Praxivist imaginaries of decolonization: Can the psy be decolonized in the world as we know it?

Is decolonization possible in this world? More specifically, can decolonizing psychology or notions and conceptions of “mental,” “health,” “mental health” and “wellness” occur in the context of this world as we know it? Can psychology be decolonized but the world remain? Can such things as the psy-curriculum be decolonized when considering arguments of the academy “as an arm of the settler state – a site where the logics of elimination, capital accumulation, and dispossession are reconstituted” (Grande, 2018, p. 47, emphasis in original)? What if the very idea of psychology or the psy is inseparable from the theory and practice of settlement?

The offering of this brief article is the provocation that decolonization will take the end of the world, and that decolonization is the end of the world as we know it. Each of these formulations are in bad debt ¹ to Denise Ferreira da Silva (2017a, 2018) and her invaluable contributions to decolonization through a black feminist poethical mode of intervention. For this article, we are bringing this contribution to bear on the specific context of decolonizing psychology to state that mental health or the psyche or the professions that take the psyche as their object of study cannot be decolonized in the context of the world as we know it. The very way in which we go about “knowing” itself is entangled in colonial/modern ways of thinking that cannot but reproduce the violences at the core of their construction and therefore cannot support an intervention capable of undermining the violences of [settler] ² colonialism (settlement, conquest and slavery) that remain largely unthought, especially in the context of higher education (da Silva, 2013, 2016, 2017a, 2019; Stein, 2018). It’s not so much the decolonization of psychology or the psy-curriculum, but the decolonization of a world that could have the violences that the psy produce (Harney & Moten, 2013). As da Silva has expressed (in the decolonial tradition of Frantz Fanon and others), we too are convinced that only the end of the world as we know it will bring about decolonization as decolonization cannot be comprehended in the ways of knowing we exist within, especially when it comes to considerations of racial subjugation (da Silva, 2019). A black feminist poethics, therefore, guides this article.

For the specific context of this article we will be drawing from a series of entangled collaborations ³ that have considered, in some way, decolonization or decolonizing psychology specifically. We’re bringing the series of recent collaborations here, along with brief discussions of each of our PhD theses that we’re currently working with, as a commitment to study as a communal practice, as a communing which to us is something different from co-authorship. This, as an anarchival ⁴ approach, is not so much a documentation of our past activities, but is a departing from and passing through these activities (Massumi, 2016), which also includes our attempt to trouble a mythology of individuation (I am not the one writing), as this writing is only made possible by the incalculable group that we are studying and thinking with, many of whom are within this article, and much of which cannot be reduced to names and citations. This is bad debt. This is anarchiving as speculative practice, open to conjecture, open to indecision and not interested in drawing conclusions about what needs to be done. This also challenges educational processes that fuel the engine in the production of [settlers] and [settler] imaginaries that have a point of view, a territory, a standpoint, that can be possessed through individual thinking (as if individual thinking is even possible). We don’t want to do anything alone anymore, not that we ever could or did (Moten, 2015). This speculative process, to us, is inseparable from decolonization and decolonizing psychology.

We weave in and out of our archive of collaborations, leaping from this archive which serves as our anarchival springboard (Massumi, 2016). This speculative exercise engages with a praxivist imaginary (an unformed knowing and doing, a knowing as doing, a knowing that follows the imagination) where research or study is the process in itself; to not border, order, or fortify but to leave open, to let go, to experiment with that which cannot be contained but escapes the border, the order, the settlement, the category, the mind – the knowledge that emerges from this nonplace is what Lindsay is considering a fugitive psyence in their ⁵ thesis (informed by the work of Britt Rusert, 2017). In thinking praxis with da Silva (2017b), the praxis of praxivist is: “a mode of knowing and doing that targets the very underground of modern thought, is a first and crucial decompositional step in the preparation of a plan for the realization of justice that aims at decolonization” (para. 6). This experiment/exercise might and must, in some way and in every way, be a failure. Decolonization must be a failure. A failure that succeeds at not allowing a sense of completion, of (en)closure, of recognition. This excess, in thinking with da Silva, is to stay with the violence ⁶ and gestures toward the obligations of an abolitionist, an abolitionist committed to decolonization as there is no abolition without decolonization, there is no decolonization without abolition (more on this soon).

In considering ways the psy operates that emerges from colonialism, Lindsay’s PhD thesis for instance asserts that the [settler] colonial psy-archives that they’re working with (which include racially segregated psychiatric asylums in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, documentation of mental examinations on Ellis Island, and the archival papers of skull anatomist Samuel George Morton) contribute ongoing motion to what is seen as the “current” global mental health movement. Thus, the seemingly “new” governance of global mental health is not just “linked” to long established global governance of madness through the psy-disciplines but is deeply implicated and of the same substance as this governance that has always been part of modernity (Miller & Mills, forthcoming). This movement has always been global and is neither “new” nor simply a recurrence of the same “old” imperialism, with the notion of “mental health” and “psy” always already a racialized, colonialized conceptualization, but also one that cannot capture the excess of blackness, indigeneity or madness as matter which, when contemplated within/as The World as Plenum (indeterminacy, without Time and out of Space; da Silva, 2017a), demand nothing less than decolonization of the world as we know it. Like this article, Lindsay’s study is guided by a black feminist poethics and, as mentioned, is considering the poethical potential of a fugitive psyence as a psy that is always on the run, can’t be captured, can’t be contained in a method, a diagnosis, a category and is especially situated in mad studies or mad study. This study is thus interested in mobilizations of so-called psy-expertise and how this relates to movement within the madness of a fugitive psyence. Furthermore, Lindsay’s thesis engages with and seeks to contribute to the “few critical voices” who, according to Adams et al. (2015), “reflect on the Euro-American colonial character of psychological science, particularly its relationship to ongoing processes of domination that facilitate growth for a privileged minority but undermine sustainability for the global majority” (p. 213). While Lindsay recognizes the importance of what “critical voices” are expressing, through taking up da Silva’s critical arsenal, they depart for instance on the focus of the anthropological notion of the cultural, especially considerations that aim to celebrate and even normalize cultural difference. As outlined in Toward a Global Idea of Race and elaborated on in da Silva’s more recent works, the cultural can be considered a scientific (psyentific) concept structured by the racial and utilized as another mode of racial subjugation governing the contemporary global configuration. While there is not enough space in this brief report to give this point the elaboration required, this critique is a necessary one at a time when cultural psychology/psychiatry is emphasized, both in the context of global mental health, and in approaches to decolonizing the psy.

With this outlining of some critical ways we come to our collaborations we ask: what is the radical potential of decolonizing psychology, or decolonizing the psy-curriculum? Weaving abolition back in, we offer to this topic of decolonizing psychology the radical potential of abolition pedagogies⁶ practiced and experimented in our entangled study, including and exceeding our PhDs and so-called academic collaborations. Our contemplations and imaginings regarding abolition pedagogies are deeply influenced by Dylan Rodriguez, particularly “The Disorientation of the Teaching Act: Abolition as Pedagogical Position”, and how this pedagogical praxis is put into a generative tension when considering Hortense Spillers’ (2015) articulations of how movements that “begin in the flesh with a certain kind of urgency or immediacy,” once translated, become “curricular objects” that produce “professors and seminars and books and papers and conferences and…” (n.p.). We’re thinking about this especially within the (un)timely movement to “decolonize the curriculum” and how this is being appropriated by the university as a “curricular object” itself (thus rendered into a metaphor; Tuck & Yang, 2012) and often removed from conversations similar to the epigraph that opened this article: what if it turns out that the university is also the engine for the production of settlers? Can we decolonize the curriculum ⁷ but keep the university? Can we decolonize the university but keep the occupied land the university was built on? Can we decolonize the land but keep the world as we know it?

To think and study with these questions and necessary tensions, these provocations as our contributions to this special issue, we are deeply influenced by Tiffany Lethabo King’s 2017 article “Humans Involved: Lurking in the Lines of Posthumanist Flight” which, when considering the “turn toward affect” (from our recent collaboration) and here in the context of the “decolonial turn” in the university that is making such calls to “decolonize the curriculum” or “decolonize the mind” assist and support us to approach with suspicion and scepticism. King’s focus on Black feminist suspicion and Native feminist refusal is synchronous with and emphasizes a commitment to decolonization and abolition. We move with King’s call for “disenchantment and pessimism” and “refusal and misandry” as a way to “reroute one set of concerns and questions and redirect them toward other pursuits” (p. 174). This opens a praxivist imaginary that has the potential to reroute the conversation from how or why to decolonize the psy or the mind, to decolonization as the end of the world as we know it. This “rerouting” is not a turn against the turn but is a way to pursue how the “turn” is not so much new and generative but may instead be deeply implicated in the violences too easily hidden in the “epistemic turns” away from that which they emerge from (the urgency and immediacy – the flesh), before the curricular object, before the professors, seminars, conferences, and special issues. This aligns with da Silva’s (2013) radical praxis and “knowing at the limits of justice” which unsettles what is viewed as “the old” but doesn’t attempt to reach for “the new”. A black feminist poethics guided by suspicion and refusal is, to us, imperative for decolonial interventions. We apply this to the decolonial turn itself: what would a decolonial refusal and abolitionist suspicion of the calls to decolonize make possible? As Tuck and Yang (2014) make clear, refusal is not a negation or a “no” as such but a suspicion or suspension that places what is being studied into reconsideration (a rerouting).

How does objecting to (refusing) the curricular object and “studying to object” (Tuck & Yang, 2014) help us to distinguish between “liberal, social justice, critical and even ‘radical’ pedagogies that are capable of even remotely justifying, defending, or tolerating a proto-genocidal prison regime ⁸  … and those attempts at abolitionist pedagogy” (Rodríguez, 2010, pp. 8–9)? With this, Michael’s thesis is concerned with educational reform efforts that ultimately re-form the violences attempting to be mitigated, and the excessive violences that aren’t even conceptualized (unthought) in the reforms. Could decolonization in its “defanged” form just be another reform? It is important to make these distinctions when considering decolonizing psychology because “decolonize (a verb) and decolonization (a noun) cannot easily be grafted onto preexisting discourses/frameworks, even if they are critical, even if they are anti-racist, even if they are justice frameworks” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 3). Again, this gives us an opening for a praxivist imaginary rather than seeking “new” ways to keep the university relevant (i.e. decolonizing the curriculum and in this case the psy curriculum) which could be taken as settler colonial thinking (“inquiry as invasion”) that is (pre)occupied with trying to “discover new frontiers” and “chart new territories” (Tuck & Yang, 2014). We intend ⁹ to contemplate a praxivism that can assist us to imagine what is already here – the unimaginable violence as well as what Moten calls the amazing chance that is constitutive of this violence. ¹⁰ These considerations within the context of abolition pedagogies and decolonizing psychology are in alignment with Martinot and Sexton’s “displacing without dispensing,” complementary with King’s refusal and suspicion as a rerouting: “We seek to displace without dispensing with the institutional rationalisations of white supremacy in order to see its own vigorous reconstitution. This will ultimately mean addressing every social motif as entailing a paradoxical or even incomprehensible scandal, something beyond the rules of society yet pawned off on us as proper and legitimate” (2003, pp. 180–181). Displacing without dispensing in consideration of decolonizing psychology makes for a rerouting that has the potential to expose the scandal of that which has been “pawned off as proper and legitimate” knowledge and which has thus served to rationalize white supremacy.

A question that we ask in our collaborations is why keep the psy? It’s not that we agree with the psy but that we make that fugitive movement from within it, because there is no outside, there is no place that we can work from that isn’t violent (we can’t just wish it away as this will not bring about decolonization; da Silva, 2017). This is not about being against, but it is a moving against as a rub that agitates and generates friction that corrupts. The aim is to subvert, not to uphold; to displace but not dispense, although this may – at times – happen, but we can’t be afraid of that risk. Maybe psy will stay, and we must stay with the psy, but ultimately the way we know psy will end.

Indeed, as Sharon Stein (2018) mentions in a recent article published in the Critical Ethnic Studies journal with regard to the difficulty and potential impossibility of transformative work, and in alignment with a praxivist imaginary: “instead of a dead end, perhaps exhausting all imaginable possibilities is precisely where the potential for something else becomes viable” (p. 147).