Domesticated decoloniality

Taming Critique in Language Scholarship

Bibliographic Data

ID6430450
AuthorsHamza R’boul (0000-0003-4398-7573, The Centre for Higher Education Leadership and Policy Studies (CHELPS) , 66390 The Education University of Hong Kong , Hong Kong , Hong Kong), Osman Z Barnawi (0000-0002-0070-3473, English Department , Royal Commission for Yanbu Colleges and Institutes , Yanbu , Saudi Arabia, corresponding author), Fajer M Bin Rashed (0000-0003-2318-620X, English Language Program , Australian University , Kuwait City , Kuwait)
Year2025
Volume2025
Issue296
Pages33-45
Publication date2025-11-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueInternational Journal of the Sociology of Language (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0165-2516 • E-ISSN: 1613-3668
PublisherDe Gruyter (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/ijsl-2025-0111
OpenAlexW4416814695
LanguageEN
References cited22

This article introduces “domesticated decoloniality”, which refers to the process through which radical, material and explicit critiques of colonial structures, systems and logics are diluted into sanitised, apolitical, ahistorical, convenient and non-confrontational discourses and frameworks aligned with neoliberal academia, state agendas and institutional policies, not threatening group/personal interests of the supposed beneficiaries of (de)coloniality. It captures how decolonial premises, objectives and commitments are stripped of their political and material urgency, and absorbed into advertised rhetorics and practices that sustain the hierarchies they purport to dismantle, rather than being anchored in embodied struggles of marginalised communities. Three main interconnected categories constitute “domesticated decoloniality”. First, the theoretical commodification of decoloniality by marketising decolonial critique and repackaging its core ideas as academic trends dissociated from material struggle. Second, depoliticising decoloniality as a diagnostic and interventional mechanism by reducing it to a mere analytical lens whose significance resides entirely in discursive critique of power relations in the abstract. Third, the co-optation of decoloniality by the elites (including Northern and Southern institutions, groups and individuals) to legitimise exclusionary hierarchies, e.g. nationalism, racism, nativism. These categories do not function independently, as they may be intersected and concurrently employed with varying degrees of influence within decolonial junctures

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