A Questionnaire on Decolonization

A Questionnaire on Decolonization The term decolonize has gained a new life in recent art activism, as a radical challenge to the Eurocentrism of museums (in light of Native, Indigenous, and other epistemological perspectives) as well as in the museum’s structural rela- tion to violence (either in its ties to oligarchic trustees or to corporations engaged in the business of war or environmental depredation). In calling forth the mid-twentieth-century period of decolonization as its historical point of refer- ence, the word’s emphatic return is rhetorically powerful, and it corresponds to a parallel interest among scholars in a plural field of postcolonial or global mod- ernisms. The exhortation to decolonize, however, is not uncontroversial—some believe it still carries a Eurocentric bias. Indeed, it has been proposed that, for the West, de-imperialization is perhaps even more urgent than decolonization. What does the term decolonize mean to you in your work in activism, criti- cism, art, and/or scholarship? Why has it come to play such an urgent role in the neoliberal West? How can we link it historically with the political history of decolonization, and how does it work to translate postcolonial theory into a critique of the neocolonial contemporary art world? —Huey Copeland, Hal Foster, David Joselit, and Pamela M. Lee OCTOBER 174, Fall 2020, pp. 3–125. © 2020 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00410 4 OCTOBER NANA ADUSEI-POKU During my studies in Berlin, London, and Ghana, decoloniality was a term that appeared, but it wasn’t the main focus in our discussions about books such as Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks (1967) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961) or essays such as Stuart Hall’s “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’” (1997) or Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988). What these texts provided under the umbrella of postcolonial studies were approaches to dismantle Enlightenment paradigms and possibilities to exist as a Black person with a historical understanding of how social, gender, and racial inequalities are produced and perpetuated in one’s own life. Hence for me from the outset, decolonization involved not only the repatriation of the land of Indigenous peoples (it is often omitted that Africans are indigenous to their lands) but, more importantly, a form of empowerment that aimed to tackle the intri- cacies of white supremacy in formerly colonized countries as well as colonizing countries. As a nineteen-year-old person, I learned in my first seminar on whiteness in literature, conducted by Peggy Piesche, a Black scholar of German literature and phi- losophy, that colonization and enslavement cannot be thought without understanding that its main seeds were planted by Enlightenment thinkers like Kant and Hegel whose theories of a just and liberal society depended on deep-rooted racial hierar- chies centering and elevating the white cis male subject.1 This knowledge allowed me to survive intellectually and physically in a context that was intrinsically hostile to my existence. Art history—or, rather, its disciplinary and institutional gatekeepers— did not provide the space to think about these questions in the European context, nor did it allow a mode of inquiry that even acknowledged the existence of race as a signifier, so I found my way into thinking through and with art via the Birmingham School of cultural studies and visual-culture studies. Nevertheless, the problematiza- tion of the art-historical canon, its genres, and methods was already beginning at this time: A healthy dose of poststructural scholarship paired with cultural and postcolonial studies allowed a generation to emerge that aimed to challenge and to change the dominant discourse.2 As in any other conservative discipline, not every art historian, artist, or cura- tor is invested in decolonial thinking or practice; however, the term and its impli- 1. See Peggy Piesche, “Der ‘Fortschritt’ der Aufklärung—Kants ‘Race’ und die Zentrierung des Weißen Subjektes,” in Mythen, Masken und Subjekte: Kritische Weiszseinsforschung in Deutschland, ed. Maureen Maisha Eggers, Peggy Piesche, and Susan Arndt (Münster: Unrast, 2005), pp. 30–40. 2. See Ann Laura Stoler, “Imperial Dispositions of Disregard,” in Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 237–78; Krista Thompson, “A Sidelong Glance: The Practice of African Diaspora Art History in the United States,” Art Journal 70, no. 3 (Fall 2011), pp. 6–31; Huey Copeland, Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Monique llewaert, Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Jill H. Casid, Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, “Still Thinking about Olympia’s Maid,” The Art Bulletin 97, no. 4 (2015), pp. 430–51; and Anne Lafont, “How Skin Color Became a Racial Marker: Art Historical Perspectives on Race,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 51, no. 1 (2017), pp. 89–113. A Questionnaire on Decolonization 5 cations are unavoidable at the beginning of this new decade. This unavoidability is certainly due to the activism initiated at the University of Cape Town by Black LGBTQ activists in 2015 with the call to remove the statue of British colonialist and diamond merchant Cecil Rhodes from their campus, which turned into a global call to decolonize universities and their curricula and equally inspired col- lectives such as Decolonize This Place, the group that relentlessly agitated, both before and during the Whitney Biennial, to get Warren Kanders removed from the museum’s board because of his connections to tear-gas production and its use in Palestine and elsewhere. Is the University of Cape Town with the removal of one statue or the Whitney Museum with the departure of one trustee thereby decolonized? Of course not. Nor has the unyielding scholarship devoted to rethinking the colonial repercussions in art institutions and discourses achieved its goal. Will there be a time in which curricula and institutions are decolonized? Not in the foreseeable future. The acknowledgment of privilege and one’s implication in the colonial paradigm—in the exploitation of resources expropriated predominantly from people of color—is not a desirable mental space. It is far easier to fall back on binaries of good and bad and to add a session on “Indigenous art” to the syl- labus. Moreover, the resources that institutions would have to invest in decolonial pedagogies work against the capitalist logic with which US universities operate. It is far easier to “diversify” the faculty—to hire a few people of color—who, though they are supposed to bring change, have no actual power to do so, as their col- leagues continue, unbothered, to teach the same uninflected narratives.3 Two strands of thought have to be taken into consideration if we want to have an informed conversation about a “decolonial” art history. Art history as a discipline emerged in the eighteenth century during a long period of colonial expan- sion and slavery; it is therefore a product, if not a centerpiece, of a disembodied modern white self in whose formation “taste” played a major role.4 The exclusion of the African gendered subject was mandatory for this project, as was the repres- sion of any subject position that was not aligned with the dominant concept of white masculine superiority. This is why white cis women were restricted to domes- tic space (where they were still important to the cultivation of “taste”) and only white cis men were blessed with “genius.” Also of great importance is the understanding of time as linear and progressive in the eighteenth century, since this concept enhanced the possibility of ordering artistic output, taxonomizing it, and valuing it (or not valuing it) accordingly.5 Like the art museum, then, art history itself is a colonial product. To be decolonialized, it must be transformed into a dis- 3. I have published extensively on the issue of diversity and will not further develop this argument here. See Adusei-Poku, “Catch Me, If You Can!” L’Internationale, 2016, http://www.internationale- online.org/research/decolonising_practices/38_catch_me_if_you_can; and “WdKA Makes a Difference Reader,” Creating010, 2017. 4. See Joe Moran, Interdisciplinarity (London: Routledge, 2010), and Simon Gikandi, “Overture: Sensibility in the Age of Slavery,” in Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), pp. 1–49. 5. Stefan Heidenreich, “Make Time: Temporalities and Contemporary Art,” Manifesta Journal: MJ, Journal of Contemporary Curatorship 9 (2010), pp. 69–79. 6 OCTOBER cipline that not only problematizes its own roots but also invests in ways of engag- ing with art that lie outside of its current definitions. This leads me to the second argument. The acknowledgment of the multiplicity of art and its definitions entails a restructuring of modern-art surveys. The entire history of art of the past two centuries can no longer be narrated through the lens of European modernism, especially if its inherent white supremacy and persistent mar- ginalizing of artists of color are not also problematized. There is nothing wrong with teaching Western art history as long as it is so problematized; I always aim to provide my students with critical tools to read against the grain and to detect a hegemonic Western perspective when they encounter it in their texts or reproduce it in their pro- jects. Is it always successful? Of course not. It is uncomfortable work. On the one hand, the Latin American discourse on decoloniality is very popular among my students; on the other, it often marginalizes Black-liberation struggles to the point of invisibility.

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