European and Spanish universities are increasingly promoting internationalization as a way of responding to the challenges of an increasingly globalized world (CYD Foundation, 2023). Meanwhile, links and connections with African universities remain invisible or lack sufficient support for their realization. This is due to the strength with which certain colonial logics still operate in the continent, which, hand in hand with the academic extractivism that operates in the discourses of openness to the West and its supposed benefits, intensify the mechanisms of control over non-Western bodies and knowledge. How to think the “decolonial dilemma” in this context? This panel aims to explore this question by assuming the place that the Canary Islands archipelago could play in order to make visible the diversity of ways of thinking, knowing and doing that can be encompassed under the decolonial perspective.
We seek to move away from hegemonic discourses -such as internationalization or educational innovation- to dialogue with works that critically reflect on the impact of these devices of knowledge and power on bodies and territories that have experienced the violence inherent to the wars of conquest, epistemicide, slavery and colonialism in the past and, at present, the violence generated by neocolonialism and economic extractivism that lead to unsustainable agro-industrial and tourism models, as well as recent modalities of epistemic extractivism. In short, we are talking about spaces that can be adjusted to the notion of coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000).
Coloniality, as thought by Aníbal Quijano, posits the idea that race becomes the main pattern of global power as of modern European expansion. But it also takes into account the “multi-insertion” of such a marker with categories such as class, gender and knowledge (Quijano, 2014). Such framework of analysis has been expanded by authors such as Walter Mignolo with his emphasis on the need to articulate an “other knowledge” that favors the de-Westernization and decolonization of knowledge (Mignolo, 2015). At the same time, we endorse Ramón Grosfoguel’s critique of occdiental epistemology and his transdisciplinary proposal to articulate a worldview based on “pluriversality” (Grosfoguel, 2022), which follows the path previously proposed by Enrique Dussel and his idea of “transmodernity” (1994). We also consider essential the contributions that feminist authors such as María Lugones (2008), Rita Segato (2013) and Ochy Curiel (2021) have made to this discussion on the scope of coloniality.
On the African continent, criticism of the predominance of the Western component in the management of difference is not new. Prominent intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon (1967); Kwame Nkrumah (1965); Chinweizu (1987); Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1986) have already problematized this issue in their respective works. However, in European universities there are few educational programs that include their ideas and take as references non-Eurocentric forms of knowledge production. In the meantime, we are witnessing the emergence of a renewed interest in the production of knowledge that responds to other genealogies. This is attested to by researchers such as Zimbabwean Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2015, 2018) in their efforts to make visible the epistemologies of the Global South.
Within this framework, the Canary Islands stand out as a highly complex territory, but also as a potentially transformative one. The archipelago serves as an “imperial frontier” (Gil Hernández, 2022), given that it is an administratively European territory located in northwestern Africa. For this reason, the reality of the Canary Islands shares some of the problems affecting the continent, such as its high levels of political, social and economic dependence on foreign countries, the growing risk of suffering the most severe effects of climate change or the strategic presence of different powers on its soil for security purposes.
From the main areas of power in the Islands, in Spain as a whole and in the European Union, this complexity is addressed by resorting to all kinds of euphemisms. Its purpose is to circumvent the problematic fit of the Canary Islands both in its immediate geographical reality and in the institutional architecture in which it is inserted through the recognition of its “differential fact”, its “Atlantic” or “tricontinental” vocation and also its “ultraperipherality” (Gil Hernández; Fernández Hernández and Zelaya Álvarez, 2023). Nevertheless, our interest is to transcend the tension of this type of concealing discourses in order to make possible the emergence of spaces of encounter, production and contestation that explore other forms of knowledge and of being in the world. This is the perspective we use to explore the social relations between bodies and territories that accompany political and cultural initiatives committed to rethinking the future of the world from the diversity of horizons offered by the African continent.
When we raise this discussion from the Canary Islands we are aware that for certain social groups, such as women, migrants from the Global South, impoverished and exploited masses of the population, these relationships are marked by forms of representation that generally show them as victims but never as people capable of contributing knowledge and value from their own realities (Zelaya, 2023). Thus, although they are sometimes called upon by the academic world to give “testimonies” of their experiences, they are rarely taken into account as subjects with a real capacity to influence their reality, fulfilling the intellectual role of experts.
In short, this panel invites those who are thinking, researching and working in the social fabric of the Canary Islands – we refer to people born in the islands and on the African continent – to share their critical vision of the functioning of their institutions, cultural associations and political collectives. We call on all these people to present academic, literary, performative, audiovisual, etc. works that attempt to provide answers that do not elude the decolonial dilemma that crosses the reality of the Canary Islands; answers that face the complexity that describes its African location, as well as its capacity to generate transformations, learning and experiences that help us to imagine another possible world.
