Critical keywords for decolonial pedagogies
We’ve provided the following critical keywords as a framework for exploring and engaging with the resources you’ll find in the learning modules. These short definitions are a starting point for further learning. You can take a deeper dive into the concepts by using the links to additional resources.
Two caveats: first, the critical keywords describe aspects of things, not absolutes. In other words, an action, project, or phenomenon can simultaneously contain aspects that are colonial, postcolonial, anticolonial, and decolonial. Sometimes, these parts can even end up contradicting one another.
Second, the critical keywords don’t describe a simple sequence from colonial to anticolonial to postcolonial, or from colonial to decolonial, etc. Because any action, project, or phenomenon can contain many aspects, they’re rarely easy to categorize neatly according to one keyword.
Colonial
Patterns of group-based subjugation and control—political, economic, representational—especially through settlement, sovereignty, or other indirect mechanisms of power or force (paraphrased from Mignolo and Walsh 2018).
Related concepts: colony, colonization, colonialism; imperial, empire; settler-colonialism.
Postcolonial
Of or about the end of colonial rule, as well as continued critical examinations of its cultural, political, and economic legacies (paraphrased from Said 1979). Often focused critically on the aftereffects of European (colonial) power—in culture, history, discourse, etc. The “post-” of postcolonial is ambivalent. It can be thought of as “after” or “in the wake of” instead of “moving beyond” or “escaping” colonialism/colonization in a clear way.
Read more about the post-colonial and (post)colonial from the Decolonial Dictionary.
Anticolonial
Opposing colonization and colonialism—especially formal, political-economic- or geopolitical colonization (basically the dictionary definition).
Decolonial
Approaches that work to disentangle and denaturalize Western modernity—in logics, epistemologies, methods, and categories linked to the colonial condition (paraphrased from Mignolo 2011, Quíjano 2000).
Read more about the decolonial from the Decolonial Dictionary. Take a deep dive into the concept of the decolonial in this chapter by María Lugones, this reading list from Global Social Theory, and the online Anthology from Keywords | ECHOES.