Modern life and colonial desire

In "Decolonizing Educational Relationships," the authors dedicate a chapter to exploring the western notion of modernity and how it relates to what they call colonial desires.  This has been a particularly enlightening piece for me to work through, though fraught with a fair amount of emotional rollercoaster-ing.  Let me try to explain.  

Attempts to decolonize (ourselves and others) can only be successful if we are aware and critical of the specific ways that coloniality plays out in our own locations and personal contexts. Coloniality is a kind of logic that is based on binaries and hierarchies of value.  This means that settlers (colonizers) like myself tend to align with structures and processes that privilege our ways of doing things--including education, labour, spirituality, and enactment of the social norms that are perpetuated.  We are conditioned to view our modern, capitalist, colonial systems as superior to others, or at the very least we remain uncritical of their dominance.  In turn, this has a profound influence on our behavior: what we value, what we desire, and what we strive for.    

Let me extend this through example. In an effort to respond to Pirbhai-Illich et al.'s (2023) activity, Exploring Your Context (p. 42), I took some time to wonder about how coloniality looks, and the legacies of coloniality that are evident, in the context of my own life.  Thus, the photo here of my PhD convocation--wearing a huge grin and projecting my relief and joy at having completed the ultimate graduate degree.  

My brain happens to be one that thrives in our modern-day colonial classrooms.  I whizzed through each education system I was a part of with little difficulty.  I had what seemed like an infinite capacity for memorization.  I implicitly knew how to play the game of delivering what my teachers wanted me to deliver.  I had a very strong drive to be the best at all things academic.  In turn, this influenced what I wanted to be when I grew up, or how I wanted to make a living.  I wanted to teach, to impart my knowledge to others.  I wanted to be officially "right," and to perch at the top of the academic heap.  I wanted to research exactly what I wanted to research.  I strove to be recognized as the best scholar possible.  I wanted to be a professor, and not just any professor--the best professor.  I wanted a job at one of the most prestigious universities.  

From the outside, this may seem like simply a reflection of my A-type personality.  However, I see it now as a direct reflection of colonial desire.  I attached my identity firmly onto something our colonial logic of superiority claims as valuable.  And, I situated myself within one of the systems that is central to controlling power within the colonial project: higher education.  I strove to become a central player within that power structure.    

This has been an incredibly hard pill for me to swallow.  I have actively sought to become an indispensable part of a system that is complicit in reinforcing the colonial agenda in Canada.  UGH.  I look at my brave-faced smile in my convocation photo and feel absolutely bewildered by what I was striving for (and what I continue to strive for, if I'm honest).  As I work through this, I know I need to sit with it for awhile.  I feel somewhat consoled by the idea that, "our desires, like our identities, don't belong to us fully" (Pirbhai-Illich et al., 2023, p. 41); however, the notion of pulling my scholarly identity apart from who I am as a person seems incredibly daunting.  

My parting thought for now is that this work needs to be done with breath (think yoga and meditation), and in community.  Don't be surprised if I hit you up for a hard conversation :)