ABSTRACT
A central concept of decolonial thought, “coloniality,” was coined by A. Quijano at an uneasy moment of the collapse of state socialism and discrediting of its utopia, and the arrival of neoliberal globalisation as the only legitimate narrative. Decoloniality is a reflection of disillusionment and a subsequent transference of decolonisation rhetoric from embodied anticolonial political struggles to the spheres of knowledge production and aesthesis. This meant at once a deeper critical delve into the modern/colonial mechanisms of the production of knowledge and subjectivities, but also a potential danger of depoliticisation. Whitewashed and sanitised “decolonial studies” or “decolonial theory” that fail to see the profound differences between postcolonial theory and decoloniality and often substitute decoloniality for deconstruction, yet keep the Euromodern epistemic framework intact, is what we find today in European and especially Nordic contexts. They are often marked by a blindness towards their own specific colonial trajectories and especially the imperial difference, and the struggles of indigenous peoples. A thorough decolonial revisiting of the Nordic colonial trajectories including the early suspended expansionist projects and specific forms of settler colonialism, could help enrich decolonial thought with additional critical optic and bring it more in tune with the current global challenges. These challenges go beyond the original decolonial focus on the intersection of race and capitalism incorporating the climate change, chronophobia, defuturing, and global unsettlement. They also urge decoloniality to move in the direction of relational agency unlimited to colonial difference alone and avoiding both the extreme of imagined indigeneity and a confinement to the ivory academic tower. Taking these nuances into account could help us come closer to an understanding of decolonial potentials in the future and its applicability in other places such as Nordic Europe.
