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damnesdelamer · 3 years

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Recommended reading for leftists

Introduction and disclaimer:

I believe, in leftist praxis (especially online), the sharing of resources, including information, must be foremost. I have often been asked for reading recommendations by comrades; and while I am by no means an expert in leftist theory, I am a lifelong Marxist, and painfully overeducated. This list is far from comprehensive, and each author is worth exploring beyond the individual texts I suggest here. Further, none of these need to be read in full to derive benefit; read what selections from each interest you, and the more you read the better. Many of these texts cannot truly be called leftist either, but I believe all can equip us to confront capitalist hegemony and our place within it. And if one comrade derives the smallest value or insight herefrom, we will all be better for it. After all... La raison tonne en son cratère. Alone we are naught, together may we be all. Solidarity forever.

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(I have split these into categories for ease of navigation, but there is plenty of overlap. Links included where available.)

Classics of socialist theory

Capital (vol.1) by Karl Marx Marx’s critique of political economy forms the single most significant and vital source for understanding capitalism, both in our present and throughout history. Do not let its breadth daunt you; in general I feel it’s better to read a little theory than none, but nowhere is this truer than with regards to Capital. Better to read 20 pages of Capital than 150 pages of most other leftist literature. This is not a book you need to ‘finish’ in order to benefit from, but rather (like all of Marx’s work) the backbone of theory which you will return to throughout your life. Read a chapter, leave it, read on, read again. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf

The Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci In our current epoch of global neoliberal capitalism, Gramsci’s explanation of hegemony is more valuable than much of the economic or outright revolutionary analyses of many otherwise vital theory. Particularly following the coup attempt and election in America, as well as Brexit and abusive government responses to Covid, but the state violence around the world and the advent of fascism reasserts Gramsci as being as pertinent and prophetic now as amidst the first rise of fascism. https://abahlali.org/files/gramsci.pdf

Imperialism: The Highest Stage Of Capitalism by V.I. Lenin Like Marx, for many Lenin’s work is the backbone of socialist theory, particularly in pragmatic terms. In much of his writing Lenin focuses on the practical processes of revolutionary transition from capitalism to communism via socialism and proletarian leadership (sometimes divisively among leftists). Imperialism is perhaps most valuable today for addressing the need for internationalist proletarian support and solidarity in the face of global capitalist hegemony, arguably stronger today than in Lenin’s lifetime. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/imperialism.pdf

Socialism: Utopian And Scientific by Friedrich Engels Marx’s partner offers a substantial insight into the material reality of socialism in the post-industrial age, offering further practical guidance and theory to Marx and Engels’ already robust body of work. This highlights the empirical rigour of classical Marxist theory, intended as a popular text accessible to proletarian readers, in order to condense and to some extent explain the density of Capital. Perhaps even more valuable now than at the time it was first published. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm

In Defense Of Marxism by Leon Trotsky It has been over a decade since I have read any Trotsky, but this seems like a very good source to get to grips with both classical Marxist thought and to confront contemporary detractors. In many ways, Trotsky can be seen as an uncorrupt symbol of the Leninist dream, and in others his exile might illustrate the dangers of Leninism (Stalinism) when corrupt, so who better to defend the virtues of the system many see as his demise? https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/idom/dm/dom.pdf

The Conquest Of Bread by Pyotr Kropotkin Krapotkin forms the classical backbone of anarchist theory, and emerges from similar material conditions as Marxism. In many ways, ‘the Bread book’ forms a dual attack (on capitalism and authoritarianism of the state) and defence (of the basic rights and needs of every human), the text can be seen as foundational to defining anarchism both in overlap and starkly in contrast with Marxist communism. This is a seminal and eminent text on self-determination, and like Marx, will benefit the reader regardless of orthodox alignment. https://libcom.org/files/Peter%20Kropotkin%20-%20The%20Conquest%20of%20Bread_0.pdf

Leftism of the 20th Century and beyond

Freedom Is A Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, And The Foundations Of A Movement by Angela Davis This is something of a placeholder for Davis, as everything she has ever put to paper is profoundly valuable to international(ist) struggles against capitalism and it’s highest stage. Indeed, the emphasis on the relationship between American and Israeli racialised state violence highlights the struggles Davis has continually engaged since the late 1960s, that of a united front against imperialist oppression, white supremacists, patriarchal capitalist exploitation, and the carceral state. https://www.docdroid.net/rfDRFWv/freedom-is-a-constant-struggle-pdf#page=6

Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic Of Late Capitalism by Frederic Jameson A frequent criticism of Marxism is the false claim that it is decreasingly relevant. Here, Jameson presents a compelling update of Marxist theory which addresses the hegemonic nature of mass media in the postmodern epoch (how befitting a tumblr post listing leftist literature). Despite being published in the early ‘90s, this analysis of late capitalism becomes all the more pertinent in the age of social media and ‘influencers’ etc., and illustrates just how immortal a science ours really is. https://is.muni.cz/el/1423/jaro2016/SOC757/um/61816962/Jameson_The_cultural_logic.pdf

The Ecology Of Freedom: The Emergence And Dissolution Of Hierarchy by Murray Bookchin I have not read this in depth, and take issue with some of Bookchin’s ideas, but this seems like a very good jumping off point to engage with ecosocialism or red-green theory. Regardless of any schism between Marxist and anarchist thought, the importance of uniting together to stem the unsustainable growth of industrialised capitalism cannot be denied. Climate change is unquestionably a threat faced by us all, but which will disproportionately impact the most disenfranchised on the planet. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-the-ecology-of-freedom.pdf

Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton I’ve only read excerpts of this; I know Eagleton better for his extensive work on Marxist literary criticism, postmodernity, and postcolonial literature, so I’m including this work of his as a means of introducing and engaging directly with Marxism itself, rather than the synthesis of diverse fields of analysis. But Eagleton generally does a very good job of parsing often incredibly dense concepts in an accessible way, so I trust him to explain something so obvious and self-evident as why Marx was right. https://filosoficabiblioteca.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/EAGLETON-Terry-Why-Marx-Was-Right.pdf

By Any Means Necessary by Malcolm X Malcolm X is one of the pre-eminent voices of the revolutionary black power movement, and among the greatest contributors to black/American leftist thought. This is a collection of his speeches and writings, in which he eloquently and charismaticly conveys both his righteous outrage and optimism for the future. Malcolm X’s explicitly Marxist and decolonial rhetoric is often downplayed since his assassination, but even the title and slogan is borrowed from Frantz Fanon.

Feminism and gender theory

Sister Outsider: Essays And Speeches by Audre Lorde The primary thrust of this collection is the inclusion of ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House’, probably Lorde‘s most well known work, but all the contents are eminently worthwhile. Lorde addresses race, capitalist oppression, solidarity, sexuality and gender, in a rigourously rhetorical yet practical way that calls us to empower one another in the face of oppression. Lorde’s poetry is also great. http://images.xhbtr.com/v2/pdfs/1082/Sister_Outsider_Essays_and_Speeches_by_Audre_Lorde.pdf

Feminism Is For Everybody by bell hooks A seminal addition to Third Wave Feminist theory, emphasising the reality that the aim of feminism is to confront and dismantle patriarchal systems which oppress - you guessed it - everybody. This book approaches feminism through the lens of race and capitalism, feeding into the discourse on intersectionality which many of us now take as a central element of 21st Century feminism. https://excoradfeminisms.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/bell_hooks-feminism_is_for_everybody.pdf

Gender Trouble: Feminism And The Subversion Of Identity by Judith Butler Butler and her work form probably the single most significant (especially white) contribution to Third Wave Feminism, as well as queer theory. This may be a somewhat dense, academic work, but the primary hurdle is in deconstructing our existing perceptions of gender and identity, which we are certainly better equipped to do today specifically thanks to Butler. Vitally important stuff for dismantling hegemonic patriarchy. https://selforganizedseminar.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/butler-gender_trouble.pdf

Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink Or Blue by Leslie Feinberg Feinberg is perhaps the foundational voice in trans theory, best known for Stone Butch Blues, but this text seems like a good point to view hir push into mainstream acceptance where ze previously aligned hirself and trans groups more with gay and lesbian subcultures. A central element here is the accessibility and deconstruction of hegemonic gender and expression, but what this really expresses is a call for solidarity and support among marginalised classes, in a fight for our mutual visibility and survival, in the greatest of Marxist feminist traditions.

The Haraway Reader by Donna Haraway Haraway is perhaps better known as a post-humanist than a Marxist feminist, but in all honesty, I am not sure these can be disentangled so easily. My highest recommendation is the essay ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century‘, but it is in many ways concerned more with aesthetics and media criticism than anything practical, and Haraway’s engagement with technology has only become more significant, with the proliferation of smartphones and wifi, to understanding our bodies and ourselves as instruments of resistance. https://monoskop.org/images/5/56/Haraway_Donna_The_Haraway_Reader_2003.pdf

Postcolonialism

The Wretched Of The Earth by Frantz Fanon Perhaps my highest recommendation, this will give you better insight into late stage (postcolonial) capitalism than perhaps anything else. Fanon was a psychologist, and his analyses help us parse the internal workings of both the capitalist and racialised minds. I don’t see this work recommended nearly enough, largely because Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks is a better source for race theory, but The Wretched Of The Earth is the best choice for understanding revolutionary, anti-capitalist, and decolonial ideas. http://abahlali.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Frantz-Fanon-The-Wretched-of-the-Earth-1965.pdf

Orientalism by Edward Said This is probably the best introduction to postcolonial theory, particularly because it focuses on colonial/imperialist abuses in media and art. Said’s later work Culture And Imperialism may actually be a better source for strictly leftist analysis, but this is the groundwork for understanding the field, and will help readers confront and interpret everything from Western military interventionism to racist motifs in Disney films. https://www.eaford.org/site/assets/files/1631/said_edward1977_orientalism.pdf

Decolonisation Is Not A Metaphor by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang In direct response to Fanon’s call to decolonise (the mind), Tuck and Yang present a compelling assertion that the abstraction of decolonisation paves the way for settler claims of innocence rather than practical rapatriation of land and rights. The relatively short article centres and problematises ongoing complicity in the agenda of settler-colonial hegemony and the material conditions of indigenous groups in the postcolonial epoch. Important stuff for anti-imperialist work and solidarity. https://clas.osu.edu/sites/clas.osu.edu/files/Tuck%20and%20Yang%202012%20Decolonization%20is%20not%20a%20metaphor.pdf

The Coloniser And The Colonised by Albert Memmi Often read in tandem with Fanon, as both are concerned with trauma, violence, and dehumanisation. But further, Memmi addresses both the harm inflicted on the colonised body and the colonisers’ own culture and mind, while also exploring the impetus of practical resistance and dismantling imperialist control structures. This is also of great import to confronting detractors, offering the concrete precedent of Algerian decolonisation. https://cominsitu.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/albert-memmi-the-colonizer-and-the-colonized-1.pdf

Can The Subaltern Speak? by Gayatri Spivak This relatively short (though dense) essay will ideally help us to confront the real struggles of many of the most disenfranchised people on earth, removing us from questions of bourgeois wage-slavery and focusing on the right to education and freedom from sexual assault, not to mention the legacy of colonial genocide. http://abahlali.org/files/Can_the_subaltern_speak.pdf

Wider cultural studies

No Logo by Naomi Klein I have some qualms with Klein, but she nevertheless makes important points regarding the systemic nature of neoliberal global capitalism and hegemony. No Logo addresses consumerism at a macro scale, emphasising the importance of what may be seen as internationalist solidarity and support and calling out corporate scapegoating on consumer markets. I understand that This Changes Everything is perhaps even better for addressing the unreasonable expectations of indefinite and unsustainable growth under capitalist systems, but I haven’t read it and therefore cannot recommend; regardless, this is a good starting point. https://archive.org/stream/fp_Naomi_Klein-No_Logo/Naomi_Klein-No_Logo_djvu.txt

The Black Atlantic: Modernity And Double Consciousness by Paul Gilroy This is an important source for understanding the development of diasporic (particularly black) identities in the wake of the Middle Passage between African and America, but more generally as well. This work can be related to parallel phenomena of racialised violence, genocide, and forced migration more widely, but it is especially useful for engaging with the legacy of slavery, the cultural development of blackness, and forms of everyday resistance. https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/756417/mod_resource/content/1/Gilroy%20Black%20Atlantic.pdf

Imagined Communities: Reflections On The Origin And Spread Of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson This text is important in understanding the nature of both high colonialism and fascism, perhaps now more than ever. Anderson examines the political manipulation and agenda of cultural production, that is the propagandised, artificial act of nation building. This analyses the development of nation states as the norm of political unity in historiographical terms, as symptomatic of old school European imperialism. Today we may see this reflected in Brexit or MAGA, but lebensraum and zionism are just as evident in the analysis. https://is.muni.cz/el/1423/jaro2016/SOC757/um/6181696/Benedict_Anderson_Imagined_Communities.pdf

Discipline And Punish: The Birth Of The Prison by Michel Foucault Honestly, I am not sure if this should be on this list; I would certainly not call it leftist. That said, it is a very important source to inform our perceptions of the nature of institutional power and abuse. It is also unquestionable that many of the pre-eminent left-leaning scholars of the past fifty years have been heavily influenced, willing or not, by Foucault and his post-structuralist ilk. A worthwhile read, especially for queer readers, but take with a liberal (zing!) helping of salt. https://monoskop.org/images/4/43/Foucault_Michel_Discipline_and_Punish_The_Birth_of_the_Prison_1977_1995.pdf

Trouble In Paradise: From The End Of History To The End Of Capitalism by Slavoj Žižek Probably just don’t read this, it amounts to self-torture. Okay but seriously, I wanted to include Žižek (perhaps against my better judgement), but he is probably best seen as a lesson in recognising theorists as fallible, requiring our criticism rather than being followed blindly. I like Žižek, but take him as a kind of clown provocateur who may lead us to explore interesting ideas. He makes good points, but he also... Doesn’t... Watch a couple youtube videos and decide if you can stomach him before diving in.

Additional highly recommended authors (with whom I am not familiar enough to give meaningful descriptions or specific recommended texts) (let me know if you find anything of significant value from among these, as I am likely unaware!):

Theodor Adorno (of the Frankfurt School, which also included Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Walter Benjamin, all of whom I’d likewise recommend but with whom I have only passing familiarity) was a sociologist and musicologist whose aesthetic analyses are incredibly rich and insightful, and heavily influential on 20th Century Marxist theory.

Sara Ahmed is a significant voice in Third Wave Feminist criticism, engaging with queer theory, postcoloniality, intersectionality, and identity politics, of particular interest to international praxis.

Mikhail Bakhtin was a critic and scholar whose theories on semiotics, language, and literature heavily guided the development of structuralist thought as well as later Marxist philosophy.

Mikhail Bakunin is perhaps the closest thing to anarchist orthodoxy. Consistently involved with revolutionary action, he is known as a staunch critic of Marxist rhetoric, and a seminal influence on anti-authoritarian movements.

Silvia Federici is a Marxist feminist who has contributed significant work regarding women’s unpaid labour and the capitalist subversion of the commons in historiographical contexts.

Mark Fisher was a leftist critic whose writing on music, film, and pop culture was intimately engaged with postmodernity, structuralist thought, and most importantly Marxist aesthetics.

Che Guevara was a major contributor to revolutionary efforts internationally, most notably and successfully in Cuba. His writing is robustly pragmatic as well as eloquent, and offers practical insight to leftist action.

Hồ Chí Minh was a revolutionary communist leader of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and a significant contributor to revolutionary communist theory and anti-imperialist practice.

C.L.R. James is a significant voice in 20th Century (especially black) Marxist theory, engaging with and criticising Trotskyist principles and the role of ethnic minorities in revolutionary and democratic political movements.

Joel Kovel was a researcher known as the founder of ecosocialism. His work spans a wide array of subjects, but generally tends to return to deconstructing capitalism in its highest stage.

György Lukács was a critic who contributed heavily to the Western Marxism of the Frankfurt School and engaged with aesthetics and traditions of Marx’s philosophical ideology in contrast with Soviet policy of the time.

Rosa Luxemburg was a revolutionary socialist organiser, publisher, and economist, directly engaged in practical leftist activity internationally for a significant part of the early 20th Century.

Mao Zedong was a revolutionary communist, founder and Chairman of the People’s Republic of China, and a prolific contributor to Marxism-Leninism(-Maoism), which he adapted to the material conditions outside the Western imperial core.

Huey P. Newton was the co-founder of the Black Panther Party and a vital force in the spread and accessibility of communist thought and practical internationalism, not to mention black revolutionary tactics.

Léopold Sédar Senghor was a poet-turned-politician who served as Senegal’s first president and established the basis for African socialism. Also central to postcolonial theory, and a leader of the Négritude movement.

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I hope this list may be useful. (I would also be interested to see the recommendations of others!) Happy reading, comrades. We have nothing to lose but our chains.

#original #leftism #leftist #Marxist #Marxism #socialist #socialism #literature #reading list #critical theory

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qqueenofhades · 4 years

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I have a question about your opinion as a historian about how to deal with problematic past. I am French, not American, so not quite as aware of what is happening right now in the US regarding statues as I probably should. My question is the following: many of the politicians who promoted (admittedly white) social equality in France, worked on reforming labor laws, etc, in the 19th / 20th century were certainly not anti-colonialist. How to deal with this "mixed legacy" today? Best wishes to you!

First off, I am honoured that you would ask me this question. Disclaimer, my work in French history is largely focused on the medieval era, rather than modern France, and while I have studied and traveled in France, and read and (adequately?) speak French, I am not French myself. So this should be viewed as the perspective of a friendly and reasonably well-informed outsider, but not somebody from France themselves, and therefore subject to possible errors or otherwise inaccurate statements. But this is my perception as I see it, so hopefully it will be helpful for you.

(By the way if you’re interested, my post on the American statue controversy and the “preserving history!” argument is here. I originally wrote it in 2017, when the subject of removing racist monuments first arose, and then took another look at it in light of recent events and was like “WELP”.)

There’s actually a whole lot to say about the current crisis of public history in a French context, so let me see if I can think where to start. First, my chief impression is that nobody really associates France with its historical empire, the same way everyone still has either a positive or negative impression of the British Empire and its real-world effects. The main international image of France (one carefully cultivated by France itself) is that of the French Revolution: storming the Bastille, guillotining aristocrats, Liberté, égalité, fraternité, a secular republic overcoming old constraints of a hidebound Catholic aristocracy and reinventing itself as a Modern Nation. Of course, less than a generation after the Revolution (and this has always amused/puzzled me) France swung straight back into autocratic expansionist empire under Napoleon, and its colonialism efforts continued vigorously alongside its European counterparts throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century. France has never really reckoned with its colonialist legacy either, not least because of a tendency in French public life for a) strong centralization, and b) a national identity that doesn’t really allow for a hyphen. What I mean by that is that while you can be almost anything before “American,” ie. African-American, Latino-American, Jewish-American, Muslim-American, etc, you are (at least in my experience) expected to only be “French.” There is a strong nationalistic identity primarily fueled by language, values, and lifestyle, and the French view anyone who does not take part in it very dimly. That’s why we have the law banning the burka and arguments that it “inhibits” Muslim women from visually and/or emotionally assimilating into French culture. There is a very strong pressure for centralization and conformity, and that is not flexible.

Additionally, the aforementioned French lifestyle identity involves cafe culture, smoking, and drinking alcohol -- all things that, say, a devout Muslim is unlikely to take part in. The secularism of French political culture is another factor, along with the strict bureaucracy and interventionist government system. France narrowly dodged getting swept up in the right-wing populist craze when it elected Emmanuel Macron over Marine Le Pen (and it’s my impression that the FN still remains relatively popular) but it also has a deep-grained xenophobia. I’m sure you remember “French Spiderman,” the 22-year-old man from Mali who climbed four stories of a building in Paris to rescue a toddler in 2018. He was immediately hailed as a hero and allowed to apply for French citizenship, but critics complained about him arriving in France illegally in the first place, and it happened alongside accelerated efforts to deny asylum seekers, clear out the Calais migrant camp, and otherwise maintain a hostile environment. The terror attacks in France, such as 2015 in Paris and the 2016 Bastille Day attack in Nice, have also stiffened public opinion against any kind of accommodation or consideration of non-French (and by implication, non-white) Frenchpeople. The Académie Française is obviously also a very strong linguistic force (arguably even more so than the English-only movement in America) that excludes people from “pure” French cultural status until they meet its criteria. There really is no French identity or civic pride without the French language, so that is also something to take into consideration.

France also has a strong anti-authority and labor rights movement that America does not have (at least the latter). When I was in France, the joke was about the “annual strike” of students and railway workers, which was happening while I was trying to study, and we saw that with the yellow jacket protests as well. Working-class France is used to making a stink when it feels that it’s being disrespected, and while I can’t comment in detail on how the racial element affects that, I know there has been tension and discontent from working-class, racial-minority neighborhoods in Paris about how they’ve been treated (and during the recent French police brutality protests, the police chief rejected any idea that the police were racist, despite similar deaths in custody of black men including another French Malian, Adama Traoré.) All of this adds up to an atmosphere in which race relations, and their impact on French history, is a very fraught subject in which discussions are likely to get heated (as discussions of race relations with Europeans and white people tend to get, but especially so). The French want to be French, and feel very strongly that everyone else in the country should be French as well, which can encompass a certain race-blindness, but not a cultural toleration. There’s French culture, the end, and there isn’t really an accommodation for hybrid or immigrant French cultures. Once again, this is again my impression and experience.

The blind spot of 19th-century French social reformers to colonialism is not unlike Cold War-era America positioning itself as the guarantor of “freedom and liberation” in the world, while horrendously oppressing its black citizens (which did come in for sustained international criticism at the time). Likewise with the American founding fathers including soaring rhetoric about the freedom and equality of all (white) men in the Constitution, while owning slaves. The efforts of (white) social reformers and political activists have refused to see black and brown people as human, and therefore worthy of meriting the same struggle for liberation, for... well, almost forever, and where those views did change, it had to come about as a process and was almost never there to start with. “Scientific” white supremacy was especially the rage in the nineteenth century, where racist and imperialist European intellectuals enjoyed a never-ending supply of “scientific” literature explaining how black, brown, and other men of color were naturally inferior to white men and they had a “duty” to civilize the helpless people of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and so on, who just couldn’t aspire to do it themselves. (This is where we get the odious “white man’s burden” phrase. How noble of them.) So the nineteenth-century social reformers were, in their minds, just doing what science told them to do; slavery abolitionists and other relief societies for black and brown people were often motivated by deeply racist “assimilationist” ideas about making these poor helpless people “fit” for white civilization, at which point racial prejudice would magically end. This might have been more “benevolent” than outright slave-owning racism, but it was no less damaging and paternalistic.

If you’re interested in reading about French colonialism and postcolonialism from a Black French perspective, I recommend Frantz Fanon (who you may have already heard of) and his 1961 magnum opus The Wretched of the Earth/ Les Damnés de la Terre. (There is also his 1952 work, Black Skin, White Masks.) Fanon was born in Martinique, served in World War II, and was part of the struggle for Algerian liberation from France. He was a highly influential and controversial postcolonial theorist, not least for his belief that decolonialization would never be achieved without violence (which, to say the least, unnerved genteel white society). I feel as if France in general needs to have a process of deep soul-searching about its relationship to race and its own imperial history (French Indochina/Vietnam being another obvious example with recent geopolitical implications), because it’s happy to let Britain take the flak for its unexamined and triumphalist imperial nostalgia. (One may remark that of course France is happy to let Britain make a fool of itself and hope that nobody notices its similar sins....) This is, however, currently unlikely to happen on a broad scale for the social and historical reasons that I discussed above, so I really applaud you for taking the initiative in starting that conversation and reaching out for resources to help you in doing it. Hopefully it will help you put the legacy of these particular social reformers in context and offer you talking points both for what they did well and where their philosophy fell short.

If there does come a point of a heightened racial conversation and reckoning in France (and there have been Black Lives Matter protests there in the last few weeks, so it’s not impossible) I would be curious to see what it looks like. It’s arguably one of the Western countries that has least dealt with its racial issues while making itself into the standard-bearer for secular Western liberalism. France has also enthusiastically joined in the EU, whereas Britain has (rather notoriously....) separated from all that, which makes Britain look provincial and isolated while France can position itself as a global leader with a more internationalist outlook. Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel are currently leading the effort for the $500 billion coronavirus rescue package for the EU, which gives it a sense of statesmanship and stature. It will be interesting to see how that continues to change and develop vis-a-vis race, or if it does.

Thanks so much for such an interesting question, and I hope that helped!

#history #french history #black history #history of racism #anonymous #ask

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fatehbaz · 4 years

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Caretaking and resistance. Thinking again about the quote from ‘Aha Makhav/Mojave writer Natalie Diaz, in an interview about her book Postcolonial Love Poem (March 2020), discussing how love can be practiced both as a part of and apart from resistance (”A dangerous way of thinking lately is that we love as resistance. I understand that, but I refuse to let my love be only that. I am not loving against America or even in spite of it. I am loving because I was made to love, love was made for me.”)

Reminds me of a few related comments from other Indigenous women.

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Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg): This continual pattern of the gutting of mass mobilization by royal commissions, national inquiries, or this time, the promise of a couple of “high level meetings”, is not a trick we can continually fall for [...]. Here we are two years later, with the components of the movement that were begging for colonial recognition [...], it matters how change is achieved. What happens when we build movements that refuse colonial recognition as a starting point and turn inwards building a politics of refusal that isn’t just productive, but that is generative [...]. Movement building is a productive or generative politics of refusal [...]. We recognize when particular animals return to our territory in the spring, and when plants and medicines reappear after winter rests. Recognition for us is about presence, about profound listening and about recognizing and affirming the light in each other, as a mechanism for nurturing and strengthening internal relationships to our Nishnaabeg worlds. It is a core part of our political systems because they are rooted in our bodies and our bodies are not just informed by but created and maintained by relationships of deep reciprocity. [...] Recognition within Anishinaabeg intelligence is a process of seeing another being’s core essence, it is a series of relationships. It is reciprocal, continual and a way of generating society. It amplifies Anishinaabewin -- all of the practices and intelligence that makes us Anishinaabeg. It cognitively reverses the violence of dispossession, because what’s the opposite of dispossession in Indigenous thought again? Not possession because we’re not supposed to be capitalists, but connection -- a coded layering of intimate interconnection and interdependence that creates a complicated algorithmic network of presence, reciprocity, consent, and freedom.

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Deanna Reder (Cree-Metis): “[A] sole focus on narratives of resistance replicates the founding ideas in much criticism about Native American literature that all Indigenous texts only exist because of the existence of the colonizer […]. [T]here is more to the politics of self-determination than resistance to oppression.”

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Melanie K. Yazzie (Dine/Navajo): Pauline Whitesinger, a Big Mountain matriarch who was prominent in the struggle on Black Mesa to resist forced relocation in the 1970s and 1980s, likened this network of extractive practices to “putting your hand down someone’s throat and squeezing the heart out”. […] Indigenous feminist and Dine land defenders […] draw connections between the everyday lived material realities of environmental violence and larger structures of colonialism [and] capitalism […]. These connections are key for understanding the politics of life espoused by Big Mountain matriarchs like Whitesinger and Ruth Benally that emerged to contest these material realities of environmental violence and death […].

The land-based paradigm that emerged from the context of these women’s resistance to forced removal had, at its center […] both an unwavering critique of the almost totalizing death that extractive practices represented […] and a framework for Dine conceptions of life rooted in one’s relationships with the land and responsibilities to life-giving forces and beings like sheep, corn, family […] an entire web of relations that have specific connections to specific places. In other words, through the act of resisting forced removal, these women enacted a politics of life that was both defensive (as in to defend life against the destruction of extraction) and generative (as in to caretake life through an ethos and practice of kinship obligation).

This dual move of defending and caretaking relational life is at the heart of the Dine concept of k’e, which is still widely practiced as a social and ontological custom in both Dine resistance struggles and in everyday Dine life. […] Our decolonial aspirations are not just about sovereignty and exerting independence over energy development […]. Our politics of [...] decolonization must thus not only act as a form of resistance to the death drive of capitalism and settler colonialism, but also function as a vehicle for imagining a politics of life that will refuse death and instead secure a future for all our relations. […] I see the work emerging from […] Indigenous feminism as a sign that intellectuals writing from both the front lines of Indigenous resistance [...] are formulating a politics of relational life that can serve as a form of multispecies justice […].

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uglyducklingpresse · 5 years

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“WE ARE ALL SOMEWHAT COLONIZED IN OUR EXISTENCE”: JAMIE CHIANG IN CONVERSATION WITH ZAHRA PATTERSON

UDP apprentice Jamie Chiang interviewed writer and educator Zahra Patterson in February 2019 after the release of her UDP title Chronology, recent winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography. They discussed Zahra's journaling in Cape Town; her friendship with Liepollo Ranekoa, who passed away in 2012; the impact of language choice in postcolonial literature; tattoos; and more.

Taking as its starting point an ultimately failed attempt to translate a Sesotho short story into English, Chronology explores the spaces language occupies in relationships, colonial history, and the postcolonial present. It is a collage of images and documents, folding on words-that-follow-no-chronology, unveiling layers of meaning of queering love, friendship, death, and power.

Can you talk about the background of your decision to go to Cape Town to find who you are or the meaning of life? Did you find it? (In Chronology, Zahra refers to her journey to Cape Town as a search for herself.)

Yeah, I mean sometimes I get a little dramatic perhaps when I'm writing in my journal.

How old were you? How many years ago was that?

It was the end of 2009 into 2010, so I would have been in my late twenties. I feel a journal is a place to express one's ideas, but it's also a creative space. I wouldn't take myself totally seriously in everything that comes out in a journal. I think there's definitely some self-awareness of one's own—my self importance, but also the quest to find oneself is not just to be made fun of. I think it's an important concept.

How long did you stay in Cape Town?

I was there for around five weeks. As far as the decision to go, it was more spur of the moment. I was in South Africa for a wedding. My cousin got married and instead of going off traveling that far for a week, I thought I would just spend a couple of months if I had to go to that part of the world; there's no point in going for a week, so I was going to stay. I hadn't actually decided where I was going after the wedding until I got there, and Cape Town seemed to make the most sense to me.

It perhaps felt the least imperialistic to go and spend time in such a cosmopolitan, international city as opposed to going somewhere more remote. You're either a tourist or a local, whereas Cape Town is an easy city to integrate into.

I see. On page 33, you mention that you have a tattoo, and in the caption there is this word ke nonyana. What does ke nonyana mean?

It means I'm a bird.

That's the first word you spoke in Sesotho?

Yes. I found the words in Liepollo’s English-Sesotho dictionary one day, and when she came home I spoke them. It meant a lot to her that I’d engaged with her language.

If you don’t mind, could you elaborate the story behind Liepollo’s colleague’s Facebook profile picture. What happened?

It was the day she died, and his Facebook profile changed to her picture. It was an image of her. That was jarring because why somebody would put an image of a friend up, and there are very few circumstances that someone would do something like that and usually it's because they're dead. So when I saw that his Facebook picture changed to her face, it occurred to me that something terrible had happened. And I was at work at the time, so it was just very disorienting.

Sorry to hear that. Did you get your tattoo because of this?

Yeah, so I didn't have anybody to mourn with because I had met Liepollo in Cape Town and we didn't have friends in common. Actually, we had a friend in common—an American who interned at Chimurenga while I was staying with Liepollo who I met once at the house in Observatory and once for coffee in Brooklyn—but she had moved to D.C. by that time, so I didn't reach out to her. It was a very isolated mourning experience. That's kind of why I got the tattoo, just to have her with me and to have that symbol and to think of her every day. Because when you have a long distance friendship, you're not going to think of the person every day. We were in touch every few months. I don’t want to forget her due to not having a lot of people to remember who she was with, so I needed to make her memory permanent on me. I think everybody thinks about getting tattoos in this day and age. My rule for tattoos is if I want it for a full year, then I'll get it, and I've never wanted anything for a year. So it’s my only tattoo.

And ke nonyana sounds beautiful.

Thank you. I think it's beautiful also.

And on page 37 and 38, there’s an interesting conversation you had with a Muslim guy named Saed. I found some of his talk kind of sexist. What was your reaction when you were talking to him? It sounds like he's almost preaching to you, trying to change your idea about what a woman's purpose is in this world.

Exactly! But he also wasn't that; he was as if playing the role that he thought he was supposed to play and open to other ways of thinking. We're socialized beings, all of us. He wasn't terribly dogmatic. I don't think he'd been challenged too much in his way of thinking, but at the same time maybe he had because he was open to being challenged. So yeah, it was very interesting.

On page 47 to 48, you write about the panel What is the value of age and wisdom? at the Bronx Museum of Art. The five panelists are: Vinie Burrows, Boubacar Boris Diop, Yusef Komunyakaa, Achille Mbembe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. There’s a quotation from Mbembe: “If the language we use is in itself a prison...We have to put a bomb under the language. Explode language!” Could you tell us more about the context?

Achille Mbembe is a leading postcolonial theorist. I think his words are also quite poetic, so he's speaking metaphorically. The context of that part of the conversation is imperialism and language. That intellectuals from formerly colonized nations use the colonial language to express decolonial ideas is problematic, but it's still very accepted. And even these intellectuals who are on the panel, they write in English and they write in French, but they also find it problematic that they do that; however, it's also part of their survival. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o wrote Decolonizing The Mind in the early eighties, where he swore off ever writing in English again, but then he is put into prison and he's exiled, so he can't actually exist in his mother tongue and his mother land; the government there has ostracized him because he speaks out against what they're doing to the people. Therefore, he has to make his life in English in America, he teaches in California.

Circumstances don't necessarily allow a person to decolonize their lives because in order to survive in this society, we are all somewhat colonized in our existence. I think that saying to put a bomb under language is saying that we need to just get our ideas out there. There’s also the visual aspect of it, I see words and letters, like, splattered. Like fucking. . .we need to fuck with language; we need to push the boundaries of language.

As Diop said “Teaching Wolof enhances self-esteem.” Does Wolof have a writing system?

I’m not positive about the history of Wolof’s writing system but I know some, especially in more northern Sub-African countries had created writing systems using Arabic script and maybe some of them now use the Latin alphabet, so I would have to look that up for Wolof specifically.

You use your mother tongue to express yourself because ideas in a specific language can't be translated. When you lose the language, you lose the culture and the history of people. Also if you're writing in any of the indigenous languages to Africa, you're not writing for the colonizer; you're writing for the people who speak that language, which is also important.

A lot of this theory, especially academic theory that is taught in universities, is very limited in its reach. I think even though these are serious intellectuals who write academic works for academia, they're aware and they're problematizing the limits of writing scholarly work for institutions that isn't necessarily reaching the people.

What other languages do you speak?

I speak French. I lived in France for awhile. I would say I used to be bilingual; I'm kind of monolingual at this point in my life.

What about in Sesotho?

I was working on the project (an attempt to translate Lits'oanelo Yvonne Nei's short story “Bophelo bo naka li maripa” from Sesotho to English) originally, but the access to the language was limited. I wasn't able to access decent grammar books, I wasn't able to access the orthography that I wanted to access so I gave up pretty quickly...but it wasn't as simple as giving up. I stepped back because I didn't really feel it was totally appropriate for me to do what I was doing. I think that’s a hugely important part of my text, the part where I put myself into conversation with Spivak and she tells me, via an essay she wrote about translation, that what I’m doing is wrong. I want to learn a language in which I'm going to be able to speak to people. I’m still not totally sure if I should have published what was supposed to be such a personal exercise, so that section with Spivak is essential to me.

On page 72, you wrote Liepollo an email about a friend who taught you how to say Your sister is a whore in Tagalog?

A friend of mine, her first love was Filipina so she knew how to insult people in Tagalog. When she said it, it sounded Spanish to me so I was wondering if that kind of insult comes with colonialism...also a misogynistic perspective can come. Not to say that misogyny doesn't exist in all cultures, although I think there are probably some cultures where it doesn't exist. Just problematizing the way language can infiltrate into a culture and then become part of the existing language but isn't part of that cultural history—the etymology isn’t actually Filipino; the etymology is Spanish.

Are there any books and authors that inspire you a lot?

For this work, Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, that was a huge inspiration. Mouth: Eats Color by Sawako Nakayasu in terms of thinking about different ways, different things that can be done with form and then different things that can be done with translation. It was very liberating to read those two authors. I don't identify as a translator nor as a poet, so most of the things I've read are novels. My background is primarily in postmodern and postcolonial pieces of literature. I also thought about the nature of collage while I was working on Chronology. I looked at Wangechi Mutu’s work specifically for inspiration, but I’ve loved Romare Bearden’s work for years.

Thanks for sharing. The last question, what are you working on now?

I've started writing and hopefully I'm able to continue it. It's a piece that will potentially be called Policy. I'm an educator and I'm pretty passionate about how distorted and messed up the reality of public school systems is in this country. Although one could say I've been researching since I've been an adult, I started specific research for Policy last summer and I didn't start writing it until a couple of weeks ago. It's experimental in form. I'd say it's fiction meets theory, whereas Chronology is memoir meets theory. I'm not sure exactly where it's going but I'm thinking critically about charter schools and desegregation efforts in New York City and also the history of that. So going back to Brown versus the Board of Ed. . .I'll probably address school shootings, the school-to-prison pipeline, school lunches, teachers’ strikes; it’s about as intersectional an issue as there is—how we educate ourselves as a nation, and on the stolen land of our nation.

I think right now, especially with the current administration, though public schools have been in danger for a very long time, our current secretary of education is a billionaire who wants to privatize education, so her agenda is to destroy our public school infrastructure. It's worrisome. Processing this information in a way makes me very angry because it's systemic. It's how you keep people oppressed. If you don't give people access to education, you're not giving them access to themselves. Never mind the tools they need to achieve and succeed in a capitalist society.

I don't feel the United States has a liberatory agenda for education and I want to explore that a little bit in the history of curriculums and pedagogy because there have been, at the turn of the century, there were some really interesting education theorists like John Dewey and Ella Flagg Young, and their ideas for public education were very progressive, such as student driven classrooms, and not having really punitive systems. You find that education in private schools but rarely in public schools, so why are we not educating our youth in ways that let them think critically about the world that they're living in? Educating children to just follow rules and memorize doesn't work for most children. How many do you know in public schools who are excited to go to school every day? I think humans naturally are curious and want to learn and know things. So why is education taking that away from children?

I don't know exactly how the project is going to manifest. It will be weird.

Zahra Patterson’s first book, Chronology (Ugly Duckling Presse 2018), won the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography and received a Face Out Fellowship from CLMP. Her short works have appeared in Kalyani Magazine The Felt, and unbag (forthcoming). A reading of her play, Sappho's Last Supper, was staged at WOW Café Theatre. She is the creator of Raw Fiction and currently teaches high school English at a Quaker boarding school. Her writing has been supported by Mount Tremper Arts and Wendy’s Subway, and her community work has been supported by Brooklyn Arts Council, The Pratt Center, and many individuals. She holds an MFA in Writing from Pratt Institute.

#author interviews #read #zahra patterson #chronology

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two-browngirls · 6 years

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vimeo

Not Today's Yesterday - Seeta Patel

Seeta Patel is a force to be reckoned with. Her strong will, magnetic presence and passionate ideas come across equally as powerful on and off stage. But the life of a dance artist isn’t as glamorous as it may seem. Seeta is extremely busy with multiple projects on the go at once but I manage to catch her during a brief lunch break while rehearsing with a group of rising Bharatanatyam dancers in Birmingham as part of #TheNatyaProject, to chat about her exciting new tour.

Not Today’s Yesterday is an international collaboration between UK award-winning Bharatanatyam artist Seeta Patel and Australian choreographer Lina Limosani. This work blends classical Indian dance (Bharatanatyam) & contemporary dance in a striking, intelligent and engaging evisceration of ‘pretty’ and ‘suitable’ historical stories. It is a one-woman show which subversively co-opts whitewashing against itself.

“The inspiration stems from our concerns that revisionist and airbrushed histories have become a central issue of tension throughout the world, in particular in Western democracies.”

I first asked Seeta how the idea of the work came about as I was aware that it had been a number of years in progress.

“It started with my feeling that the history of Bharatnatyam has been white-washed. Having read Unfinished Gestures by Davesh Soneji, it really blew my mind that many of us going through the system are not often taught about the social and political history of the art form in its entirety. There’s more niceness rather than the grit of it. This is basically how history is white-washed in order to make it more palatable.”

I’d seen the work in progress around a year ago and it was haunting, hypnotic and extremely clever in its execution. Through the medium of a fairy-tale story, it draws people in with eerie familiarity, but as with any fairy-tale there are always dark undertones. Parts are grotesque and exaggerated with caricatures of colonial supremacy but other parts are gentle and vulnerable as Seeta gazes wide-eyed into the depths of what was.

The collaboration between Seeta and choreographer, Lina Limosani was first funded by the Arts Council’s Artist International Development Fund 2016 where Seeta travelled to Australia where Lina is based, to research and develop the work.

“Britain and Australia, amongst others, have sordid histories and relationships with indigenous and migrant communities. Skewed histories fuel a distorted sense of nationalism. This work aims to open up conversation through a clever appropriation of whitewashed histories.”

The following year, Seeta was able to gain further funding to develop the work in Poland, as another one of the collaborators was based there and perform previews of ‘Not Today’s Yesterday’ around the UK. Being based in a foreign country during this process really fuelled the creative ideas and themes, which fed into the piece.

Earlier this year they were able to sharpen the work to a fine point and received funding to perform ‘Not Today’s Yesterday’ at Adelaide Fringe Festival. During that period, they were successful in gaining a UK touring grant for this Autumn, so it has been through several stages and Seeta envisions it to live on in many different contexts, as the work deals with some of the most pressing issues of our time.

“This piece is a part of my wider work. Along with my classical work, whatever I do is political on a certain level. I can’t wake up in the morning and change the colour of my skin or the country that I’m born and live in, I am political. It’s not something I can choose to remove. I’m not of that privilege. Not in this country.”

As Seeta’s career rises and expands, I’m interested to learn about what advice she has to offer the next generation who look up to her as a role model and as an example of someone with a successful career as an Indian classical dancer or dancer from a South Asian background in this country. She’s brutally honest and explains that this career is by no means conventional, in any sense of the word. Her path has forced her to challenge the accepted ‘norms’ that we are socialised into as first and second generation South Asian immigrants who constantly strive to over-achieve. So to have to find temporary or casual work through the ebbs and flows is perfectly acceptable as it means that you can earn money, which doesn’t have to eat into the time that you want to work on dance.

“Certain professions require just as much energy as dance does, so I don’t personally believe that you can do both and give each job the commitment that it deserves.” says Seeta. “You have to understand what you really want and sometimes take scary steps to get there that you’re not confident or comfortable with.”

The interactive element of the work is the carefully curated post-show talks, as Seeta hopes that the audience becomes lured into a dark fantasy and taken on an experiential journey during the performance then the discussion afterwards is a chance for reflection and transformation.

Each performance has specifically relevant researchers, academics and powerful personalities who will help to uncover the themes behind the performance and welcome the audience to share their thoughts and ideas too.

So don’t miss out on a very special chance to experience a dance theatre work by such a phenomenal BROWNGIRL and book your tickets to a performance near you.

TOUR DATES

Seeta is on a UK Tour of her one woman dance theatre work Not Today's Yesterday this Autumn 2018. A collaboration with Limosani Projects. Tour details as follow:

- 2nd Oct - The Place - 3rd Oct - The Place

booking info

[email protected]

+44 (0)20 7121 1100

SPEAKERS

2nd October Gurminder K Bhambra is Professor of Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies in the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex.

Alice A. Procter is an art historian and museum educator. She runs Uncomfortable Art Tours, unofficial guided tours exploring how the UK’s major art institutions came into being against a backdrop of imperialism.

Tanika Gupta - Over the past 20 years Tanika has written over 20 stage plays that have been produced in major theatres across the UK. She has written 30 radio plays for the BBC and several original television dramas, as well as scripts for EastEnders, Grange Hill and The Bill.

3rd October Kenneth Tharp - Kenneth Tharp is the former Chief Executive of The Place, the UK’s premier centre for contemporary dance.

Inua Elams - Born in Nigeria, Inua Ellams is a cross art form practitioner, a poet, playwright & performer, graphic artist & designer and founder of the Midnight Run — an international, arts-filled, night-time, playful, urban, walking experience.

Tobi Kyeremateng - Tobi Kyeremateng is a theatre, festival and live performance producer. She is currently Producer at Apples and Snakes, Executive Producer (Up Next) at Bush Theatre, and Programme Coordinator at Brainchild Festival.

- 5th Oct - Amata Theatre Falmouth University

booking info

Phone: 01326 259349

Email:

[email protected]

SPEAKERS - TBC

- 12th Oct - Watermans Arts Centre

booking info

Box Office: 020 8232 1010

SPEAKERS

Bidisha Mamata: Bidisha is a British writer, film-maker and broadcaster/presenter for BBC TV and radio, Channel 4 news and Sky News and is a trustee of the Booker Prize Foundation, looking after the UK's most prestigious prizes for literature in English and in translation.

- 13th Oct - Kala Sangam, Bradford

booking info

SPEAKERS

Pauline Mayers Associate Artist with the West Yorkshire Playhouse Pauline produces her own shows as The Mayers Ensemble themed around participation, intimacy and identity.

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is a writer, speaker, playwright, award-winning spoken-word activist and founder of the political blog www.thebrownhijabi.com

- 23rd Oct - Patrick Centre, Birmingham

booking info

Box Office: 0844 338 5000

SPEAKERS

Dr Kehinde Andrews: is Associate Professor of Sociology, and has been leading the development of the Black Studies Degree at Birmingham City University.

Abeera Kamran: is a visual designer and a web-developer based in Birmingham and Karachi, Pakistan. Her creative practice is research-based and lies at the intersections of design, archiving practices and the internet.

“Once upon a time... in a faraway land... it happened... did not happen... could have happened.”

Supported by Chats Palace, Arts Council England, Country Arts SA, Arts SA, The Place London, Adelaide Fringe Artists Fund, LWD Dance Hub, British Council, The Bench UK and NA POMORSKIEJ Artist residency.

#bharatanatyam #bharatnatyam #indian dance #indian classical dance #classical dance #dance #dancer #dancers #theatre #colonialism #white supremism #white supremisist #white superiority #australia #britain

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decolonise-modernism · 2 years

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Recomended literature for understanding the context of coloniality in German Architectural Modernism:

Kenny Cupers´ On the Coloniality of Architectural Modernism in Germany

Itohan Osayimwese´s From Postcolonial to Decolonial Architectural History: A Method

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sorchanitua · 7 months

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University of Texas-San Antonio Assistant Professorship in English -- Latina/ o/ x Literatures

Deadline: November 6 Length/Track: Apparently tenure track Description: “Candidates may specialize in any aspect of Latina/ o/ x Literatures, preferably with an emphasis on the literatures of the U.S./ Mexico border; postcolonial/ decolonial theory; literary and cultural formations of Latinidad both regionally and globally; and/ or trans- and multi-disciplinary approaches to Latinx…

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exchangehe · 4 years

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The Lone Wolf and Cub: A Learning Developer’s Nurture of Decolonial Pedagogy in a UK Higher Education Institution. Written by Dr Ryan Arthur,FHEA

First published in 1970, Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima’s Lone Wolf and Cub depicts the perilous journey of a swordsman and his three-year-old son (Pusateri, 2001). Set in the Tokugawa period, Koike and Kojima’s manga offers the reader an apt metaphor for a learning developer’s journey of discovery. This journey seeks to go beyond the slogans and metaphors of the ‘decolonising the curriculum’ movement to understand how these very young and ‘cub-like’ decolonial pedagogies can be deployed by learning developers in British higher education institutes (HEIs). This will involve engaging with the decolonial literature to extract a definition, present a rationale, articulate principles and provide a tangible example. This essay is significant because it seeks to contribute to the minuscule literature base of decolonial pedagogies in British HEIs. More specifically, it offers a critical review of how decolonial pedagogies can be operationalised in the learning development sector.

Introduction

This study utilises Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima’s gripping story of the Lone Wolf and Cub as a metaphor for an enlightening journey. As Giroux (1988, p.162) cites, ‘We are living out a story. There is no way to live a storyless… life’. This story adopts the funnel approach; it starts very broadly by looking at the parallels between Koike and Kojima’s manga and the subject at hand. This will lead to a focus on the matter of decolonisation; though this study’s focus is on decolonial pedagogies, the broader theme of decolonisation informs and shapes the pedagogies. Moving on, it is crucial that the author distinguishes between decolonial pedagogies from other pedagogies of disruption to give a better understanding of the field. Funnelling down even further, the author seeks to move from pedagogies to pedagogy by specifying an approach. The approach selected was the Critical Inquiry Approach, which prompted the development of six principles that will guide its usage. Also, the focus on the Critical Inquiry Approach required a rationale and an explanation of its deployment in the Learning Development sector, all of which completes a ‘general to specific’ journey of discovery. This study will commence with some parting thoughts about the practical usage of the Critical Inquiry Approach.

Lone Wolf and the Cub

First published in 1970, Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima’s Lone Wolf and Cub depicts the perilous journey of a swordsman and his three-year-old son. Set in the Tokugawa period, Koike and Kojima’s manga offers the reader an apt metaphor for not only a learning developer’s journey of discovery but also a metaphor for the nature of decolonisation itself. Koike and Kojima were captivated by the American cinematic western (Pusateri, 2001). Instead of just recreating what captivated them, the Japanese authors sought to repurpose the mythic West for their own mythic purposes (Pusateri, 2001).[1] This repurposing of Western artefacts was not simply a matter of exchange, it was also a critique of those artefacts.

Moreover, parallels between decolonisation and the Lone Wolf and Cub can also be drawn from the violence of both. Lone Wolf, in its effort to establish itself as a ‘counter-myth’, is violent ‘at an unparalleled level of extremity and departure from realism’ (Pusateri, 2001, p. 88). Likewise, decolonial projects are violent, as Sefa Dei and Simmons (2010, p. XVIII) stated in the Pedagogy of Fanon, ‘Decolonisation is violent and is a creative urgent necessity. Such violence has a cleansing force to rinse the oppressor detoxify the oppressed, and make both the oppressor and oppressed human again’. However, it must noted that it is ‘not the violence of billy clubs, bullets, or bombs but the violence of ripping a plant out of the ground, roots and all, the violence of plowing the earth to make it receptive to new seeds (Fujino et al., 2018 p. 71). Lastly, Lone Wolf is a difficult read, there are many problematic themes and unsavoury sections. Correspondingly, decolonial projects do not hold any illusions of universal and utopian ideals, ‘it is a paradigm that harbors an element of unpredictability and uncertainty’ (Mendieta, 2003, p. 159). Smith (1999, p. 186) pointed to the ‘real-life ‘dirtiness’ of political projects, or what Fanon and other anti-colonial writers would regard as the violence entailed in struggles for freedom’.

Decolonisation

The broader notion of decolonisation rests on the assumption that British Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are sites where the transmission and production of knowledge are wholly embedded in Eurocentric epistemologies that are ‘presented’ as objective and universal (Cupples and Grosfoguel, 2018; Domínguez, 2019). It is argued that the fetishisation of Eurocentric ways of thinking, knowing and researching has prevented ‘a broader recognition and appreciation’ of an epistemic, ontological and cultural plurality (Domínguez, 2019. p. 49). This has been referred to as the ‘hubris of the zero point’ which renders alternative epistemologies as subaltern (Castro-Gómez, 2020; Domínguez, 2019).

In a direct challenge to the ‘zero point’, decolonial projects seek to deconstruct dominant Eurocentric forms of intellectual production and transmission whilst promote the pluralisation of the knowledge field (Zembylas, 2018; Mignolo, 2007; Domínguez, 2019). Such projects have a long history; (Mignolo and Escobar, 2013, p116) notes, ‘Decolonisation is an idea that is probably as old as colonisation itself. But it only becomes a project in the twentieth century’ (Mignolo, 2007; Stanek, 2019).

It is worth briefly discussing the emergence of the project or what is also referred to as the ‘decolonial turn’, given that it birthed and continues to shape manifestations of decolonial pedagogies (Jansen, 2019). Moreover, we can view the almost ‘funnel’ form of the decolonial discourse that started very broad; with each phase, finetuning itself to address specific issues of the HE sector. Beginning broadly, the decolonial discourse began with the ‘decolonial turn’ which represented the shift from the acceptance of inferiority to the assumption of the position of a questioner; ‘It is a position that entails not only a scepticism of the a priori superiority of Europe but also radical doubt about the lack of the full humanity of the colonised’ (Maldonado-Torres, 2017). This position was largely established with Dubois’ question in 1903; How does it feel to be a problem (Du Bois, 1999; Gordon, 2000)? More specific answers to this question were forthcoming in the landmark texts of the mid-twentieth century; Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, Albert Memmi’s Colonizer and the Colonized and Frantz Fanon’s the Wretched of the Earth. Amid the physical presence of colonial forces, these texts depicted the devasting effects of colonisation. However, decolonial projects did not cease with the withdrawal of colonial troops, in fact, ‘postcolonial’ scholarship penetrated deeper to reveal the cultural effects of colonisation; Edward Said’s Orientalism, Homi Bhaba’s Location of Culture and Gaytri Spivak’s celebrated essay Can the Subaltern Speak. Delving further, Latin American scholarship, Santiago Castro-Gomez (2020), Anibal Quijano (2000), Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2007) and Walter Mignolo (2013), moved us closer to issues around the decolonisation of epistemologies and ontologies; through their notions of ‘coloniality’ and ‘decoloniality’, our attention was drawn to the way in which knowledge is categorised, produced, controlled, legitimised and delegitimised. Finally, the last phase that took us directly to the door of university curricula was initiated by South African scholarship (Jansen, 1998; Mamdani,1998; Mbembe, 2001). With the end of the oppressive and racist apartheid system, South African scholars observed curricula, which remained mostly Eurocentric and reinforced white and Western dominance and privilege (le Grange, 2016; Heleta, 2016; Jansen, 2019). At the time of writing, the bulk of scholarship emanates from and is influenced by the Rainbow Nation.

Decolonial Pedagogies

The use of the above texts to inform decolonial pedagogies is promising for several reasons. First, the texts overwhelmingly emanate from the Global South, ensuring that the ‘fuel’ of decolonial pedagogies influences the ‘direction’ of decolonial pedagogies. As we shall discuss later, this cannot be said about other ‘pedagogies of disruption’ (Zembylas, 2018). What is also remarkable is that these texts are ‘talking’ to each other, each discussion building on the last and seeking to find a way to repurpose each other’s ideas. Second, the broad range of literature that shapes decolonial pedagogies offer unique perspectives that differentiates decolonial pedagogies from other pedagogies. Their uniqueness may enable us to address the broad range of challenges facing HEIs (UUK and NUS, 2019; Thomas, 2001). Domínguez reminds us that, ‘These are challenging times’ which require us to be ‘innovative’ to improve the quality of teaching and learning (Domínguez, 2019, p.48). Third, the ethos of the decolonial literature counteracts the deficit model assigned to students who are not from ‘traditional’ backgrounds and fail to meet the ‘success’ criteria (Nyoni, 2019; Dirth and Adams, 2019; Thomas, 2001; Hockings, 2010; Bamber and Tett, 2008; Bamber, 2008); instead, there is a recognition of the value and viability of diverse experiences. Moreover, it relocates pathology from inside individuals to the cultural and institutional context (Dirth and Adams, 2019). Fourth, these texts engaged and benefited from the European canon. However, they reformulated and extended paradigms so that they could apply it to their concrete, lived experiences (Bulhan, 1995).

Distinguishing the Field of Decolonial Pedagogies

From the 2010s, there appears to be a body of literature that was concerned with the ‘ease’ in which the language of decolonisation had been ‘superficially appropriated’ into education and other social sciences (Tuck and Yang, 2012, p.2; Jansen, 2019; Zembylas, 2018). Examples range from Sweeting’s cautious approach of using of Radical Constructivism to decolonise epistemologies (Sweeting, 2018); Baron’s ‘gumbo mix’ of various pedagogies (Baron, 2018); Richardson’s critique of Margonis’ use of Rousseau and Heidegger to develop his ontological attitude towards decolonial projects (Richardson, 2012); Monzo and critical pedagogue Mclaren’s efforts to unite decoloniality and Marxism, ‘decolonial Marxism’, arguably produced ‘Marxism-lite’ (Monzo and McLaren, 2014).

Thus, scholars have worked diligently to maintain the ‘purity’ of the decolonial discourse (Jansen, 2019). Out of this diligence, scholars sought to distinguish decolonial pedagogies from critical pedagogy. Considering that the latter is arguably the most prolific umbrella counter-tradition used in HE, it is not difficult to see why scholars have sought to place decolonial pedagogies under the critical pedagogy umbrella. Nonetheless, it is worthwhile exploring this ‘push back’ to not only give us a better understanding of the field of decolonial pedagogies but also to direct us towards key principles that distinguish decolonial pedagogies from other pedagogies.[2]

Broadly speaking, critical pedagogy, as popularised by Freire, is the cultivation of critical consciousness through the application of critical theory to the field of education. From the outset, we can identify some semblance of a non-alignment between critical pedagogy and decolonial scholarship; Freire’s central text, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, was seen as a response to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (Tuck and Yang, 2012; Walsh, 2015; Jain and Meyer, 2018). By response, it was less of a refutation, more of a refinement. Freire’s ‘timid’ referencing of Fanon understates the immense influence that Fanon had on Freire (Taylor, 1993; Jain and Meyer, 2018; Caribbean Philosophical Association, 2011). Taylor mentions that significant aspects of Freire’s pedagogy were appropriated from Fanon (Taylor, 1993; Jain and Meyer, 2018; Caribbean Philosophical Association, 2011).

Nonetheless, the non-alignment between critical pedagogy and decolonial pedagogies is observed in three contested issues. First, Freire and his critical allies situate most of the work of liberation in the minds of the oppressed whereas decolonial projects position the work of liberation in the structures of colonisation (Zembylas, 2018; Tuck and Yang, 2012; Batacharya and Wong, 2018) Tuck and Yang (2012, p. 19) argue that the less controversial mental activity of ‘conscientization’ had subsumed the more uncomfortable task of ‘disruptive’ decolonial events; ‘the experience of teaching and learning to be critical of… colonialism can be so powerful it can feel like it is indeed making change’ (emphasis added).[3]

Second, the Eurocentricity of critical pedagogy has troubled many decolonial educators (Deutscher, and Lafont, 2017, p202). Though critical pedagogy is a ‘counter-tradition’ it is still a tradition reflecting European dispositions (Luke and Gore, 1992; Ellsworth, 1989; Zembylas, 2018). In contrast, decolonial literature either ‘edits’ European epistemologies and ontologies to reflect the lived experiences of the people under the yoke of colonialism or it draws from its own well (Bulhan, 1995; Richardson, 2012). This is not necessarily the case with critical pedagogies; this was best explained by Catherine Walsh, who discarded critical pedagogies in favour of decolonial pedagogies, ‘Still, critical pedagogy in its theoretical formulations thought and paradigmatic assumptions, a Western, anthropocentric, and largely Marxist-informed endeavour’ (Walsh, 2015, p13). Similarly, Margonis (2003, p145) noted that despite Freire’s intention to overthrow the colonial heritage, he essentially prescribed the ‘teaching of Eurocentric perspectives’. Also, Allen questions whether the focus on European thinkers to critique Eurocentrism reifies the very concept that they claim to be criticising; ‘Mining the insights of European thinkers’ leads us to a kind of decolonisation from within, when what is needed is a more radical decolonisation from without’ (emphasis added) (Deutscher, and Lafont, 2017, p202). Simply put, ‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’ (Lorde, 1984, p.112).[4]

Critical pedagogy’s ‘white gaze’ has created distance from women and people of colour; many were ‘leery… of its blindness to coloniality as modernity’s underside’ (Walsh, 2015, p14). It has been noted that ‘pedagogies, postures and views —often regarded as deriving from Freirean approaches’—have worked to obscure and negate the methodological standpoints, practices, processes and approaches of feminists, theorists of colour and indigenous peoples’ (Ellsworth, 1989, p. 305; Smith, 1999; Yoon, 2005; Walsh, 2015).[5]

The third issue is that critical pedagogies’ categorising approach is problematic for decolonial scholarship. Jansen (2009), an authority on decolonisation but not a friend, puts forward an intriguing observation about critical pedagogies, that sharply differs from decolonial pedagogies; the former receive and construct the world as divided; black/white, oppressors/oppressed, master/slave, and power/freedom and ‘then take sides’ to free the oppressed. In doing so, critical educators irresponsibly see themselves as ‘floating’ above the moral, ideological, and political messiness of real classrooms – ‘encasing itself in a language of certainty, abstraction and universalism’ (Jansen, 2009).[6]

No such claim is made in decolonial scholarship; instead, acknowledging and embracing one’s positionality is crucial. The ‘suicides’ demanded by critical pedagogy are regarded as simplistic and unrealistic; Ellsworth (1989) is deeply suspicious that relatively privileged educators’ cannot unproblematically enter solidarity with students of different ethnicities or gender orientations than themselves’; ‘I as a professor could never know about the experiences, oppressions, and understandings of other participants in the class. A recognition, contrary to all Western ways of knowing… that there are fundamental things each of us cannot know’ (Ellsworth, 1989, p. 153).[7]

All three of these issues are attempts to place some distance between critical and decolonial pedagogies. However, these issues have not been embraced by all parties; at a feedback session, an attendee regarded these issues as ‘strawman arguments’. The attendee was not alone in his observation; he was pre-empted by Giroux, who retorted to Ellsworth and others that they ‘succumbed to the familiar academic strategy of dismissing others through the use of strawman tactics and excessive simplifications’ (Giroux and Robbins, 2016). Problematically, in the same section, Giroux continues to critique Ellsworth’s character, of which the author has no desire to reiterate (Giroux and Robbins, 2016).

The repudiation of ‘strawman tactics and excessive simplifications’ seem to be based on the assumption that critical pedagogy has evolved; its evolution was achieved through its ‘serious integration’ and welcoming of post-structural and feminist theories of identity, power, subjectivity and culture, neo - Marxist articulations, critical race theories and postcolonial theories (McLaren and Kincheloe, 2007). However, such an eclectic integration prompts several questions; does the continuous incorporation of ideas and critique take away from the initial pedagogy? How should we regard the initial conception, if it has been constantly ‘eaten away’ by waves of critique? Similarly, Mignolo (2011, p.11) asks: ‘What should critical theory aim to be when the damnés de la terre are brought into the picture? Azumah interprets this to mean, ‘to incorporate race, gender and nature into the conceptual and political frame of critical theory would require its substantive transformation’ (Bhambra, Gebrial, and Nişancıoğlu, 2018, p.307). Moreover, it doesn’t seem that feminist and decolonial scholarship have been notified that their concerns with critical pedagogy have been adequately addressed (Darder, 2003, p. 16 – 20; Batacharya and Wong, 2018).

Perhaps there has been some degree of simplification and strawman construction. The practice of critical pedagogy is too varied; critical pedagogues have continuously observed that they have seen a wide variety of pleasing and displeasing practices in the classroom (Darder, 2003; Giroux, 1988; Giroux and Robbins, 2016). Thus, the critique against critical pedagogy may have succumbed to the Weberian notion of the ‘ideal type’ in order to conceptualise certain characteristics of critical pedagogy. Also, the simplification may be due the possibility that much was ‘lost in translation’; Darda (2003, p. 17) opened his Critical Pedagogy Reader with the admission that the often convoluted, dense and Frankfurtesque’ language’ of critical pedagogy has been a ‘serious point of contention’ in which critical pedagogues have been asked to ‘rethink the direction of the work and reconsider alternatives and approaches to the articulation of theoretical concerns’.

Taking a step back from the debate, the author observes that there is considerable agreement between pedagogies; the chief difference seems to be one of intensity. This can be traced back to Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth in which the former was charged with ‘swerving safely around it’ (Morgan, p159). This is seen in several themes, for example, though they both advocate that ‘decolonising the mind’ or the ‘cultivation of critical consciousness’ is a crucial first step to lead to tangible action, decolonial pedagogies are typified by direct action (Tuck and Yang, 2012). Anecdotally, many of us came to know about decolonisation through the various passionate student campaigns, whereas, our first encounters with critical pedagogy may have been in more banal and erudite situations (Pillay, 2016; Begum and Saini, 2018). Also, both pedagogies appreciated that engagement with the Eurocentric canon is problematic. However, decolonial pedagogies are distinguished by their attempts to subvert the canon and look for alternatives, whilst the reference list of the leading critical pedagogues reveal their moderation (Ellsworth, 1989; Smith, 1999; Yoon, 2005; Walsh, 2015).

The lack of intensity of critical pedagogy is often attributed to the overwhelming ‘white maleness’ and the ‘link to Marxist analysis and classical European philosophical roots’, which moderated pedagogues to ‘explicitly treat questions of subordinate cultures from the specific location of racialised population themselves’ (Darda, 2003, p. 17). Broadly, this observation was manifested in Freire’s last two publications (Walsh, 2015; Caribbean Philosophical Association, 2011). In his later years, Walsh accompanied Freire to the US in which his ‘whiteness’ was brought face to face with US racial politics to the extent that his ‘class-based focus seemed somehow out of place’ (Walsh, 2015; Caribbean Philosophical Association, 2011). Spurred by his meetings with racialised groups, Freire engaged much more with Fanon in his later years which lead him to intensify the link between ‘decolonisation and (re) humanisation’ (Walsh, 2015; Caribbean Philosophical Association, 2011). Allowing Fanon (1961, p. 6) to have the last words on the debate between decolonial and critical pedagogies, he succinctly states, ‘Challenging the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of viewpoints. It is not a discourse on the universal, but the impassioned claim by the colonised that their world is fundamentally different’.

From Decolonial Pedagogies to Decolonial Pedagogy

Moving on from the broad view of decolonial scholarship, this section will select the most appropriate decolonial pedagogical approach to implement in British HEIs. There are at least six different approaches (Jansen, 2017; Ammon, 2017); as these conceptions are discussed, it is essential not to read them too rigidly, there is significant overlap. Out of these six approaches identified in the literature, there are three approaches that are not entirely relevant to British higher education context as they relate to indigenous knowledge and practices (Jansen, 2017; Ammon, 2017). Such a small number of approaches are due to the context-specific nature of the decolonial discourse. The discourse is unified by the notion that no approach provides ‘an eternal philosophical foundation or universal and neutral knowledge transcendent of historical horizons, cultural conditions and social struggles’ (Rabaka, 2010, p. 20).

The first of three is referred to as the ‘additive-inclusive approach’ (Jansen, 2017; Ammon, 2017). This approach asserts that the current Eurocentric cannons are valuable but insists that new knowledge should be recognised and added to the settled curricula. However, this approach remains problematic because it can be considered ‘window dressing’ in the sense that conventional authors and concepts are left as the canon, ‘undisturbed in many ways, and all non-canonical theory occupies a secondary place in the imaginations of both students and instructors’ (Philipose, 2007). Similarly, Dominguez (2019, p. 51; Paris and Alim, 2017) points out that inclusion of alternative voices is ‘often peripheral, positioning multicultural content as outright appropriation, or merely stepping-stones towards the ‘real’ content of the western canon’.

The second approach is assimilationist; that is, it doesn’t seek to separate knowledge into neat binaries like ‘us’ and ‘them’; ‘the Global South’ and ‘the Global North’; European and Non–European. Instead, it views ‘our knowledges, in likeness to our human existences, as intertwined’ (Jansen, 2017; Ammon, 2017). Implementing this approach can be construed as a disservice to learners. Muddling intellectual traditions together may make it difficult for traditions to be treated with their proper respect and consideration of their particularities, whether European or non–European (Jansen, 2019). Building on this point, feminist Philipose (2007) argued why it is essential that we dedicate time to engage with each tradition; ‘Without comprehending the ideas that shape us in our political locations, we are without the necessary language to challenge and disrupt the continued institutionalisation of traditional concepts and ideals’.

This leads us to the critical inquiry approach (Jansen, 2017; Ammon, 2017); this concept advocates the empowerment of students to engage with canonical knowledges by critical questioning; where did this knowledge come from? In whose interest does this knowledge serve? What does it include and leave out? Whose lived experiences is this depicting? How can I utilise this knowledge to understand and map my lived experience? This approach was selected because each tradition is given ‘earthly’ attention, compelling students to confront ‘uncomfortable’ issues about the development and implications of Eurocentric traditions. Moreover, students play a lead role in creating new knowledge as they interrogate traditional canons aided by voices of dissent (Jansen, 2017; Ammon, 2017).

Principles of Critical Inquiry Approach

This section will formulate six core principles that will guide the practice of the Critical Inquiry Approach. Singh (2015, p. 379) explains the importance of this formulation,

All pedagogic discourses promote certain rules or principles of power with which they select and organise knowledge for pedagogic purposes. Even the most ‘noble’ pedagogic discourses aim at shaping communication and controlling pedagogic relations according to certain principles, so there is always an element of regulation or control in what is selected as valid knowledge.

These principles came out of a review of the decolonial literature that had a specific focus on teaching and learning. The author extracted the main themes from a largely empirical literature base of which there was minimal disagreement.

1. Positionality: The appreciation and articulation of the social and political context that creates our identities (Schmidt, 2019; Ellsworth, 1989; Sefa Dei and Simmons, 2010; Harvey and Russell-Mundine; 2019; Tuck and Yang, 2012; Begum and Saini, 2018; Donelson, 2018).

2. Explicit Purpose: The learning experience should be based on consent and intent in order to honour the diversity of lived experiences of the student body (Nyoni, 2019; Begum and Saini, 2018; Jansen, 2019; Donelson, 2018)

3. Dialogical: Holding a dialogue and developing ‘meaning-making’ from shared experiences and readings. (Schmidt, 2019; Jansen, 2019; Walsh, 2015; Boonzaier and van Niekerk, 2019)

4. Concern of the psychosocial wellbeing: Decolonial projects should be imbued with empathy and respect to uplift students. (Domínguez, 2019; Jansen, 2019; Bhambra, Gebrial, and Nişancıoğlu, 2018)

5. Theorising one’s lived experience: Building theory is central to the decolonial project, rather than just rely on critique, it is imperative that something is put forward that reflects the lived experiences of students (Schmidt, 2019; Bhambra, Gebrial, and Nişancıoğlu, 2018; Jansen, 2019; Donelson, 2018).

6. Interrogation of the taught programme: A decolonising approach is one that confronts ‘traditional claims of the educational system’s neutrality, objectivity, and colorblindness’ (Jansen, 2019; Zembylas, M. 2018b; Harvey and Russell-Mundine; 2019; Decolonising SOAS Working Group, 2018; Moncrieffe, Asare, Dunford, 2019)

As these principles came together, the social constructivist approach offered the appropriate ‘housing’. Such housing appears to foster ‘the active role played by the learner as he or she acquires new concepts and procedures’ (Lester, Stone and Stelling, 1999, p. 2). Commonly, deployed as an engine for self-efficacy[8], this teaching approach supports the Critical Inquiry Approach by placing an emphasis on students to derive their own solutions to problems, interactively with the facilitator and peers, instead of just accepting information as a ‘passive participant’ (De Wet, 2017; Lester, Stone and Stelling, 1999). Arguably, for such reasons, the social constructivist approach appears to be the most prevalent within the decolonial discourse (De Wet, 2017; Howard-Wagner, Kutay and Riley, 2012; Stewart, 2009). However, the author remains cautious when invoking this European tradition, Sweeting (2018, p.326 - 327) also trod carefully, ‘There is reason to proceed cautiously, especially given that radical constructivism is itself located within Western thought, albeit as a form of counter-tradition’. He went on further to provide some advice of which the author has taken heed; the engagement with social constructivism ‘must not be treated as ends in themselves but as ways to open up further questions’ (Sweeting, 2018, p.326 – 327). In order to enable students to become ‘social constructivist’ learners, it is essential to consider the author’s current sector.

Employing the Critical Inquiry Approach in the Learning Development Sector

With the selection of the Critical Inquiry Approach selected, it’s important to reify this conversation by looking at its potential use in my current role at London Metropolitan University (LMU). The work I do at LMU is described as ‘learning development’ (LD); coined in the 1990s, LD was defined as ‘a field of practice concerned with how students learn and how they make sense of academic conventions’ (Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education, 2020; Hartley et al., 2011; Hilsdon, 2018)

The LD literature has yet to engage with the decolonial literature. The absence is curious given its student-focused ethos and that much of the HE’s ‘supporting cast’ have attempted to grapple with decolonial concepts (Crilly, 2019; Pimblott, 2020). With the decolonial agenda gathering pace, neutrality is becoming less of an option, particularly given the LD’s problematic practice of the improvement of ‘study skills’ and ‘academic socialisation’ (Lea, 2016; Lea 2006; Lea, 1998). First, ‘study skills’ represents the transmission a set of atomised skills that students must learn to ‘fix’ problems with student learning, that is often treated as a pathology (Lea, 2016). Second, ‘academic socialisation’ is the unquestioning induction of students into a new ‘culture’ of the academy (Lea, 2016). Both practices may entail getting working-class students of color to speak and write more like middle-class White ones (Paris, and Alim, 2014). Also, Dominguez (2019) sees this as the ‘core of coloniality’ in which the essence of teaching is stripped down to transmitting mimicry.

Tackling our complicity in the colonisation process is not the only reason to connect LD with decolonial pedagogies or more specifically, the Critical Inquiry Approach. There is already a significant literature base in LD that could be built upon and enhanced with the decolonial literature. The Critical Inquiry Approach complements the ‘academic literacies’ approach (Lea, 2016; Lea 2006; Lea, 1998). An academic literacies approach foregrounds the institutional nature of what’ counts’ as knowledge by looking through the prism of meaning-making, identity, power and authority (Lea, 2016; Lea 2006) Such an approach invites students to read between the lines; instead of focusing on what disciplines ‘are’, and teaching mimicry to students, there is an insistence on paying close attention to uncovering what disciplines actually ‘do’ and how they shape student’s thinking and the academy’s production of knowledge (Lillis, Harrington, Lea, and Mitchell, 2016; Lea, 2016; Lea 2006).

There are comforting signs within the academic literacies approach that would welcome a much closer union with decolonial pedagogies. The academic literacies draw a significant amount of its substance from South African scholarship, the current incubator of decolonial pedagogies. Though the former may not specifically mention the latter, the pervasiveness of the decolonial project has seemingly permeated their work (Jacobs, 2013; Duckworth, and Ade-Ojo, 2015; Coleman, 2012). Second, academic literacies maintain a similar ‘plasticity’ to decolonial pedagogies, in fact, the architects of the former explicitly encourage the expansion of the ‘lens’ to explore new developments in HE (Lea, 2016).

Another positive sign that the Critical Inquiry Approach is at home in LD is that LD is often practised between the ‘cracks’ of HEIs. Though there has long been a move to embed LD into the core curriculum, a significant proportion of LD takes place the ‘cracks’ between student’s classroom time and student’s free time. These ‘cracks’, lunchtime workshops, inductions, enrichment and transitional events, offer meaningful spaces for meaningful engagement in which decolonial pedagogies can be implemented. As Walsh (2015) contended, ‘The cracks become the place and space from which action, militancy, resistance, insurgence, transgression and/as pedagogization are advanced, alliances are built and the otherwise is invented, created and constructed’. As attendance is voluntary, these spaces are not constrained by rigid assessment criteria or mapped to an evaluative framework. Correspondingly, Le Grange argues that the voluntary space is fitting for decolonial projects because ‘decolonisation is not something that should be imposed because then it would be driven by negative power of potestas’. If it imposed, it is ‘in all likelihood itself become colonising’ (Jansen, 2019, p.42).

Rationale

The Critical Inquiry Approach is best suited for adults entering higher education. This is because Mezirow saw that children’s learning is socialisation; adults, on the other hand, need to acquire ‘new meaning perspectives’ (Jarvis, Holford, and Griffin, 2003). Though the rigidity of his categorisation is rather sharp, broadly, it is in ‘adulthood that we develop a more critical worldview as we seek ways to better understand our world’ (Taylor, 2008, p. 5).

More specifically, the Decolonising SOAS Working Group (2018) focuses on the rationale of enhancing institutional practice. While Le Grange (Jansen, 2019) centred on the rationale to ‘affect’ the student body. Regarding institutional practice, the Working Group (2008, p. 1) saw it as a means to be ‘responsive to the problems of colonial and racialised privilege and discrimination’. Directing attention to the ‘student experience’, Le grange noted that the university is the optimum site to dispel the illusion that Eurocentric knowledge is universal. Students often enter university believing that their disciplines are transparent, ‘untouched by the geo-political configuration of the world’ (Castro-Gomez, 2005) Thus, it is vital for students to engage with the notion that knowledge is rarely neutral; opening up a discourse about who produces knowledge, what type of knowledge is produced and valued, the context it is produced in and what knowledge is left out is crucial to contest the neutrality of the canons that students encounter (Jansen, 2019). Through this approach, a psychosocial transformation occurs, which allows students to gain a ‘critical’ feel for the game (Jansen, 2019; Mignolo, 2009; Quijano, 2000; Castro-Gomez, 2005).

Conclusion

Following Le grange (Jansen, 2019) who ended his chapter with a section titled 'some parting thoughts in lieu of a conclusion', the author does not 'really wish to conclude and sum up, rounding off the arguments so as to dump it in a nutshell for the reader'. Following suit, the author would like to leave the reading with some parting thoughts about the obstacles of employing Critical Inquiry Analysis. First, there appears to be only two critiques of decolonial pedagogies (Jansen, 2019; Vickers, 2019). Both of which are very mild, in order for decolonial pedagogies to refine themselves and become more robust, they need more sustained and sterner opposition, as Christian (1987, p. 63) noted, ‘Writing disappears unless there is a response to it’. Second, the Critical Inquiry Analysis should be harnessed by individuals that work within LD, it cannot be left to teaching staff alone who face ‘a painful and frustrating increase in the bureaucratization’ of their work and ‘neoliberal policy pressures that undermine and undercut’ their role, both of which have produced ‘compliance officers’ (Mirra, and Morrell, 2011; Begum and Saini, 2018; Li and Hu, 2016; Rust, Price, and O'Donovan 2003). This not to say that individuals that work within LD are without similar pressures (Hilsdon, 2018; Hartley et al., 2011). However, unlike teaching staff, our role is imbued with a specific focus on how students learn and how they make sense of academic conventions; this provides slightly more scope to hold sessions that do not necessarily conform to a rigid set of assessment criteria (Hilsdon, 2018). Third, employing this pedagogy runs the risk of a ‘violent’ backlash from members of staff, interrogating the canon and by extension ‘whiteness’ is a ‘violent’ activity, which in turn prompts ‘violence’ even within so-called progressive teaching circles (Mignolo, 2009). There is a deep almost spiritual connection to the canon; there are many individuals within the Academy that work within the spirit of Bloom’s words ‘Without the canon, we cease to think’ (Pine, 2014, p.70 - 72). Any interrogation of such sacred objects will not go unnoticed or unpunished. I have experienced this violence by just discussing the possibility of Critical Inquiry Analysis. Thus, I ask myself, is it worth it?

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[1] Koike and Kojima came out of a tradition that replaced the frontier of the United States with the Tokugawa Period and the symbol of the gun with the samurai sword (Pusateri, 2001: Slotkin, 1992).

[2] Given decolonial scholarship’s understandable apprehension of canonicity, our only means of identifying a collection of principles is through the triggering of the decolonial defence mechanisms.

[3] Their scathing critique maintains that ‘Freire’s philosophies’ have inspired educators to use ‘decolonization’ as a metaphor for ‘internal decolonization’ rationally leading to ‘the solution of decolonizing one’s mind and the rest will follow’ (Tuck and Yang, 2012; Batacharya and Wong, 2018; Shih, 2018). Conscientization alone, is not sufficient to be the central vehicle for emancipation; it is an important first step, but it is just a step (Tuck and Yang, 2012; Batacharya and Wong, 2018; Shih, 2018; Ellsworth, 1989; Luke and Gore, 1992).

[4] Unsurprisingly, the well which nourished critical pedagogy was never going to provide to the sufficient nutrients that would speak to the lived experiences of those on the ‘underside’; as Edward Said observed, ‘Frankfurt School critical theory, despite its seminal insights into the relationships between domination, modern society, and the opportunities for redemption through art as critique, is stunningly silent on racist theory, anti-imperialist resistance, and oppositional practice in the empire’ (Said, 1994, p.336).

[5] Ellsworth (1989, p305), a former devote to critical pedagogy, explains how this might occur; critical pedagogues’ insistence on rational deliberation over their truth considering competing claims compels students to subject themselves to the ‘logics of rationalism and scientism which have been predicated on and made possible through the exclusion of socially-constructed irrationally ‘others’’. As a result, critical pedagogues unwittingly collude with the oppressor in keeping ‘the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns’ (Ellsworth, 2005, p. 305; Lorde, 1984).

[6] This ‘floater’ has committed ‘class – suicide’ and ‘race suicide’.[6] They have ‘cleansed’ themselves of all inclinations in order to commit themselves to standing in solidarity with their students in their educational and political struggles… they must soak themselves in their students’ culture and worldviews’ (Freire,1993, p. 20; Freire and Faundez, 1989, p. 46; Margonis, 2003). This category of the ‘teacher’ is steeped in the thoroughly Eurocentric concept of the ‘committed intellectual’ who stands among the oppressed (Bartocci, Betti, Guerraggio and Lucchetti, 2011, p. 157; Conner, 2014, p. 44; Abdi, 2012; Yoon, 2005; Monzo and Maclaren, 2014).

[7] She continues, ‘No teacher is free of these learned and internalized oppressions. Nor are accounts of one group’s suffering and struggle immune from reproducing narratives oppressive to another’s (Ellsworth, 1989, p. 307). Decolonising pedagogies recognises and works within the messiness; it remains ‘deeply humanist’ dismantling any binary divisions that do not accurately depict the ‘messiness’ of the classroom and wider society (Ellsworth 1989; Yoon 2005; Zembylas 2013; Katz and Spero, 2015; Albrecht-Crane, 2005). Moreover, decolonial pedagogies recognises the symbiotic ‘trauma’ of colonialization on ‘oppressed’ and the ‘oppressor’ (Wane and Todd, 2018; Fanon, 1968). From Dubois’ ‘decolonial turn’, this has been a constant in the literature (Wane and Todd, 2018). For example, Fanon, who treated victims and perpetrators of torture as a psychiatrist working for French colonial forces in Algeria, famously stated, ‘For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man’ (emphasis added) (Fanon, 1968, p. 315).

[8] Defined as the belief in one’s capabilities to execute the courses of action required to manage prospective situations (Bandura, 1995, p. 2).

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Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s “Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples”

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As a first-generation migrant living between the Western walls of the academy and white walls of the gallery, it is vital for us to understand historical facts and stories from an indigenous perspective which prioritizes indigenous self-determination. As a Middle Eastern artist working in the West, reading this book is essential. There is an intersection between different decolonial methodologies. Previously, I have been introduced to Harsha Walia’s work on Border Imperialism which is written in the context of North America. There are also a lot of differences between the notions of decoloniality based on geography and community. Understanding these differences can help us work toward a mutual goal. According to Aníbal Quijano, decoloniality is a response to the relation of direct, political, social and cultural domination established by Europeans. The decolonizing approach might slightly vary from the vantage point of multiple perspectives, for example; (1) indigenous peoples (2) first-world racialized minorities (3) People in third-world post-colonial or neo-colonial societies. If we don’t consider the literature, lived-experince, and epistemology from all different positionalities, our decolonial methodology might be a bit one-sided or narrow, especially when our center is in the West.

In the secularized Christian West, racism (with its tentacle stereotypes) operates in many different ways while targeting the natives (indigenous peoples) compared to other people of color. This process has been intensified in the post-Trump-election era of far-right and reactionary nationalism in the West. We are living in the midst of environmental challenges around the world specifically in South America where indigenous activists are taking a stand against the neo-colonial regimes and Western interventions. While white Swedish student Greta Thunberg is getting all the media attention as the forefront of the global fight against climate change, numerous indigenous activist such as Paulo Paulino Guajajara (Lobo) and Edwin Chota have been brutally murdered simply for defending the environment and their way of life. On the sideline of Euro centered media publicity on Thunberg, there are many other indigenous activists who have been fighting the real fight and risking their lives for generations.

Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s decolonial methodology is centered around the politics of sovereignty and self-determination for indigenous peoples. She mentions that for indigenous peoples it is important to resist “being thrown in” with every other minority group by making claims based on prior rights.

Walter Mignolo included this book in his graduate seminar. For Mignolo, it is always revealing to see in the discussion who is feeling empowered by the book and who is feeling threatened and bothered. (1) Writers such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Edward Said, Fanon, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Foucault have shaped Smith’s theoretical approach to research. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Glen Sean Coulthard are among other researchers and activists who have been influenced by this iconic book.

Similar to other postcolonial writers, Smith’s work is also preoccupied with the question of knowledge (epistemology) and power. Her Maori perspective makes these questions much more complicated and challenging. She reminds us that indigenous peoples have been, in many ways, ”oppressed by theory”. The scientific (or pseudoscientific) research of the colonizers puts them in a peculiar position in relation to the indigenous peoples. The anthropological studies conducted on indigenous peoples have been not only contradictory to their cultural knowledge, but it has also been quite violent. The Western research methods and their long-term damages are still fresh in indigenous peoples’ consciousness. Therefore, Western notions of ”writing history” and conducting scientific research have been very much against the indigenous livelihood and knowledge. She writes on the notion of history and modernity:

”It is because of this relationship with power that we have been excluded, marginalized and ‘Othered’. In this sense history is not important for indigenous peoples because a thousand accounts of the ‘truth’ will not alter the ‘fact’ that indigenous peoples are still marginal and do not possess the power to transform history into justice.”

She continues by asking;

”Why then has revisiting history been a significant part of decolonization?’ The answer, I suggest, lies in the intersection of indigenous approaches to the past, of the modernist history project itself and of the resistance strategies which have been employed. Our colonial experience traps us in the project of modernity. There can be no ‘postmodern’ for us until we have settled some business of the modern. This does not mean that we do not understand or employ multiple discourses, or act in incredibly contradictory ways, or exercise power ourselves in multiple ways. It means that there is unfinished business, that we are still being colonized (and know it), and that we are still searching for justice.

Critique of Western History

Even today, 20 years after the publication of the book, we see the same issues in the literature and research conducted “on” indigenous culture, history and peoples. For example, you can read any random article or essay on colonialization and find the difference in tone and positionality. Take, for example, “smallpox” as a biological weapon during the indigenous genocide in North America. When we read the History Chanel, the usually white writer’s position towards this issue is easily detectable compared with indigenous activists or researchers writing on the same topic. (2) The outsider researcher is arguing about the effectiveness of government programs in fighting the natives during the 18th Century. The insider researcher, for example, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and her book: An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is choosing to talk about the first occurrence of smallpox in 1620 by the English trade ships. A simple comparison between these two modes of historiography and research can help us a lot to understand the decolonizing methodology. Dunbar-Ortiz gives us a context in which a huge amount of native lives was lost due to English trading ships off the coast to the Pequot. King James attributed the epidemic to God’s “great goodness and bounty toward us.”

“In each place, after figures such as Columbus and Cook had long departed, there came a vast array of military personnel, imperial administrators, priests, explorers, missionaries, colonial officials, artists, entrepreneurs and settlers, who cut a devastating swathe, and left a permanent wound, on the societies and communities who occupied the lands named and claimed under imperialism .”

The critique of Western history argues that history is a modernist project which has developed alongside imperial beliefs about the Other. Implicit in the notion of development is the notion of progress. This assumes that societies move forward in stages of development much as an infant grows into a fully developed adult human being. The earliest phase of human development is regarded as primitive, simple and emotional. As societies develop they become less primitive, more civilized, more rational, and their social structures become more complex and bureaucratic.

In a recently published series of essays edited by Jo-Ann Archibald Q’um Q’um Xiiem, “Decolonizing Research: Indigenous Storywork As Methodology”, the editors have collected insider research focusing on what Archibald called Indigenous Storywork. (3) The term highlight multiple ways in which indigenous peoples using storytelling as a method of documenting generational events, form of teaching and learning, and as an expression of indigenous culture and identity. (4)

Enlightenment: Racist Progress at The Expense of The Colonized

Indigenous knowledge didn't consider as 'real knowledge' by colonizers. This struggle continues today both inside the academy as well as in real life outside the walls of the institution. If you are one of those students in liberal universities in the West, you are probably familiar with at least one of liberal positives (progressive) theories of the enlightenment project. Take for example the neo-colonial liberal theories of Steven Pinker. Aside from the recent news about Pinker’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein even after his sex trafficking conviction, Pinker has been an advocate of Western scientific progress and return to concepts such as human nature and enlightenment. (5) In his recent book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, we can basically replace the word Human with Westerners or white men in order to be accurate. His binary theories completely dismiss the fact that European progress was based on the genocide, slavery, and suffering of millions of colonial subjects, which to a lesser degree still continues today. For many indigenous peoples today, the word “research” basically means “being a problem”.

Literacy, as one example, was used as a criterion for assessing the development of a society and its progress to a stage where history can be said to begin. Even places such as India, China and Japan, however, which were very literate cultures prior to their ‘discovery’ by the West, were invoked through other categories which defined them as uncivilized. Their literacy, in other words, did not count as a record of legitimate knowledge.

We are all familiar with the Western origin of Humanism, manifest destiny, age of reason and doctrine of discovery. There is a direct connection between these concepts and the simultaneous exploitation of the people and the production of concepts such as racism, nation-state, and the Orient. Both Christianity and Western science played a vital role in this framework and indigenous peoples were left with either extermination or assimilation. (6) The Europeans privatized the land that indigenous peoples once owned. The colonization was accompanied with ideological drive to paint the commoners who resisted as violent, stupid and lazy. (7)

"Underlying these categories is the rigidly binomial opposition of “ours” and “theirs,” with the former always encroaching upon the latter (even to the point of making “theirs” exclusively a function of “ours”). This opposition was reinforced not only by anthropology, linguistics, and history but also, of course, by the Darwinian theses on survival and natural selection, and—no less decisive—by the rhetoric of high cultural humanism. What gave writers like Renan and Arnold the right to generalities about race was the official character of their formed cultural literacy. “Our” values were (let us say) liberal, humane, correct; they were supported by the tradition of belles-lettres, informed scholarship, rational inquiry; as Europeans (and white men) “we” shared in them every time their virtues were extolled.” -Edward Said - Orientalism

Western-Centered ‘Collaborative Research’

We did not practice the ‘arts’ of civilization. By lacking such virtues, we disqualified ourselves, not just from civilization but from humanity itself.

What researchers may call methodology, for example, Maori researchers in New Zealand call Kaupapa Maori research or Maori-centred research. This form of naming is about bringing to the centre and privileging indigenous values, attitudes and practices rather than disguising them within Westernized labels such as ‘collaborative research’.

Smith often mentions that writing research is more important than writing theory. Research produces results that are more immediate and useful for farmers, economists, industries and sick people. (1) From Kant to Badiou, white theoreticians have been utilizing Western anthropological material as fuel for their theories. There is a lot of fancy vocabulary that generates things such as “collaborative research”, or “research with the aim of reconciliation”. In reality, these methodologies are NOT beneficial for the indigenous peoples. However, they continue to be used because they are well-known and they generate a lot of scholarship and capital for white state-ideal subjects.

At the same time research historically has not been neutral in its objectification of the Other. Smith reminds us that from indigenous perspective objectivation of research is also a process of dehumanization. She identifies the contributions of second-wave feminism more beneficial to the indigenous cause compared to the Marxist methodologies introduced in the first half of the twentieth century. The reason for this distinction is the challenges that feminism has introduced to the presumably neutral position of Western philosophy, academic practice and research.

Decolonize This Place

Rather than see ourselves as existing in the margins as minorities, resistance initiatives have assumed that Aotearoa, New Zealand is ‘our place’, all of it, and that there is little difference, except in the mind, between, for example, a Te Kohanga Reo where Maori are the majority but the state is there, and a university, where Maori are the minority and the state is there.

The latter part of the book tracks the transition from Maori as the ”researched” to Maori as the ”researcher”. Smith acknowledges that the academic institutions’ eco-system is toxic for non-white folks. Crystal Fraser, a Gwichyà Gwich'in Ph.D. student at the University of Alberta, among many other indigenous peoples agrees. Fraser, belives that Western Academic institutions are not made for indigenous peoples and there are numerous barriers on the way. Regarding research, Smith uses the term ”insider” research to highlight the work conducted by indigenous community members who are part of the culture and understand the aim of the research as self-determination. Similar to Said, she is skeptical about the role of Western ”experts” especially in relation to imperialism and power relations.

While indigenous voices have been silenced for many decades by Western researchers, the role of the insider researcher is very important. Addressing the indigenous communities, Smith writes that many of the issues in indigenous communities are in fact internalized stress factors that are not voiced. Therefore, insider research must be ethical, respectful and reflexive. It also needs to be humble, because the researcher belongs to the same community but with a different set of roles, relationships, status, and position.

On a more personal note, I want to briefly review the state-funded higher education that I received in the United States and Finland. They are both white-majority countries, yet they might seem far apart in every sense. In both of my art schools, there was an obvious gap in terms of understanding of indigenous subjects and worldviews, as well as an absence of curriculum on postcolonial topics. There were no Indigenous students, staff, and teachers at either school which I study for over 6 years.

There are many contemporary examples that show the intersectionality of migrant struggle with the indigenous struggle over self-determination and sovereignty. A perfect example of this solidarity is the Numerus Haka dances in honor of the victims of the white-terror attacks in Christchurch.

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Bib.

1. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies Research and Indigenous Peoples (Second Edition). London: Zed Books, 2012. 2. Kiger, Patrick J. Did Colonists Give Infected Blankets to Native Americans as Biological Warfare? history. [Online] 11 15, 2018. https://www.history.com/news/colonists-native-americans-smallpox-blankets?fbclid=IwAR3AdkyYDlMmLOt2YYU_VBIUaIqZINNx4HIatBoHIxQd1C9T5DWouj8CBN0. 3. Archibald, Jo-Ann, Jenny Bol Jun, Lee-Morgan and Jason, de Santolo. Decolonizing Research: Indigenous Storywork as Methodology. s.l. : Zed Books, 2019. 4. Archibald, Jo-Ann. Indigenous Storywork: Educating the Heart, Mind, Body, and Spirit. s.l. : UBC Press, 2007. 5. Flaherty, Colleen. Pinker, Epstein, Soldier, Spy. insidehighered. [Online] July 17, 2019. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/07/17/steven-pinkers-aid-jeffrey-epsteins-legal-defense-renews-criticism-increasingly. 6. CAMACHO, DANIEL JOSÉ. UNLEARNING THE DOCTRINE OF DISCOVERY. SOJOURNERS. [Online] 10 8, 2018. https://sojo.net/articles/unlearning-doctrine-discovery?fbclid=IwAR1VIL-7ohHW3MKsIzTB62UPkSyhlqnQe-CLeMf5D0Nev-RUiw8Xez4ewwE. 7. Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (ReVisioning American History). s.l. : Beacon Press; Reprint edition, 2015.

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