Decolonization Unnamed: Echoes of Healing and Refusal in the Face of Dehumanization and Alienation

Abstract

In this concluding article of our two-part special issue entitled, Perspectives on Colonial Violence “From Below”: Decolonial Resistance, Healing, and Justice, we share reflections on the multiplicity of colonial violences that authors speak to in the articles we accepted for publication. We invite readers to contend with the transnational imbrications of dehumanization and alienation as well as decolonial struggles that have emerged in a myriad of praxes against these colonial violences: from the borderlands of the Indian state (material and imagined) to the terrains of indescribable violences of settler colonial onslaught in Palestine; from Kurdish struggles for self-determination to racialized colonial violence in the Americas and beyond. We link decolonial praxis with critical enactments of healing and resistance in the face of alienation and dehumanization across the articles accepted. When doing so, we center refusal, collectivity, decolonial love, and unknowingness—the experience of decolonization and decoloniality as always evading comprehension. With all the institutional appeal and proliferation of writings, conferences, and initiatives using the term “decolonial” in psychology and related fields, we give space to that which is nameless: all that is present yet unspoken; unwritten and always changing and emergent—in the persistence, in the strategies, and in the sacrifice of decolonial frontliners.