Decolonial Computing and Networking Beyond Digital Universalism

Abstract

The prominent collective of global scholars who wrote of decolonial thinking and the “decolonial option” in the 2007 essay series in the journal Cultural Studies did so urging a broader recognition of the diverse contexts and agents of knowledge production who long represented “a colonial subaltern epistemology.” They wrote to draw attention to the long and diverse histories of decolonial interventions that emerged to confront the “variegated faces of the colonial wound inflicted [over] five hundred years of… modernity as a weapon of imperial/colonial global expansion” (Mignolo, 2007, Mignolo & Escobar, 2010). Writing as researchers bridging conversations and debates across four continents, but facing the new millennium largely as scholars with roots and ties to Latin America, they renewed critiques of how the colonial underpinnings of global knowledge production continued to reassert Western frames of thought as universal scientific truths. And they underscored how this “historically worked to subordinate and negate ‘other’ frames [and] ‘other’ knowledge,… reproduc[ing] the meta-narratives of the West while discounting or overlooking the critical thinking produced by indigenous, Afro, and mestizos whose thinking… depart not from modernity alone but also from the long horizon of coloniality” (Walsh, 2007, p. 224).