Storylines in psychology: rewriting or rehearsing colonial scripts? Response to ‘Frantz Fanon and the decolonial turn in psychology: From modern/colonial methods to the decolonial attitude’ by Nelson Maldonado-Torres

Maldonado-Torres’ (2017, this issue) article, titled Frantz Fanon and the decolonial turn in psychology: From modern/colonial methods to the decolonial attitude, (re)invigorates questions about psychology’s role as a decolonial practice. The article, in its reading of Fanon, invites us to take up a decolonial attitude through a mode of questioning. It is such a mode of interrogation, a search for knowledge, that propels us towards solutions for the problems of coloniality and its effects on how knowledge is produced and its implications for being. It offers, in part, some of the key considerations – at least for psychology as a discipline and practice – that invite critical reflection on the extent to which we express our humanity in our work.

The response to this challenge might be framed as a question that surfaces in the work of critical community psychology, particularly in our field engagements. How do we contribute to decolonising our communities when our social and institutional arrangements mirror relationships asymmetrically structured in configurations of race, gender, and class that are naturalised through our everyday lived relations? I draw from Community Storylines (hereafter Storylines), a community participatory research and intervention project of the Institute for Social and Health Sciences at the University of South Africa. The project is centred on the community of Thembelihle, a peri-urban township community that, over the years, has been mired in structural violence and oppression. Storylines aims to generate new forms of knowledges and create avenues for rehumanisation and social recognition. To achieve these, the project draws on storytelling and story listening processes, and their productions through digital stories and performing arts as tools for social recognition. In drawing attention to the work of process, the affective flow of engagements with the community, between research team members, and in our own subjective modes of personal reflection, we recognise that what might be termed interventions, findings, and conclusions – from a traditional psychology perspective – instead emerge rather non-formulaically, pointing to particularities rather than generalities and to unique lessons rather than generalisable outcomes. In this respect, story processes are legitimated alongside story content as forms of knowing, being, and doing. The spirit in which the Storylines objectives are derived is closely aligned to the liberatory and emancipatory goals of critical community psychology and, at least on the surface, sits closely aligned with what might be termed forms of decolonial practice.

However, to take seriously Maldonado-Torres’ (2017, this issue) argument, by way of Fanon’s (1967) articulation of a decolonial attitude, prioritised over method, to ‘build the world of you’ (p. 181) perhaps is to open up for scrutiny of those aspects that might allow us to translate attitude into actionable practice at least in the doing of critical community psychology. What is proposed in Maldonado-Torres’ contribution is the necessity of garnering an attitude that affirms our humanity with others in a commitment to rehumanise the world. A decolonial attitude for Maldonado-Torres (2017, this issue) moulds subjectivity, not in a reductionistic and simplistic sense, but, more interconnectedly, how the subject relates to the fundamental aspects of human experience (embodiment, intersubjective contact through language and love, time, and space) to derive a sense of being. Moreover, as outlined in his article, a decolonial attitude is connected to productions of knowledge, power, and being and, more critically, to ethical action towards a rehumanised world. In this exposition, what Maldonado-Torres (2017, this issue) points towards is cultivating an ethical attitude that prepares us towards action that opens up rather than closes down the ‘horizons of possibility’ (p. 435), spatially and temporally, in respect to science, society, and the world. More specifically, for the work of critical community psychology with which we are engaged, a decolonial attitude requires that the discipline become ‘less a unified doctrine with a particular method, and more a form of questioning and an attitude in face of the world’ (Maldonado-Torres, 2017, p. 435).

Perhaps, to apply this mode of questioning to Storylines and, more pointedly, our role as researchers and facilitators of story-centred activities, we might pause to reflect and ask how we make sense of the processes of storytelling and story listening in the project. In communities such as Thembelihle, fractured along ideological lines, the process of co-creating stories seems, at times, born out of struggle, as evinced in heated exchanges between storytellers who battle out ideological differences to find a unifying voice to represent the community. These moments of tension reach a crescendo at some points and dissipate into moments of resolution before resurfacing as disagreements (see Lau, Suffla, & Kgatitswe, in press). Yet, there are instances when these processes unfold in more quiet ways, articulated by the participants through a lens of understanding, empathy, and seeing the other (see Lau & Seedat, 2015), perhaps in accordance with ‘moment[s] of humanization’ (Maldonado-Torres, 2006, p. 132). What do we make of these elusive, fleeting encounters that seem to be ‘authentic’ psychological moments? Do we consider them as spaces of mutual recognition where subjectivities meet, perhaps likened to ‘intersubjective contact’ (Maldonado-Torres, 2017, p. 434)? At least for those transient and spontaneously unfolding moments, they seem to dissolve the roles we (researchers and participants alike) have been scripted to play and bring forth new ways of relating. Yet, from a less romanticised, more distantiated, critical, and self-reflective mode of interrogation, perhaps another question might be asked: Is recognition an available meaning-making frame that we, as researchers, impose on these interactions where once staunchly divided individuals see each other or are seen for the first time (Lau & Seedat, 2015)? Yet, by such an account, is it not that we, the researchers, hold the privilege of knowledge power conferred by the university, who inscribe ourselves in the position of conferring recognition? In our positionings as psychologists, moreover, does mutual recognition not become a (therapeutic) interpretive frame that offers an imaginary fiction in a Lacanian sense to cover over relations of domination and, in turn, allow us to convince ourselves of our effectiveness as agents actively engaged in the participatory work of social transformation (McNay, 2008)? To take this more interrogative orientation to the project is to rethink our own positionings as researchers and psychologists in relation to a community whom we identify and define as oppressed, ‘needing’ liberation and emancipation. Despite our well-intentioned efforts, there is an inherent paradox that, in promoting the ideals of social recognition, we by virtue of our privileged positions as university researchers and facilitators of stories tend to fall back onto the familiar and comfortable power asymmetries in which we ourselves are (un)consciously scripted to perform. This may be evinced in the dual power that we, as researchers and facilitators of stories, hold in conferring or withholding recognition, depending on whose stories are given space to be heard, which types of stories are encouraged to be told, and which story trajectories are held as ideal, in spite of the participatory orientations of the project. The stories that are named as having liberatory, transformative potential are also those stories that showcase the project, the researchers, and the university alike as doing the ‘good work’ of community-engaged research.

In his article, Maldonado-Torres (2017, this issue) proposes that a decolonial attitude is constituted in ‘the questioning attitude of the psychologist who seeks to “understand” rather than to punish’ (p. 439). Certainly, to do community-engaged participatory research with communities requires that we avoid pathologising our participants through their inscriptions as objects of research. More than this, a participatory framework for community-engaged research also demands a collaborative partnering with communities on various elements of the research process. This not only destabilises what might be conceived as unequal power relations between researchers and the community but also promotes meaningful participation and co-ownership of the research data and process and provides for the continued building of relationships (Seedat, Suffla & Ward, 2015). Perhaps more in line with a decolonising stance, it is to avoid reinscribing the hierarchical structures of knowledge, being and recreating the very systems of domination and oppression. To engage in questioning as a basic attitude of decolonisation, we might ask ourselves, ‘How do we through modes of action translate these ideals that – while consciously aimed at breaking down hierarchies and opening up new spaces for being and knowing – might inadvertently reproduce the colonial script of progress, inhered in psychology as a disciplining practice and profession, despite our conscious efforts to disrupt it?

Perhaps for the Fanonian ideal, as explicated through Maldonado-Torres’ (2017, this issue) idea of intersubjective contact ‘via language and love’ (p. 434), to be realised as ‘authentic’ actionable practice geared towards a decolonisation of sciences and a rehumanisation of the world requires that we take seriously our own complicity in potential oppression in processes of relating. Therefore, to rephrase the opening question along these lines is, ‘How do we rehumanise a world and create decolonised communities when the very nature of our social and institutional arrangements – in which we are privy and complicit – continue to mirror historically asymmetrical relationships that privilege configurations of race, class, and gender?’ Perhaps there remains further critical interrogation of our very efforts towards rehumanisation of the world. Here, we find that the responsibility of doing the ‘good work’ of contributing to the liberation of so-called oppressed communities must simultaneously be a self-confrontation that involves the necessary and uncomfortable task of liberating or, rather, decolonising ourselves. This is not simply an act of self-indulgence, but a social obligation so that even our supposedly good actions do not get folded back onto ourselves, resulting in a re-oppression of another and ourselves (Beasley-Murray, 2014). Perhaps only then might new meanings and roles that resist the hegemonic script be conceivable. In this respect, Duran, Firehammer, and Gonzalez’s (2008) observation offers a useful frame:

. . . we are all oppressed and wounded in ways that require healing if we are to become liberated from such oppression. When discussing these issues, it is important to realize that we have all been on [and continue to be on] both sides of the oppression/oppressor coin at different points in our lives. (p. 288)

Therefore, translating a decolonial attitude into actionable practice seems to involve a task that requires transcending the historical and instrumental constraints that determine who we are towards discovering ourselves as ‘authentically’ free (Beasley-Murray, 2014) or at least towards such ‘horizons of possibility’ (Maldonado-Torres, 2017, p. 435). Perhaps then, the past can be drawn on not to ‘diagnose’ the present, but to promote new ways of becoming (Probyn, 1996).