Decolonization of knowledge (also epistemic or epistemological decolonization) is a concept advanced in decolonial scholarship that critiques the perceived universality of what the decolonial scholars refer to as the hegemonic Western knowledge system. It seeks to construct and legitimize other knowledge systems by exploring alternative epistemologies, ontologies and methodologies. It is also an intellectual project that aims to "disinfect" academic activities that are believed to have little connection with the objective pursuit of knowledge and truth. The presumption is that if curricula, theories, and knowledge are colonized, it means they have been partly influenced by political, economic, social and cultural considerations. The decolonial knowledge perspective covers a wide variety of subjects including epistemology, natural sciences, science history, and other fundamental categories in social science.
Background
Decolonization of knowledge inquires into the historical mechanisms of knowledge production and its colonial and ethnocentric foundations. It has been argued that knowledge and the standards that determine the validity of knowledge have been disproportionately informed by Western system of thought and ways of thinking about the universe. According to the decolonial theory, the western knowledge system developed in Europe during renaissance and Enlightenment was deployed to legitimise Europe’s colonial endeavour that eventually became a part of colonial rule and forms of civilization that the colonizers carried with them. The knowledge produced in Western system has been attributed a universal character and claimed to be superior over other systems of knowledge. Decolonial scholars concur that the western system of knowledge still continues to determine as to what should be considered as scientific knowledge and continues to "exclude, marginalise and dehumanise" those with different systems of knowledge, expertise and worldviews. Anibal Quijano stated:
In effect, all of the experiences, histories, resources, and cultural products ended up in one global cultural order revolving around European or Western hegemony. Europe’s hegemony over the new model of global power concentrated all forms of the control of subjectivity, culture, and especially knowledge and the production of knowledge under its hegemony. During that process, the colonizers... repressed as much as possible the colonized forms of knowledge production, the models of the production of meaning, their symbolic universe, the model of expression and of objectification and subjectivity.
In her book Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes:
Imperialism and colonialism brought complete disorder to colonized peoples, disconnecting them from their histories, their landscapes, their languages, their social relations and their own ways of thinking, feeling and interacting with the world.
According to the decolonial perspective, although colonialism has ended in the legal and political sense, its legacy continues in many "colonial situations" where individuals and groups in historically colonized places are marginalized and exploited. Decolonial scholars refer to this continuing legacy of colonialism as "coloniality" which describes colonialism's perceived legacy of oppression and exploitation in many interrelated domains, including the domain of subjectivity and knowledge.
Origin and development
In community groups and social movements in the Americas, decolonization of knowledge traces its roots back to resistance against colonialism from its very beginning in 1492. Its emergence as an academic concern is rather a recent phenomenon. According to Enrique Dussel, the theme of epistemological decolonization has originated from a group of Latin American thinkers. Although the notion of decolonization of knowledge has been an academic topic since the 1970s, Walter Mignolo says, it was the ingenious work of Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano that "explicitly linked coloniality of power in the political and economic spheres with the coloniality of knowledge." It has developed as "an elaboration of a problematic" that began, because of a number of critical positions such as postcolonialism, subaltern studies and postmodernism. Enrique Dussel says epistemological decolonization is structured around the notions of coloniality of power and transmodernity, which traces its roots in the thoughts of José Carlos Mariátegui, Frantz Fanon and Immanuel Wallerstein. According to Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, although political, economic, cultural and epistemological dimensions of decolonization were and are intricately connected to each other, attainment of political sovereignty was preferred as a "practical strategic logic of struggles against colonialism." As a result, political decolonization in the 20th century failed to attain epistemological decolonization, as it did not widely inquire into the complex domain of knowledge.
Theoretical perspective
Decolonisation is sometimes viewed as a rejection of the notion of objectivity, which is seen as a legacy of colonial thought. It is sometimes argued that universal conception of ideas such as "truth" and "fact" are Western constructs that are imposed on other foreign cultures. This tradition considers notions of truth and fact as "local", arguing that what is "discovered" or "expressed" in one place or time may not be applicable in another. The concerns of decolonisation of knowledge are that the western knowledge system has become a norm for global knowledge and its methodologies are considered to be the only form of true knowledge. This perceived hegemonic approach towards other knowledge systems has resulted in reduction of epistemic diversity and constituted the center of knowledge which eventually suppressed all other knowledge forms. Boaventura de Sousa Santos says "throughout the world, not only are there very diverse forms of knowledge of matter, society, life and spirit, but also many and very diverse concepts of what counts as knowledge and criteria that may be used to validate it." This diversity of knowledge systems, however, has not gained much recognition. According to Lewis Gordon, the formulation of knowledge in its singular form itself was unknown to times before the emergence of European modernity. Modes of knowledge production and notions of knowledge were so diversified that knowledges, in his opinion, would be more appropriate description. According to Walter Mignolo, the modern foundation of knowledge is thus territorial and imperial. This foundation is based on "the socio-historical organization and classification of the world founded on a macro narrative and on a specific concept and principles of knowledge" which finds its roots in European modernity. He articulates epistemic decolonization as an expansive movement that identifies "geo-political locations of theology, secular philosophy and scientific reason" and simultaneously affirms "the modes and principles of knowledge that have been denied by the rhetoric of Christianization, civilisation, progress, development and market democracy." According to Achille Mbembe, decolonization of knowledge means contesting the hegemonic western epistemology that suppresses anything that is foreseen, conceived and formulated from outside of western epistemology. It has two aspects: a critique of Western knowledge paradigms and the development of new epistemic models. Savo Heleta states that decolonization of knowledge "implies the end of reliance on imposed knowledge, theories and interpretations, and theorizing based on one’s own past and present experiences and interpretation of the world."
Significance
According to Anibal Quijano, epistemological decolonization is necessary for creating new avenues for intercultural communication, interchange of experiences and meanings as the foundation of another rationality which may justifiably claim some universality. Sabelo Gatsheni says epistemological decolonization is crucial in handling the "asymmetrical global intellectual division of labor" in which Europe and North America not only act as teachers of the rest of the world, but also have become the "sites of theory and concept production", which are ultimately "consumed" by the entire human race.
Approaches
Decolonization of knowledge is neither about de-westernization nor about refusing Western science or Western knowledge systems. According to Lewis Gordon, decolonization of knowledge mandates a detachment from the "commitments to notions of an epistemic enemy." It rather emphasizes "the appropriation of any and all sources of knowledge" in order to achieve relative epistemic autonomy and epistemic justice for "previously unacknowledged and/or suppressed knowledge traditions."
Raewyn Connel states:
The colonized and postcolonial world [...] has actually been a major participant in the making of the dominant forms of knowledge in the modern era, which we too easily call ‘Western science’. The problem is not the absence of the majority world, but its epistemological subordination within the mainstream economy of knowledge. This economy has been profoundly shaped by what the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano (2000) has called the ‘coloniality of power’. In consequence, a wealth of knowledge produced in colonized and postcolonial societies has never been incorporated into the mainstream economy, or is included only in marginal ways.
According to Raewyn Connel, decolonizing knowledge is therefore about recognizing those unincorporated or marginalised forms of knowledge. Firstly, this includes indigenous knowledge, which was dismissed by the colonialist ideology. Secondly, it endorses alternative universalisms, i.e., knowledge systems having general and not just local application, which have not derived from the Eurocentric knowledge economy. Connel says the fairly known system among these is Islamic knowledge. This is not, however, the only alternative universalism. She also suggests Indian knowledge tradition as an alternative to the current economy of knowledge. Thirdly, it concerns Southern theory, i.e., knowledge framework developed during colonial encounter which emphasizes that the colonized and the postcolonial world has been affluent in theoretical thinking and that these societies have continually produced concepts, analyses and creative ideas.
According to Achille Mbembe:
The Western archive is singularly complex. It contains within itself the resources of its own refutation. It is neither monolithic nor the exclusive property of the West. Africa and its diaspora decisively contributed to its making and should legitimately make foundational claims on it. Decolonizing knowledge is therefore not simply about de-westernization.
Walter Mignolo theorises his approach for decolonizing knowledge in terms of delinking, which he believes shall ultimately lead to decolonial epistemic shift and will eventually foreground "other epistemologies, other principles of knowledge and understanding."
Decolonizing Academia
One of the most crucial aspects of decolonization of knowledge is to rethink the role of the academia, which, according to Louis Yako, has become the "biggest enemy of knowledge and the decolonial option." He says Western universities have always served colonial and imperial powers, and the situation has only become worse in the neoliberal age. According to Yako, the first step toward decolonizing academic knowledge production is to carefully examine "how knowledge is produced, by whom, whose works get canonized and taught in foundational theories and courses, and what types of bibliographies and references are mentioned in every book and published article." Yako says a research work in almost any given field is required to include names of certain "elite" European or American scholars in the bibliography or references. These scholars are commonly considered "foundational" in their respective fields. The citations are evaluated based on the "credibility" of the sources, which must be accepted by the "ruling elite, including the elite that rules the universities." For example, citing sources from a university press or an academic journal is deemed to be more "credible and rigorous" than citing sources from independent authors and experts. There is a hierarchy even when citing publicly available works. Citing the New York Times, the Guardian, or the Washington Post is considered "better" to a newspaper from Africa or Latin America. Even when such citations are allowed, foreign sources are typically seen as insufficient, necessitating their "validation" by Western sources. Yako opposes to the labeling of new scholars as "Marxist", "Foucauldian", "Hegelian", "Kantian", and so on, which he sees as a "colonial method of validating oneself and research" through these scholars. According to Yako, despite the fact that scholars such as Marx, Hegel, Foucault, and many others were all inspired by numerous thinkers before them, they are not identified with the names of such intellectuals. He criticizes the academic peer-review process as a system of "gatekeepers" who regulate the production of knowledge in a given field or about a certain region of the world.
Decolonizing research
Neo-colonial research or neo-colonial science, frequently described as helicopter research, parachute science or research, parasitic research, or safari study, is when researchers from wealthier countries go to a developing country, collect information, travel back to their country, analyze the data and samples, and publish the results with no or little involvement of local researchers. A 2003 study by the Hungarian academy of sciences found that 70% of articles in a random sample of publications about least-developed countries did not include a local research co-author.
Frequently, during this kind of research, the local colleagues might be used to provide logistics but are not engaged for their expertise or given credit for their participation in the research. Scientific publications resulting from parachute science frequently only contribute to the career of the scientists from rich countries, thus limiting the development of local science capacity (such as funded research centers) and the careers of local scientists. This form of "colonial" science has reverberations of 19th century scientific practices of treating non-Western participants as "others" in order to advance colonialism—and critics call for the end of these extractivist practices in order to decolonize knowledge.
This kind of research approach reduces the quality of research because international researchers may not ask the right questions or draw connections to local issues. The result of this approach is that local communities are unable to leverage the research to their own advantage. Ultimately, especially for fields dealing with global issues like conservation biology which rely on local communities to implement solutions, neo-colonial science prevents institutionalization of the findings in local communities in order to address issues being studied by scientists.Evaluation
According to Piet Naudé, decolonization's efforts to create new epistemic models with distinct laws of validation than those developed in Western science has not produced reliable outcomes. Because the central issue of "credibility criteria" has yet to be resolved. He says decolonization will not succeed unless key concepts such as "problems", "paradigms", and finally "science" are essentially reconceptualized. The present "scholarly decolonial turn" has been criticised on the ground that it is divorced from the daily struggles of people living in historically colonized places. Robtel Neajai Pailey says that 21st-century epistemic decolonization will fail unless it is connected to and welcoming of the ongoing liberation movements against inequality, racism, austerity, imperialism, autocracy, sexism, xenophobia, environmental damage, militarisation, impunity, corruption, media surveillance, and land theft because epistemic decolonization "cannot happen in a political vacuum".
