Decolonisation at York St John

Decolonisation is a complicated and contested term, particularly in the context of higher education (HE). Broadly, decolonisation refers to the ongoing historic struggle for collective liberation, self-determination and the emancipation of all peoples from colonial domination, oppression, exploitation and dispossession. This includes the dismantling and, ultimately, abolition of the systemic logics, institutions and structures that continue to legitimise and maintain colonial power and white privilege beyond the formal 'end' of colonial rule. As Frantz Fanon argued in 1961, decolonisation is not simply the 'restoration of nationhood to the people' but the full-scale transformation of society, where 'the proof of success lies in the whole social structure being changed from the bottom up' (2001, 27).

To understand decolonisation, then, we must first seek to understand colonialism and anti-colonial resistance as well as the central role they have played in the uneven development of our modern world. In the context of HE, this requires us to grapple with the university's historical role in shoring up colonial and imperial power, but also to consider the ways in which structural racism, whiteness and imperialism are manifested in and reproduced by such institutions today.

As sites of critical thinking and global knowledge production, universities have a particular responsibility to confront their complicity with colonialism and its enduring influence in their policies, practices, values and hierarchies. For some, this means not only reckoning with the vast material wealth accrued to universities by and from empire (see Gopal 2021, 879), but challenging their ongoing financial entanglements with the structures of plunder, violence and dispossession on which colonialism rests. For others, it means recognising the ways in which colonial narratives have been 'produced, consecrated, institutionalised and naturalised' by HE institutions, scrutinising and combating their persistence within knowledge, research, curricula and pedagogy (Bhambra, Gebrial and Nişancıoğlu 2018, 5).

York St John has expressed commitment to decolonisation and anti-racism, and staff and students are working collectively towards understanding what this means for our University, our approach to curricula, pedagogy and practice, and our relationship with wider society and the communities we serve.

This work is necessarily difficult and discomforting: among other challenges, it demands a continual process of self-reflection upon our own values, assumptions and various forms of complicity with structural and systemic oppression, along with an ongoing commitment to learn, act and be otherwise. It requires us to develop approaches to scholarship, curricula and pedagogy in which 'whiteness' and other forms of privilege are decentred so that myriad forms of knowledge can be valued and explored – not in ways that aim to be extractivist or for the mere sake of diversification, but as a means of developing a fuller account of the world and its history. It might also mean investigating our institution's own historical links with colonialism and related endeavours (see McCarthy 2021), as well as interrogating the wider (geo)political context in which we are operating today, in the interests of building towards more equitable collective futures.

The Discussing Decolonisation event series at York St John seeks to move our community towards what Priyamvada Gopal (2021, 889) terms 'the horizon of decolonisation' by providing opportunities for learning and thinking more deeply about colonial histories and continuities as well as their ramifications for pedagogy and praxis today. Our new reading and discussion group also allows York St John staff and students to (re)examine the key concepts, debates, texts and thinkers who have laid the groundwork for intellectual and institutional decolonisation through their critical analyses of imperialism, capitalism, colonialism, (anti-)racism and various forms of resistance.

To receive updates about these events and related activities, you can sign up for our Discussing Decolonisation mailing list.

Approaches to decolonisation will, of necessity, vary according to contexts, histories and the demands of their corresponding ‘communities of resistance’ (see Sivanandan 1989). As Gopal (2021, 881) reminds us, '[p]osing the right questions for each context is, in itself, part of the intellectual work of decolonisation'.  

Harnessing Gopal’s 'critical and radical spirit of enquiry' (889), members of the York St John Anti-Racist and Decolonial Pedagogies (ARDP) Working Group have put together a set of questions and prompts from which we, as university staff and students, might begin thinking about our own contexts and practices: Discussing Decolonisation - Questions and prompts (PDF, 0.4 MB).

The prompts are by no means exhaustive, and relevant questions will vary by institution and discipline, as well as by one’s professional role and position. Nonetheless, we posit that such a process of questioning can offer a useful place from which to begin thinking about decolonisation in (and beyond) the university context.

As a taster, prompt questions include: 

• What is the history of my discipline, and how does it relate to colonialism and/or the broader imperial-capitalist project?
• What are the underlying assumptions of my discipline or field, and how might these help to maintain or legitimise colonial activity?
• What insights or interpretations have been omitted or marginalised from my field of expertise? What are the politics of these omissions, and how might they be addressed?
• What are the politics of different research methodologies, and how could we do things differently to ensure less harm to indigenous communities in the name of academic research (see Tuhiwai Smith 2021)?
• How do whiteness and other forms of privilege assert themselves in the processes and practices with which my team and/or I am involved? Is there scope for disrupting this?
• Can my team or I do more to work in solidarity with or 'in service to' racialised, marginalised or otherwise oppressed communities in the UK and globally (see Joseph-Salisbury and Connelly 2021)?
• What can I learn from anti-colonial thinkers and activists of the past or present day? How can I implement this learning in practice?
• What kinds of preparation or guidance might my students need to enable them to participate in and/or contribute to co-producing a curriculum that both demands and practices decolonisation?
• Does my practice help students to better understand the world beyond the University, and does it empower them to act or resist?
• What is the relationship between colonialism, imperialism and neoliberalism in the context of HE, and what 'pockets of possibility' exist to progress decolonisation and anti-racism within (and beyond) the contemporary university (see Joseph-Salisbury and Connelly 2021)?

Below, you will find a selection of quotations from some of the key anti-colonial and decolonial thinkers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. You can follow up on and find links to the full texts within our Recommended Reading and Resources page. York St John staff and students can also explore their work further by joining our Discussing Decolonisation Reading Group.

'Europe is indefensible. [...] And today the indictment is brought against it not by the European masses alone, but on a world scale, by tens and tens of millions of men who, from the depths of slavery, set themselves up as judges.'

― Aimé Césaire, 'Discourse on Colonialism' (1950)

'National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.'

― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

'Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder. But it cannot come as a result of magical practices, nor of a natural shock, nor of a friendly understanding. Decolonization, as we know, is a historical process: that is to say it cannot be understood, it cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself except in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and content.'

― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

'Culture has proved to be the very foundation of the liberation movement. Only societies which preserve their culture are able to mobilize and organize themselves and fight against foreign domination. Whatever ideological or idealistic forms it takes, culture is essential to the historical process.'

― Amilcar Cabral, 'The role of culture in the struggle for independence' (1972)

'The power to act independently is the guarantee to participate actively and consciously in history. To be colonized is to be removed from history, except in the most passive sense. ... Colonialism determined that Africans were no longer makers of history than were beetles—objects to be looked at under a microscope and examined for unusual features.'

― Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972)

'More far-reaching than just trade is the actual ownership of the means of production in one country by the citizens of another. When citizens of Europe own the land and the mines of Africa, this is the most direct way of sucking the African continent. Under colonialism the ownership was complete and backed by military domination. Today, in many African countries the foreign ownership is still present, although the armies and flags of foreign powers have been removed. So long as foreigners own land, mines, factories, banks, insurance companies, means of transportation, newspapers, power stations, etc. then for so long will the wealth of Africa flow outwards into the hands of those elements.'

― Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972)

'Imperialism is total: it has economic, political, military, cultural and psychological consequences for the people of the world today. ... The oppressed and the exploited of the earth maintain their defiance: liberty from theft. But the biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against that collective defiance is the cultural bomb. The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people's belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves.'

― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind (1986)

'The call for the rediscovery and the resumption of our language is a call for a regenerative reconnection with the millions of revolutionary tongues in Africa and the world over demanding liberation. It is a call for the rediscovery of the real language of humankind: the language of struggle. It is the universal language underlying all speech and words of our history. Struggle. Struggle makes history. Struggle makes us. In struggle is our history, our language and our being.'

― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind (1986)

'Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires.'

― Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)

'What I am interested in doing now is suggesting how the general liberal consensus that "true" knowledge is fundamentally nonpolitical (and conversely, that overtly political knowledge is not "true" knowledge) obscures the highly if obscurely organized political circumstances obtaining when knowledge is produced. No one is helped in understanding this today when the adjective "political" is used as a label to discredit any work for daring to violate the protocol of pretended suprapolitical objectivity.'

― Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)

'Taking colonialism as a global project as the starting point, it becomes difficult to turn away from the Western university as a key site through which colonialism – and colonial knowledge in particular – is produced, consecrated, institutionalised and naturalised. It was in the university that colonial intellectuals developed theories of racism, popularised discourses that bolstered support for colonial endeavours and provided ethical and intellectual grounds for the dispossession, oppression and domination of colonised subjects.'

― Gurminder Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial and Kerem Nişancıoğlu, Decolonising the University (2018)

'The foundation of European higher education institutions in colonised territories itself became an infrastructure of empire, an institution and actor through which the totalising logic of domination could be extended; European forms of knowledge were spread, local indigenous knowledge suppressed, and native informants trained. In both colony and metropole, universities were founded and financed through the spoils of colonial plunder, enslavement and dispossession.'

― Gurminder Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial and Kerem Nişancıoğlu, Decolonising the University (2018)

'Decolonize (a verb) and decolonization (a noun) cannot easily be grafted onto pre-existing discourses/frameworks, even if they are critical, even if they are anti-racist, even if they are justice frameworks. The easy absorption, adoption, and transposing of decolonization is yet another form of settler appropriation. When we write about decolonization, we are not offering it as a metaphor; it is not an approximation of other experiences of oppression. Decolonization is not a swappable term for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools.'

― Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, 'Decolonization is not a metaphor' (2012)

'Decolonisation, while not a metaphor, can certainly be a metonym, situated at the heart of and signifying a range of interlinked emancipatory projects that are, in fact, commensurable without flattening. Decolonisation is meaningless without a set of principles – anticolonialism – that enables it to emerge as a practice that is sensitive to the present and to context while yet steeped in historical awareness.'

― Priyamvada Gopal, 'Decolonisation and the University' (2021)

'The university cannot be decolonised independently of society and economy, but it can be a site where these questions are frontally addressed towards wider change, not least in habits of mind. If we take the production of knowledge seriously as a vital contributor to systemic transformation, then it would be equally perverse, indeed, harmful to leave the university out of endeavours to 'decolonise'. It may well be possible to practice a contrapuntal engagement with 'decolonisation' somewhere between impossible dream and tick-box exercise.'

― Priyamvada Gopal, 'Decolonisation and the University' (2021)

References

• Bhambra, G.K., Gebrial, D. and Nişancıoğlu, K. eds. (2018) Decolonising the University. London: Pluto Press.
• Cabral, A. ([1977] 2016) 'The role of culture in the struggle for independence', in Resistance and Decolonization. Translated by Dan Wood. Rowman & Littlefield International.
• Césaire, A. ([1950] 2000) 'Discourse on Colonialism'. Translated by J. Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press.
• Fanon, F. ([1961] 2001) The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by C. Farrington. London: Penguin Classics.
• Joseph-Salisbury, R. and Connelly, L. (2021) Anti-Racist Scholar-Activism. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
• McCarthy, A. (2021) 'Decolonising York St John University: An exploration of alumni colonial missionary work across three colonies from 1913 to 1928'. York St John University: Unpublished conference paper.
• Gopal, P. (2021) 'Decolonisation and the University', Textual Practice, 35(6), 873-899.
• Rodney, W. ([1972] 2018) How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: Verso.
• Said, E. ([1978] 2019) Orientalism. London: Penguin Classics.
• Sivanandan, A. ([1990] 2019) Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism. Updated edition. London: Verso.
• wa Thiong'o, N. (1986) Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Nairobi: James Curry (imprint of Boydell & Brewery).
• Tuck, E. and K.W. Yang (2012) 'Decolonisation is not a metaphor', Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society, 1(1), 1-40.
• Tuhiwai Smith, L. (2021) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Bloomsbury.