Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2023.2220589
Shuchen Xiang
ABSTRACT The previous generation of Sinologists were of the overwhelming consensus that race consciousness did not exist in pre-modern China. However, in recent decades there has been a revision of this consensus. This paper frames this shift in terms of Sinology’s complicity with white supremacy, imperialism and the military-industrial-academic complex. Contemporary Sinology sets itself up as exposing a colonial mentality in pre-modern China. The irony is that it is contemporary Sinology which is complicit with white supremacy and itself is in need of decolonisation. This paper will analyse the most prominent example of this sea-shift in the Sinological consensus on race in China: Frank Dikötter’s The Discourse of Race in Modern China. That such scholarship, deficient in the most basic scholarly standards, was overwhelmingly feted upon its publication, continues to be cited as an authority and to receive inordinate recognition reveals Western academia’s problematic attitudes towards China and the issue of racism. This paper will show how all of the above phenomena can be understood in terms of the “epistemology of ignorance.” By misappropriating the discourse of the critical philosophy of race, Sinology’s epistemology of ignorance universalises Western racism. Sinology has weaponised the discourse of race.
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Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2023.2229132
C. Eze
ABSTRACT The Rhodes Must Fall social movement infused new life into the decolonisation discourse in Africa. However, whereas most scholars agree on the need for decolonisation, there is little consensus or even clarity on what it actually means in our everyday encounter with others and engagement with reality. Indeed, much of the debate on the issue consists of a recycling of the arguments employed by the first generations of anticolonial/postcolonial scholars and political leaders – a pattern of anti-imperialist thinking and litigation of the past which fails to enhance African self-understanding. This article examines the structure of thought that underlies that pattern and much of Africa’s intellectual decolonisation. I argue that Nelson Mandela understood the risks of the decolonisation arguments embodied by the likes of Robert Mugabe and intentionally adopted a different approach, anchored in encounter as an ethical and epistemic imperative. I therefore propose a theoretical approach drawing on Mandela’s thought and actions and argue that his politics of encounter constitutes a hermeneutic condition for a proper constitution of epistemic decolonisation.
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Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2023.2234132
F. Campello
ABSTRACT This paper examines the narrative turn in decolonial theory, specifically regarding the use of experience as sources for normative theories. While narratives of experience can challenge claims of universality, they alone cannot provide broader normative criteria that extend beyond specific experiences, making their use as moral justification ambiguous. Before seeking criteria for moral justification, it is essential to examine the epistemic contribution of experience-based discourse, such as standpoint theories and the Brazilian concept of “lugar de fala” (place of speech). Instead of relying solely on experience, the paper argues for an epistemic critique of the socially shared vocabulary that precedes these experiences. The paper proposes that a more productive approach lies in identifying blind spots in our concept of injustice and examining the vocabulary that shapes our disposition to feel and narrate experiences. This critique challenges the limitations of relying solely on identity for moral justification, emphasising the importance of collective understanding and the need for a broader framework. By expanding this vocabulary, alternative ways of being affected and describing forms of life can be explored.
摘要本文考察了非殖民化理论中的叙事转向，特别是将经验作为规范理论的来源。虽然经验叙事可以挑战普遍性的主张，但仅靠它们无法提供超越特定经验的更广泛的规范标准，使其作为道德理由的用途变得模糊。在寻求道德正当性的标准之前，有必要考察基于经验的话语的认识贡献，如立场理论和巴西的“lugar de fala”（演讲地点）概念。本文主张对这些经验之前的社会共享词汇进行认识论批判，而不是仅仅依赖于经验。本文提出，一种更有效的方法是找出我们对不公正概念的盲点，并研究塑造我们感受和讲述经历的倾向的词汇。这一批评挑战了仅仅依靠身份来进行道德辩护的局限性，强调了集体理解的重要性和更广泛框架的必要性。通过扩展这个词汇，可以探索受影响和描述生活形式的其他方式。
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Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2023.2226500
A. Nyamnjoh
ABSTRACT While Africanisation remains a popular idiom for intellectual decolonisation, it raises difficult issues around citizenship, identity and belonging, alongside their constitutive dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. Using the “politics of belonging” as a conceptual frame, I unpack the tensions involved in grounding decolonisation in a substantive insistence on Africanness. This lens centres important questions like who can successfully claim Africanity and what it means to be intellectually African. Reflecting on the former, both historically and in the aftermath of student calls for a decolonised African university in South African higher education, I show that Africanness is rarely settled by first principles. There are often competing claims regarding the African for whom representation is sought. I therefore contend that the intuitiveness of framing decolonisation as Africanisation elides the politics of belonging that characterises talk of making universities more African, which is sometimes shaped by exclusionary configurations of race, class, nation and indigeneity.
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Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2023.2226497
Veeran Naicker
ABSTRACT Decolonial theory argues that the coloniality of rational Western epistemology is the cause of all global crises, including violent patriarchy, racism and ecological destruction. Contemporary decolonial scholars consequently advocate de-linking from the colonial matrix of power which defines the modern world system. They promote a move towards an epistemologically pluriversal world, which they consider to be theoretically superior and a politically radical advance over postructuralism, postcolonialism and Marxism, which are denigrated as complicit iterations of Eurocentric coloniality. In this article, I critically respond to Decolonial theory’s reductive generalisations by demonstrating that its ostensibly constructivist articulation of geopolitics and standpoint theory amounts to a simplistic inversion of colonial stereotypes found in postcolonial analyses of colonial discourse. After establishing that Decolonial theory is unwittingly bound to a colonial, albeit inverted discourse of essentialist racialised morality, I exhibit that its stereotypical reduction of Western epistemology to a subject-object dualism misrepresents developments in Euro-American epistemology and continental philosophy of science, citing the case of French historical epistemology. I conclude by demonstrating that Decolonial theory is contradictory and self-defeating because it replicates metaphysical errors in Western philosophy and supports political values closer to the far right than leftist ideals of universality and a common world.
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Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2023.2243078
Buhle Zuma
planet Earth under the mirage of the universality of knowledge and human destiny” and that he will “reconsider the cosmogonies and cosmologies that never sought to divide us from the living energy of planet Earth and the cosmos” (3). This is one of those moments, along with the remark that the human species has been severed “from the cosmic planetary energy” (3) in which Mignolo reveals just how much he shares in common with Deepak Chopra; that he is, at least in some of his moods, a hippie spiritualist with a penchant for neologism. Every now and then, the so-called West undergoes an existential crisis and reaches to the East (and more fashionably these days, “the Global South”) for spiritual succour. This is precisely why ideas such as “Ubuntu” (70), “Pachamama” (241, 262), “Sumak Kawsay” (336–337), and talk of “Mother Earth” and “Gaia” are so enticing to him. The actual content of these ideas is entirely irrelevant, especially to those fetishists combing the Earth for candidates to groom into noble savages. But what happens when an individual departs from the thought patterns of their native culture and is no longer espousing views consonant with their “body-political location?” By what authority might Mignolo patrol the borderlines of thought, and will his reply entail that this is a case of brainwashing by the CMP? This is what I call the problem of the wrong natives. It is a counter to his assumption that non-Western peoples intrinsically “think” and “do” in ways which are constitutively anti-Western and that, if they do not, then they must be helplessly ensnared in the colonial matrix of power. Part of Mignolo’s lure inheres in a kernel of truth – that the demythologisation of the Western cultural superiority exported through colonialism is a noble objective. But Decolonial Investigations, with all its conflations, elisions and shadow-boxing with the 500 year-old journals of European explorers, is an underwhelming addition to this worldhistorical process. Only the already-converted will be pleased by the grandiose sloganeering of this self-ordained oracle of the Other.
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Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2023.2243077
George Hull
ABSTRACT This special issue of Social Dynamics assembles several new articles, essays, and book reviews voicing critical perspectives on intellectual decolonisation. Theoretical approaches to intellectual decolonisation articulate different positions on what it takes for inculcation of ideas to count as colonisation. For some, it is because these ideas’ acceptance enables a harmful political or economic regime that their inculcation amounts to colonisation. For others, it is the ideas’ foreignness by itself alone which makes their promotion colonial. Yet others do not count any peaceful proselytisation as colonisation. Some approaches to intellectual decolonisation embrace relativism; others are objectivist and universalist. Since the various approaches to this topic contradict each other about what intellectual decolonisation is, and how it is to be achieved, it is impossible to be in favour of all versions of intellectual decolonisation. The contributions to this issue argue that certain theoretical approaches to intellectual decolonisation have important drawbacks. Several point out theoretical incoherences and deeply troubling political implications in the “Decoloniality” theory of Grupo Modernidad/Colonialidad. Though the contributions to the special issue highlight flaws in specific approaches to this topic, they do so in order the better to motivate for more defensible approaches to intellectual decolonisation.
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Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2023.2240151
Stephen Chan
ABSTRACT The term has become a mantra, but “decoloniality” has almost no precise meaning and is used as an ideological trope. It points in a “progressive” sense towards a status quo ante, almost an arcadia descended from an anti-slavery Victorian regret that colonialism had robbed the “native” of his “innocence.” It is a term brandished often in African studies, but the imperial outreach impacted most of the world. When China’s President Xi Jinping speaks of eroding Western influence, is this a form of decoloniality or a form of chauvinist imposition? If imposition, it all the same draws from a Confucian tradition in which an endless genealogy of Chinese emperors have participated. When Zambia, under the organised umbrella organisation, the United Church of Zambia, brings together both mainstream Christian religions and a host of charismatic religions that have “indigenised” Christianity, is Christianity anymore a colonial project? Is there anything at all in common between Xi and Zambian Christianity? In this essay I object to the laziness of “decoloniality” as a term of righteousness, and argue for complexity, plurality, and a means all the same of speaking together in a common language for international decency and generosity.
【摘要】“去殖民化”这个词已经成为一种口头禅，但它几乎没有确切的含义，只是被用作一种意识形态的修辞。它在“进步”的意义上指向一种现状，几乎是维多利亚时代反对奴隶制的世外之境，因为殖民主义剥夺了“本地人”的“纯真”。这是一个经常在非洲研究中使用的术语，但帝国的扩张影响了世界大部分地区。如果是强加的，它同样来自儒家传统，中国历代皇帝都参与了这个传统。当赞比亚在一个有组织的伞形组织——赞比亚联合教会(United Church of Zambia)的领导下，把主流基督教和一大批将基督教“本土化”的灵恩派宗教结合在一起时，基督教还会是一个殖民项目吗?在这篇文章中，我反对将“去殖民化”作为一种正义的术语的懒惰，并主张复杂性、多元性和一种同样的手段，即为了国际体面和慷慨而用一种共同的语言一起说话。
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Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2023.2220588
M. N. Smith, C. Lester
ABSTRACT Traditions within development thought sceptical of market-led development and which emphasise the unevenness and instabilities of global capitalism are experiencing some renewed interest. One such tradition is dependency studies: a school of thought once prominent in the field of development. We critically review the dependency tradition alongside a more recent branch of critical inquiry into development, namely decoloniality. One of our core contributions is to clarify what makes the decolonial tradition substantially distinct from dependency and other traditions in development thought. We locate decoloniality in the context of the “cultural turn” that swept through social theory from the 1970s. Our paper problematises decoloniality’s critique of Modernity as inherently colonial and oppressive and finds that its core features are idealism and the strong risk of cultural relativism. We assert that the substantive commitments of the dependency tradition are its strength and reject the equivalence drawn by decolonial theorists between “Eurocentrism” and belief in Enlightenment values and methodologies. Drawing on the work of Samir Amin, we emphasise the need for development theory to retain an analytic focus on a materialist analysis of global capitalism; we echo Amin’s critique of culturalism and endorse his defence of universalism.
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