Can we decolonise decolonisation?

Nelson’s Pillar in Dublin, blown up in … 1966.

Image from National Library of Ireland, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49984903

In some ways it’s a given that the current usage of “decolonise” is largely being exported from … the UK and the USA. The wave may have started with South African students in 2015, but it was only several years later when activists in the current and previous imperial centres picked up on the term that it became universalised as decolonisation “with Anglo-American characteristics” so to speak.

Specifically of course, the characteristic familiar to the rest of us on the Internet: if someone states something as a universal perspective (“we” this, that and the other) and doesn’t say where they’re coming from, it’s a pretty safe bet that they’re saying it from one of those two places. Not always true, but usually.

The universalising going on here is the assumption that decolonisation is something in “our” future, not something which the vast majority of people on the planet have been living with for decades (in Asia and Africa) if not centuries (in Latin America).

Now it is easy to verify that most English people in particular are woefully ignorant of history in general and the awkward bits in particular. You have to go well to the left of the Labour Party before you find a political tradition with any consistent history of opposition to empire (on the far left, and in radical migrant politics). The UK is literally a state where the Brexit referendum was won on racist grounds.

So for all these reasons, it is great that a newer generation of radicals are managing to challenge racism, imperial history, the legacies of slavery and colonisation, and the utter provinciality of so much of English intellectual life (about 3% of novels published in the UK are translations from ROW, Rest Of World). I have less direct personal experience of the US and (these days) western Europe, but electoral results and street violence tell their own story.

So do these places have a lot of work to do in decolonising? Absolutely. Is it great that there are new movements led by young migrants and students from racialised minorities pushing this? Totally. Is it sheer delight to see statues of slavers and racists knocked off their pedestal? Of course.

But is their situation a general one? Actually, no. ROW has been at this particular challenge for some time. That’s not to say it’s solved – but it is now phrased rather differently than in the places that exported empire in the first place.

Of course you can’t centre yourself, or your own context, if you acknowledge that – and so most UK-US accounts simply leave this out altogether, as if what they know is the totality of what exists.

But.

Anti-colonial movements in Asia alone (because that is where 60% of our species lives) brought about the single largest structural change from below ever, and in many different forms (older people will remember a comparison between the outcomes of the Chinese revolution and Indian independence). Add Africa to this – never mind Latin America where the process goes back to the early 19th century, never mind Ireland which is right next door to our comrades in England and where the revolutionary decade is only just fading from living memory – and you are saying something quite important about how popular struggle has been experienced in most of the world.

To put it simply for our friends in England and the States: in most of the world, the statues that we walk under are the statues of the (usually male) Heroes of the Independence Struggle. The renaming of streets and railway stations, the pulling down (or blowing up) of prominent colonial statues – it’s great you’re trying to catch up with this, but we’ve done enough of it that we can also see the limitations.

Most human beings live in states which became independent from empire within living memory. In what is literally a majority world, the project of decolonisation – not only political independence, but the struggle to break free from economic exploitation and dependency, the battle to decolonise language, literature, music, education, sport and all the rest – is one that has been going on for a very long time.

When the Zapatistas call themselves an army of national liberation and invoke one of the heroes of the Mexican Revolution, they are saying something slightly more complicated, but familiar around the post-colonial world: the revolution is an unfinished project. In the Republic of Ireland, radicals often say that they are fighting for the true meaning of “1916”.

Depending on context, the point is sometimes (as Indian Subaltern Studies highlighted) that the peasants, workers, women, subaltern castes and others whose movements were central to the actual achievement of independence were marginalised in the moment of state creation. At other times (as in some Chinese radical arguments) the tendency is less to reject the terms of independence and more a critique of what happened next.

Precisely because of the effectiveness of anti-colonial movements in bringing about visible change, this horizon is very widely shared around the post-colonial world – including the critique of “corrupt politicians” who supposedly distort a legitimate state, or the resignation of those who cannot imagine another kind of politics but realise that the existing one does not meet their needs in any meaningful way.

In India, the far-right BJP government is happy to wrap the flag of “decolonisation” (in its simplistic Northern form) around itself – while it is challenged on all sides by Dalits, Adivasis and subaltern castes, by women and LGBTQIA+ movements, by Muslims, by civil rights activists and others who in almost no case reject the achievement of independence (though they often have deep critiques of the process).

Decolonisation is one of the central ways in which popular struggles around the world understand the process and problems of social movements. It is both how states, dominant ethnicities and religious power structures legitimate themselves and the most widely available framework for struggles that target those states. There are of course authentic popular discourses which reject the nation-state equation that resulted from the end of empire, in many parts of the majority world; but they are minority voices within the broader horizon.

So one of the most important political results of the Anglo-American, or more broadly global North, appropriation of the idea of decolonisation is to make this long history of popular struggle, its many complexities and contradictions, invisible. The actual collective action of the majority of the world’s population vanishes in favour of … the attempt to educate the ineducable. In hopes perhaps that they might be shamed into giving back everything that was stolen.

The rest of the world went through this learning curve some time back. It is not that anti-colonial movements were uninterested in having arguments with the imperial core, or raising moral demands for an end to exploitation – it is rather that the successful ones put their energies elsewhere, in “centring” (as Americans call it) not so much the voices as the popular struggles of the colonised.

Meanwhile, our actual struggles – to get beyond the patriarchal/capitalist/ethnocentric etc power relations of our various post-colonial nation-states, for international solidarity with others in similar situations, against our local racists, to construct pluricultural forms of knowledge as particularly in the Andes, to imagine a different global economic order and all the rest of it – are all too easily drowned out by the noise of The Latest Thing We Are Supposed To Talk About from London or New York, which is typically transported not through networks of movement solidarity but by those who have (all too easily) appropriated their own local struggles and converted them into publishing capital, academic capital, social media capital to be expanded along familiar circuits that mysteriously reproduce those of imperial power.

Is it possible to decolonise decolonisation? And to replace the recent history of its Anglo-American use as metaphor within the much longer and more complex history of more or less effective practical attempts at unpicking empire in ROW? UK, US and European movements could certainly stand to learn something from a less cartoonish understanding of what happens when movements become states, of the post-colonial struggles to overcome the global division of labour, of attempts at decolonising education, high culture, religion and all the rest of it.

But if activists cut themselves off from the long history of popular struggles around the world and collude with their local (post-)imperial power in declaring its history and situation the important one – and are not organising a potentially massive colonised majority as in those earlier moments – the results are likely to be shaped by the very same local (English, American) relationships of power, privilege and money that they are challenging.

Or, more simply: are UK, US and other post-imperial decolonisers capable of noting what is particular to their own context, and that they are catching up with processes that are decades or centuries old in the rest of the world? Or will they carry on exporting their own local learning curves as though they are universal?

Can we decolonise decolonisation?