We also point to unsettling themes within transnational/Third World decolonizations, abolition, and critical space- place pedagogies, which challenge the coalescence of social justice endeavors, making room for more meaningful potential alliances. In this article, we analyze multiple settler moves towards innocence in order to forward “an ethic of incommensurability” that recognizes what is distinct and what is sovereign for project(s) of decolonization in relation to human and civil rights based social justice projects. 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. Because settler colonialism is built upon an entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave, the decolonial desires of white, non- white, immigrant, postcolonial, and oppressed people, can similarly be entangled in resettlement, reoccupation, and reinhabitation that actually further settler colonialism. As important as their goals may be, social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches that decenter settler perspectives have objectives that may be incommensurable with decolonization. The easy adoption of decolonizing discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship, evidenced by the increasing number of calls to “decolonize our schools,” or use “decolonizing methods,” or, “decolonize student thinking”, turns decolonization into a metaphor. 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. Our goal in this article is to remind readers what is unsettling about decolonization.

State University of New York at New Paltz

You can download the pdf from following link: Decolonization is not a metaphor by Eve Tuck

The wretched of the earth 1963