Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Also known as decolonialism, the concept of decoloniality is a Latin American political and cultural theory, an intellectual crusade even, of Latin-American derivation whose vocation is to re-examine and rewrite the discourse of colonialism. Presenting decoloniality as a decisive intervention for most postcolonial societies to reclaim knowledge from what decolonial theorists is the grip of the Western (white) man, the scholars draw on renowned scholars such as Frantz Fanon, Aime Caesaire, as well as other discourses such as liberation theology, the Foucaudian poststructuralist, and other philosophical discourses, as the founding conditions of possibility for the development of the decolonial theory. In this paper, I situate the decolonial debate in the context of postcolonial theory and poststructuralist discourses, from which the discourse of decoloniality derives much of its force, to demonstrate its coterminous nexus with postcolonial theory and discourses – the link which lends colour and credence to the view that decoloniality is nothing but “old wine in new bottles.” The argument of the paper is that decolonial scholars’ attempt to, at once, deconstruct and reconstruct or reshape what are regarded as normative and prevailing means of knowledge production is hardly a pioneering enterprise, and so the scholars have not blazed any trail in the field of colonial discourse. Thus the decolonial scholars’ supposed mediation on knowledge production constitutes a revisionist project.