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Abstract

This article provides a theoretical evaluation of the author’s attempts at decolonising a sociology and social theory course in Singapore. It also introduces the notion of ‘decolonial reflexivity’ as a strategy for refining academic decolonisation. In doing so, this article seeks to overcome both the insufficient introspection about the potential for coloniality to reside within efforts at academic decolonisation, and the tendency to separate theoretical and applied discussions about academic decolonisation. It is argued that the author’s attempts to decolonise the curriculum were limited because the course may have inadvertently: (a) sustained exclusion while claiming to be inclusive; (b) maintained the status quo while claiming to be radical; and (c) reinscribed Westerncentrism while claiming to decolonise. This article suggests that although academic decolonisation is a commendable aspiration, academics who wish to decolonise must continually consider the theoretical complexities that are generated by our attempts at academic decolonisation.

Keywords

academic decolonisation decolonising the curriculum higher education social theory sociology teaching Westerncentrism

Introduction

Sociology and social theory have been characterised by an ethnocentrism that has privileged the questions, experiences, and knowledges of Western scholars and societies at the expense of their non-Western equivalents. In order to address this Westerncentrism,¹ there are growing calls for academic decolonisation (Bhambra et al., 2018; Meghji, 2021). This would involve highlighting and dismantling the continued influence of the colonial legacy in shaping academia, specifically in relation to the Westerncentrism that characterises knowledge production in scholarly research and academic teaching. Where there is less consensus is regarding whether academic decolonisation is also about anti-racism within higher education. While some distinguish academic decolonisation from critical race theory but find these two paradigms to be complementary (Magubane, 2013; Meghji, 2020), others reaffirm this distinction but appear to prioritise one of the paradigms over the other (Go, 2018; Meer, 2018), and others blur such a distinction due to a belief that academic decolonisation and anti-racism are inseparable projects (Bhambra et al., 2020; Go, 2020). Despite these differences, what is clear is that academic decolonisation is a result of a recent ‘decolonial turn’² within academia. Although there are now many who have ‘jumped on the decolonial bandwagon’ (Moosavi, 2020b), this does not mean that academic decolonisation is being roundly achieved. In fact, a recent comprehensive review of British sociology found that the discipline is not only largely characterised by disturbing ethnic inequalities in relation to staff representation and student outcomes, but that topics like race/racism, postcolonialism, and decolonisation are often kept on the fringes of curricula, which instead tend to be Westerncentric and mostly focused on class and gender (Joseph-Salisbury et al., 2020). This is a telling reminder that a silent majority of academics may at best be ambivalent about academic decolonisation, and a significant portion may even wish to resist it.

In this article, I attempt to address two specific limitations of academic literature about the decolonisation of sociology and social theory. First, within this literature there is often a gulf between theoretical and applied literature. In other words, the theoretical literature about academic decolonisation does not often focus on the applied implications for research and teaching, and likewise, the applied literature may not always engage with the nuances raised by the theoretical interventions. This point was recently echoed by Morreira et al. (2020: 2) who noted ‘that while debates on decoloniality and decolonisation have proliferated at a theoretical level, work on operationalising them within the academy is just beginning; and that there is a gap between high-level decolonial theory and its practices of implementation’. The second issue with existing literature on academic decolonisation is that it often contains insufficient introspection about the impact of colonialism on itself. That is to say, while those of us who wish to decolonise sociology and social theory usually call for other scholars to be reflexive, it is rare for decolonial scholars to turn the decolonial gaze towards ourselves and interrogate our own positionality or scholarship in relation to coloniality. For example, as is typical of most decolonial scholars, my own recent scholarship has called for universities and other academics to engage in greater reflexivity about the way in which they may promote racism and coloniality (Moosavi, 2019, 2020a, 2021a, 2021b). Yet, in this article I aim to apply this mantra to myself, so as to realise my own call for ‘a heightened reflexivity amongst those of us who are advocates of intellectual decolonisation in much the same way that we expect other scholars to become more introspective about their intellectual outputs’ (Moosavi, 2020b: 333).

In order to achieve this, in this article I call for ‘decolonial reflexivity’, which involves decolonial scholars drawing upon theoretical discussions about academic decolonisation to introspectively locate the inadequacies, limitations, and contradictions within our own efforts at academic decolonisation, particularly in relation to the potential for us to inadvertently perpetuate coloniality rather than dismantle it. This will require those of us who claim that our curriculum, teaching, research or other academic practice is decolonial to unpack our decolonial activities so that we can seriously consider whether we are really decolonising, or whether we are merely performing decoloniality. In this regard, decolonial reflexivity is a methodological tool tantamount to a theoretically informed autoethnographical exploration of one’s decolonial activities with the objective of achieving a more successful academic decolonisation. The purpose of decolonial reflexivity is not to engage in a narcissistic self-indulgence for the sake of overcoming our insecurities but to revisit our analyses, theories, concepts, research and teaching with a frankness that will enable us to build on existing attempts to decolonise. Decolonial reflexivity will also ensure that decolonial efforts do not stagnate into mundane routines by way of ensuring that there is a continual refreshing of efforts to decolonise in the spirit of recognising that decoloniality is a journey and not a destination. This will help us avoid a self-righteous confidence in our status as enlightened decolonial scholars by being prepared to self-scrutinise our own decolonial efforts. As I can attest, decolonial reflexivity can be an uncomfortable exercise, especially after we have already exerted so much effort in our initial efforts to decolonise. Thus, decolonial reflexivity requires a level of bravery that is not always easy to muster, particularly for those who already feel vulnerable and fatigued owing to hostile academic environments. The outcome may not be entirely gratifying either, as it may require confronting the realisation that even those of us who identify as decolonial scholars may not only be the products and beneficiaries of coloniality, but we may also sustain it. Despite the discomfort that decolonial reflexivity will inevitably generate, it is a necessary undertaking given the imperative need to avoid decolonial interventions leading to recolonisation.

In this article, I foreground decolonial theory about the Westerncentrism of sociology and social theory to engage in a decolonial reflexivity about my own efforts to provide a decolonised curriculum. This approach is similar but different from those who have criticised overall efforts to provide a decolonised education (Adebisi, 2016; Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013) and those who have discussed students’ receptiveness to their decolonised sociology and social theory courses (Alatas and Sinha, 2001; Parker, 1997), because I additionally offer a theoretical critique of the shortcomings of my own decolonial intervention. It is also similar but different from Puwar’s (2020: 552) call for the most prominent decolonial scholars to engage in ‘an element of stepping back, out of the light, to exercise reflexivity on academic performativity, in terms of how space is taken up and granted’, because, again, I apply such reflexivity to my self rather than to others. In some respects, decolonial reflexivity is most similar to those scholars who have engaged in reflexivity about their complicity with sustaining white privilege in academia (Linley, 2017; Wood, 2017), yet with the important difference being that decolonial reflexivity is about assessing decolonial scholars’ potential complicity with coloniality. In order to achieve this, I first introduce some of the most pivotal theoretical scholarship to have called attention to the Westerncentrism of sociology and social theory as familiarity with this tradition is essential for arriving at a more robust decolonial reflexivity.

The Westerncentrism of Sociology and Social Theory

As far back as the 1960s, eminent American sociologists Hughes (1961) and Moore (1966) lamented the parochialism of Western sociology. Around the same time, the Malaysian sociologist Syed Hussein Alatas (1963a, 1963b, 1970, 1977b) repeatedly drew attention to the ethnocentric and Orientalist character of Western sociology and social theory. Alatas (1972, 1974, 1977a) expanded these arguments to also recognise that non-Western scholars often emulate such Westerncentric perspectives due to them suffering from a ‘captive mind’. As a corrective, Alatas (2000, 2002, 2006) advocated an ‘autonomous’ approach to knowledge production that does not reject Western sociology and social theory, but that is appropriately critical and creative in diverging from it with original insights that are rooted in non-Western categories, contexts, concerns, and cultures. In this regard, Alatas was among the first to systematically identify and seek to remedy the manifestation of the colonial legacy in shaping sociology and social theory. Although the problem of Westerncentrism was clearly defined in the 1960s and 1970s, sociology largely continued in the same Westerncentric direction during this period. As dissenting voices continued to draw attention to the Westerncentrism of academia throughout the 1980s and the 1990s, it became apparent that while there was some agreement that sociology and social theory needed to be more inclusive of non-Western contexts, perceptions and knowledge, the specifics of why and how this was to be done varied considerably. Thus, one found approaches that may have been well meaning but that also contained questionable aspects, such as being overly obsessed with comparative studies, being overly Americancentric, or calling for foreign students to be utilised as a resource to enrich Western students (Crittenden, 1994; Lie, 1995; Tiryakian, 1986). Elsewhere, one found more rousing approaches that successfully illuminated the Westerncentrism of sociology and social theory, and in doing so, acted as precursors to the sophisticated theorising that was to come in the 2000s (Oommen, 1991; Parker, 1997; Turner, 1989).

The theoretical critique of the Westerncentrism of sociology and social theory most thoroughly materialised as the 21st century began. In particular, a number of sociologists, including Aníbal Quijano, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Syed Farid Alatas, Raewyn Connell, Gurminder K Bhambra, and Julian Go offered key theoretical contributions that still underpin efforts to decolonise sociology and social theory, even though they began discussing these themes long before it became fashionable to do so.³ As one of these pioneers, Quijano (2000a, 2000b, 2007 [1999]) is known for developing the notion of ‘coloniality of power’. This concept, first, recognises the uninterrupted persistence of colonialism by shifting the lexicon to one of ‘coloniality’, and, second, draws attention to the entanglements of colonial hierarchies and coercion in various domains. More specifically, Quijano wished to outline how a type of racial capitalism that was born in the colonial era generated a matrix of inequalities that sought to both dehumanise and excavate benefit from the non-white Other, not only in economic and material ways, but in cultural and ideological terms too. Thus, according to Quijano, the colonisers’ racism and ethnocentrism enabled them to dismiss non-Western knowledge at the same time that their capitalist Machiavellianism enabled them to extrapolate from it when it was profitable to do so. This focus on the racialised dynamic of colonial capitalism as essential for understanding Westerncentrism is a novel approach among theoretical literature on the Westerncentrism of sociology and social theory, and is, as is the case with Quijano’s work more generally, yet to be given the attention it deserves, despite Quijano having been described as ‘one of the most strenuous and consistent thinkers within the de-colonial canon’ (McLennan, 2013: 130).

Like Quijano, Santos (2001, 2006, 2014) drew attention to the need for the parallel decolonisation of knowledge alongside the dismantling of wider capitalist structures that enable the Global North to prosper at the expense of the Global South. Santos’ critique is based on his understanding of globalisation as having been hijacked by Western nations in the pursuit of their own neoliberal imperialist agendas. As part of this project, Santos claims that Western nations have engaged in an ‘epistemicide’ in which they have actively suppressed and even eradicated non-Western knowledge systems. Alongside this, Santos describes the twin processes of ‘globalised localism’ and ‘localised globalism’, which ultimately refer to particularistic ideas being universalised and universal ideas being particularised, as further entrenching global inequalities. In alluding to the relationship that exists between the Westerncentrism of knowledge and geopolitical oppression, Santos places considerable emphasis on the need for a ‘counter-hegemonic’ resistance that goes much further than the university campus and that may trigger a moment of pause for those of us who only prioritise academic decolonisation. Santos wishes to restore what he believes are valuable ‘epistemologies of the South’, but uniquely, Santos does not envision this as residing within neglected individual intellectuals, but rather, in peripheral communities who have their own systems and modes of knowing, which are fundamentally distinct from those that are cultivated in the West.

If Santos gives the impression that the Westerncentrism of sociology and social theory is largely the result of a deliberate Western plot, in his contributions, SF Alatas (2009, 2010, 2012) seems to suggest that it is more of a passive ignorance that needs to be rectified with ‘alternative discourses’ so as to overcome the ‘academic dependency’ that characterises the global inequality in academic knowledge production. In this respect, SF Alatas’ approach is faithful to the spirit of his father’s legacy in wishing to revive ‘autonomous’ traditions from the non-West. In particular, Alatas (2006, 2007, 2014) has invested much effort to positing Ibn Khaldun, the 14th-century polymath, as an exemplar of a non-Western scholar who is worthy of greater engagement. Furthermore, SF Alatas seeks to demonstrate how one may actively apply Ibn Khaldun’s theoretical and conceptual contributions to various contexts and fields, including political sociology, historical sociology, and social theory. One of SF Alatas’ most distinct contributions relates to decolonising the curriculum, as he has co-authored a textbook that operates as one of the most essential teaching resources for those who wish to decolonise sociology and social theory (Alatas and Sinha, 2017).

Taking an approach that resembles SF Alatas’ approach, Connell (1997, 2007a, 2019) argues that the sociological canon is a contestable socio-historical discourse. She deconstructs the narrative about who the founders and custodians of sociology and social theory were by problematising the way in which figures such as Marx, Durkheim, and Weber are immortalised within the field, even though sociologists did not always imagine them as uniquely central to the discipline, and even though the relevance of their scholarship to contemporary social issues is not always apparent. Connell problematises the sociological canon for claiming to offer a neat exposition of the most significant sociologists to have lived, even though it actually just privileges particular types of people while simultaneously excluding others. Connell also criticises the sociological canon for mostly ignoring the Global South while occasionally exoticising, stereotyping, and exploiting it. In seeking a more inclusive canon, Connell (2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2011, 2014) calls for the recognition of ‘Southern theory’ to counterbalance the prevalence of ‘Northern theory’. By this, Connell means paying more attention to knowledge that has been produced within African, Aboriginal, Islamic and other such contexts,⁴ which may mean it would have actually been more apt for Connell to call for ‘Southern theories’. Out of all of the scholars presented in this section, it is Connell’s work that has provoked most response. While one can only speculate on whether this is ironically related to Connell being white and from a Western country, what is more certain is that this attention has furthered discussions in the field. Thus, Connell has triggered heated responses throughout her career, ranging from those that attempt to systematically refute her arguments as analytically redundant (Collins, 1997) to those who accuse her of extracting from the South, silencing peripheral scholars, and indulging in white privilege (Puwar, 2020).⁵

One of the richest critiques of the Westerncentrism of sociology and social theory comes from the impressive work of Bhambra (2007a, 2007b, 2014a, 2014b, 2016, 2021). Bhambra’s critique is specifically directed towards sociology, which is, as she explains, a discipline that defined its subject matter as Western modernity, but which failed to recognise the essential role that the colonisation of the non-West – and the related components of slavery and racism – played in shaping Western modernity. This has occurred despite sociology’s foundations having been laid in the 19th and 20th centuries during the height of colonisation/decolonisation. Bhambra believes that sociologists and social theorists can rectify this glaring omission by urgently incorporating postcolonial and decolonial perspectives⁶ into sociology and social theory so as to recognise how the non-West and the West shaped each other. This approach, which Bhambra refers to as ‘connected sociologies’, does not merely wish to recognise that non-Western voices and experiences exist, but it also wishes to engage in a ‘reconstruction’ of the inseparable and intimate ties that bind the West and the non-West in their shared experience of modernity. Furthermore, this approach also seeks an understanding of how the West came to be seen as endogenous while its interconnected relationship with the non-West was elided within sociology and social theory. More than this, Bhambra also offers something crucial that other scholars rarely do, which is to go beyond a critique of scholarship that is Westerncentric, by also critiquing scholarship that critiques scholarship that is Westerncentric. That is to say, Bhambra examines scholarly approaches that seek to challenge the Westerncentrism of sociology and social theory – such as the Multiple Modernities framework, Dependency Theory, World Systems Theory, Indigenous Sociologies, and even the likes of SH Alatas, Santos, SF Alatas, and Connell – and identifies what she believes are the inadequacies, limitations, and contradictions of these approaches. Bhambra’s chief complaints against such approaches are that: (a) they often recentre the West rather than dislodge it; and (b) they often essentialise the non-West as a homogenous entity.

The scholarship of Go (2013a, 2013b, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020) is not only as impressive as Bhambra’s but it also charts a similar territory. Like Bhambra, Go recognises that, as a discipline, sociology has either overlooked colonialism and non-Western peoples’ experiences of modernity or tacitly affirmed imperialism due to being contaminated by a Westerncentrism – or ‘metrocentrism’ as he prefers to call it – which is premised on the ideology of Empire and sustained by a positivist universalism that originated in the Enlightenment era. Also similar to Bhambra, Go critiques the existing approaches to addressing this problem⁷ and likewise suggests that what is required is the incorporation of postcolonial perspectives⁸ within sociology and social theory. According to Go, this will allow us to achieve a ‘postcolonial sociology’ that would counterpose the prevailing ‘imperial episteme’ with a refreshing and necessary ‘situated knowledge’ from the ‘subaltern standpoint’. In this way, Go’s approach echoes Connell’s and SF Alatas’ desire to promote non-Western scholars and scholarship while also resonating with Bhambra’s emphasis on the historic and evolving interconnectivity of the globe, or what Go calls ‘postcolonial relationalism’. Among other benefits, Go suggests that a postcolonial sociology will help us overcome the common pitfalls that he identifies as reoccurring within sociology and social theory of ‘analytic bifurcation’ and ‘methodological nationalism’, which are, respectively, when simplistic, exclusionary, and hierarchical binaries about ‘us’ and ‘them’ or ‘here’ and ‘there’ are reified within a rubric of coloniality, and when social phenomena are treated as if they are contained within national borders rather than appreciating their transnational dynamics. In anticipating the allegation that postcolonial sociology is a contradiction in terms because sociology and social theory require a degree of generalisability whereas postcolonialism leans towards a culturally relativistic approach, Go proposes ‘perspectival realism’ as a solution. This would recognise that, since all perspectives are partial yet not necessarily invalid, there are benefits in putting multiple perspectives into conversation with each other, in much the same way that different maps of a terrain can complement each other since they may all chart different dimensions of a territory. Thus, Go’s proposal is to ensure that, when navigating sociology and social theory, one consults all of the maps, or scholarship, that exist, rather than only subscribe to a narrow pantheon, and to recognise the potential universality and the particularity of each contribution.

Decolonising the Curriculum

In recent years, calls to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ have intensified. This typically means trying to address the Westerncentrism of teaching content by incorporating perspectives that have often been excluded because of coloniality. While a mere diversification does not necessitate a decolonial shift, introducing students to scholars, theories, topics, solutions, case studies, or concepts that have been relegated to the periphery due to coloniality is a common approach to decolonising the curriculum. While some universities may promote decolonising the curriculum on the grounds that it will create ‘global citizens’ who are more employable and better suited to industry needs (Clifford and Montgomery, 2017: 1138–1139), decolonial scholars usually favour a decolonised curriculum on two other grounds. First, a decolonised curriculum is said to result in valuable yet neglected knowledge being incorporated into higher education for a more holistic understanding, and second, a decolonised curriculum is said to prevent ethnic minority students from being injured or disadvantaged by a curriculum that negates their heritage, identity, and experiences.

Although some scholars have been expressing optimism for some time about the way in which the racialised and gendered sociology and social theory canon may gradually be moving towards a greater incorporation of those who have historically been regarded as ‘outsiders’ (Reed, 2006), my own university education in the UK (2003–2011), and the colleagues’ courses that I taught on when I began teaching sociology and social theory (2007–2013), were still overwhelmingly Westerncentric. When I was first tasked with the responsibility to design a sociology and social theory course for undergraduates in Singapore, I sought to offer a decolonised curriculum that contained what Mignolo (2014: 589) has called ‘border thinking’ and ‘disavowed epistemologies’. To put it differently, I attempted to teach ‘peripheral scholars’ that offer what SF Alatas, Santos, and Connell respectively call ‘autonomous social theory’, ‘epistemologies of the South’, and ‘Southern theory’. More specifically, between 2013 and 2020, I taught a sociology and social theory course that, in the first semester, introduced the social theory of Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Theodor Adorno, Pierre Bourdieu, Talcott Parsons, Robert K Merton, Georg Simmel, Erving Goffman, and Michel Foucault, and in the second semester, examined the broad themes of globalisation, feminism, postmodernism, technology studies, and cultural studies, as well as the social theory of Ibn Khaldun, WEB Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Syed Hussein Alatas, and Ali Shariati.⁹ While there is very little literature that attempts to put any of these six peripheral scholars into conversation with each other, an effort was made in my course to draw comparisons between them. Furthermore, the theorists’ works were used to make sense of the broader objective of decolonising the curriculum given that they all had something to say about the sociology of knowledge. I also explored the biographies of each of the peripheral scholars so as to emphasise the importance of contextualising knowledge production. Finally, a deliberate effort was made to critique the peripheral scholars’ theories and concepts so as to avoid an unwarranted romanticisation.

Decolonial Reflexivity

Before offering a theoretical critique of my course, it is worth stating that a more sanguine evaluation may have lauded it for providing my students with perspectives that most other courses would not even mention. More specifically, students were introduced to discussions that prioritised colonialism, racism, and religion in ways that are less common in Westerncentric curricula. It has long been established that some students may be resistant to more inclusive curricula to the extent that they may feel threatened, be openly hostile to educators, and lodge formal complaints to university management, all of which can be highly disconcerting for the academic staff member who departs from convention (Ng, 1993). However, in my case, my students’ informal and formal feedback, as well as their engagement and performance, demonstrated an overall appreciation for the decolonised curriculum. Yet, in the spirit of decolonial reflexivity, it is necessary to introspectively interrogate my attempts at generating a decolonial curriculum, which will involve reflecting upon the inadequacies, limitations, and contradictions of my efforts. It is already well established that, more broadly, ‘sociological theory has been unreflexive’ (Connell, 2007b: 368) and ‘Euro-American theories [are] being unproblematically and unreflexively transposed to other historical and sociospatial contexts’ (Go, 2016: 215). However, going beyond the call for Westerncentric scholars to adopt reflexivity, here I would like to demonstrate how decolonial scholars must also aspire towards being reflexive about our own interventions which we purport to be decolonial. The decolonial theory about the Westerncentrism of sociology and social theory can assist in this objective given that scholars such as Syed Hussein Alatas, Aníbal Quijano, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Syed Farid Alatas, Raewyn Connell, Gurminder K Bhambra, and Julian Go have all grappled with the complexities of academic decolonisation in ways that can be helpful for those of us who wish to implement decolonisation in our academic practice. Thus, in this section, I seek to engage in decolonial reflexivity by identifying three possible limitations that my decolonised curriculum may have had, which are that it may have: (a) sustained exclusion while claiming to be inclusive; (b) maintained the status quo while claiming to be radical; and (c) reinscribed Westerncentrism while claiming to decolonise.

Sustaining Exclusion While Claiming to Be Inclusive

A paradox exists for those who wish to deliver a decolonised curriculum which is that in seeking to be inclusive, one cannot avoid but to also be exclusive. That is because, by their very nature, curricula are exclusionary articulations that are shaped by definitive decisions about what should be incorporated and what should be left out. This may favour elite members of the periphery and further exclude those who are marginalised among the marginalised. Thus, in seeking to deconstruct the traditional canon, one may find that one still resembles the ‘disciplinary gatekeepers’ (Reed, 2006: 10) who construct a canon that silences even as it amplifies. This is unfortunate because a fundamental principle of decolonising the curriculum is to incorporate a multiplicity of perspectives, particularly those that have been excluded owing to coloniality, rather than merely offering a minor expansion of the canon and stopping there. In identifying and teaching the same six peripheral scholars every year, I ultimately, yet unintentionally, excluded many other peripheral scholars and failed to convey the gradations of colonial exclusion, which mean that not all peripheral knowledge is equally peripheral (Quijano, 2000a: 542). In this regard, a decolonised curriculum may be a false promise if the objective of a decolonised curriculum is to incorporate peripheral scholars because even decolonised curricula will exclude other peripheral scholars.

The exclusion that one enacts when delivering a decolonised curriculum is not only the result of the finite nature of curricula. It can also be due to practical reasons and personal biases. In practical terms, decisions that are made about who to include and who to exclude are not merely objective assessments about eruditeness but are also tacitly informed by who is known, and whose scholarship is accessible. This results in an exclusion of peripheral scholars who are either not well known, or whose works have been erased by epistemicide, or who are not accessible, or who are not available in the languages that one understands. Thus, while the peripheral scholars that I included in my course are all relatively well known, at least in some circles, and ample scholarship by and about them is available in English, there remain other peripheral scholars who have either been lost to history, are less well known or whose work is harder to access. Alas, the most peripheral scholars remain excluded on account of the intensity of their exclusion. This realisation raises the question of whether the decolonisation of the publishing industry and libraries are a more urgent priority than decolonising the curriculum given that peripheral scholarship is unlikely to find its way into decolonised curricula if it is not printed or stocked in the first place (Mohammed, 2021: 4–5). In terms of personal biases, one may find an inclination, albeit often subconscious, to give preference to those peripheral scholars that one has an affinity with. In this regard, when students asked me why my course did not include any Chinese or Indian scholars, especially given that the majority of students on my course were Chinese and Indian, these students may have uncovered an unintentional bias that I had in favour of peripheral scholars from contexts that I was better acquainted with, particularly Muslim contexts.¹⁰ In this sense, my course may not have adequately adhered to the suggestion that a decolonised curriculum, particularly in the non-West, must have local relevance and reconnect students with their own intellectual heritage (Adebisi, 2016; Mamdani, 2019).

Similarly, one of the glaring limitations of my course was that all of the peripheral scholars who were taught were men. Although I made brief reference to Claudia Jones, the general absence of female peripheral scholars meant that even if my course could claim to offer a decolonised curriculum, it could not claim to offer a non-androcentric one. In this sense, while supposedly achieving some degree of inclusivity, my course may have excluded on account of gender. This is unfortunate given that it has been suggested that we do not only need a ‘counter-Eurocentric’ curriculum but also a ‘counter-androcentric’ one (Sinha, 2001: 76). This issue could have been addressed by utilising the resources that have long charted the vital scholarly contributions that women have made to sociology and social theory over the centuries (McDonald, 2013 [1994]; Madoo Lengermann and Niebrugge, 2007 [1998]; March, 1982). Others have gone a step further in also drawing attention to the marginalisation of queer scholars and scholarship, which has resulted in calls for a more all-encompassing and intersectional ‘decolonial feminist-queer epistemology’ (Rodríguez, 2010: 49). While it is of course not possible to include every peripheral scholar that one may wish to include in a course, at the very least, while teaching our decolonised curricula, we must concede to our students the partiality of the decolonised curriculum that we offer and the subjective role played by the educator in constructing such courses. Alongside this, we must be willing to invest time to identify and familiarise ourselves with a diverse range of peripheral scholars by either consulting the resources that introduce peripheral scholars (Alatas and Sinha, 2017; Bhambra et al., 2019: 817–818; Reed, 2006) or by pursuing unconventional reading trails.

Maintaining the Status Quo While Claiming to Be Radical

Those who claim to offer a decolonised curriculum must ask ourselves whether we have really departed from the status quo. My course may have been distinct from standard sociology and social theory courses but that is not to say it was as radical a departure as it could have been. Rather than constituting an ‘intellectual revolution’ or an ‘epistemic uprising’ that is said to be necessary (Go, 2016: 20), at best, my efforts to decolonise the curriculum offered a tempered reform. That is because it left intact a number of assumptions that academic decolonisation might otherwise call into question. For example, my attempt to decolonise the curriculum was not accompanied by a sufficient effort at seeking out a decolonised pedagogy. Nor did it offer any consideration about the much-neglected question of decolonising the hidden curriculum. Moreover, I taught the traditional canon in much the same way that it would be taught in traditional social theory courses; that is, without deploying sufficient ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (Santos, 2014: 44) concerning the Westerncentrism of those scholars, choosing instead to reserve that discussion for the second semester. This missed opportunity meant that if the portion of my course that introduced the peripheral scholars was decolonised, the larger portion that focused on the traditional canon was not. A less superficial approach that follows the declaration that educators ‘have to do much more than diversify their canons in order to get rid of their modern/colonial inheritances’ (Maldonado-Torres et al., 2018: 79), may have been to emulate that taken by Alatas and Sinha (2001, 2017), who unsettled the traditional canon by subjecting it to a decolonial gaze to highlight its Westerncentric inadequacies. This approach achieves a greater degree of ‘epistemic pluralism’ by recognising that ‘we should indeed add different social theorists and sociologists to our canon, but we must also provincialize the existing canon’ (Go, 2020: 91). Another missed opportunity was not making greater effort to explore whether we can abandon the notion of the canon or abandon the notion that social theory is most evidently found in the logocentric writings of individual intellectual elites (Connell, 2019: 358–363; Hill Collins, 2013: 143; Meghji, 2021: 145–150). Instead, these two principles, both of which are hallmarks of Westerncentric curricula, were taken for granted rather than unsettled. For instance, it may have been beneficial to illustrate how communities can produce knowledge in ways that are not traditionally recognised within academia. In this sense, a decolonised curriculum must be prepared to be more radical in not only incorporating peripheral scholars who conform to academic standards that are largely infused with Westerncentrism, such as I did, but to go further in seeking to identify and engage with more unconventional sources of knowledge.

Looking at the bigger picture, it is also regrettable that I did not make adequate efforts to try and decolonise the broader programme that my specific course belonged to by encouraging my colleagues to address the Westerncentrism that may have characterised their courses. This would have involved awkward conversations with colleagues that may have been interpreted as undermining their academic autonomy but perhaps were necessary given that students do not experience their education as discreet courses but as overarching programmes. Thus, if students only experience a decolonised curriculum in a small part of their overall studies, we may still be complicit in being part of an educational programme that is Westerncentric and that we have not done enough to subvert. Therefore, one should perhaps assume the role of what may be called a ‘decolonial ambassador’, or what has more cynically been referred to as a ‘decolonial killjoy’ (Mogstad and Tse, 2018: 56), so as to encourage one’s colleagues to partake in academic decolonisation to ensure that one’s own efforts are not miniscule in the broader scheme of things. Yet, as Abu Moghli and Kadiwal (2021) have argued, local efforts at decolonising the curriculum may only achieve an individualised ‘soft reform’ rather than the ‘radical reform’ that is needed at the institutional level. Thus, even better than recruiting one’s colleagues to engage in academic decolonisation, it may be better to lobby one’s university for institutional changes in implementing academic decolonisation at a more strategic level.

Although those who attempt to decolonise the curriculum may mean well, it may not achieve as much social justice as we may hope. Some may suggest that approaches to decolonising the curriculum like mine are dangerously close to limiting academic decolonisation to a superficial check-list approach. While I would like to think that I avoided treating the peripheral scholars as mere ‘ethnographic trophies of display’ (Puwar, 2020: 548) owing to me offering a fairly thorough engagement with their scholarship, some may still believe that no matter how good academic decolonisation is, it will never constitute sufficient decolonisation because it does not enact the level of radical change that is required to achieve a decolonisation that must go beyond the university (Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013; Tuck and Yang, 2012). In this regard, academic decolonisation may be less urgent than other manifestations of decolonisation, such as those that attempt to practically resist the direct discrimination, pain and suffering of those who are still harmed by coloniality. It is therefore important that academic decolonisation does not lose sight of broader decolonial struggles given that decolonising the curriculum may be futile without concurrent efforts to decolonise the material hierarchies that define society more broadly. If such warnings are to be heeded, those who engage in decolonising the curriculum may need to prove our commitment to unsettling the status quo by engaging in riskier and more impactful sacrifices beyond only marginally reforming our curricula.

Reinscribing Westerncentrism While Claiming to Decolonise

As explained above, attempts to decolonise the curriculum may inadvertently result in perpetuating exclusion and preserving the status quo, even while imagining that we are doing the opposite. As if this is not already troubling enough, decolonising the curriculum may even reinscribe the very Westerncentrism that we think we are dislodging. For instance, in my course, a recentring of Westerncentrism may have resulted from teaching a larger number of scholars from the traditional canon and teaching them first. As well as inferring that the traditional canon is superior to peripheral scholarship, this may have also given the impression that peripheral scholars are merely respondents to a Westerncentric starting point by whose terms peripheral scholarship should be judged (Hill Collins, 2013: 141–143). To further subvert this subtext, one may not only aim for a more balanced number of scholars in a course, but to also teach the traditional canon and the peripheral scholars alongside one another, so as to draw better equivalence between their content, value and reception, an approach that has been referred to as ‘conversational sociology’ (Meghji, 2021: 96–97). Some may even wish to make more drastic changes, such as entirely omitting the traditional canon from a course altogether and solely focusing on peripheral scholars. Even though this risks leaving students lacking in knowledge about dominant discourses, it may dislodge the reoccurring foregrounding of Westerncentric scholarship by not only provincialising Westerncentric knowledge, but even bypassing it.

Aside from the way my course was structured, it is also worth reflecting upon what my presence as the course leader may have signified. The general sentiment that one finds in discussions about decolonising the curriculum is that everyone should be equally involved as if everyone has an equal relationship to coloniality. However, this glosses over the identities of educators that are visible in teaching contexts, as well as our own positionality in relation to power and privilege, which is precisely why more conversations are required about the complexities of how educators who align themselves with decoloniality are often the beneficiaries of coloniality (Lewis, 2018: 31; Mogstad and Tse, 2018: 54, 62). In my own case, there is some irony about a decolonised curriculum being taught by a privileged British citizen, working for a relatively elite British university, in a former British colony (Moosavi, 2022). In retrospect, it would have been better to more explicitly explore the coloniality of my encounter with my students given that the reason why I was the one that was teaching them sociology and social theory, in the English language I may add, was not only a vestige of British colonialism, but arguably a continuation of neo-colonial British soft power. The fact that I am a mixed-race Muslim with heritage in the non-West does not necessarily expunge this reality given that ethnic and religious minorities from one milieu can still dominate marginalised peoples in other colonial assemblages (Tuck and Yang, 2012: 7).

Questions must also be asked about the extent to which the peripheral scholars that I taught were non-Westerncentric. While I am describing them as ‘peripheral scholars’ because there could be little objection to the claim that they have been marginalised in sociology and social theory, I would be reluctant to refer to them as non-Westerncentric scholars – with the exception of Ibn Khaldun – because of them having been located within Western academia and because of their intellectual projects having been influenced by Western sociology and social theory. In this regard, we may find that the peripheral scholars that we incorporate into our teaching and research for the purpose of academic decolonisation are at least partially an extension of Westerncentric sociology and social theory rather than a departure from it. More specifically, the peripheral scholars that I taught were largely influenced by the likes of Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Antonio Gramsci, thus raising questions about the extent to which they are extensions of a Westerncentric tradition. This is why Ogunnaike (2018) notes that while there is benefit in engaging with non-Western scholars who may be partially Westerncentric, to decolonise and achieve what he calls a ‘multicanon’, one must also explore genuine alternatives to Westerncentric knowledge that are found in non-Western literatures, philosophies, and spiritualities, rather than being satisfied with marginalised contributions that are intertwined with a Westerncentric episteme. To put it differently, a ‘Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism’ must be superseded by a ‘non-Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism’ in order to truly ‘delink’ from the ‘colonial matrix of power’ and achieve ‘pluriversality’ (Mignolo, 2018: 147–151). Yet, this may be easier said than done given that we live in a world that has been so intensely and irreversibly scarred by Western coloniality. Thus, when attempting to decolonise the curriculum with actual non-Westerncentric sociology and social theory, one may come to the conclusion that such an initiative is scarcely possible. This is why Jansen (2019) has registered his scepticism about achieving a decolonised curriculum owing to his belief that when one tries to replace one ‘knowledge regime’ with another, one will never be able to fully expunge the previous ‘knowledge regime’. Thus, he suggests: ‘There is no such thing as a pure knowledge regime; the newly dominant order always reflects in the curriculum, as codification of knowledge, vestiges from previous or alternative authorities’ (Jansen, 2019: 58). Others have even gone as far as suggesting that the notion of decolonisation, anti-racism, and inclusivity themselves are actually, at least partially, derived from elements of Western intellectual history (Lewis, 2018: 22–24; Morreira et al., 2020: 11–14). Thus, it may not even be possible to decolonise the notion of academic decolonisation. This may also be why several scholars have begun asking whether universities can be liberated from the harms that they generate or whether the university needs to be abandoned in favour of more radical alternatives instead (Meyerhoff, 2019). In relation to decolonising the curriculum more specifically, Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández (2013) have even gone as far as portraying efforts to decolonise the curriculum as a kind of selfish academic therapy that preserves coloniality by strengthening existing structures and distracting from more radical solutions that are required to achieve justice. Corresponding with Mignolo’s (2014: 589) warning against the danger of ‘rewesternization disguised as dewesternization or decoloniality’ Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández’s provocative suggestion leads them to an even more provocative suggestion that rather than trying to incorporate peripheral knowledge into university curricula, it may actually be better if peripheral knowledge is protected from university curricula, given that the academic appropriation of this knowledge may harm or bring no benefit to marginalised communities. While it is necessary to acknowledge the limitations of the university and to admit that an entirely decolonised curriculum may not be possible, given that universities continue to be highly influential spaces, such concerns need not prevent efforts to recognise and deconstruct the Westerncentrism that so often characterises sociology and social theory curricula, in much the same spirit that Mamdani (2019: 17) has encouraged:

For those of us who are inmates of the modern university, prisoners in an ongoing colonising project, at least in a metaphorical sense, I suggest we think of our task as one of subverting the project from within, through a series of acts that sift through the historical legacy, discarding some parts, and adapting others to a new-found purpose.

In this sense, even if one cannot wholly decolonise, one can subvert Westerncentrism by moving towards a decolonised curriculum while simultaneously recognising the limitations of such a project.

Conclusion

This article has introduced the notion of ‘decolonial reflexivity’ as a theoretically informed methodological tool for introspectively evaluating one’s efforts at academic decolonisation. Decolonial reflexivity is a crucial undertaking because if decolonial scholars do not introspectively critique our own efforts at decolonising, not only will the project fail to evolve in the necessary directions, but it may unwittingly derail into either having little impact or even perpetuating that which we are seeking to undo. Decolonial reflexivity is not supposed to disarm decolonial scholars by sowing seeds of doubt that stifle ambitions to decolonise. In fact, it is intended to serve the opposite function by giving decolonial scholars greater confidence in our efforts to decolonise by way of enabling us to interrogate our decolonial practice to the extent that it is transformed into a more robust project. Similarly, decolonial reflexivity is not supposed to be an abstract pondering in an individualistic silo that detracts from enacting material change in one’s broader milieu. This is why Johnson (2020: 94) has warned us that ‘declarations of “reflexivity” and “positionality” cannot be the end goal in and of themselves . . . reflexivity can only be a first step towards an urgent political call to challenge the structures that reproduce normative whiteness [or coloniality] within academia’. In this article, in the spirit of decolonial reflexivity, I have sought to reflect upon the limitations of my efforts at decolonising the curriculum, partly to further understanding on how to (or not to) decolonise the curriculum, and partly to show how one can implement decolonial reflexivity. In closing, it appears to me that decolonial reflexivity is essential for all of us who claim to be decolonising as it provides hope that our attempts to decolonise may one day be as successful as we may like to think they already are.

Footnotes

An earlier version of this article was presented at a workshop entitled ‘Colonialism,Anti-Colonialism and Dissident Sociology Traditions’,hosted by the American University of Beirut in November 2020. Finally,I would like to dedicate this article to the legacy of Dr Mohammad Momani (Sheikh Abu Islam) (1959-2022). He inspired us to strive for justice in the world,the community,and at home,and he always did so with a glowing smile and a compassionate demeanour.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research,authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Leon Moosavi

Leon Moosavi is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology,Social Policy and Criminology at the University of Liverpool,UK. He has been based in Singapore since 2013 where he is the Director of the University of Liverpool in Singapore. Leon’s research interests relate to the sociology of race,religion,and migration,and the decolonisation of universities and academic knowledge production. In 2021,Leon founded The Decolonial Critique,a global network of more than 1600 scholars and activists who have an interest in theoretical and applied approaches to coloniality/decoloniality within and beyond the university.

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