Important theoretical contributions to the “decolonizing turn” have come from decolonial thinking and practice employed and promoted by a group of South and Central American thinkers, including Walter Mignolo, Enrique Dussel, Anibal Quijano and Ramon Grosfoguel, whose refined critiques of coloniality have pointed out news ways of construing the relations between south and north in both political and epistemological terms. In the twentieth century alone, strands of post-colonial thought, intellectual movements like Negritude, alliances among the non-Aligned, and a wide range of individual citizens, artists and academics have taken part in debates that have spanned the globe (Jansen and Osterhammel 2015, Chapter 6). The intellectual history of the calls to decolonize culture and history is long and broad. The RMF movement began outside Europe and from there spread to cities within Europe.Ĭontestations over the same issues – material legacies of colonialism, discriminatory practices and knowledge diversification – have also been central to demands to decolonize voices in other Europeans cities in recent years, including Amsterdam and Copenhagen. 2 RHODES MUST FALL, OXFORD: Calls to decolonize education in Oxford (2016). 1 RHODES MUST FALL, UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN: challenging the “Colonisation of the Mind” (2015).
Despite important differences in social and political contexts, the Rhodes Must Fall Movement in both Cape Town and Oxford gathered momentum around a call to decolonize that meant at least three things: First, changing or removing iconography, monuments and other material legacies of colonialism in and around the universities, notably the statues of the British imperialist and colonial politician Cecil John Rhodes (1953–1902) second, a call for more black South African academics (in the case of UCT) and more racial diversity (in the case of Oxford) and third, the inclusion of more non-Western authors, approaches and topics in order to decolonize curricula and allow a broader representation of epistemologies (Knudsen & Andersen 2018) (Ill.
From Cape Town the movement spread to other campuses and cities outside and within Europe, notably the University of Oxford in Britain. The most prominent recent example may be the Rhodes Must Fall Movement that began with student protests at the University of Cape Town in March 2015, with demands to decolonize higher education in South Africa. Mahatma Gandhi’s insistence that real independence required the rejection of Western universalist claims and Walter Rodney’s indictment that colonialism was a one-armed bandit shared, for example, with Edward Said’s critique of orientalism, the idea that decolonization and the challenge to the alleged universality of Western epistemologies were intimately connected concerns. The ideas and social movements that have driven the calls to decolonize have originated outside Europe and, from there, found their way into public arenas and academic discourse within Europe. Decolonization, therefore, is not merely (or indeed primarily) an event that took place when and where formal colonial rule came to an end, but rather a process of challenging the cultural and epistemic legacies of colonialism in broader fields of history, aesthetics and culture. To decolonize has different meanings, but the underlying assumption is that the effects of colonialism on the cultures of the colonized have been profound, negative and enduring.
In recent years contestations around European colonial heritage and legacies have been voiced around calls “to decolonize” institutions, public spaces, curricula and forms of knowledge.
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