Thread by @TheTattooedProf

The weekly Chronicle Review newsletter highlighted this excellent essay by Sumana Roy, where they observe "decolonizing your syllabus" is often "a form otf atonement," where the "guilt tax" is paid. I've been sitting with this all day. A brief🧵if you care
chronicle.com/article/the-pr…

Also in the email digest was a link to this even more challenging essay by Blake Stimson, who identifies a "colonial narcissism" inherent in the mainstreamed sense of "decolonize your syllabus," adding an even sharper edge to the critique Roy makes. /2

nonsite.org/deneocolonize-…

As Stimson points out: "The “you” in the slogan “decolonize your syllabus” is not addressed to those existentially threatened by police violence and the like but instead to those—the professional managerial class, we might call us—who are its beneficiaries." I mean...yeah. /3

I count myself in the ranks of aspiring "decolonizers," and care deeply about the spirit and aspirations that suffuse the decolonizing project in higher ed. But as a white-dude settler myself, being implicated in these colonial-imperial structures' perpetuation is a thing! /4

In both of these essays, I encountered several moments where my 1st gut reaction, before I could consciously articulate anything, was a rush of defensiveness. Of "OK, *that's* too out there." Of "that can't work." Even, tbh, "that isn't right." The imperial id runs deep. y'all /5

So why was my first, visceral, reaction to some of the most challenging points in these essays like that? I mean, I "decolonize" my syllabus, right? I'm writing a book based in settler-colonial theory, right? I'm one of the good ones, right?

LOL Nope. I am implicated. Deeply./6

I *know* that "decolonizing your syllabus" means more than just [insert "diverse voice" here in the reading list]. But as Roy points out, in practice, that's what it often ends up being. And now those postcolonial voices are given the burden of critique and critique only! /7

The "decolonized" readings are meant to show whites like me the fundamental injustice and violence of imperialism. But they don't get to do the other things that white readings get to do: be whimsical, or "day in the life," or whatever. Roy makes this point much better than me./8

I mean, Roy and Stimson are right! Like, we say "oh, you should read Tuck and Yang's 'Decolonization is not a Metaphor'," and then let its (fundamental) challenge wash over us before we go back to doing what they warn us about. And by "we," I mean "me," too. I do this! /9

To me, as I continue to read and listen and try to learn, what it comes down to is we often equate "decolonize" with "diversify." Diversity is good! For lots of reasons! But it isn't decolonizing. And people (including me!) need to stop eliding the difference in our practices /10

A diverse reading list for a course designed within the structural and ontological imperatives of higher education in the Global North is not, in and of itself, anything more than appropriating decolonizing discourse for a more palatable embedding of settler-imperialism /11

It's the "ways of knowing" that really matter here. In my own discipline of history, for example, we privilege a Eurocentric, patriarchal set of discourses based upon a Western epistemology that fetishizes "objectivity," cognition, written text, and individual authority. /12

But there are other ways of knowing! Written documents are the best only for a particular (and culturally-specific) set of problems. There is no such thing as objectivity; it's an affect to lend the trappings of authority to what is often very particular strands of discourse /13

We (in Western disciplines) neglect oral and aural traditions. We shun "bias." We are leery of "identity." We fetishize ways of knowing, writing, speaking, and being that are absolutely the artifacts of a settler-imperial-patriarchal hegemony. /14

So how do I "decolonize my syllabus" if I'm so embedded in these epistemological structures that, like a fish trying to describe water, I struggle to even imagine alternatives? This is why those two essays gut-punched me. They revealed the limits of my imagination! /15

Walter Mignolo talks about the "Epistemologies of the South." I'm super-on-board with what he's describing, valorizing, prescribing. But then I go to operationalize these ideas and it's like trying to build a house with a putty knife and scotch tape. I don't have the tools! /16

I don't like not knowing how to do something I really want to do. I feel like a failure. And that's a totally Western-academia-induced thing: I have an expertise, so I should be able to do all the things that require some expertise! I'm steeped in only one way of knowing. /17

For a white-dude settler, a product of Westernized schooling w. its attendant epistemologies and norms, trying to break free of that is unsettling (pardon the pun) and requires a conscious, sustained effort to overcome the implicit norms in which I've been thoroughly soaked. /18

Now how do I help my students begin that effort, too? *That's* decolonizing the syllabus, it seems to me. And I don't feel like I'm anywhere near that. But getting whacked upside the head by Roy's and Stimson's ideas was a good way to reboot the effort. /19

I often feel unmoored, flailing, and clumsy doing this work. I'm glad I have colleagues, and other scholars who share their wisdom, to help me navigate.

Anyway, teaching is really hard if you want to do it equitably, justly, and well. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. /fin