User:BigHeadPhilippe/Decoloniality

Decolonial critique
Researchers, authors, creators, theorists, and others engage in decoloniality through essays, artwork, and media. Many of these creators engage in decolonial critique. In decolonial critique, thinkers employ the theoretical, political, epistemic, and social frameworks advanced by decoloniality to scrutinize, reformulate, and denaturalize often widely-accepted and celebrated concepts. Many decolonial critiques focus on reformulating the concept of modernity. Walter Mignolo situates modernity within colonial and racial frameworks. Pheng Cheah describes Mignolo's argument: "Modernity conserves itself as a totality by positing an “outside” of Europe and the North Atlantic that is excluded from modernity through a discourse of racism". Franz Fanon and Aimé Césaire contributed to decolonial thinking, theory, and practice by identifying core principles of decoloniality. The first principle they identified is that colonialism must be confronted and treated as a discourse which fundamentally frames all aspects of thinking, organization, and existence. Framing colonialism as a "fundamental problem" empowers the colonized to center their experiences and thinking without seeking the recognition of the colonizer—a step towards the creation of decolonial thinking. The second core principle is that decolonization goes beyond ending colonization. Nelson Maldonado Torres explains, "For decolonial thinking decolonization is less the end of colonialism wherever it has occurred and more the project of undoing and unlearning the coloniality of power, knowledge, and being and of creating a new sense of humanity and forms of interrelationality." This elaboration of decoloniality and decolonization as fundamentally "unfinished" projects leads to decolonial critique as a method of applying decolonial methods and practices to all facets of epistemic, social, and political thinking.

Critiquing democracy
Moving beyond the critiques of enlightenment philosophy and modernity, decolonial critiques of democracy seek to uncover how assumptions and practices in democratic governance root themselves in colonial and racial rhetoric. As Mignolo seeks to recontextualize and critique the totalizing discourse around western modernity, Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee seeks to counter "hegemonic models of democracy that cannot address issues of inequality and colonial difference." These models are hegemonic for Banerjee in that they make assumptions about the nature of individual existence that do not and cannot take colonized existence into account. He emphasizes how the formulation of democracy as resting in the political participation of individuals fails to understand how the colonial matrix of power impacts individuals' communities and identities. Banerjee explicitly critiques western liberal democracy: "In liberal democracies colonial power becomes the epistemic basis of a privileged Eurocentric position that can explain culture and define the realities and identities of marginalized populations, while eliding power asymmetries inherent in the fixing of colonial difference.” He also extends this analysis against deliberative democracy which seeks to root political legitimacy and democratic governance in the rational deliberation between citizens of equal political power and participation. He argues that this political theory fails to take into account colonized forms of deliberation often discounted and silenced—including oral history, music production, and more—as well as how asymmetries of power are reproduced within political arenas.