2.3 Theorizing Decolonization

There are many ways to understand and articulate decolonization. Read through the quotes below to start to familiarize yourself with different theories of decolonization.

“Decolonial theory is concerned with confronting, challenging, and undoing the dominative and assimilative force of colonialism as a historical and contemporary process, and the cultural and epistemological Eurocentrism that underwrites it.”
- Noah De Lissovoy (2010), Decolonial pedagogy and the ethics of the global Links to an external site.(p. 279)

"Decolonization is a future-oriented project that requires imagining, building, and fighting for forms of nationhood and self-determination not premised on the relations of exploitation, dispossession, elimination, and extraction that define liberal nationalisms and capitalist, imperial, and colonial formations."
- Melanie Yazzie (2017), Decolonization and National Liberation: From Turtle Island to Ireland Links to an external site.

“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.”
- Frantz Fanon (1963), The Wretched of the Earth (p. 35)

“A decolonial approach to curriculum is not only an education oriented against ideological and discursive common sense (Kumashiro, 2001); it is an education directed against a violence that reaches to the very conditions of possibility of knowledge (Tejeda, Espinoza, & Gutierrez, 2003).”
- Noah De Lissovoy (2010), Decolonial pedagogy and the ethics of the global Links to an external site.(p. 285)

“This imperialistic system of knowledge that is considered the ‘mainstream’ functions like a ‘keeper’ current in a rapidly flowing river or ocean. The keeper current drags a person to the bottom and then to the top, but if one fights against the current one usually drowns.” 
- Marie Battiste (2013), Decolonizing Education Links to an external site. (p. 107)

"[W]e want to be sure to clarify that decolonization is not a metaphor. When metaphor invades decolonization, it kills the very possibility of decolonization; it recenters whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future. 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. Decolonization doesn’t have a synonym."
- Tuck, E & K.W. Yang (2012), Decolonization is not a metaphor Links to an external site. (p. 3)