Domesticated decoloniality: taming critique in language scholarship

Abstract This article introduces “domesticated decoloniality”, which refers to the process through which radical, material and explicit critiques of colonial structures, systems and logics are diluted into sanitised, apolitical, ahistorical, convenient and non-confrontational discourses and frameworks aligned with neoliberal academia, state agendas and institutional policies, not threatening group/personal interests of the supposed beneficiaries of (de)coloniality. It captures how decolonial premises, objectives and commitments are stripped of their political and material urgency, and absorbed into advertised rhetorics and practices that sustain the hierarchies they purport to dismantle, rather than being anchored in embodied struggles of marginalised communities. Three main interconnected categories constitute “domesticated decoloniality”. First, the theoretical commodification of decoloniality by marketising decolonial critique and repackaging its core ideas as academic trends dissociated from material struggle. Second, depoliticising decoloniality as a diagnostic and interventional mechanism by reducing it to a mere analytical lens whose significance resides entirely in discursive critique of power relations in the abstract. Third, the co-optation of decoloniality by the elites (including Northern and Southern institutions, groups and individuals) to legitimise exclusionary hierarchies, e.g. nationalism, racism, nativism. These categories do not function independently, as they may be intersected and concurrently employed with varying degrees of influence within decolonial junctures.