Insurgent Decolonial Thought

Between 2018 and 2020, when I was working alongside student activists in Honduras, I often reflected upon the importance of situating decolonial thought in sites of struggle. I critiqued the textualism that seemed to be taking prominence in decolonial scholarship in the United States. I was also seeing a tendency in the Global North, particularly the scholarship that had little to say about social movements and the knowledges, educational experiences, and pedagogical practices created/constructed in the process of resisting, organizing, and building collectives and relational political subjectivities. I did not know then that my future work would primarily focus on situating decolonial thought in entangled sites of struggle. Without a doubt, the student movement's collective project to radically democratize the university taught me how to see more clearly the entangled global/local forces student activists and other movements were up against. In other words, there were global-local frictions that were made more visible as students took direct action, confronted the police, and took over the university for months at a time, reclaiming university space and thus making it possible to transform the university plaza into a space in which popular and political education could take place. Students held public assemblies and political workshops to not only talk about neocolonial/neoliberal higher education reforms. Most importantly, they discussed the broader sociopolitical context that saw the emergence of social and territorial movements after the US-backed coup of 2009. The dictatorial regime imposed by the US created the material conditions of possibility for campesino, Indigenous, and Afro-Inidgenous communities to organize and reclaim the territories the authoritarian government intended to sell to the highest bidders (e.g., ZEDES).

The student movement taught me that global education policies are central to global coloniality. Students often referred to the recolonization of higher education, not merely as the restructuring of the curriculum but also of the governance structure. While the curriculum aims to reproduce the subjectivities, knowledge practices, and skills aligned to political economic interests (corporations, call centers (english), maquilas), the governance structure is responsible for silencing, criminalizing, and repressing student activism. The latter seeks to strip away the autonomy the university once had.

I mention all of this to say that alongside the student movement I learned what insurgent decolonial thought and praxis looks like within sites of struggle. Nelson Maldonado-Torres conceptualizes this as combative decoloniality. On the one hand, combative or insurgent decolonial thought entails critique. Deconstructing dominant knowledge systems is necessary since they justify and legitimize material systems of domination. Acquiring said knowledge or aspiring to submit to Eurocentrism places a person at a superior position in relation to those who do not have access to dominant ways of knowing. Here, we are likely to recall Fanon’s discussion on speaking French fluently as a means of becoming more white.

On the other hand, critique alone is insufficient. Combative or insurgent decolonial thought is about combining critique/deconstruction with reconstruction. It is not an individual action but a collective praxis seeking to dismantle rather than reform institutions from within (e.g., “decolonize” a field or discipline). As Maldonado-Torres writes, “it requires the will and ability to connect with others and to engage in collective movement against coloniality.”

Thinking alongside liberation and decolonial struggles requires a political commitment that will often result in losing one’s job. This commitment requires one to speak out against colonial violence, organize, and create spaces where one can share experiences with one another, no matter the consequences. Maldonado-Torres reminds us that very few academics reflect these commitments. Frantz Fanon, for instance, resigned from his professional positions to work alongside the decolonization struggle in Algeria. Without his involvement in this struggle, would he have understood the entangled relationship between liberation struggles around the world? Would he have advanced the anti-colonial thought that he did? Would he have offered us the insights of the inseparability of material and symbolic decolonization? Fanon taught us that a combative decolonial position is not about seeking recognition from the colonial powers that have systematically excluded and denied our existence. Rather, it is about articulating our struggles with others, despite our differences. An insurgent decolonial attitude means adopting Ghassan Kanafani’s militancy to encourage others even when overwhelming despair is felt in one’s heart. But it is this despair that has the potential to transform itself into optimism, hope, and collective action. For Palestine and for all other peoples, regions, and communities facing the iron fist of imperialism and colonialism, we must continue to write in an insurgent form so that despair does not become a permanent condition.