Decoloniality as inversion: decentring the west in emancipatory theory and pedagogy

This study starts from contemporary scholarship in decolonial theory as well as from the seventeenth century political thinker Guaman Poma de Ayala, whose critique of colonial society in Peru enacted an epistemological displacement of colonial authority in its own method and perspective. On this theoretical basis, and by means of a contrast with the accumulative drive that has partly characterised both capitalism and Western critical theory, I argue that interrogating the Eurocentric architecture of emancipatory praxis from a decolonial standpoint necessarily involves a project of inversion that disrupts modernity's developmentalist imaginary, and that restores historical agency to the marginalised while exposing the corruption of power's supposed virtue. Extrapolating from Guaman Poma and contemporary theorists of decolonisation, the paper argues that rather than a dialectical process of progression, emancipatory theory and practice must be thought of first of all as a process of unwinding, in which the catastrophe of colonialism is reckoned with and what has been taken is restored. In education, both on the terrain of curriculum proper as well as in the process of subject formation in schools, this means a radical reconstitution of the values underwriting canon, rationality, and ways of being - as they are lived within the school and in its relationship to the communities around it.