Is it Time to Abandon Decolonisation?

The Telegraph, among other right-wing commentators, tends to use ‘decolonisation’ as a code for all that is wrong with our universities, especially with the humanities. It has not quite replaced ‘woke’. It has a different set of associations, primarily related to the downgrading of English history, but it is used in much the same way, without any specific content. The difficulty with trying to counter such usages is that we have perhaps come to a position where the term itself has very little real meaning or use within academic discourse, whatever its significance within right-wing rhetoric.

In early December I attended a wonderful conference in Cairo focusing primarily on contemporary Arabic literatures. Needless to say, the conference was saturated with ideas of decolonisation, even to the point that we had a brief argument when one of the speakers suggested that Egypt did not have a colonial past (which, of course, it did, although not like some other nations). The frame for many of the presentations was the colonial history, or postcolonial context, of many Arab nations. Decolonisation was also used to describe the way speakers sought to discover Arabic terms to replace theoretical concepts from the West, most notably that of ‘trauma’, or by questioners who wanted to challenge other speakers use of Western theoretical concepts, all without fully recognising that ‘decolonisation’ itself was a concept with a strong Western theoretical genealogy.

During the conference I read a book, written in the 1990s about African literature, including comments on the way African writers presented European colonial characters and the relationship between African literatures and Black writing from the States and writing from the African diaspora. This was what I think of as classic ‘decolonisation’ although that was not a term that was ever used within the text. More recently I have read a book about the way European economic development was dependent on the East, particularly on the Muslim world and China, and only came into a prominent position in the world after 1800, building on racist constructions of Africa, Native America and the East to create a narrative saturated by Eurocentrism. Again, this is a practical example of the decolonisation of history, without ever using the term. Currently, I am reading through the catalogue for an exhibition at the Musée Quai Branley Jaques Chirac on the Dakar Djibouti Expedition in 1931-33 earlier in the year. Once again, the aim has been to highlight the African contributions and the concerns relating to collecting and the restitution of objects associated with the expedition. Clearly a decolonising text.

What has particularly struck me, however, is the range of uses of decolonisation in a series of papers for the latest edition of the Journal for the British Association for the Study of Religion, the proofs of which I have just finished checking. Here decolonisation is used to describe the epistemicide of Muslim modes of thought, treating Muslims, even in the UK, as a colonised people almost by definition. Decolonisation is also assumed as an uncontested starting point for a course on religion and the media, with reference to the range of voices heard and the need to challenge the often-stated narratives within the classroom. It is also related to ideas of cultural appropriation in a paper about yoga. Finally, and coming back to my starting point in a rather roundabout way, decolonisation is claimed by Modi’s right wing BJP government as a justification for the destruction of a mosque in Ayodhya and the building of a temple dedicated to Rama.

With so many different uses and references, decolonisation becomes all but meaningless. The fact that books written before the 1990s could talk about many of the concepts that are currently incorporated into the term ‘decolonisation’ without using the term, also suggests that it is not necessary. Let us not continue to be lazy in our thinking, reaching out for the latest fashionable concept of the moment, and let us try to express, in our own words, what it is that we are actually trying to say. It is only in that way, I would suggest, that any true social theory can move forward.