Decolonising the Neoliberal University. Law, psychoanalysis and the politics of student protest

Abstract

planet Earth under the mirage of the universality of knowledge and human destiny” and that he will “reconsider the cosmogonies and cosmologies that never sought to divide us from the living energy of planet Earth and the cosmos” (3). This is one of those moments, along with the remark that the human species has been severed “from the cosmic planetary energy” (3) in which Mignolo reveals just how much he shares in common with Deepak Chopra; that he is, at least in some of his moods, a hippie spiritualist with a penchant for neologism. Every now and then, the so-called West undergoes an existential crisis and reaches to the East (and more fashionably these days, “the Global South”) for spiritual succour. This is precisely why ideas such as “Ubuntu” (70), “Pachamama” (241, 262), “Sumak Kawsay” (336–337), and talk of “Mother Earth” and “Gaia” are so enticing to him. The actual content of these ideas is entirely irrelevant, especially to those fetishists combing the Earth for candidates to groom into noble savages. But what happens when an individual departs from the thought patterns of their native culture and is no longer espousing views consonant with their “body-political location?” By what authority might Mignolo patrol the borderlines of thought, and will his reply entail that this is a case of brainwashing by the CMP? This is what I call the problem of the wrong natives. It is a counter to his assumption that non-Western peoples intrinsically “think” and “do” in ways which are constitutively anti-Western and that, if they do not, then they must be helplessly ensnared in the colonial matrix of power. Part of Mignolo’s lure inheres in a kernel of truth – that the demythologisation of the Western cultural superiority exported through colonialism is a noble objective. But Decolonial Investigations, with all its conflations, elisions and shadow-boxing with the 500 year-old journals of European explorers, is an underwhelming addition to this worldhistorical process. Only the already-converted will be pleased by the grandiose sloganeering of this self-ordained oracle of the Other.