2023 ASR Distinguished Lecture: Decoloniality and Its Fissures. Whose Decolonial Turn?

ABSTRACT This paper examines the fissures within recent decolonial debates, arguing for the privileging of alternative narratives from formerly colonized groups and a shift away from centring colonialism. It calls for the recognition of decolonial struggles whose histories run deep and the need to link the struggles with indigeneity, its poetics of relations, and connectedness. Therefore, decoloniality requires thinking and doing and paying attention to social and economic well-being of hitherto marginalized indigenous communities, while giving due recognition to their poetics of relationality, reciprocity, and conviviality. Drawing on the example of #RhodesMust Fall movement in South Africa, it raises difficult questions around ownership, agency, while pointing to cracks that this contemporary movement surfaced, in spite of its claim to decoloniality.