Dismantling the colonial structure of knowledge production

Abstract

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2012) unequivocally criticizes the colonial structure of knowledge production and the specific ideas and individuals that come to be valorized within such an unequal and disempowering structure. She describes the academic practices that engender the profound depoliticization of “indigenous” ideas. These academic practices include: the proliferation of “neologisms” (Cusicanqui, 2012, p. 102) and “language (that) entangles and paralyzes their objects of study” (Cusicanqui, 2012, p. 102), the creation of “a new academic canon, using a world of references and counterreferences that establish hierarchies and adopt new gurus” (Cusicanqui, 2012, p. 102) and the (re)production of “the arboreal structure of internal-external colonialism” (Cusicanqui, 2012,p. 101) with its “centers and subcenters, nodes and subnodes, which connect certain universities, disciplinary trends and academic fashions of the North with their counterparts in the South” (Cusicanqui, 2012,p. 101) through intertwined networks of guest lectureships, visiting professorships, scholarships, conferences, symposia and the like. These practices enable the circulation, valorization and reproduction of particular ideas, i.e. “a fashionable, depoliticized, and comfortable multiculturalism” (Cusicanqui, 2012,p. 104), in academic fields that seem intent on reproducing themselves by “changing everything so that everything remains the same” (Cusicanqui, 2012, p. 101). In this regard, Cusicanqui (2012) seems most critical of those who “strike(s) postmodern and even postcolonial poses” (p. 97) and who, through “cooptation and mimesis (and) the selective incorporation of ideas” (Cusicanqui, 2012, p. 104) produce decontextualized, depoliticized but academically fashionable work that may further academic ambitions but are ultimately disconnected from, irrelevant to and even exploitative of “the people with whom these academics believe they are in dialogue” (Cusicanqui, 2012, p. 102). She is unsparing in her depictions of the academics whose specific ideas in relation to multiculturalism “neutralize(s) the practices of decolonization by enthroning within the academy a limited and illusory discussion regarding modernity and decolonization” (Cusicanqui, 2012,p. 104). She names them – Walter Mignolo (who she is especially