A contested term

When we were editing this book, and thinking about the title, we discussed at various points whether to use decolonise or ‘decolonise’, and it's noticeable that the contributing authors to this volume sometimes also use ‘decolonise’. So, what is the tension around this term?

Decolonisation as an intention has clarity. The students at the University of Cape Town in 2015 were intent on decolonising: ‘For the first time since the anti-apartheid movement, South African students were grabbing international headlines, as they struggled for universal access to an education that did not reproduce the imperial logic their parents’ generation fought to dismantle’ (Elliott-Cooper, 2018, 290).

The intentions of students and other activists in the UK are also clear, though in the different context of its being a historic European centre of colonialism, as expressed in Keele University's Manifesto for Decolonising the Curriculum:

So are the tensions around the call to ‘decolonise the library/curriculum/university’ more about enactment than purpose? In relation to the library, perhaps it is the implication that decolonisation is a definable, finite and measurable process that is problematic; like so many processes that constitute the organisation of libraries, the implication that we can start and one day finish this project. The library is a place that privileges practicality (Hudson, 2017; Nicholson and Seale, 2018), and though there is work to be done, this is not the familiar project process with measurable time scales and impacts that we are so used to implementing, and is about learning and unlearning as well as about activity.