The Decolonial Intellectual

More from Shih. I must say, this short essay of hers has been pretty inspiring as I go about working on the chapter-that-will-not-behave. Perhaps there is a reason for that.

Knowing the embeddedness of [...] disciplines [such as literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and anthropology] in colonial ideology, the decolonial, postcolonial, or minority intellectual has two choices. One is to express endless anxiety over the racialization of thought through an infinite critique of the derivative nature of disciplines and their theories. For a time, several postcolonial scholars made this choice, and some of the most significant conceptual breakthroughs in postcolonial theory were arguably in this vein. Anthropology as the colonial discipline par excellence has for the past decades led a soul-searching critique of itself, with mixed results (Said, "Representing the Colonized"). Fanon would have called these "reactional" rather than "actional" measures (Black Skin [trans. Markmann] 222). The other choice is Fanon's: he appropriates and synthesizes disciplines, especially psychoanalysis, with great confidence and poise, as DuBois did with sociology. When scholars are so busy learning the disciplines that they have no time left to unlearn them, the confident use, revision, and extension of psychoanalysis by Fanon and sociology by DuBois offer inspiring lessons on how to race these disciplines and make them take race seriously.

Source: Shih, Shu-mei. "Comparative Racialization: An Introduction." PMLA 123.5 (October 2008): 1359-60.