A Decolonial Theoretical Intifada
…scholars tend to sharpen their pens after the smell of death has dissipated and moral clarity is no longer urgent. —Rabea Eghbariah
Since October 7th, I have been thinking about the role decolonial thought needs to play in thinking and rethinking the world anew. What is revealed about the modern/colonial world by Israel’s genocidal actions? How do the concepts we employ limit and enhance our understanding of reality?
Decolonial thought, as many of you may already know, is not a coherent whole made up of fixed concepts. In other words, it is not a monolith. It is plural and it is not limited to academic intellectual thought. Indeed, decolonial ways of interpreting the world is as old as colonialism. However, in historically specific geopolitical conjunctures, thought becomes more intimately linked to struggles and vice versa. Within the context of liberation and decolonization movements in the 20th century, we saw the articulation of Pan-Africanism, Philosophy of Liberation (sociology of liberation and pedagogy of liberation), anti-colonial thought, Third World Feminism, Queer thought, and Indigenous thought. This does not mean that radical forms of interrogating the world were nonexistence before these conjuctures. Nonetheless, geopolitical contexts do create the material conditions of possibility to think otherwise—that is, to rethink what we thought we knew about the world and its dominant configuration. This is the ethico-political imperative at hand.
With the genocide unfolding in Gaza and the increasing settler coloinal violence unfolding in the West Bank, we cannot shy away from the urgency of co-theorizing and reinterpreting the modern/colonial world. I would go as far as saying that we should not underestimate the power of knowledge, that we urgently need a decolonial theoretical intifada—a shaking off of and uprising against the dehumanizing racial theories, narratives, and myths that shackle and thus limit our interrogation of and collective action within the modern/colonial world, which, as we know, justify colonial domination, displacement, dispossession, and genocide in Palestine and in many other parts of the world. We should not become the complicit scholars Edward Said (1994) critiqued:
“Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position, which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. Personally I have encountered them in one of the toughest of all contemporary issues, Palestine, where fear of speaking out about one of the greatest injustices in modern history has hobbled, blinkered, and muzzled many who know the truth and are in a position to serve it. For despite the abuse and vilification that any outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and self-determination earns for him or herself, the truth deserves to be spoken, represented by an unafraid and compassionate intellectual” (p. 100).
Israel's actions show exactly how discourses materialize into the cruelest practices. Discourse becomes real, concrete, violent. Israel’s actions also reveal the importance of continuing to think and act together, since what would the world look like if alternative discourses and practices no longer existed, if Eurocentric and Zionist propaganda was left unquestioned. It is not for nothing that Zionism is no longer as convincing as it was before. Much has to due with the invaluable insights and interpretations we have offered through social media and alternative news sources. Co-theorizing to inform collective action is what this decolonial theoretical intifada demands. What would become of us? What would the world turn into if we stopped questioning dominant discourses and practices?
More than ever, we need to organize spaces and movements that seriously involve and are led by decolonial liberation struggles. We don’t need more conventional academic spaces where individuals present soon-to-be published peer-reviewed articles. I’m not suggesting that radical academic discourses are insignificant. However, what we need today are organizations that situate decolonial thought in sites of struggle, particularly during a time when we're not only facing superficial readings and hasty reactionary critiques that dismiss the multiplicity of decolonial thought, which also result in emptying decolonial concepts of their ethical and political content, but, most importantly, because we are also witnessing an important geopolitical conjuncture unfold before our eyes. Academia’s silence, complicity in colonialism in the past and present, repression of student organizations and protests, and outright support of Israel is sufficient proof that we need alternative models of knowledge production. Perhaps production is the wrong word. Perhaps the co-creation of knowledge lends itself to more radical possibilities.
As the geopolitical landscape shifts, it is imperative that we collectively put theory to work, that is, to interrogate interlocked systems of domination and exploitation as and to inform collective action. I would go as far as saying that we should not underestimate the power of a decolonial theoretical intifada—a shaking off of the theories, narratives, and myths that shackle and thus limit our interrogation of and collective action within the modern/colonial world, which justify at the same time the genocide in Gaza.
A decoloial theoretical intifada is a collective rather than individual project. We cannot continue with the same old possessive individual academic/intellectual practices that do more to center those who are already in dominant positions. We must therefore avoid thinking that decolonial thought is somehow merely an academic project consisting of a handful of scholars. This is not the case, though that’s what some critics and consumers often maintain.
This theoretical intifada would require those with privileged geographic, economic, and institutional locations to dislocate themselves from dominant positions in order to open up space for Others to become more visible and to be heard. This form of dislocation implies seriously thinking with (ethical) and from (geopolitical) other histories, geographies, and liberation movements. Those who don’t necessarily find themselves in privileged positions in the geographic Global South, yet submit to dominant interpretive lenses, must also recognize that they have been systematically dislocated from their places of understanding without their own choosing—that they have been seduced by the false promises of modernity. While the first form of dislocation has decolonial implications, the second constitutes a process of colonization that depends on erasing the histories, stories, and memories of the colonized—a process of erasure designed to minimize the possibility of collective decolonial resistance in the present. We are seeing this happen in real time as Israel bombs universities, mosques, libraries, and historical archives. Negating the institutions, discourses, narratives, myths, and practices that dislocate us from our communities’ struggles is the theoretical intifada to which we must contribute, whereby the negation of our dislocation becomes a form of relocation—a radical or rooted position (enraizamiento) that helps us interrogate the world’s modern/colonial configuration from one’s particularity—from one’s territorial commitments and relationships.