Decolonizing the Imagination
Decolonization questions these stories and analyzes their impact on our realities, even our futures.
There are stories that fill our minds that have been crafted and inserted by family, religion, culture, community, education, and the state. These stories determine how we perceive and engage in the world, and how we treat ourselves, other humans, and the Earth. They control what and how we educate, eat, and even what we wear. We analyze our world based on what is or is not possible or appropriate through the lens of these mindsets. Decolonization questions these stories and analyzes their impact on our realities, even our futures. The purpose of decolonization is to disconnect from systems of oppression that have haunted us for centuries limiting our ability to imagine something greater, more expansive. The process of decolonizing invites us to find another way that doesn’t exclude, extract, or exploit. Decolonization rests on the belief that the colonial agenda set upon us is not healthy or sustainable, but instead perpetuates and justifies hierarchies which often leads to harm.
The decolonizing movement has recently gained more visibility because more and more people of all races and genders are beginning to recognize how the legacy colonial mindset has been infecting everything that constitutes our very being. Social media especially has helped to distribute and circulate the truths we need to understand the structure and operation of colonialism and how it shows its ugly head today. For our collective futures to move in harmony these thought patterns can no longer be encouraged.
What does this have to do with our imagination?
Control what people dream, you control what they imagine
Our imagination is fed by the conscious and subconscious mind. Within the matrix of the colonized mind, we are being fed things that limit what we think is possible. A mindset of control, the remnants of the colonial ways of moving through the world ensures you only move towards visions that limit access to space and time. This lack of access reduces the mind’s ability to wander into the surreal, the desired, and the impossible. Control what people dream, you control what they imagine, which controls what they manifest thus controlling the design of our shared reality and futures.
While colonialism is the system, coloniality, a lesser-known term, is the mental state that upholds the system and is deeply embedded in our mental models today. Dr. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira of the University of British Columbia explains the difference perfectly in her book Hospicing Modernity: Facing Human Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism.
“While colonialism is often presented as the formal occupation and administration of lands and the subjugation of the original peoples of these lands, coloniality refers to the enduring manifestations of colonial relations, logic, and situations — even after the official decolonization of formal structures of governance. In this sense, coloniality represents a global hegemonic form of power that organizes bodies, time, knowledge, relationships, labor, and space according to economic parameters (ie exchange value) and to the benefit of particular groups of people, with or without formal colonization.”
My work aims to free the imagination of mental constraints that coloniality typically guides us towards so that Black people can cultivate the destinies that reflect their dreams. The best way to combat the colonial infection of coloniality is to question systems and possibilities. And, as sci-fi writer Octavia Butler would say, “play with everything, absolutely everything.” As a form of resistance but also as a liberatory portal, play, especially amongst adults, relies on intuition and joy to guide and thus influence the futures we imagine, piercing the harmful veil of coloniality. Feeding the imagination with just decolonized images and approaches will invite the librated self within to lead and craft new futures that we all may enjoy.
