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ABSTRACT
In this essay, we theorize how terms like “decolonization” and “decoloniality” have entered into the vernacular of the discipline of Communication Studies and remained largely as metaphors. We connect to a conversation among scholars in Indigenous Studies, Cultural Studies, and others who have turned attention to “decolonial” critiques in academic environments, and how they remain detached from their activist origins. We begin with a discussion of metaphor and the cultural and political implications for adopting and misattributing a term like decolonization. Moreover, this study develops a critical method to make sense of the rapid and vast uptake of the term decolonization as a harmful metaphor in the discipline’s most widely read journals. Our critical thematic meta-analysis is driven by a quantifying tool – we turn our research lens to the body of literature written by the collective of scholars in the discipline who refer to or rely on decolonization in their research to reveal the way in which the term is connoted over the last decade. Our analysis reveals “decolonization” is often used as a liberal abstract concept divorced from material contexts. We critique this reductionism, noting how decolonization becomes a buzzword for institutional change without genuine engagement with anti-colonial movements. We end by inviting scholars to reconsider the study of colonization and those materially resisting it with new energies and orientations.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Our intention is not to attribute individual blame or to denigrate these efforts. We also acknowledge that as scholars we are inevitably imbricated within these trends. Thus, we have preferred to report on broader trends in the data and in cases where we draw examples or quotes from the dataset that might reflect these trends, we kept them anonymous.
2. A comprehensive inclusion of all the journals of in the communication discipline could be a future direction for scholars interested in applying our critical thematic analytic method.
3. Mignolo and Walsh (Citation2018) note the “exponential” increase in the usage of the term “decolonization” and its verb “decolonize” in the five years prior to the publication of their book, although they do not attribute this to the Tuck and Yang article (p. 108).
4. Although the terms are used interchangeably, there are important distinctions between decoloniality and decolonization. While decolonization refers to the undoing of colonization in the face of a nation state’s dominance over dependent territories, decoloniality refers to the epistemic reconstitution which occurs in the delinking from the colonial matrix of power. To put it otherwise, decoloniality is epistemic decolonization (Quijano, Citation2007). However, both terms generally speak to “one complex concept” of undoing (Mignolo & Walsh, Citation2018, p. 109) and both demand what Maldonado-Torres (Citation2008a) describes as a “decolonial attitude” to think with and not just about the insurgence, knowledges, and thoughts of those below.
5. For Garba and Sorentino (Citation2020), “The problem with such moves lay in the way that [Tuck and Yang] position slaves within the world, imbuing them with positive substance, so as to vivify the ethical-political dilemmas of decolonization” (p. 766). They claim the concept of decolonization as popularized by Tuck and Yang exists only in the flattened space of discursive acknowledgment for Indigenous sovereignty that, they argue, reduces blackness to a condition of a binary colonial worldview. In other words, even Tuck and Yang rely on the metaphor of decolonization; maybe even they can’t escape it.
6. The development of this tool is a collaborative one: we are grateful to Michael’s colleague Dr. Mohammed Yousuf for guiding us to broaden our methodological approach even further by collaborating with us on this new avenue of investigation.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Michael Lechuga
Dr. Michael Lechuga is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication & Journalism at the University of New Mexico, he researches and teaches Rhetoric Studies, Migration Studies, Settler Colonial Studies, Cultural Studies, Affect Studies, and film.
Noor Ghazal Aswad
Dr. Noor Ghazal Aswad is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communications at the University of Alabama. Her research interests revolve around social movement rhetorics, racial rhetorical criticism, and rhetorics of immigration and identity.