New book out from Stanford Press

Across the world, we hear calls to “decolonize” from many corners. Many focus on making universities, libraries, archives, and museums more welcoming while others address the persistent Western-centrism in environmentalism, humanitarianism, and development aid. This project empirically explores what these projects are actually about in different contexts. What kinds of changes are actually envisioned, who is participating, and whose interests are served. What types of claims and perspectives are subsumed under the chameleon-like call to decolonize?

I take up these questions in several arenas. The first is by co-facilitating (with Nora El Qadim) a series of conversations organized by the Global (De)Centre about decolonizing in specific national contexts and fields. So far, participants from Argentina, Mexico, Angola, Mozambique, Indonesia, Iran, Taiwan, Ukraine, and Georgia have shared their experiences. We have also hosted sessions on decolonizing archives in Canada and Belgium, environmentalism, and development assistance. We are currently working on an edited volume based on these presentations.

These conversations confirmed the importance of examining not only how and where theories of post-coloniality and decoloniality circulate, but also the ways in which these theories have been translated into action. There are often stark differences between ideology and practice. We need to actually study how and why these struggles evolve as they do in different settings. We need to also decipher how projects to decolonize universities, museums, and archives compare across former colonial contexts and why. How do they differ in the Francophone, Lusophone, Anglophone, Arabophone, and Spanish-speaking worlds and what does that tell us about colonialism’s lingering footprint? And what about spaces that remain contentious, such as Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, or Taiwan, where the dynamics of occupation are not necessarily labelled colonial, but where the language of decolonization has also been mobilized as a call to action both by people on the left and right?