One of the highlights of my teaching career was teaching Cabral (who paved the liberation of FOUR countries), including his moving tribute to Mondlane in which he thinks through what national liberation really means, and seeing whole room of grad students have their minds explode https://twitter.com/auwn_/status/1305063691063365638

Here’s a little object lesson though in how decolonial thought can be decoupled from an actual politics of decolonization and turned into an object of aesthetic consumption or currency in global structures of knowledge production.

Film buffs unfamiliar with the history of Portuguese colonialism are likely to have encountered Cabral in Chris Marker’s landmark film Sans Soleil (full disclosure: I love this work):

Marker himself talks about Cabral’s influence in the politics that underwrote Sans Soleil. But in the throwaway line in this interview, we see how he came to enter Cabral’s world and specifically the country he helped liberate: https://chrismarker.org/chris-marker/interview-fragment/

Years later, I would learn about how the African film-makers Marker had gone to ‘educate’ experienced his presence amidst them:

Many of the images that formed the montage of Sans Soleil was their work, not Marker’s. Their work in building a national film culture had been stolen and subsumed into a film that is still a touchstone for European progressive circles (and where I first encountered the film).

This little object lesson is illustrative of the pitfalls of the self-described movement to “decolonize the university” in the West. As @samhaselby puts it, you can’t “decolonize” an institution in the heart of the metropole which has been and is vital to the work of imperialism.

You might try to end its intimate complicity with imperialism (have you considered defunding Security Studies as a discipline?) And you should be pushing to democratize it for marginalized people in western societies. But decolonizing the university in the West is meaningless.

Decolonization cannot happen within the self-enclosed institutional confines of western universities or even academia at all. It’s too easy for that to turn into performative appropriations of decolonial thought. So as academics let’s think tangibly about how we can contribute.

That means scrutinizing colonial outposts of our campuses abroad, thinking about channels of university funding (do you REALLY need that Confucius Center), how academic production legitimates imperial projects (ahem, security studies).