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diverging path

Decolonization is not (just) a metaphor

One of our aims with poco.lit. is to try to demystify some of the key ideas in and around postcolonial studies, as we’ve done here and here. In this post, we take a look at an article called “Decolonization is not a metaphor”, published by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang in 2012. In it, they make a powerful argument against the overuse of the term “decolonization”. Given the increasing number of initiatives that call themselves “decolonial”, and that “decolonization” has entered mainstream discourses on a variety of subjects in recent years, from street names to museum collections, it seems like the points they make in the paper are at least as pertinent today as they were when this article came out over ten years ago – though for many people who understand themselves as having “decolonial” or at least anticolonial sympathies, their argument may be a bit of a bitter pill to swallow.

Tuck and Yang argue against the use of the term “decolonization” to denote various kinds of activities that are not strictly speaking decolonization as they configure it – they speak against the use of ‘decolonization’ in an abstract or metaphorical sense. Many practices that pursue a broadly pro-social justice ethic may (want to) frame themselves as decolonial, but this doesn’t mean they actually do decolonizing work. To pretend they do is to agglomerate all kinds of oppression together as colonialism (which is flattening and reductive) and, worse, can actually be counter-productive to real decolonization.

Their argument is founded in the specific context of settler colonialism. Settler colonialism describes the kind of colonialism where, as it is often put, colonizers “came to stay” – for example, Australia, Canada and the US (the last is the context Tuck and Yang focus on). Crucially, in settler contexts, colonization is therefore ongoing; colonial occupation has not come to an end. Tuck and Yang thus articulate a precise understanding of decolonization: it is the giving back of land to Indigenous communities. Indigenous sovereignty was never ceded, and the continued presence of settlers is essentially illegitimate.

The problem with using the term decolonization too glibly, for a range of activities that engage more or less meaningfully with practices that aim to contribute to building a more just society, is that such use fosters the assumption that all of these objectives are compatible, when they may in fact not be. Anti-capitalist protests like the Occupy movement, for instance, do not actually seek the complete undoing of the colonial system and ongoing occupation of Indigenous land. Achieving the desired redistribution of wealth that such movements call for would not bring about the giving back of land to Indigenous peoples, and would in fact reproduce and perpetuate the idea of land as property that can be owned by people.

Another problem is that such overuse empties the term of what should be ‘unsettling’ (a word Tuck and Yang use in a powerful way, and which resonates evocatively with settler colonialism) about decolonization. Metaphorization allows what they call “settler moves to innocence”: ways in which settlers try to enact a distancing from various forms of complicity with ongoing colonialism and its systems – and how they profit from them.

In this framework, anticolonial critiques are not the same as decolonial work, because they don’t seek to undo colonialism, but remake or subvert it. In essence, they entail a tacit acceptance of systems and structures that, for Tuck and Yang, would actually require radical unmaking in order to constitute a part of decolonization. It is necessary to acknowledge what is incommensurable about these different projects and pursuits; what will never come together.

Their intervention might seem like a bit of a downer, especially in the context of pro-social justice work whose participants are eager to build solidarities and bridges between projects that often seem aligned under the banners of, for instance, anti-racism and anti-inequality activism or scholarship. But Tuck and Yang point out that this recognition can help reduce frustration and aid an understanding that some alliances may only ever be – and perhaps only should be – fleeting and contingent. As they say, this “may feel very unfriendly”, but it is important to recoup what decolonization actually calls for.

For many, especially perhaps for people who do work related to postcolonialism in non-settler contexts, this might seem too radical and restrictive a configuration of decolonial work. It entails a very specific understanding of colonialism, which some might argue registers only some articulations of a global colonial project. Whether you agree with them or not, the argument that decolonization is not just a metaphor is, at the very least, an important call to recognize the shallowness of many uses of the term and what they obfuscate – especially as regards ongoing colonialism in settler societies.

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