General Psychology Otherwise: A Decolonial Articulation

Locus of Enunciation

By locus of enunciation Grosfoguel (2016) means “the geo-political and body-political location of the subject that speaks” (p. 213). This notion resembles feminist ideas of standpoint theory and situated knowledge (Harding, 1991; Haraway, 1988), Afrocentric epistemology (Collins, 1990), geopolitics of knowledge (Dussel, 1977), and body politics of knowledge (Anzaldúa, 1987; Fanon, 1967/1952. However, as the reference to “body-political” suggests, we enlarge the idea of locus of enunciation by adding embodiment, action, and other senses beyond speech/sound and vision. We are more than what we write, more than what we say, more than our identities as psychologists. We act in relation to others in particular circumstances that leave bodily traces. A history of engagement with particular social and material realities sculpts patterns of affective association or habits of sense-making that might escape our conscious awareness or elude attempts at verbal articulation, but nonetheless constitute forms of knowledge. The idea of locus of enunciation includes these habits of being and sense-making.

It has become a common practice in various formations of identity-conscious research for authors to reflect on their positionality: the various identity locations that inform their understanding of the topic under investigation (e.g., Fernández et al., 2021; James & Lorenz, 2021; Terre Blanche et al., 2021). We have similar reservations about this practice as James & Lorenz (2021), who report hesitation “to fix [their] identities in terms of the racist and violent metrics of coloniality – ¼ that and ½ this,” which they characterize as “slave math.” Too often, such positionality statements reflect and reproduce problematic forms of essentialism. First, there is an essentialization of actors. Each of us are creative authors of emergent stories whose experience is not entirely reducible to the combination of identity positions that society affords us. In addition, there is an essentialization of categories. The identity categories that help shape our subjectivity are not timeless monolithic wholes; instead, they are collective constructions that allow however modestly for our contestation and resistance. And yet, though mindful of these issues, we nevertheless find the practice of positioning to be a necessary response to the evasions and cultivated ignorance of the zero-point epistemology (more on this in a later section) that informs hegemonic approaches to general psychology (Adams & Salter, 2019). So, we proceed. What is our locus of enunciation? What are the embodied histories of engagement that, individually and collectively, inform our approach to this project?

I, Geetha (she/her/they/them), am a queer multiracial person born in Singapore. I use my multidimensional existence across space and time to guide my thinking on antiracist praxes that I want to embody. I exist in London and I exist in South Africa, albeit my privileges and marginalizations change drastically. Past, present, and future me all exist at the same time in that I am aware of how racism is cyclical, constantly evolving, and (currently) existing in all of the dimensions in which my ancestors, future generations, and I exist. Fortified and nourished by Black feminist decolonial scholars around the world, I ground myself in establishing solidarities across struggles and acts of resistance. I am guided by an African-centered, liberation-focused, trauma-informed, antiracist, anti-capitalist, anti-caste, gender-fluid, and decolonial psychological map for the creation of expansive, radically free, and justice-directed future worlds.

The laws and white supremacist practice in colonial and apartheid South Africa used different labels to refer to people like me, Kopano (in English, he/him; in Sesotho, o): Non-European, non-white, Native, Bantu, Black, or African. The labels kept changing as the white racist leaders sought to find comfortable labels for themselves to refer to us, but it also suggested racist ideology itself has continually changed its lexicon if not its intention in order to justify itself in response to antiracist struggles. Non-European and non-white are ridiculous identity labels, defining me in negative terms. I identify myself as African man. I speak seven South African languages. Sesotho is my mother-tongue. Setswana was my first language of schooling. My father’s bloodline appears to come from the land of the Zulus. My early life was spent in a small village, Maboloka, on the north-west part of the country, a place that was incorporated under Bophuthatswana—literally, the land that gathers the Tswana—under apartheid’s Bantustan policy; hence, Setswana was my first medium of instruction. From my pre-teens until my early twenties, I grew up in Katlehong, a Black township around 30 km outside of Johannesburg that experienced incredible violence from state security in the late 1980s and early 1990s. My work is informed by ongoing engagements with power and domination, dispossession and struggle, poverty and freedom; with struggles against different forms of violence and for self-determination. As I see these as some of the major issues of African lives, they are the problems that I grapple with in my work as a critical and cultural psychologist.

I, Shahnaaz (she/her), am a Black South African woman. I am a scholar-activist, activist-scholar, practitioner, educator, and everyday person whose thought and praxis have been shaped in profound ways by the racialized and gendered oppressions of apartheid and “post-apartheid” South Africa, the liberating ideas of Black Consciousness, and the emancipatory imaginings and labor of collectives—past and present—in and with whom I find location, connection, and resonance. My refusals of non-(white) and non-(male)—that of negation, absence, insignificance and deficit—together with the accompanying violences inflicted in the everyday, by the discipline in which I have been schooled, and by the academy in which I serve, inspire my visions and strivings toward anti-oppressive practice and decolonial futures. In the academy, I locate my efforts in disciplinary nexuses—alongside real-world settings—and direct them simultaneously at the critique of psychology and its potentialities for liberatory ethics, epistemes, and actions. In this, I remain cognizant of my own privileges, attentive to my hyphenated identity, and unsettled by the contradictions, complexities, and messiness of this work in which I yet find radical joy.

I, Glenn (he/him/they/them), am a white descendant of European settlers in what many Indigenous Peoples call Turtle Island or what the modern/colonial order refers to as North America. I spent my youth in a racially homogenous setting in rural Pennsylvania immersed in ways of being associated with white Christian nationalism. Despite this relatively humble background, collective investments in whiteness meant that I had access to educational opportunities, the most formative of which was the (not unproblematic) experience of living and working for more than 5 years in a variety of West African settings. My experiences during that time continue to inform my current work as a social and cultural psychologist in whitestream US institutions. They set me on a trajectory for engagement with decolonial perspectives, which provide an invaluable guide for thinking about and organizing responses of refusal (Coultas, 2021)—both personal and professional—to the modern/colonial order and white settler futurity.

I, Garth (he/him), am a Black South African man, who would in all likelihood be identified as being of mixed descent by others. My political identification has been sharply influenced by an early life exposure to the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa, as a response and resistance to the racialized experiences under the yolk of apartheid and its continuing legacies. As a consequence, my intellectual and activist energies have centered on apprehensions of the endemic nature of racism and violence within the particular context of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, both from within and outside of psychology as a frame. Shaped by these histories, my work continues to focus on highlighting continuities and fracture points in systems of oppression, in the pursuit of new forms of radical humanism and emancipatory futures.

As these brief statements suggest, each of us brings to the project multiple perspectives informed by our own idiosyncratic accumulations of divergent experience across a variety of African, Asian, European, and North American settings. The product of this transnational engagement is an editorial collective with its own distinctive locus of enunciation or epistemic standpoint. One feature of our collective standpoint is a transdisciplinary approach to general psychology that seeks knowledge in methods and fields beyond the insular self-indulgence of what Lewis Gordon (2014) refers to as disciplinary decadence:

Disciplinary decadence is the phenomenon of turning away from living thought, which engages reality and recognizes its own limitations, to a deontologized or absolute conception of disciplinary life. The discipline becomes, in solipsistic fashion, the world. … In more concrete terms, disciplinary decadence takes the form of one discipline assessing all other disciplines from its supposedly complete standpoint. (p. 86)

Rather than “deontologized” discipline-based knowledge, our collective standpoint draws inspiration from forms of identity-conscious and place-based knowledge, especially the transdisciplinary projects of Black and African Studies. ¹ Maldonado-Torres (2021) provides a similar injunction when he suggests that we must be prepared to use our disciplines in ways that counter the catastrophes of modernity/coloniality, and that the logical extension of such a praxis may very well include fluid interdisciplinary movements or even the abandonment of some of our most cherished canonical ideas within such disciplines. In this way, the emphasis on transdisciplinarity connects well with another feature of our collective standpoint in what liberation psychologists and social scientists (see Malherbe & Ratele, 2021) refer to as a “preferential option” (e.g., Martín-Baró, 1986) to prioritize the concerns and perspectives of the marginalized global majority in settings of the Global South. When thinking about such topics as history, progress, well-being, and human development, we privilege the epistemic perspectives of communities who experienced the colonial violence associated with European global domination. As we discuss in the following pages, this shift in the geographies and cartographies of knowledges has profound implications for articulations of general psychology.

Colonialism and Coloniality

Viewed from this Southern and majority-world standpoint, a central idea for understanding current global realities is the concept of coloniality: habits of mind, ways of being, strategic relations of power, and systems of knowledge that have roots in the colonial period but persist long after the end of colonial rule. Whereas mainstream accounts typically portray modernity and its individualist psychological manifestations as the leading edge of progress, decolonial theorists use the phrase modernity/coloniality to emphasize the extent to which colonial violence constitutes the modern global order. This phrase positions coloniality as the “darker side of modernity” (Mignolo, 2011): the typically obscured shadow of racist violence inseparable from modern individualist growth and development.

Decolonization and Decoloniality

If colonization refers to a bounded historical period of formal occupation or settlement, then decolonization refers to the process of ending that formal occupation. The contrast between colonization and coloniality informs a similar contrast between decolonization and ideas for thinking about what comes after nominal independence.

In its most direct and profound form, decolonization involves an end to colonial occupation of land. Indeed, some observers have responded with caution to a recent explosion of work that refers to decolonization—"decolonizing methods” (Smith, 1999), “decolonizing the university” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni & Zondi, 2016), and even “decolonizing psychology” (Adams et al., 2015; Bhatia, 2017; Dudgeon & Walker, 2015; Kessi, 2016; Pillay, 2017; Segalo, 2016)—by suggesting that scholars limit their use of the concept to this fundamental sense. “Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools.” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 1). The concern is that “the metaphorization of decolonization makes possible a set of evasions, or ‘settler moves to innocence’, that problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 1). Prominent among these “settler moves to innocence” is an overemphasis on mental decolonization as a substitute for physical decolonization.

We wonder whether another settler move to innocence is to focus on decolonizing the mind, or the cultivation of critical consciousness, as if it were the sole activity of decolonization; to allow conscientization to stand in for the more uncomfortable task of relinquishing stolen land. We agree that curricula, literature, and pedagogy can be crafted to aid people in learning to see settler colonialism, to articulate critiques of settler epistemology, and set aside settler histories and values in search of ethics that reject domination and exploitation; this is not unimportant work. However, the front-loading of critical consciousness building can waylay decolonization, even though the experience of teaching and learning to be critical of settler colonialism can be so powerful it can feel like it is indeed making change. Until stolen land is relinquished, critical consciousness does not translate into action that disrupts settler colonialism. (p. 19)

We share the concern about using the language of decolonization as a fashionable metaphor to talk about a broader set of vaguely progressive projects, and we agree that metaphorical overextension can rob the concept of its liberatory potential. Yet, we hesitate to dismiss calls for various forms of mental or intellectual decolonization (e.g., Kessi, 2019; Ndlovu-Gatsheni & Zondi, 2016; Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 1986) as merely metaphorical appropriations of decolonization language. As Bhatia and Priya (2021) note in their contribution to this special issue, the situation of anti-colonial struggle in Indian, other Asian, and African settings differs from that of anti-colonial struggle among Indigenous communities whose land remains under occupation via white settler colonialism. In the former settings, communities under formal colonial occupation have reclaimed ostensible control of land and political power, yet many people feel as if they remain under colonial domination (see Fanon, 1963/1961), on “pitfalls of national consciousness”).

Some of the contributors in this special issue used two additional terms common in decolonization and decolonial studies: neocolonial and postcolonial. These two are sometimes used loosely and it feels necessary to bear in mind some crucial distinctions. While both terms refer to temporality, the period after the end of colonialism, the former is most appropriate when referring to colonialism with a new face. Under neocolonialism, for example, the same power institutions, laws, socio-economic dynamics, and rules that obtained during the colonial order persist even though the color of the rulers may have changed. Ghanaian independence leader, Kwame Nkrumah (1965), is one figure who popularized the concept of neocolonialism, using it to name, identify, and thereby begin to counteract lingering manifestations of colonial control over material or political-economic resources (akin to what decolonial theorists refer to as coloniality of power). Contrastingly, while postcolonialism is also understood in temporal terms, it has achieved prominence mainly as a theoretical and analytical tool associated with literary and cultural studies, resulting in development of postcolonial studies (e.g., Bhabha, 2012; Mbembe, 2001; Said, 2012; Spivak, 1999). As a body of thought, postcolonial theory is mainly concerned with analyzing the varied impact and non-linear changes wrought by European colonial rule in former colonies and colonizing countries since the 18th century.

In contrast to decolonization and related terms like neocolonial and postcolonial, we prefer to use decoloniality and the adjective, decolonial, to refer to a process of dismantling and disrupting the broader manifestations of coloniality that endure after the end of formal colonial rule. The concept of decolonial(ity) can illuminate (and inform responses to) slower (Nixon, 2011), less spectacular, more insidious manifestations of colonial violence that persist via occupation of mind and being even when occupation of land has ended (Bulhan, 2015). Understood in this way, the emphasis on decolonial(ity) is not a move to dilute struggles for decolonization or rescue white futurity, but instead to mobilize even stronger responses to it.

Indigenization: Recovery of Place-Based Knowledge

A first orientation of decolonial work is what one can refer to as indigenization. The core feature of an indigenization orientation is recovery of historical memory, ways of being, and understandings of the world that colonial violence suppressed or denigrated (Gone, 2021; Smith, 1999). In this way, indigenization approaches are a response to the “culture bomb” (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 1986) that we discussed in a previous section. Rather than assimilate to Eurocentric modern/colonial forms imposed as general standards, indigenization approaches draw on local understandings and local lifeways as epistemic resources to counteract the violence of colonialism—that is, to promote ways of being attuned to local realities, to restore a sense of collective pride and efficacy, and to provide a ready foundation for collective identification around which to organize and motivate action and resistance.

Perhaps the most obvious expression of an indigenization orientation is the growing influence of various indigenous or identity-based psychology movements (e.g., Enriquez, 1992; Pe-Pua & Protacio-Marcelino, 2000; Sinha, 1998; Teo & Wendt, 2020). In a narrow sense, the concept of indigenous psychology refers to forms of theory and practice that address themselves to problems of particular Indigenous Peoples and Indigenous Peoples in general (see e.g., Dudgeon & Walker, 2015; Dudgeon et al., 2018). In the broader sense that we apply here, the concept of indigenous psychology refers to home-grown forms of theory and practice that arise within particular communities—a kind of place-based knowledge (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015)—regardless of whether one would understand those communities as “Indigenous” (Kim et al., 2006).

An important contribution of an indigenization orientation is to reveal the sensibility or adaptability of patterns in majority-world settings that hegemonic knowledge forms regard as categorically harmful. An example comes from the article in this special issue by Bhatia and Priya (2021), who review ethnographic field research among Indian youth working for multinational corporations (MNCs). These corporations impose standard management techniques from organizational psychology to train workers in neoliberal individualist technologies of entrepreneurial self that are at odds with the ways of being in the communities of social embeddedness that these youth inhabit outside of work. These techniques train Indian workers to experience their patterns of speech, habits of interaction, and ways of being as problematic deviations from a natural standard—outdated vestiges of backward traditions that they should forgo in pursuit of professional growth and personal fulfillment. In response to this pathologization of local experience, an indigenization orientation to decolonial work illuminates how local ways of being constitute time-tested wisdom that has evolved to promote optimal experience in settings characterized by social embeddedness and interdependence.

Knowledge Otherwise

As the RGP co-editors noted in their inaugural editorial, an orientation toward Indigenization and place-based knowledge might, at first glance, seem incompatible with or even inimical to the project of general psychology. Indeed, for many psychologists who enact this orientation, the purpose is to work “with and from within” (Fernández et al., 2021, p. 359) communities toward healing and recovery of lifeways, self (Nandy, 1983), and historical memory (Martin-Baro, 1986) from the violence of Eurocentric modernity/coloniality (Biko, 2004; Bulhan, 1985; Burrage et al., 2021; Dudgeon, 2017) with little interest or concern about broader implications for a general psychology. Without denying the importance or validity of that orientation, we emphasize again that the point of moves toward indigenization is not simply to gain intimate knowledge of the particular patterns of specific, supposedly discrete, and bounded communities. Instead, the more important task is the project of knowledge Otherwise (Escobar, 2007): that is, to accompany people in particular communities, to gain an appreciation for history and the wisdom of everyday lifeways in those communities, and to re-think the broader world (including the project of general psychology) with the epistemic tools that these communities afford.

The primary strength of this orientation is to illuminate the coloniality of knowledge and being in standard patterns of hegemonic general psychology and thereby to denaturalize patterns that hegemonic accounts regard as just natural. When psychologists celebrate and impose “hegemonic standards of future-oriented individualism and radical abstraction [from place]” (Schmitt et al., 2021, p. 406), they contribute to epistemic violence by laundering patterns associated with the modernity/coloniality of being and re-packaging them as human nature (Adams et al., 2018). When psychologists portray racism as individual bias and emphasize prejudice reduction or tolerance in anti-racism work (Malherbe et al., 2021), they contribute to epistemic violence by whitewashing the structural roots of racism (Salter et al., 2018) and inducing people to settle for harmony instead of justice (Dixon et al., 2010). When management consultants export tests and workshops based on Euro-American psychology to Indian organizations (Bhatia & Priya, 2021), they contribute to epistemic violence by propagating forms of neoliberal selfhood oriented toward personal growth at the expense of broader solidarities (Adams et al., 2019; Sugarman, 2015). When mental health workers draw on therapeutic regimes of Euro-American psychology to treat survivors of communal violence (Bhatia & Priya, 2021), they contribute to epistemic violence from forms of psychologization that emphasize emotional trauma over material harm (Burrage et al., 2021). Decolonial accounts of knowledge Otherwise emphasize that the epistemic violence of these examples is not only about the imposition of models that are inappropriate for local realities, but also concerns the elevation of particularly positioned tendencies to the level of white-washed general standard. Decolonial approaches work to counteract these forms of epistemic violence and to illuminate alternative ways of being that better serve interests of humanity. The decolonial potential of these alternative ways of being is not only to better reflect the epistemic perspectives of people in racially oppressed communities, but also to provide a more just and sustainable foundation for a general psychology. In the words of Frantz Fanon (1961/1965, p. 316) “For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new [hu]man.”

Decolonial Attitude

The orientation of knowledge Otherwise—and particularly the task of denaturalizing hegemonic knowledge forms—illuminates the relevance of decolonial work for researchers and practitioners working within the over-privileged minority of people in centers of the Eurocentric modern/colonial order. The point of this work is not to re-center the standpoint, thoughts, and feelings of people in WEIRD settings who already occupy too much representational space (Coultas, 2021). Rather, the point is to “unsettl[e] subjectivities of power/privilege” (Fernández et al., 2021; p. 364): that is, to break the delusional spell of colonial narcissism and to reveal the coloniality inherent in modern individualist ways of being—to the benefit of all concerned—by re-considering WEIRD experience from a Southern epistemic standpoint (Connell, 2007; Escobar, 2007; de Souza Santos, 2014). Alternatively stated, the goal is to promote “sociohistorical intersectional consciousness” (Fernández et al., 2021; p. 361) about the source of modern realities in “sociohistorical conditions of injustice and inequity tethered to coloniality, and its manifestations in structural violence and racial capitalism” (Fernández et al., 2021, p. 361).

Given the relevance of decolonial work, how might researchers and practitioners working in centers of the Eurocentric modern/colonial order go about it? Clearly, a decolonial attitude requires a recognition and re-thinking of our complicity as psychologists in global and local injustice. Beyond re-thinking complicity with colonial power and contemporary global apartheid, it is necessary for decolonial psychologists to resist privileging cognitive labor over forms of action, particularly active engagement on pressing issues and working in collaboration with social movements as inevitable requirements of decolonial work. Decolonial attitude invites psychologists to get up from their desk and join the protest, not as leaders but in solidarity with community organizations. For most psychologists, though, protest is something to do (if at all) in one’s free time, not the job of a psychologist. Given the hegemonic view that psychology is objective, apolitical science, we are conscious of the difficulty it takes to convince psychologists of the imbrication of their discipline and profession with politics or even (at a minimum) their embeddedness in society.

Regardless of the form that decolonial work takes, a significant barrier to a decolonial attitude is the position of academic psychologist as outside expert. The expert’s position of relative power and privilege can enable forms of epistemic extractivism (Grosfoguel, 2016; see Smith, 1999) in which experts swoop into majority-world settings and appropriate local voices for their own professional agendas. A related barrier is the “The White-Savior Industrial Complex” (Cole, 2012). This manifestation of colonial narcissism holds that the solution to global injustice requires benevolent intervention of heroic outsiders to lead oppressed Others to liberation. The problematic feature of this complex is not just its racist paternalism, but also the danger that a focus on saving others obscures the expert’s own complicity in enduring forms of colonial privilege and domination. Yet other barriers to decolonial work are constructions of success in the neoliberal academy that require tendencies of self-promotion, the occupation of representational space, and an attitude of bold intervention that resembles imperialist imposition.

A solution to these barriers is to refuse the role of expert (Coultas, 2021). The method of refusal entails a conscious effort to de-occupy representational space in ways that do not merely leave it vacant for further colonial exploitation, but instead facilitate decolonial work by scholars from more marginalized circumstances (Coultas, 2021; Simpson, 2007; Tuck & Yang, 2014). Along with conscious cultivation of epistemic humility (Medina, 2013), epistemic modesty (Teo, 2019), and “relationships of mutual accountability” (Fernández et al., 2021, p. 362), a strategically deployed practice of refusal provides an important foundation for a decolonial attitude in general psychology.

Orientations to Praxis of Decoloniality

The first article in the special issue is by a transnational collective of scholar-activists and activist-scholars (Fernández et al., 2021) working within the perspective of community psychology. Fernández and her colleagues invoke the metaphor of “roots and routes”—referring to loci of enunciation and pathways of engagement, in both disciplinary and personal registers—to chart possibilities for decolonial psychology praxes. The authors anchor their strivings toward decolonial recuperations of knowledge, power, and being in analyses of data gathered from community psychologists via both formal survey and roundtable discussions at an international meeting. They identify four imbricated orientations that signify the ways in which their participants engage with the praxis of decoloniality: generating knowledge with and from within recognizes the embodiedness, pluriversality, and situatedness of knowledge-making; sociohistorical intersectional consciousness refers to the development of critical consciousness to comprehend and resist the sociohistorical and interlocking oppressions bred and braced by coloniality; relationships of mutual accountability denotes relational accountability as an ethic and virtue that privileges accompaniment, reciprocity, and cultural and epistemic humility; and unsettling subjectivities of power/privilege signals the imperative to disturb the multiple formations of power bound to whiteness and white supremacist ontologies. Collectively, these orientations reflect and prefigure the decolonial praxes and prerequisites for community and general psychology.

Decolonial Teaching of (Decolonial) Psychology

Given the origins of our collaboration in a context of student demonstrations about decolonizing education, it is perhaps fitting that the next two articles in the special issue trouble themselves specifically with decolonial teaching. In the first of these articles, Terre Blanche and colleagues (Terre Blanche et al., 2021) provide an account of their various attempts at teaching community psychology in a South African university from a decolonial stance. In the second article, James & Lorenz (2021) describe two courses—Introduction to a Decolonial Psychology and Foundations in Research—that they teach for a specialization in community psychology, liberation psychology, and ecopsychology within a graduate training program in depth psychology at a US-based institution.

In contrast to the discussions of curricula, reading lists, and other matters of content that are typically the focus of discussions about decolonizing the university or disciplines, a key concern of both articles is that teaching decoloniality in psychology also requires transformation in the process or practices of decolonial teaching. As Terre Blanche and colleagues (2021) put it, teaching about decoloniality in psychology is not the same as teaching psychology decolonially. Approaches and techniques of teaching and learning are not value-neutral, but instead require decolonial engagement as much as the “content” of the curriculum. For Terre Blanche and colleagues (2021), teaching decolonially means taking seriously critiques of Western psychology, the large body of work that shows the biases inherent in Western ways of knowledge-making, and the need to open up space for other forms of psychology and knowledge Otherwise. Instead of discounting anything beyond a concern with individual behavior as outside of psychology (a form of disciplinary decadence; Gordon, 2014), the authors argue for learning from cross-disciplinary, institutional, and psychological contexts that have a longer history of transformation efforts.

For James & Lorenz (2021), teaching decolonially means a focus on re-thinking modern/colonial ontology in addition to the more typical focus on epistemology. In contrast to the modern/colonial experience of radical abstraction of person from context, the authors emphasize the relationality and connectedness of students to each other and to nature. This form of decolonial learning is as much about training bodies in habits of being as it is training minds in habits of thought. To scaffold visceral and experiential learning of relational ontologies, especially among students whose background of lived experience in modern/colonial realities has obscured the experience of connection, the authors engage students in healing and knowledge practices of marginalized communities (such as pachakutik and en’owkin), Their pedagogical emphasis is on artistic expression and affective ways of knowing (e.g., sentipensar), bringing these techniques into dialogue with the more modernist pedagogical traditions (e.g., focused on Enlightenment rationality and transmission of knowledge via written text) in whitestream psychology.

The incorporation of Other healing and knowledge practices into one’s teaching is not without practical and ethical difficulties. A particularly important consideration is how to engage practices without reproducing forms of colonial extraction, performing cultural appropriation, or diluting the efficacy of the practices by abstracting them from their particular cultural-historical context. Mindful of this caveat, we agree that training bodies in relational ontologies or habits of being is an intriguing case of knowledge Otherwise, one that not only challenges manifestations of coloniality in modern ways of knowing, but also expands conceptions of education in ways that resonate with socialization practices in many majority-world settings.

Countering Epistemic Violence

The remaining three articles in the special issue illuminate the ambiguous position of general psychology with respect to theory and research. On one hand, the authors draw on their disciplinary training as psychologists to illuminate the coloniality of being and knowledge, thereby demonstrating the potential of general psychology as a tool for decolonial work. On the other hand, the authors show that general psychology is not merely an unobtrusive observer; instead, it actively contributes to the coloniality of being and knowledge via the reproduction and proliferation of modern individualist lifeways and zero-point epistemology. In this way, the authors identify general psychology as a site that is ripe for decolonial intervention.

In the first of these articles, Schmitt & colleagues (2021) illuminate the epistemic violence of whitestream psychological knowledge as a force for promotion of Time-Space Distantiation (TSD): a radical abstraction of experience from temporal and spatial context made possible by the modern/colonial individualist sense of freedom from material constraint. With respect to temporality, modern/colonial abstraction disrupts immersion in the flow of experience so that time becomes a resource: something to sell to buyers of labor; to spend in self-improvement or the pursuit of happiness; or to save via conveniences so that one can devote it to more productive activities. With respect to spatiality, modern/colonial abstraction both reflects and promotes an experience of mobility wherein people imagine themselves free to construct their relationship to particular places in the service of personal fulfillment (Oishi, 2010). Simply put, TSD transforms experience of space and time from the relational ontologies of place-based community to that of market-based commodity—a process that general psychology amplifies via the promotion of modern (and even neoliberal; Adams et al., 2019; Bhatia, 2017; Teo, 2018) individualist lifestyles.

In the second of these articles, Bhatia & Priya (2021) draw upon their respective research projects—a decade-long ethnographic analysis of youth who provide labor for MNCs and research on the psychologization of politically induced distress—to illustrate epistemic violence of psychological knowledge in Indian contexts. They document instances of imperialist imposition (Readsura Decolonial Issue Editorial Collective, in press(b)), not only in the uncritical importation of tests and techniques from industrial-organizational psychology to manage and discipline MNC employees, but also in the uncritical importation of diagnostic categories from clinical psychology to understand and treat socio-politically induced distress (Mills, 2014). They document instances of epistemological violence (Teo, 2010) in the tendency of MNC employee training programs to promote racialized and Orientalizing interpretations of Indian cultural patterns—regarding styles of communication, interpersonal relations, or emotional expression—as manifestations of backwardness that trainees must shed to become proper modern/colonial subject. In this way, Bhatia and Priya identify psychological science as a primary vector for modernity/coloniality, a body of knowledge and practice preaching conversion to modern/colonial neoliberal lifestyles that promise personal growth and fulfillment but at the cost of alienating people from social relations and leaving them susceptible to mental and material suffering.

In the last article in the collection, Malherbe and colleagues (2021) demonstrate the decolonial principle of knowledge Otherwise by applying an Africa(n)-centered standpoint to reveal the epistemic violence of psychological research on (anti)racism. To the extent that whitestream psychology has considered the topic of (anti)racism, it has typically been via theory and research on individual bias (Salter et al., 2018; Unzueta & Lowery, 2008). Psychologists tend to approach racism as a problem of antipathy, with a foundation in ignorance, that requires interventions to change individual hearts and minds. Given this construction of the problem, psychologists tend to focus on creation of good feeling and “getting along”—that is, peaceful coexistence within current arrangements—rather than address the material injustice and structural violence that racist systems reflect and promote (Dixon et al., 2010). In contrast, the authors note how the view from African settings shifts analytic attention about racism from individual bias to systemic manifestations built into the structure of everyday worlds. It illuminates the coloniality (and thus racism) inherent in Eurocentric modernity and thereby resists the normalization or even naturalization of the colonial present. It shifts the direction of anti-racism work in psychology from the goal of deprogramming individual bias or changing hearts and minds toward forms of collective action and everyday resistance. An Africa(n)-centered antiracist psychology calls for “creative maladjustment” (King, 1968) rather than counsel adaptation to the modern/colonial order.