#Imperialism 2 remake free#
Under the banners of “more than a statue” and “decolonize the university,” students called for social and economic transformation to undo the racial hierarchies that persist in post-apartheid South Africa, free university tuition and an Africa-centered curriculum. Students at the University of Cape Town targeted the statue of the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes, but saw its removal as only the opening act in a wider struggle to bring white supremacy to an end. South Africa, where a reckoning with the persistence of the settler regime has gripped national politics, reignited the latest calls for decolonization in 2015 with the #RhodesMustFall movement.
The struggle against this has been especially central in settler colonies in which the displacement of Indigenous institutions was most violent. The colonized were treated as people without history. Indigenous cultural traditions and systems of knowledge were denigrated as backward and uncivilized. European political and economic domination coincided with a Eurocentrism that valorized European civilization as the apex of human achievement. In that period, decolonization was primarily political and economic.Īs more colonies gained independence, however, cultural decolonization became more significant. Between 19, as struggles for independence were won in Africa and Asia, United Nations membership grew from 51 to 144 countries. But in the mid-20th century, anticolonial activists and intellectuals demanded immediate independence and refused to model their societies on the terms set by imperialists.
Museums such as the Natural History Museum in New York and the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Brussels have been compelled to confront their representation of colonized African and Indigenous peoples.īut what is “decolonization?” What the word means and what it requires have been contested for a century.Īfter World War I, European colonial administrators viewed decolonization as the process in which they would allow their imperial charges to graduate to independence by modeling themselves on European states. Students from South Africa to Britain have marched under its banner to challenge Eurocentric curriculums. Indigenous movements have reclaimed the mantle of “decolonization” in protests like those at Standing Rock against the Dakota Access pipeline. In the past few years, decolonization has gained new political currency - inside the borders of the old colonial powers. “Decolonize this place!” “Decolonize the university!” “Decolonize the museum!”
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