizing Curriculum Knowledge Translation on a Global Landscape, 2021

In this chapter I weave a tapestry of theoretical threads that combine postcolonial, decolonial and psychoanalytical concerns and that (to a great extent) inform the work of the "Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures" arts/research collective, of which I am a part. The thread-insights are intentionally organized in a non-linear way, requesting from the reader the labor of contextualization and re-contextualization as an effort of co-weaving reciprocity. The weaving interlaces threads in the works of David Scott, Leela Ghandi, Ashis Nandy, Ananya Roy, Ilan Kapoor, Michalinos Zembylas, Nick Mitchel, Gayatri Spivak and Denise Ferreira da Silva, with Carl Mika's work being woven across all threads. The patterns that are woven in this process attempt to visibilize problematic normalized affective and intellectual economies focused on mastery, progress and universality at work in different attempts to critique and transform the world through human agency and imagination. They highlight the limits of modern-colonial frames of desire and intelligibility in terms of wording-the-world to control it, and the onto-epistemic difficulties of wanting, hoping and imagining something genuinely different from the parameters of reality, existence and desirability that one has inherited. The conclusion of this chapter outlines selected aspects of the work of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective and the collective's modest attempts to issue an invitation for horizons of hope to be set beyond what is imaginable within "the house modernity built". David Scott's thread In 'Refashioning futures: Criticism after postcoloniality', David Scott (1999) presents an empathetic critique of representational and epistemological claims that have been emphasized in postcolonial theory as foundational for justice-to-come (see also Andreotti 2014). In his critique, he focuses on the 'essentialism versus non-essentialism debate', drawing attention to how it reinforces a circular intellectual economy of competition for a position of epistemic privilege. He shows that the unexamined terms of intelligibility normalized in this intellectual economy severely constrain what can be imagined, asked, wanted or talked about in the actual debate. He illustrates this by showing how anti-essentialist modes of critique attempt to expose the naivety of essentialist positions using an 'epistemological law' (p. 9) that declares that cultures are heterogeneous, subjectivities are inscripted in language, identities are fluid, community borders are constructed, and so on. This strategy of delegitimisation and dismissal of essentialism, according to Scott, is used to establish epistemological superiority by historicizing answers to questions that are left unexamined. Scott explains: The anti-essentialists are not interested in what constellation of historically constituted demands may have produced the supposedly 'essentialist' formulations. They are not interested in determining what the strategic task at hand was or what the epistemic and ideological material conditions were that formed the discursive

Interfere, 2022

Occupying weapons factories to prevent the production of arms and generate radical theory as part of guerrilla activist research supporting Palestine. Subverting Brahminical Hindu supremacy which co-opts the language of decolonising to justify attacking and criminalising minorities, activists, and scholars in present-day South Asia and the diaspora. Understanding rap music as a generative epistemic site for counter-publics which resist policing and co-option. Engaging with the camera as a way of processing and documenting histories of oppression. Poetically resisting Irish epistemicide. Recovering political spirituality. Demanding material interventions from the University to generate praxes of pedagogical solidarity.

Critical Quarterly, 1992

The 'other' worldliness of postcolonial discourse: a critique One set of approaches to the question of postcoloniality may be identified by their claim to represent a continuation of Frantz Fanon's thinking.* As exemplary texts in this tradition, I will examine Edward Said's writings on postcoloniality (which I would distinguish from his Orientalism, whose object is the disciplinarylideological basis of imperialism, although there are aspects of this text which anticipate the later treatment of postcoloniality), Benita Parry's 'Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse', Abdul JanMohamed's Munichean Aesthetics as well as his programmatic essay, co-authored with David Lloyd, on 'minority discourse'.2 JanMohamed, in his attempt to develop a theoretical framework for reading African fiction started with Fanon's idea of a 'Manicheism' which, he said, governed colonial discourse. According to Fanon the space of colonial politics and culture was represented in terms of a Manichean division along the binary axes of whitelblack, goodlevil, primitivelcivilised, etc. While this 'primary Manicheism' was an ideological weapon of the coloniser, Fanon envisaged that the anti-colonial struggle would reciprocate the gesture in an initial necessary reversal of the terms of the binary.3 This very model depended on Fanon's sense that the colonial space was the site of an irreconcilable antagonism: 'Decolonisation is the meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature.'4 On the basis of this insight, JanMohamed divided up the field of 'African' fiction into two empirical categories: texts written by the colonisers, and those written by the colonised. While the former showed the workings of a Manichean logic in the techniques of representation of the colonial situation in Africa, the latter were read as exemplars of a counter-effort. The reading of individual texts then proceeds in the form of an exercise of judgment, tracing in the texts moments of complete surrender to the Manichean logic or partial or complete transcendence of it through honesty, exemplary humanism or whatever. Thus, in contrast to Joyce Cary, who turned paranoid and avoided contact with the Africans over whom he ruled, Is& Dinesen is said to have 'embraced the new society around her' wholeheartedly, which made her more 'open minded'.5 The 'other' worldliness of postcolonial discourse: a critique 75 What needs to be noted in this is the activation of a system of cultural justice, for which the 'neutral' position of a judge, equipped with the sanction of a certain constituencya certain constitutionis absolutely necessary. However, one is not objecting to the necessity of judgment as such so much as the sanctioning authority for this act of judgment. For, despite a Fanonian assertion of the uncompromising antagonism of the coloniser and colonised, JanMohamed repeatedly re-enacts the sublation of that antagonism in the transcending achievement of a justness of representation. This justice, as Homi Bhabha has pointed out, is a question of 'a form of recognition' of pre-given reality. The representation is 'measured against the "essential" or "original" in order to establish its degree of representativeness, the correctness of the image'.6 JanMohamed's recent attempt (with David Lloyd) to produce a theory of 'minority discourse' represents a slight shift away from the approach in Manichean Aesthetics. 'Minority discourse' is defined as 'a variety of minority voices engaged in retrieving texts repressed or marginalized by a society that espouses universalistic, univocal, and monologic humanisml.7 In a paradoxical turn, the authors plead for the idea of u minority discourse 'to describe and define the common denominators that link various minority cultures' on the strength of the fact that they all share an 'antagonistic relationship to the dominant culture, which seeks to marginalize them all' (MD 1). While the groups, when so assembled, would constitute an empirical majority (MD 2), the authors continue to employ the term 'minority discourse' to describe them. Thus the descriptive force of the term depends on the identification of each group in its autonomy and their subsequent assembly on a common platform without, however, seeking to alter the identifications that each group separately and in its one-to-one relation to the dominant discourse, was compelled to adopt. This is at first sight quite in keeping with the premises with which the project began. Insofar as the dominant discourse's successful marginalisation of these groups is based on the universalisation of its own ideology, the programme designed to empower the minority groups would be repeating this universalising move if it were to abstract from the shared experiences of these groups to a common identity which, in hegemonistic fashion would seem to dissolve these identities into a new and 'higher' unity. In order to avoid this, the programme would have to continue to employ in the singular the term which has a plural meaning in the context of the 'assembly' of minority cultures. The 'difference' of the assembly as reality, the possibility that it may be more than the sum of its parts, has to be repressed in order to keep intact the identity of each group which is determined by its relation to a dominant group.

'Rethinking de-colonial dualism' proposes a partial criticism to Grosfoguel's decolonial project from two different perspectives: the first one has taken globalization studies and Arjun Appadurai's 'scapes theory' as a starting point to reshape the understanding of the complexities and interconnections through which modernity and globalization have evolved. Taking this complexity as keystone to deconstruct the decolonial replica of the North/South confrontative dualism, the text introduces the critique to Appadurai proposal underlining the lack of political activism and historical reflexion, particularly in relation to the structures integrated in power and privilege. In the text I argue that it is only by adopting the radical emancipatory approach taken by Grosfoguel on the one hand, and Appadurai's complexity on the other, that a more realistic and holistic approach to context-specific research and action can be achieved. In the second part of the text 'Rethinking de-colonial dualism' I transit from theory to practice through Farah Ahmed application of the Islamic Research Method and the implementation of Halaqah as a decolonial research method. Ahmed proposal is taken as a practical example, understanding the decolonial project as an exercise that, taking into account the proposals of both Grosfoguel and Appadurai, insists in an approximation to methodology based on dialogue to overcome dual confrontation.

Studies in Social and Political Thought, 2011

Journal of Institute of Postcolonial Studies, Routledge., 2016