Varieties of intellectual decolonisation: an introduction

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.