Short Abstract:

The European academy promotes decolonial theory as a “ commons”. This panel explores how the class/racial/economic hierarchy of European academia limits access to it and explores how we can rethink the communalization of decolonial theory in a world marked by colonial and capitalist legacies.

Long Abstract:

In the current context of planetary and social crises, decolonial theory has been adopted by the European academy as an apparently transformative theoretical resource accessible to all within a “global academic common”. However, this process of commoning conceals an academic space deeply marked by the exclusion and marginalization of voices from the Global South in the circuits of knowledge construction and circulation. At the same time, they strip the decolonial theoretical corpus of its disruptive potential.

This panel aims to problematize how the European academy, by co-opting decolonial theory, has transformed it into a homogeneous and universal discourse, suppressing the specificities of the local struggles and resistances from which this theory originally emerged. It inquires how the hegemonic structures of the European academy (racialized and classist) together with bureaucratic, linguistic and economic obstacles limit real access to this supposed “commons” and perpetuate a pyramidal academic caste.Finally, the panel will discuss the possibility and implications of sharing decolonial methods and theories in the context of this co-optation. Is it possible for decolonial theory, born out of specific contexts of oppression, to be shared without losing its subversive power? How and by whom should these theories and methods be used to prevent them from becoming just another academic commodity, emptied of their critical potency? How do we rethink the ways in which knowledge is constructed, distributed and “communalized” in a world still deeply marked by colonialism and capitalism?

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