Are Neo-Traditionalism and Decoloniality Theory Alike? (Dr George Hull)

Are Neo-Traditionalism and Decoloniality Theory alike? In this thought-provoking interview, Dr. George Hull, senior lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Cape Town, dives deep into the surprising parallels between these two ideological frameworks. Exploring the concept of epistemic ethnonationalism, he explains how both schools of thought tie knowledge, values, and identity to cultural and ethnic belonging.

We examine how figures like Alexandr Dugin and decoloniality theorists such as Walter Mignolo and Aníbal Quijano challenge modernity, liberalism, and universalism, raising critical questions about cultural relativism, identity policing, and academic freedom.

Dr George Hull is a senior lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa. He has taught widely in the areas of the philosophy of race, political philosophy, ethics and German idealism. Dr Hull has edited a number of books, including Debating African Philosophy: Perspectives on Identity, Decolonial Ethics and Comparative Philosophy (Routledge, 2019) and The Equal Society (Lexington Books, 2015).

*** Links ***

Article: ‘Epistemic ethnonationalism: identity policing in neo-Traditionalism and Decoloniality theory’

Edited book: Intellectual Decolonisation: Critical Perspectives

YouTube channel Beyond Decoloniality

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
So I'm not very committed to thelabels of left and right, but
what is interesting is that if one is going to say that kind of
cultural authoritarian view in the neo traditionalists like
Dugan, if that's a right wing view as people do say, then it's
difficult not to say the same thing about the decoloniality
theorists who are espousing sucha similar type of theory.

(00:33):
Hello everyone, welcome to the Generalist Universe podcast.
My name is Sky Hoax Berandelli. I'm an economist in science
communicator from Brazil, and intoday's episode I'm joined by
Doctor George Hull. He's a senior lecturer in the
Department of Philosophy at the University of Cape Town, South
Africa. We explored some topics related
to his research paper, epistemicethanol nationalism, identity

(00:56):
policing in neo traditionalism, and decoloniality theory.
In the episode description, you'll find links to this paper,
as well as to other projects andpublications by Doctor George
Hull. I like to mention that I run
this entire science communication project on my own,
from recording to editing, so any financial support through
the podcast PayPal account is greatly appreciated.

(01:19):
You can find the PayPal link fordonations in the episode
description or use the QR code displayed on the screen.
If you're watching this on YouTube, don't forget to like
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And if you're listening or watching this on Spotify, be
sure to follow and rate the podcast there too.
Doctor George Hall, welcome to the show and thank you very much

(01:42):
for accepting my invitation to share insights from some of your
research. Thank you very much for inviting
me Kayo. I'm happy to be here.
Good. So today we'll be delving into
your paper Epistemic Ethanol Nationalism, Identity Policing
in Neotraditionalism and Decoloniality theory where you
draw parallels between neotraditionalism and
decoloniality theory. So from the papers title we can

(02:06):
see that one significant common between these two traditions is
what you've termed epistemic ethno nationalism.
So before we impacted this specific concept, could you
first explain what is ethno nationalism?
Ethno nationalism, I would say, is the assertion of an ethnic

(02:26):
identity. The political assertion of an
ethnic identity, however that isto be understood.
Ethnic or ethnicity can be cashed out in a variety of ways.
Sometimes it involves the assertion of the superiority of
1 ethnicity, Sometimes it's moreabout saying that an ethnicity
has been marginalised and it's about insisting on having an

(02:47):
equal place at the table. And I would say that all
versions of ethno nationalism insist on loyalty from members
of the ethnos or ethnic group asdefined.
They should act in a way which is loyal to their fellow members
of the ethnic group and not defect or become an agent as it
were of another ethnic group. Now ethno nationalism, it need

(03:10):
not be the claim that that grouphowever defines should become a
nation state which is the case with nationalism.
For example, you could be a Pan Arabist or a Pan Slavist without
thinking that there should be 1 nation state, for all Arabs are
all Slavs. But it does involve usually a
kind of conception of the balance of the ethnicity, as

(03:30):
well as perhaps some other kindsof bounds, like bounds of
kinship or language, religion orculture.
Okay. So it doesn't have to
necessarily have as an objectiveethanol state, but it can take
that path. Yeah, sometimes it involves the
assertion that a group should become a state, but it need not.
And then comes in the concept ofepistemic ethanol nationalism.

(03:53):
What would that be? Epistemic that simply means as
regards knowledge or regarding all of us in our capacity as
knowers. So epistemic ethno nationalism
applies that demand of loyalty to ones ethnic group, however
understood to people in their capacity as knowers.
And specifically it says that what beliefs you espouse, what

(04:16):
kind of concepts you use, perhaps what values you frame
your ideals in terms of, are properly determined by what
ethnic group or ethnos, or putting it slightly more
broadly, geographical identity Group 1 belongs to.
And that if one strays outside the bounds of what's proper in
terms of knowledge and ideas andvalues for your ethnic group,

(04:37):
that's a problem. It means that there's something
wrong with you and you can then be criticised for that.
So you would say that epistemic ethno nationalism is what the
coloniality theory and neo traditionalism have in common.
Would that be correct? Yes.
OK, So before comparing both andseeing what they have in common,
would you mind giving the audience a quick overview of

(04:59):
these two theoretical frameworks, starting with neo
traditionalism, or maybe even telling the audience what are
these two things that we're talking about here, like neo
traditionalism and decolonialitytheory?
Are they ideologies? Are they political perspectives?
What are they? I guess they're kind of

(05:19):
theoretical schools. Perhaps that's the best way to
put it. Neo traditionalism is best
understood by explaining first of all what traditionalism is.
So traditionalism with a small T, Obviously that means a
preference for customary ways orresistance to change or
something like that. That's not what we're talking
about here. It's traditionalism with a big

(05:40):
TA capital T, which is a particular school of thought.
Rene Genon GUENON is thought of as the first person who wrote
about traditionalism with a capital T, and it's a little bit
difficult to sum up very quicklywhat it is.
But the essence of it is that hewas a perennialist in the sense

(06:01):
that he thought that there was an eternal truth, which is
captured partially by all the religions in the world.
He himself became a practising Muslim, but he'd grown up in the
Martinist sect and he'd got involved in esoteric beliefs
that way. And he also wrote about the
traditional truths with a big T,which one can find in the Hindu

(06:24):
Vedanta. But the basic idea is that
rather than it being about following the traditional ways,
traditions with a small T is that there is one tradition with
a big T. And so Renee Gannon was very
interested in this idea of an elite who had the consciousness
of this tradition and then couldguide others.
Then the next big player was a slightly younger Italian man

(06:45):
called Julius Evola. And he was, unlike Genon, he was
very much involved in politics and it's fair to say that he was
on the far right. Julius Evolo wrote a book called
Fascism Viewed from the Right, so that's not somebody who's in
the middle of the political spectrum.
Certainly he believed in hierarchy.
He had that in common with Genonand he was close to Mussolini,

(07:06):
though he didn't count himself as a fascist himself.
Anyway, So with Julius Evolo youget the seeds of neo
traditionalism because he at a certain point suggests that
there's not one tradition which everybody should be living by,
but rather that people from different areas of the world
should possibly be living by their own traditions.

(07:27):
So in one of his books he deplores the fact that a series
of, and this is a quote, a series of non European peoples
are quote, renouncing their traditions, which date back for
ages and have westernised, adopting the cultural
ideologies, political forms and lifestyles of white peoples, as
Ebola puts it. And that's really what the main
character I'm interested in and picks up on, and that is

(07:49):
Alexander Dugan, who is a contemporary figure in Russia.
He's sometimes been described asPutinci brain, which may be a
bit of an exaggeration, but it seems like Vladimir Putin, the
president of Russia, is aware ofhis work and has possibly been
influenced by it somewhat. But Alexander Dugan, he
explicitly says that the world divides up into four or five, as

(08:11):
he puts it, great spaces. And he's using the terminology
of a right wing German theorist,Carl Schmidt.
He was a Nazi jurist. And though some people think
there's more to Carl Schmidt, inany case, great spaces is his
term. Dugan says that there are four
or five great spaces in the world corresponding with an

(08:32):
ethnos. So he uses this terminology of
ethnos. And in fact there's a Russian
academic tradition of talking about the ethnos going back to
people like Lev Gimmilov. So he's using anthropological
terminology and he thinks that there is an episteme, so a set
of ideas, beliefs, concepts and so on associated with each of

(08:52):
those ethnoses. Now it's important with Dugan to
note that he's also drawing on another tradition which is more
particular to Russia, and that is called Eurasianism.
And so Dugan describes himself as a neo Eurasianist.
The original Eurasianists were writing between the two world

(09:12):
wars and they were figures like Trubetskoy, for example.
I think it's Prince Nikolai Trubetskoy and he was one of the
people who who were exiled afterthe Bolshevik Revolution in
Russia. And the analysis which the
Eurasianists of the 1920s had was that what had gone wrong in
Russia is that it had been mentally colonised from.

(09:35):
This connects with the other school of thought we're talking
about today, mentally colonised by West European ideas.
And that was a process which theEurasianists thought it started
under Zarkita, the first, when he started speaking French at
course and introduced ideas fromWestern Europe into Russia and
arts of that style and so on. And they thought that the
Bolshevik Revolution was just the latest iteration of this

(09:57):
mental colonisation of Russia byWestern Europe.
And of course it's an interesting test case for the
idea of mental colonisation, because Western Europe never
politically colonised Russia, soit's purely a mental or
ideational colonisation. Whereas the EUR Asianists of the
1920s, they conceived of the ethnos in terms of a kind of
race. So EUR Asian people, EUR Asian

(10:19):
as in the EUR Asian landmass, people should have certain ideas
and values, people from Western Europe should have certain other
ones. Alexander Dugan, he doesn't
associate himself with the idea of race.
He wants to give an analysis of what an ethnos is, which draws
on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger.
So the neo traditionalism that I'm looking at, I guess it's not
the only one, but it is EUR Asianist neo traditionalism

(10:42):
because it's become quite influential in the hands
especially of of Alexander Dugon.
OK. And then we can explore the
coloniality theory. So a quick overview of it and
then I would also like to know from you, like how did you come
with the this perspective of comparing both?
When did you realize that they had something common to like new

(11:03):
traditionalism and decolonialitytheory?
Yeah, OK. I can probably explain both of
those things together. I'm from the UKI did my PhD in
London, UCL, and part of my PhD work was looking specifically at
the way that power or what the workings of power can tell us
about what we should believe or what we should be sceptical

(11:24):
about. And I looked at that in the in
connection with the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche,
because he has a book called theGenealogy of Morality.
What's interesting about it is why he thinks that he needs to
tell the history of the development of modern post
Christian morality in order to critique it.
You might think, can't you just critique it from first

(11:44):
principles? He thinks it's very important to
look at history, and I argued inmy PhD thesis that was because
he thinks that the way not just individual psychology but also
social dynamics of what people are pressuring others to
believe, what being aware of those dynamics tells us about
what we should be sceptical about in our own beliefs in the

(12:04):
present day. Now when I came to South Africa
to be at the University of Cape Town in 2013, soon after that
there were the protests, the Rose Moss Fool protests in 2015,
which was initially about removing a statue from the
campus. And then it became about this
theme of decolonisation of the mind and specifically of the

(12:26):
curriculum. And both of those elements
taking statues down, campaigns to get rid of statues, and also
the idea of decolonising the curriculum, decolonising
academic studies. They then became global
phenomena, but I think partly spurred by what happened here.
And so I was interested to look at because it wasn't the first
time that people had thought that there was an epistemic

(12:47):
dimension to colonisation and therefore also decolonisation
and some of the theories which people came up with.
For example, in Ghana, the philosopher Kwaziiweraidu spoke
about what he calls conceptual decolonisation in philosophy.
So my discipline, it's a similarthing to what I'd looked at in
my PhD in the sense that it's about looking at the way that

(13:08):
power can distort or create blind spots in academic fields
of study and in our thinking in general.
And so that's the way that Kwasiwarodi pursues this idea of
conceptual decolonisation. Now decoloniality theory is
something a bit more specific. It's also approach to the

(13:29):
question of how do we conceive of the mental or intellectual
side of colonisation and how do we conceive of how we would undo
that. But rather than seeing it purely
in terms of the workings of power, decoloniality theory does
something similar to neotraditionalism, or at least
the Eurasianist neotraditionalism, because it
divides the world up into groups, geographical groups,

(13:52):
with which it associates particular ideas, values,
beliefs and concepts. And the reason for that is kind
of a strange origin story, as itwere, because the figures in
Latin America who came up with decoloniality theory.
And so that's people like AnibalQuijano, Peruvian sociologist
Walter Mignolo, who's an Argentinian literary critic,

(14:14):
Ramon Grossbergwell, who's a Puerto Rican sociologist, and
Nelson Malvanado Torres. They were, I think all of them
is about to say, were initially dependency theorists, which is a
school of Marxism. And it's specifically the idea
that you have to understand capitalism as a global
phenomenon rather than a national phenomenon.

(14:34):
And so dependency theory says you can't think of the stages of
development, economic development, going through
feudalism, capitalism, socialismand so on, as Marx describes
them as, as national phenomena. You have to understand it as a
global phenomenon. And so the dependency theorists,
they said, well, in the mid 20thcentury you had global

(14:55):
capitalism where there's a division of labour between the
economic core, which is the industrialized countries like
North America in North America and Europe principally.
And then the periphery and the periphery countries, they
basically they provide raw materials and then they have
imports of the value added manufactured goods.

(15:15):
And they're never going to get out of that position of
dependency of being the providers of raw materials and
the the importers of finished goods from the core of the world
economy unless they delink. And delinking is the
prescription for how to get out of a situation of economic
dependency that you have in people like Raul Prabesh

(15:36):
Gundefrank and then Balustein, who incorporated dependency
theory into his world systems analysis.
And what happened in the 1990s was that the decoloniality
theorists, they said delinking is still the answer, but
economic delinking is not enough.
And for a successful economic delinking from global capitalism

(15:57):
to take place, there has to be aprior epistemic delinking.
So that changes what delinking means entirely, because it's no
longer about what gets produced where.
It's no longer about essentiallyimposing tariffs and in
protecting domestic industry, refusing to import cheaper

(16:17):
manufactured goods from the coreof the world economy.
It becomes rather about discarding or refusing to
countenance certain ideas based on what?
Well, just like with the core ofthe world economy where they're
from. So Walter Mignolo describes this
new kind of delinking as delinking from Western
epistemology. So it's no longer from the core

(16:37):
of the world economy, it's from Western epistemology.
And then and so once you describe delinking like that,
you're forced to apply geographical labels to ideas or
world views because otherwise you don't know what to dealing
from and what to embrace in other level of ideas and values
now. Yeah.
So there's one, perhaps one moreingredient which is important to

(16:59):
mention, and that is the concepts which Anibal Quijano,
who I already mentioned, broughtto the table.
So he was a co-author of an article with Emmanuel Palestine.
He was very much a world systemsanalysis scholar, but he thought
that you couldn't give a purely economic characterisation of the
world system the economic world system, because he thought that

(17:23):
the idea of race plays a structuring role in the sense
that the division of labour between core and periphery
relied on people. There'd been a widespread belief
in the idea that the human species divided into races, the
idea that they formed a hierarchy and the idea that
certain kinds of work belonged with certain racial groups.

(17:45):
And so he analysing the situation in Latin America, he
thought that what had happened from the 16th, 17th century
onwards is that enslaved people from Africa would be counted as
black and they would be doing a compulsory slave labour.
The indigenous people of the Americas were often in semi
feudal situations, in situationsof peonage, A peon for Padron,

(18:10):
and then wage labour was more orless reserved for white people,
Europeans, for all people of European ancestry.
And he thought that kind of racialized division of labour
was essential for the maintenance of the world system
and specifically the division oflabour.
Now, what the people who came after Quijano did was they took

(18:31):
that idea and they said with this idea of a race hierarchy,
that's kind of an epistemic aspect to colonialism, or as
they put it, coloniality, because this this was something
which could carry on after political colonialism had come
to an end. So what that tells us is that in
order to undo coloniality, this is how Mignolo Grosfogwald would

(18:53):
put it, one must not only to dismantle the hierarchy and
create a more egalitarian political system, the hierarchy
of people, but one must also dismantle the hierarchy of
knowledges. They like to talk about
knowledge in the plural, where the European colonizers had
imposed their, as they would putit, knowledge.

(19:15):
This is the Western epistemologywhich we talked about earlier,
delinking from, and that would include things like this idea of
a race hierarchy. But they would then push to the
side the indigenous knowledge systems of the people in the
areas which they colonized, whether that was in Latin
America or of course, Africa, Asia, wherever it was.

(19:35):
And so Quijano described the role played by the race
hierarchy in the division of labour globally as the
coloniality of power. But Mineolo and Grosvenor Guel,
and then also theorists from elsewhere in the world who've
become part of this decoloniality theory, a network
of scholars like in Zimbabwe, he's from Zimbabwe, but now in

(19:56):
Germany, Sabello and Klobukashini, what Madina Tlo
Stanova, a Russian theorist, andin India, Sai Deepak, all of
those people think that as well as what was called the
coloniality of power, which is the hierarchy of people based on
a race hierarchy thesis, the myth of race.
There's also what they call the coloniality of knowledge.

(20:17):
And that's the idea that European knowledge was imposed
as being the superior kind of outlook and what people should
aspire to, and other world viewswere pushed to the sides.
So undoing the coloniality of knowledge is identical with
delinking from Western epistemology.
And so that's how you get from aMarxist dependency theory, which

(20:39):
is very much about economic dependency.
And economic sovereignty was thegoal of the dependency theorists
in the 60s and 70s. You've now got to something
which is much more is to do withthe intellects than mind getting
rid of ones for, you know, ceasing to be an adherent of
values, ideas, concepts, ways offraming things which are now

(20:59):
thought of as Western epistemology.
And that's exactly what they this last point is exactly what
they have in common with Neo traditionalism.
Would you say that both doctrines assert that knowledge
and beliefs are ethnically or culturally bound?
Would that be the case? Yes, that's right.
So the way that Alexander Dugan in his theory of Neo Eurasianism

(21:23):
puts it is that each ethnos has a particular way of being in the
world. And there he's using language
from the German philosopher Martin Heidegger.
And that's why there are certainconcepts and there are certain
values which are right for people from that ethnos and
other values and other concepts which are right for people from

(21:44):
a different ethnos. And so an example would be that
Alexander Dugan claims in his, so he wrote a book called The
4th Political Theory where he sets this out.
And he says that during the transition after the USSR there
was a big problem because a lot of Russians, but also people in
newly independent Georgia, Ukraine and other countries

(22:07):
which used to be part of the Soviet Union, were embracing
liberalism and democracy. And those are values which Dugan
thinks are right for what he calls the Atlantic ethnos, which
comprises Western Europe and North America, but not right for
the EUR Asian ethnos. And so that tells you something

(22:28):
interesting, which is that when epistemic ethno nationalists
claim that certain ideas belong to a particular ethnos, or Ethni
as Quijano likes to say, they'renot saying that they're
necessarily the ideas which are currently most prevalent or most
popular among the actual people that they're talking about.
It's quite possible for most people in an ethnos to have

(22:51):
ideas which are not right for them.
And then the theorists, in this case Dugan, would criticize them
for that. Then comparing that with the
coloniality theory, you have this same idea.
You know, maybe it's quite nice to compare it to the figure of
the comprador in dependency theory.
So in dependency theory, the idea is that the periphery

(23:12):
countries of the world in globalcapitalism are kept in a
situation of dependency. They're just supplying raw
materials and then they have to import all the value added goods
from the core, partly because ofthe existence of a class in
their own territory, which is called the comprador, so a kind
of merchant. And this is somebody who
facilitates the export of raw materials and then the imports

(23:33):
of the value added goods and pressures their governments to
keep up this economic situation of dependency, which is
ultimately going to be not in the best interests of their
country. Now for the decoloniality
theorists, the comprador, thoughthat perhaps might not use that
word anymore to describe them, takes on a different character.

(23:53):
This is somebody who though theyare in, say, an African country
or in an Asian country, they arethinking and speaking as though
they were. This is the kind of language
which Mignolo Grosvenquel and Anglo Ghacceni use as though
they were European. And so that's what you might

(24:14):
describe as an epistemic comprador.
And that's somebody who's in thesame situation as in Dugan's Neo
Eurasianism, a Russian or a Georgian who was advocating for
liberal democracy, not the proper values for their ethnos,
according to Alexander Dugan. Similarly, this kind of
epistemic comprador figure is somebody who has not

(24:37):
sufficiently delinked from Western epistemology, And for as
long as there are a lot of thosesorts of people around,
according to decoloniality theory, well, no delinking from
Western epistemology is going tobe possible, and therefore also
no delinking from the other sorts of oppressive or
explicitive relations which exists will be possible.
So would you say they both promote identity policing

(24:59):
because of that? Yeah, absolutely.
That's a good way of putting it.Alexander Dugan, he's very clear
that we can't convert to anotherethnos in neo traditionalism.
It's not like a religion. By changing what you believe,
you don't end up being a member of another ethnos because what
he calls your deep identity remains the same.
And it's on that basis that he can say that you don't have the

(25:20):
beliefs which are proper to, youknow, your ethnos.
With decoloniality theory, they're a little bit less
explicit about the kind of divisions that they are
describing when they talk about Western epistemologies and
African epistemologies or Andeantime, Andean conceptions of
time, for example, as Mineolo sometimes talks about.

(25:40):
And they're clear that they're as clear as Dugan is that
knowledges or wealth used and value systems, they come with
flags attached, as it were. They come with their
geographical labels. So an example would be Sabello
and Globicache, the Zimbabwean decoloniality scholar, when he
is talking about the theorist Olufemi Taiwo who was born in

(26:02):
Nigeria, who is an advocacy of liberal democracy.
So again, quite similar to neo traditionalism, he criticises
him by saying that this is somebody who is enchanted by
Euro modernity, so kind of has been seduced away from the
proper values or ideas that he should be espousing.
So that's you can see a parallelbetween the kind of criticism

(26:22):
based on identity which the two theorists make of people who
have order, in their view, the wrong values or the wrong ideas
for their geographical identity group.
OK, so they have an essentialistconception of identity, right?
So in neo traditionalism, it kinds of gives you a path for
that, where you go to when it comes to finding your identity.

(26:45):
But in decoloniality theory, this is not quite clear, right?
They're not very specific when it comes to what exactly would
be the source of your identity. Yeah, I think that's fair.
Do you think he uses this word ethnos very explicitly?
And he theorizes it. Now the decoloniality theorists,
they do use the word ethne, specifically Quijano.

(27:08):
He uses the word ethne. And let me see if I can find
what he says. Yeah.
So this is Anibal Quijano. He says nothing is less rational
than the pretension that the specific cosmic vision of a
particular ethne should be takenas universal rationality, even
if it's, if such an ethne is called Western Europe.

(27:30):
So he uses that ethnic language as well.
And Walter Mignolo likes to quote that passage a lot.
But what you don't find is them theorising what an ethne is.
I mean, so that makes us think, what should we say about this?
And I think that what the decoloniality theorists are
essentially doing is they're taking it for granted rather

(27:51):
than making it an explicit thingwhich they theorise, they're
taking it for granted that thereare African knowledges, there
are Andean or South American knowledges, there are Asian
knowledges, like always using knowledge in the plural.
That's how they like to express themselves.
And So what you might describe that as a moral geography, in
this case, a moral geography of knowledge.
And what a moral geography is insocial science is just, it's

(28:14):
usually an assumption that, for example, people, certain people
shouldn't be in a particular place.
And it doesn't have to be theorised, it just has to be
something which is taken for granted.
Similarly in the coloniality theory, rather than there being
a big theory of what kind of groups these ethnis are, it's
just taken for granted that certain knowledges belong with

(28:34):
certain ethnic groups. And it's on that basis that one
can talk about such a thing as delinking from Western
epistemology. It would be impossible to delink
from Western epistemology if there were no such thing as
Western epistemology. When you mentioned the rejection
of universal truth or rational standards in both of them, and
you also mentioned in your paperthat they at the same time

(28:56):
they're serving universally applicable critiques.
Could you explain a little bit or expand a bit on that?
Yes, yes. So let's start with
decoloniality theory, because asI said, that comes out of
dependency theory, which is as aschool of Marxism, it is a
universal theory. It's they're trying to state

(29:18):
principles which are true acrossthe board, which can be
confirmed by examples all over the place.
And so there's a grand narrativethere essentially, which is
about how the world is made-up of these regions which are in an
exploitative relationship with one another.
And then it prescribes a remedy for that which involves economic
separation. Now decoloniality theory, it

(29:39):
wants to keep on that grand narrative, and indeed that is
always touted by the decoloniality theorists as what
distinguishes their theory and makes their theory better than
post colonialism. So they are quite critical of
postcolonial writers like EdwardSayiz, Kayatri Spivak and other

(30:00):
theorists, and probably Akhil and Bembe as well, people who
actually want to get away from having a grand narrative, a
grand universal narrative of history or a sociological
narrative of the way the world works.
Decoloniality theorists do want to maintain a grand narrative,
but at the same time they want to delink from Western

(30:21):
epistemology. And it's actually this
overlaying of a kind of postmodernist, somewhat
postmodernist approach to truth and objectivity.
So criticism of objectivity and universalism overlaying that
upon a theory which is which hasroots in universalist Marxism,
which creates a big tension, thetension which you you notice in

(30:43):
fact, at the heart of decoloniality theory because but
when they talk about delinking from Western epistemology,
Walter Mignolo likes to talk about there being no truth
without parenthesis. In other words, any claim that
something is true or something is factual or of or of value is
legitimate needs to be put in inverted commas or bracketed.

(31:06):
It's true relative to a particular context of utterance,
the context of the West. If it's Western epistemology and
he says 1 conception of what time is might be true for the
West or valid for the West. He likes to use the example of
time, the concept of time. He says that when the Spaniards
colonised the Andes they imposedtheir conception of time.

(31:30):
So again associating a concept of time with a particular ethne
and he he asserts that the Andean conception of time of the
indigenous people of the Andes was something very different,
but their conception of time wascolonised by the other.
There he wants to assert that both of them are right, though
they apparently disagree. Both of them are right because

(31:51):
one of them has a conception of time which is true in
parenthesis relative to the European or West European
context or ethne, whereas the other is true or valid relative
to the Andean context. So that raises a problem because
we have this grand narrative about how a colonial matrix of
power involving the coloniality of power, the coloniality of

(32:14):
knowledge, which I've already mentioned, and also what Nelson
Malcolm Auditoris calls the coloniality of being.
And that's, and that is a systemwhich describes the whole world.
So it's just like the Marxist vision of economic exploitation.
It is meant to be objectively true for everyone everywhere.
And that obviously raises the problem.

(32:36):
I thought there was no truth in parenthesis.
Or why don't you tell us, Mineolo, which Ethni, which part
of the world, which regional identity group, that grand
narrative of the colonial matrixof power having been put in
place and staying in place for the past 500 years is true
relative to. But of course they don't really
want to do that. Mineola Grosfeld Well, and the

(32:57):
other decoloniality theorists, because they they want to
maintain that grand narrative. And so there's a tension there
between maintaining that grand narrative of the colonial matrix
of power and their assertion that, as Glover Gacheny likes to
say, everybody is born into valid and legitimate knowledge
systems. In other words, all the
different knowledges are true, and they're true in parenthesis.

(33:18):
It's it's difficult to maintain both of those positions at once.
Right. And it's also the case that one
of the critiques I've heard around the colonial theory is
just that the Western perspective with the western
culture would also be an ethne, right?
So it should be respected as onevalid like source of knowledge
and then is not taken that way by decoloniality theory.

(33:43):
Would you say that is also a valid point, a valid critique?
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah.
I think that maybe the best way to bring out what you've just
said is with that race hierarchythesis, which I mentioned,
Quijano contributed to world systems analysis because he's

(34:03):
very clear that when Westerners began to divide the population
of the world into four or five races and then to create a
hierarchy, that that is false. It's a racism myth.
It's not, not just the hierarchical aspects of it, but
the very idea that there are clean racial divisions among the
human species. He's very clear that has nothing
to do with the realities of human biology.

(34:25):
But then, as you just said, whenMignolo and others talk about
the coloniality of knowledge, they seem to associate the idea
that that the human species divides into races with Western
epistemology. And yeah, just as you said,
doesn't that commit them to saying that even those ideas are

(34:46):
true in parenthesis, they're true for Westerners.
So on the one hand, Quijano, youknow, quite reasonably seems to
want to say that it's outright false.
It's totally false that there isthis race hierarchy.
And that seems the correct position.
On the other hand, by saying that Western epistemology is
true in its in what Mineolo causes proper localism, he likes

(35:08):
to say that all ideas are true and they're proper localism.
That seems to mean that you you're forced to concede that it
has some kind of relative truth,which doesn't seem like a
position any theorist would wantto be in.
Also in in the paper you talk about egalitarian discourse in
both of them, the coloniality theory and neo traditionalism.
Can you explain a little bit or expand on that a bit?

(35:31):
Well, so I guess egalitarianism in politics is the idea that
humans are fundamentally equal. We're not all equally good at
various things or equal the sameheight or that sort of thing,
but we're all morally equal in that we're all worthy of
consideration. We all have certain rights which
have to be respected and that kind of idea, and we should all

(35:51):
have opportunities to make something of our life.
So that's egalitarianism, I suppose.
So decoloniality theory is clearly an egalitarian theory in
the sense that it wants to overturn the hierarchies
associated with capitalism and also colonial racism.
So it's egalitarian in that sense, but it's also egalitarian
in an epistemic sense because itwants to overturn the hierarchy,

(36:14):
which it describes as the coloniality of knowledge.
So it wants all knowledges or all kind of outlooks, all sets
of concepts and beliefs or all epistemes.
They also use that language to be counted as equally valid and
legitimate. But it's a an egalitarianism of
a special kind because the decoloniality theorists do not

(36:39):
argue that in all parts of the world, all knowledges or all
world views should be equally espoused or equally taught or
equally broadcast. Because as I said, they always
link geographical labels to eachworldview, each knowledge
system. And so it's a kind of separate
but equal egalitarianism which they have in mind for knowledges

(37:02):
because as we talked about before, they want to be
delinking from Western epistemology.
Well, that means you leave Western epistemology in it's
place and you have African epistemologies in Africa and
Latin American ones in Latin America and so on.
So that's the kind of egalitarianism which they seem
to be espousing, which leads to what you've talked about before,

(37:23):
which is the identity policing. Because if you if you're
espousing the wrong knowledge for the place that you're in,
that's a problem. As Walter Mignolo likes to sum
it up, you are where you think. That's his way of putting that.
Now for Alexander Dugan, even though he comes from this
traditionalist with a big T school of thought, which tends
to valorise hierarchy. So, for example, Julius Evela,

(37:47):
as I said, a far right thinker in Italy, he wanted to revive
what he described as a knightly order.
He wanted that to be ruled by Knights in according to the
tradition with a big T in Europe.
But Dugan, in a sense, because he picks up this idea that there
are different traditions with a big T in different parts of the

(38:08):
world, he does assert a kind of egalitarianism because he thinks
that each ethnos should be entitled to live according to
its own tradition with a big T. He describes the imposition or
the importation or however you want to put it, of Western or
Atlanticist ideas into Eastern Europe and Russia and Central

(38:30):
Asia as a form of racism, a formof violence, epistemic violence.
So he uses that sort of languageas well.
And so just like the decoloniality theorists, he
espouses a kind of separate but equal egalitarianism for the
epistemes of each different ethnos.
Having said that, on the other hand, it gets a little bit

(38:50):
complicated because you might ask what about if the value
system and the ideas of a particular ethnos is itself in
egalitarian? And in fact, that's something
which Dugan countenances becausehe thinks that's ruled by the
czars, for example, was something which is more suitable
to the EUR Asian ethnos than it would be to the Atlanticist 1.

(39:12):
So again, there's a kind of tension with precisely this
concept of egalitarianism which you're homing in on.
Because if you're going to say that everybody's born into valid
and legitimate knowledge systems, which is a quote from
Glover Gachani, what about if they're born into a knowledge
system or a system of values, which is actually in
egalitarian? And that's a kind of tension
which is never satisfactorily dealt with by the two schools

(39:36):
that we're talking about. And also when it comes to
Western, well, their perspectiveon Western knowledge, right,
they also have an opposition to modernity and liberalism.
Would you say both of these theories would assert that they
oppose modernity and liberalism as all?
Yes, I think probably that's true.

(39:59):
So they have slightly different ways of coming at that point.
The traditionalists, even beforeneo traditionalism, were against
modernity and against liberalism.
And Julius Eveler was very clearin his writings that the
explanation for why the tradition with a big T
disintegrated in Europe was because of the revolutions which

(40:19):
brought in liberalism, the French Revolution, and then the
revolutions in the middle of the19th century, which were
essentially against absolutist rule.
Saying that individuals, no matter what their birth is,
should have equal political rights.
So that was the beginning of thethe idea that all individuals
should have the same sort of rights.
Now with neo traditionalism, Dugan's Eurasianist

(40:42):
traditionalism, it gets a littlebit more complicated because he
does say things which sound verymuch like Julius Evella's
critique of liberalism, critiqueof the revolution.
But on the other hand, he talks about the Atlantis Cyst ethnos,
which is Western Europe and North America as being an ethnos
which is entitled to live according to its way of being in

(41:03):
the world and should have the ideas and the values which are
suitable to it, which includes liberal values.
Whereas Evola was just against liberalism, Dugan ends up being
both forests and against it. He's forests in the right place.
So modernity is conceived of by the traditionalist and the neo
traditionalist as a departure from the primordial tradition.

(41:25):
Though it's also a little bit complicated because they don't
think that the tradition with a big T was ever realised fully in
any place anyway. OK, for the decoloniality
theorists, their criticism of modernity is slightly different
because they so Mignolo Quijano,Ramon Grosfel, Guel Martin
Auditoris, and Globi Gacchini, all of these theorists, they

(41:47):
would say that modernity and coloniality are two sides of one
coin. They're inextricably bound up
with one another. One of the ways that Walter
Mignola likes to speak about this is by saying that one side
of the coin is the rhetoric of modernity.
In other words, all of this talkabout equal rights, democracy,
equality, that's the rhetoric. But the logic, in other words,

(42:08):
how things actually work, is coloniality, and that means the
colonial matrix of power, the division of the world
hierarchically, and the divisionof knowledge it's hierarchically
as well. So their criticism of modernity
is for being inextricably bound up with coloniality.
As for liberalism that claims about human rights, Bolton,

(42:29):
Minolo, he is a little bit ambivalent about that kind of
liberalism conceived that way because I think he's resistant
to coming out fully against human rights.
And so rather he will say that these are kind of concepts which
have different versions in different areas.
So democracy might mean something different in Asia from
what it means in Western Europe,for example.

(42:51):
But the main criticism of is that it's bound up with
coloniality. Would you say they're just
theories or they have political aspirations?
Alexander Dugan is a theorist who clearly advocates for a
particular politics. And so he is a Russian, he's a
resident in Russia. He wrote a textbook which was

(43:12):
prescribed by the staff College in Russia.
His idea is that the EUR Asian economs comprises not just the
territory and the population of Russia, but also that of many
Central Asian countries and alsoEastern European countries,
including Ukraine. So he's explicitly supported the

(43:33):
incorporation of Ukraine into Russia, or at least it's
political subordination to Moscow.
And he has a basis, as he sees it, for that kind of politics
because he thinks that's they comprise 1 ethnos, which has one
kind of being in the world whichis different from that of the

(43:53):
other ethnoses. So there's a clear political
implication there. And also he criticized the
movement towards a more Liberal Democratic system in Moscow and
indeed in other post Soviet states on the basis that not
that these ideas are totally false, because he thinks that
they're right for the Atlanticist Ecnos, but rather

(44:14):
that they're not EUR Asian, they're not sufficiently EUR
Asian. So there's clear political
implications there. As regards decoloniality theory,
it really seems like because of the structural similarity of the
theory, it must have quite similar political implications.
So if you think that there's a particular kind of political
thinking which belongs to the West or Europe or North America,

(44:36):
then presumably the prescriptionto Delink from Western
epistemology will include a prescription to delink from that
kind of political thinking as well.
Now the theorists, people like Walter Miniolo, Grossburg World,
they're not so explicit about advocating a particular
political platform on the basis of it.

(44:57):
But you can see that would be there could be political
implications for that kind of theory.
Other than all these topics we explored here, is there a shared
language between these two theories?
Yeah, there is some shared language.
It's now true that both Dugan and the decoloniality theorists
use the language of colonisation.

(45:17):
And as I said, that's actually something which goes back
further in the EUR Asian Ness tradition which he's part of.
He describes himself as a neo EUR Asianist, and the original
EUR Asianists were clear that the Russian mind had been
colonised by the West. And that's something which Dugan
agrees with. And of course that's also a
claim which the decoloniality theorists make.
Dugan takes some of his languagefrom the writers of what's

(45:40):
called the German conservative revolution.
So Dugan is inspired by Osvald Spangler, for example.
And Osvald Spangler is a theorist who divides the world
into kind of, he thinks that theworld is made-up of organic
civilizational holes which go through a phase of growth and

(46:01):
then decay. And so Oswald Spangler wrote a
famous book called The Decline of the West in which he was
claiming that the the Western civilisation was in its time of
decay. So Dugan uses that language and
he was also, he also uses some of the language of Car Schmidt.
And that's also true of Water Mignolo.
The Dugan uses the concept Greatspace from Car Schmidt.
Mignolo uses the concept of the pluriversality, which is also

(46:24):
from Karl Schmidt. And what's interesting is that
that's language which is also used by the European New, Right.
So people like Alante Benoit, they will talk about being in
favour of pluriversalism or you know, the Pluraverse, which is
the idea that each region of theworld has its own kind of ideas
which are not universal, but rather one should endorse

(46:46):
pluriversality, which is the idea of truth in parenthesis.
So there are some interesting overlaps.
And another thing which is interesting about that is that
Carl Schmidt is usually thought of as a thinker of the right.
But the decoloniality theorists that come out of Marxism, which
is thought of as a school of thought on the left and their
anti colonialism, they think of as progressive leftist thoughts

(47:07):
as well. But there is this sort of
convergence both at the level ofwhat we've been talking about
mainly, which is the kind of structure of the theory itself,
but also some of the concepts. And it seems like some of the
theorists that they're inspired by, there's a kind of
subterranean common inspiration from the theorists of the the
time of the conservative revolution in Germany.
While reading your paper one thing that came to mind was

(47:30):
horseshoe theory, which like from time to time someone always
brings it up just to talk about how similar the extreme left is
to the extreme right and so on. So in this case we have the
coloniality theory that we can say comes from the radical left
or the extreme left on the political spectrum and then neo
traditionalism as something thatis coming from the extreme

(47:54):
right, from far right of the political spectrum.
So what do you think of this idea of horseshoe theory and do
you think it makes some sense given some of the your findings
from your paper? Yeah.
So this the idea that. So one example of that is that
the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in China in 1966,

(48:17):
there was a member of the Communist Party who warned the
Red Guards for what they were engaging in, though they thought
it was leftism was actually going to make them rightists.
And he was somebody who said a circle consists of a left
semicircle and a right semicircle, and going too far to
the left, you end up on the right, which I think is the
horseshoe. Horseshoe concept is what you're

(48:37):
talking about, I think. I'm not sure whether that's
applies across the board becauseif you take one particular thing
like let's take egalitarianism or let's take egalitarianism in
terms of opportunities, should people have equal opportunities?
We generally think it's the leftist view that one should
equalise opportunities and a rightist view that actually

(49:00):
inequality of opportunity is OK to some extent.
If you equalise opportunities and you advocate for more and
more equalisation of opportunities, it doesn't seem
to me that you suddenly become right wing.
You can that continues to be a leftist position and you can
insist on it more and more. On the other hand, what is true
is that whether you're on the left or on the right, the more

(49:22):
you insist on compliance with a policy, whether it has to do
with egalitarianism or cultural uniformity or whatever it might
be, the more likely you are to use certain methods which are
more authoritarian or more repressive.
So what I would say is that rather than that showing that if
you go far left, you end up on the right, what it shows is that

(49:42):
those categories of left and right that we use, they actually
they're a bundle of different values.
And the way that those values are collected together can shift
and change. And I think that's happening a
lot at the moment in general. So for example, if you take the
United States of America, there's been there's been a
number of shifts. The Republican Party, which is

(50:02):
thought of as the rightist party, always used to be in
favour of free trade and the free market and not too much
protectionism or too much regulation and and more welfare.
But that's not the case now at all.
On the other hand, it has more kind of conservative family
values policies like it used to before the left used to be much
more absolutist about rights such as a right to free speech

(50:25):
than it is now. And that's more associated with
the right. So these different values which
are collected in baskets, which we call the left wing and the
right wing, they can actually get jumbled up in ways that even
over the course of a decade or two in ways which can surprise
us. So I think maybe that's what's
coming out more that these categories like left and right,
there's no inherent affinity between the different values

(50:47):
which are collected in the basket of the left or the right
at any given time. And that's what we're seeing
with these with these theorists as well.
But I mean, what I would say is that so the idea that we should
be, as you were talking about, we should be policed in terms of
what values we espouse or what even what beliefs we have, what
fundamental concepts we use based on what our identity is,

(51:12):
what ethnos or ethni we're told that we belong to.
To me that is a kind of a somewhat authoritarian idea
because it's telling people whatto think.
So it has that kind of characterof repressive or authoritarian
behaviour or a potential for that kind of behaviour, which is
more associated I think with theright wing in the sense that

(51:33):
it's about policing a kind of cultural community.
So I'm not very committed to thelabels of left and right.
But what is interesting is that if one is going to say that kind
of cultural authoritarian view in the neo traditionalists like
Dugan, if that's a right wing view as people do say, then it's
difficult not to say the same thing about the decoloniality
theorists who are espousing sucha similar type of theory.

(51:55):
Yeah, I see how complex this cancan be.
Or just to state that they're just becoming the same thing is
quite is way more complex than that.
And how is science seen under these two theories, the
coloniality theory and neotraditionalism?
Do they have similarities when it comes to also seeing science?

(52:15):
So you mean like science as in natural science as opposed to
social sciences? No, I mean more like science as
something objective, as something that depends on
universal standards in order to compare things and to reach or
to advanced knowledge. How do these two things see
science? To be honest, it's not the

(52:37):
favorite example. So certainly like physics
experiments or physical physics theories that or biological
theories, they're not the favorite example of either the
neo traditionalists or the decoloniality theorists.
But on the other hand, they are committed to a particular view,
which is that knowledge or the view of physical reality, of
natural reality, is something where there's only truth in

(53:00):
parenthesis in Minolo's terminology.
And I suppose they would probably take the line that even
our observations of natural phenomena are already overlaying
with or charged with assumptionsand content which is specific to
a particular world view. So they're committed to taking
that position. And the decoloniality theorists,

(53:20):
they do often speak about cosmologies, for example, which
I suppose is a proper study of science because it means the
whole universe. But they don't go into very much
detail, except to say that thereare cosmologies which belong to
the African region of the world,cosmologies which belong to the
Andean region which Mignolo speaks about, and also ones

(53:40):
which belong to the West. They tend not to go into great
detail and the same is true Alexander Dugan.
OK, so would you say that when it comes to social sciences that
they should have more of a saying when it comes to
analysing social sciences than other sciences because they you
tend to analyse cultures and then comes in anthropology,
sociology and so on? Yeah, those are their favorite

(54:02):
areas to you're right about. That's where the their examples
tend to be taken from, and also,I suppose, political ideas.
In do you see them as influential in academia today,
these two ideas or one is standsout in terms of that?
Yeah, they're influential in different domains.

(54:23):
As far as I understand, it's Eurasianism today is very much
associated with this figure of Alexander Dugan is Russian
theorist and he is quite influential and he also he
networks with political groups in Europe or he used to.
I don't know whether that's the case anymore.
So as Alain de Benoit, who I already mentioned in France, the

(54:44):
doyenne of the French New Right,he is somebody that Dugan that I
think has corresponded with, andthere are some affinities
between their ideas. So the new rights in France,
they're involved in putting forward an idea of Europe as a
civilizational space, and they see themselves as defending
European values and that sort ofthing.

(55:04):
And that's clearly has affinity with Duggan's view.
So his influence is much more inpolitics and kind of political
discourse, whereas the decoloniality theorists, they
have so far at least been mainlyinfluential in scholarship.
And I think they're very influential.
Walter Mignolo especially, he's a professor at Duke University,
He's written a lot of books, thedarker side of Western

(55:26):
modernity, the politics of decolonial investigations, and
people are citing them all the time here in South Africa.
As I say, I became aware of decoloniality theory as the
protests were going on about Roads must Fall, removing the
statue and curriculum change. And my university, the
University of Cape Town, there was a curriculum change
framework which was put in placewhich explicitly draws on what

(55:49):
they call Latin American decolonial theory.
So that's the kind of place where it's very influential.
Is there any political influencein South Africa coming from
decolonial theory or even neotraditionalism?
I think there's certainly a degree of epistemic ethno
nationalism which is present, and one of the areas where that

(56:12):
plays out is in law. So thinking about the law, and
that's also true in India, by the way, where side Deepak, who
I mentioned who wrote a book called India that is Bharat,
which is a citation from the start of the Indian
Constitution, I think. But anyway, so he has argued
that the legal system in India reflects coloniality and he

(56:35):
thinks that the law in general should be reformed in line with
what he describes as Bharati civilisation or Indian
traditional Hindu specifically values, because he's part of the
Hindutva school there. Now in South Africa there has
been something similar, a criticism of the South African

(56:56):
Constitution. So South Africa, in South
Africa, of course, there was a legalised sort of white
supremacy, including the apartheid system after the
Second World War, which was onlyproperly dismantled in 1994.
And in 1994 there was a provisional constitution when
there were the first democratic elections and then the full

(57:17):
constitution was brought in a few years after that.
And there have been a number of kind of attempts to critique.
I mean a lot of people are very positive about the South African
constitution because it enshrines not only political and
civil rights but also some socioeconomic rights.
And so it's seen as giving very good protections to individuals
as long as the state can come through with those.

(57:39):
But there have been some lines of critique of the South African
Constitution as a legal framework.
And initially it was about whether this was actually going
to be a way of bringing about radical change, whether property
rights should have been enshrined so fully into the
constitution or not. But lately, in the last few
years, there's been another school of critique which says

(58:00):
that the South African Constitution is not sufficiently
African or Azanian as it's sometimes put, and that it
reflects a kind of Western or European mentality instead.
And that became part of the platform of a new political
party last year when there were the general elections.
The former President Jacob Zuma,who was the president, he was a

(58:20):
member of the African National Congress and he was the
president as president of the country.
He was also president of the ANC, but he then broke away and
formed his own political party and they explicitly put that in
their election platform. The the Roman Dutch law, the
traditions which informed South African law should be looked at
again and the foreign basis for the legal system should be

(58:42):
rejected. So that's an area where this
idea that there are particular ideas and values, including the
values which should inform the legal system which belong to
particular areas of the world. That's coming through in
politics in South Africa and it also in other countries like
India. And after your extensive
research on these topics that weexplore today, and especially

(59:02):
comparing both understanding both new traditionalism and the
coloniality theory, what advice would you give to academics or
policy makers when navigating identity based political views
like the ones we explored here today?
What is the importance of understanding everything we
talked about today? I think the one of the important

(59:23):
things is that ideas do have power.
They do have influence and they even have influence on people
who are not necessarily reading the books by the theorists we've
been talking about, for example.Because the fact that a kind of
idea or an approach, a politicalapproach, it is something which

(59:46):
people know that there's some professor at a university who
who writes a lot of books and has come up with some theory
vindicating that can give peopleconfidence in taking a political
line which they otherwise might not have done.
And so that's one reason why it's relevant even for people
who do not read these books. I think the other, the other

(01:00:07):
thing which I think is importantin this discussion is that
decoloniality theory. That's a particular approach to
the idea of decolonisation of the mind.
And just because that approach doesn't.
Hold water or it's not defensible.
It has these kind of internal tensions that we've been talking
about. That doesn't mean that the idea
of intellectual decolonisation should be thrown out.

(01:00:28):
As I said much earlier on, the fundamental idea of intellectual
decolonisation is that the exercise of power
internationally can distort the ideas that we come up with.
And I think that's an important,that's an important truth in
that. And so we should examine the
impact of power relations, including colonial power

(01:00:48):
relations in the past of colonization on the ideas which
people take for granted or the way that curriculums are
structured. So maybe a way of summing up
that would be to say that we need to separate out the idea
that the impact of power on knowledge needs to be
interrogated. We need to give a kind of audit

(01:01:09):
to our ideas based on whether they've been influenced and
taken the shape they have because of power relations.
That's one thing, but that doesn't mean that we should make
it. We should tie knowledge to
identity, which is a different thing.
And that's exactly what the D coloniality theorists have done.
So interrogating the effect of power on our ideas is not the

(01:01:33):
same thing as saying that we should adopt ideas based on who
we are, based on our identity. And I think the two can be
separated out. And that, for example, the
Ghanaian philosopher Kwadiwerati, who I mentioned
earlier, is an example of somebody who has an approach to
decolonization of the mind, which respects that distinction
between interrogating the effects of power on ideas and

(01:01:56):
associating ideas with particular identities.
Because his idea is we should look at the areas of theory and
the areas of our curriculum which are the way they are
because of colonial influences. And we should be very careful to
check whether those ideas or ideas we do wish to espouse or
whether there's some alternativewhich would be better supported

(01:02:16):
by the evidence. That's very different from
saying that we need to get rid of foreign ideas.
Two things are totally different.
So I think that is a problem in the contemporary discourse about
decolonisation. So decolonisation nowadays, when
people use that term, they're more likely to be referring to
curriculums of schools and universities or museums or art

(01:02:39):
or general approaches to things rather than politics and
economics, which used to be the domain in which people talked
about decolonisation. And there's, I think there's
sometimes an assumption that decolonisation means getting rid
of the foreign and valorising only that which is indigenous.
That doesn't have to be what decolonisation of the mind
means. And there are other approaches
to it. Keep these two thoughts

(01:03:00):
separate. Number one, that power has
influenced knowledge or indeed culture or ideas in a way which
is a problem and needs to be reviewed and responded to.
And #2 the idea that different identity groups or different
geographical groups or differentethnoses have different ideas or
cultural art which are proper tothem and there's something wrong

(01:03:21):
with them if they depart from that, that is a problematic
idea. That's the identity policing
which he mentioned earlier, and that's the kind of approach to
decolonisation which I think we should be wary of.
If people take that distinction into account, I think that that
makes the discussion about decolonisation a lot more
constructive. OK.
And based on your experience or just sharing your experience

(01:03:42):
debating these topics in the academic environment, are people
open to these discussions or there has been a lot of push
back when it comes to criticizing these ideas?
What has been your experience with that?
It's been variable to some extent.
It's been positive because I think some people, some
audiences that I've talked to, they've already had a nagging

(01:04:06):
feeling about the coloniality theory, whether it's Walter
Mignolo or Sabello and Toby Cacheni or however they've been
reading that there's something wrong.
Hear or there will be a better way of going about if, if we
think about decolonisation in the mental or intellectual
sphere of something legitimate, that there might be a better
approach to that. On the other hand, I think some
people, some audiences, I've found, they're already locked

(01:04:28):
into the idea that decolonialitytheory is the correct approach.
I think one of the dynamics there is that the decoloniality
writers, they tend to want to recruit everybody else who's
written about decolonisation of the mind to their school of
thought. It can make it a little bit
difficult to distinguish betweenone approach to intellectual
decolonisation, like quasi wearages, and a different one

(01:04:50):
like Walter Mignolos. And then of course as academics
people write and sometimes they have said in print that they
approve of Walter Mignolo and then it's very difficult to walk
back from that. So that can be a problem.
But generally I would say that some people can be resistant,
but one generally finds people who are quite reasonable and
willing to talk about these things open mindedly.

(01:05:12):
So I found, I haven't found thatit's, it hasn't let, it hasn't
led to me being cancelled yet. OK.
OK, OK. Doctor George Hall, thank you
very much for coming on the show.
I'll leave links to some of yourpapers, especially the paper
that we explore here today on the description of this
interview. And thank you for for coming on

(01:05:33):
the show once again. Thank you for having me.

(01:05:56):
None.