“Decolonize the curriculum / decolonize [X]”
Stripping Eurocentric dominance from institutions — and the “not a metaphor” critique
Sparked by #RhodesMustFall (Cape Town, 2015) and echoed in UK campaigns (“Why is my curriculum white?”), “decolonize the curriculum” spread across Anglophone universities. It is contested from two directions: conservatives/liberals who call it censorship, and — crucially — decolonial scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, who argue that using “decolonization” for anything other than the return of land to Indigenous people empties the word.
What happened
A student threw excrement on the Cecil Rhodes statue at the University of Cape Town, launching #RhodesMustFall; the campaign spread to Oxford and merged with UK curriculum-diversification demands.
A lot of the time when people talk about colonialism they think of it as a past event that happened. They don’t think about it as something that manifests itself in everyday life at institutions like Oxford. (Ntokozo Qwabe)
Under each definition
No metropole, territory, or administration; the “colony” here is figurative (the syllabus).
Tuck & Yang argue this is exactly the misuse: real decolonization is land return, not curriculum reform.
Not about post-independence economic control.
A paradigmatic metaphorical/expansive usage of “colonial/decolonize.”
The case that the label applies
Supporters argue curricula, canons, and institutions carry forward colonial hierarchies of whose knowledge counts, and that “decolonizing” them — widening reading lists, foregrounding non-Western thought — is a legitimate extension of anti-colonial critique into the academy.
The case against
Critics argue it lowers standards, politicizes teaching, and is coercively imposed; UK minister Kemi Badenoch said the curriculum cannot be “decolonised” because it was never “colonised.” Separately, Tuck & Yang argue that calling curriculum reform “decolonization” is a “settler move to innocence” that avoids the material question of land.
In their words
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.
she did not support plans to decolonise the curriculum as she doesn’t believe it has been colonised in the first place.
The verdicts above are how each definition would most likely classify this situation — illustrative guidance, not court rulings. Colonialism has no treaty crime, so no application is a legal “finding”; every characterization is attributed to the person or body that made it. The lenses diverge most on two questions — whether there is a “metropole” and who counts as “indigenous” — and on the difference between a historical judgment and a moral analogy. See the Definition tab for each definition’s full text. Inclusion is documentation, not a finding.