A Man In The Sun - Reflections On Decolonisation, What It Means, How Does It Apply To Various Areas Of Human Knowledge

Essay

A Man in the sun – Reflections on decolonisation, what it means, how does it apply to various areas of human knowledge

Decolonisation isn’t simply a matter of expunging an occupying power, but of subverting the regimes of order it imposes on the world—of tearing away its masks of conquest, to use Gauri Viswanathan’s memorable phrase.

Steven Salaita, Decolonisat ion: Survival: Water: Life, 2019

This is an essay without reason. It emerges as a result of recent discussions with a friend and colleague about decolonialisation–what it means, how does it apply to various areas of human knowledge, and what can it mean for photography. Actually, this essay without reason emerges as a result of discussions at The Polis Project as we design a “Decolonise Photography” workshop series. Our discussions have led us to think about what new and different ways of seeing and doing could emerge in a documentary and photographic practice that recognises that “…the target of epistemic de-colonisation is the hidden complicity between the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of coloniality,” and is based on a need to learn to “unlearn” [See Walter Mignolo, Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-Coloniality, Cultural Studies, Volume 21, 2007].

By Asim Rafiqui

August 28, 2019

There are many who are sceptical and critical of the current decolonial moment. There is now a widespread backlash against decolonial projects, aided and abetted by this current political moment of politically correct racism, popular authoritarianism and ethnic nationalism. Students who refuse Eurocentric histories, erasure of the Other’s suffering, colonial historical teleologies, concocted knowledge genealogies, the silencing of resistance historical and present, the elision of evidence of non-European scientific, cultural, social and artistic influences and more, are often accused of being ‘sensitive’ or ‘petty’ or ‘spoilt’ and unwilling to accept a ‘hard, tough education’. These critics assume a ‘correct’ set of knowledge, which is precisely what is being questioned. It is difficult to take this backlash seriously, emanating as it is from the pens and persons of the established, the privileged and the cock-sure–precisely the group and structures of thought that decolonial projects take direct aim at. If the…