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As promised, a thread on de/colonial citational politics and embodying de/coloniality. A few days ago Sam Museus did a thread on neoliberal citational politics, which is the inspiration behind this thread. Hope you will read and share. #AcademicTwitter #acwri #highered #educolor
1. First - situating term - de/colonial is something I've been writing with a slash to denote the movement between utopian desires of freedom & material condition of resisting colonization. Written & theorized in 2005, 2009, & in almost all of my pubs where I have used the term.
2. I do so to conceptualize de/coloniality not just as resistance to settler colonialism but also as a marker of the conditions of people who are part of once-colonized nations. The settler has left but effects of colonization have not.
3. A de/colonial citational politics involve an understanding of how colonization is pervasive in multiple social structures and the messiness of it. Colonizing ways of being, knowing, dividing up people, land, resources are often normalized by those who gain from it.
4. If one hasn't engaged with the colonial influence in one's field explicitly, then it becomes a vanity & bandwagon move to start spouting decolonial this & that. It's not as simple as Wakanda, where we can point at a white person & call him a colonizer. We're all complicit too.
5. In that way de/colonizing work is work in present continuous tense. It is never completely done, nor are we that woke that we have achieved some enlightenment free of colonial influences. The pervasiveness of colonization makes it impossible for any of us to be free from it.
6. If we really want to engage with de/coloniality, then we have to understand who we are in relation to de/coloniality. What is the history of colonialism & resistance to it in our field, with our ancestors, with our bodies & spirits? This is heavy lifting & a lot of unlearning.
7. Then we have to know how structures of colonialism intersect with other structures of oppression such as racism, patriarchy, homophobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia, transphobia, ableism, & more. These are interconnected structures but we need to trace them instead of conflating.
8. In other words de/coloniality and anti-racism are connected, and we have to know how, instead of using one as a synonym of the other. A citational politics should involve such historiography and citing those who have done such work in body, being, and scholarship.
9. Given the global pervasiveness of colonization, a de/colonial citational politics would have to include those who actively interrogate this pervasiveness, approach any kind of inquiry with humility and not entitlement, and steadfastly work to reconfigure power.
10. Reconfiguring power should include colonizing & other interconnected power structures. If our de/colonial approach is to simply change the characters who can now have more power, but still enact power in colonizing and oppressive ways, then we haven't done de/colonizing work.
11. At the core of de/colonizing work should be a deep engagement with power and understanding how colonizing and other power structures work in tandem. De/colonial work then would have to be more than replacing people and power structures, but fully reconceptualizing power.
12. Reconceptualizing power requires imagining a free future that doesn't represent oppressive, invasive, entitled, hierarchical, authoritarian, arrogant forms of power structures which privilege exactly the same power relations that de/colonizing discourses try to disrupt.
13. To that end we need to cite people outside of academia even who engage in this work daily who might be comedians, musicians, literary scholars, activists, artists, poets, or people on the street, who know resistance and freedom from their daily & ancestral experiences.
14. I think de/colonial has become a bit of a buzz word, so I am careful when I see folx using it. I want to simply know what is the person's history of interrogating colonialism in their own field.
15. And if the person has no history & no acknowledgement of just jumping on to the concept as a new learner, then that move is what colonizing education taught us -- that we can be invasive and arrogant, without having to do the labor of being thoughtful & humble learners.
