Reproducing Coloniality: Language, Gender, and Neoliberal Discourses of Selfhood

Authors

Sunil Bhatia
Anjali Ram, Roger Williams UniversityFollow

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Title

Handbook of Decolonial Community Psychology

Publication Date

2024

Comments

Published in: Handbook of Decolonial Community Psychology, 2024

Abstract

Decolonial and decolonizing theories emerge out of different and often incommensurable genealogies of native studies on settler colonialism, decolonial theory from Latin America, and postcolonial theory that is rooted in European colonialism of Africa and Asia. A decolonizing perspective shows how contemporary psychological science and psychological theories are inextricably linked to the legacy of colonialism, coloniality, settler colonialism and created through the Eurocentric nexus between power and knowledge. From Black Lives Matter, Rhodes Must Fall in the UK and South Africa to Standing Rock, and #NoBansOn StolenLand, decolonization has been invoked from different vantage points to dismantle the legacy of colonialism and coloniality. While the decolonial turn in psychology has provided us with critical knowledge in connecting questions of race, empire, and colonialism to knowledge production and power structures, we believe there is a pressing need for more historically specific, granular and situated accounts of decolonization. This article is organized around three key themes. First, we draw on our ethnographic research on upper-, middle- and working-class communities in Pune, India to show how Euro-American psychological discourses of self, happiness, community, and diversity are being reconstituted in the social life of urban Indian youth. Second, we specifically show “coloniality of knowledge” is reflected in the way specific accents and ways of speaking the English language have become “embodied” markers of social mobility and “neoliberal subjecthood”. We analyze how EuroAmerican cross-cultural psychology, psychometric personality tests, and the language of “diversity” is being used to exhort Indian youth workers to adapt and assimilate to cultural practices that can be framed as practices of global coloniality. We focus on how these psychological discourses reflect new forms of coloniality that exploit the workforce and increase their precarity and burden of affective labor. Third, we analyze how the reworking and reframing of these EuroAmerican psychological discourses in local settings gives rise to hybrid and asymmetrical constructions of “self,” and “culture” and “community.” In conclusion, we argue that there are hardly any accounts in psychology that reflect the cultural lives and experiences of people who live in the Global South. Additionally, the idea of culture—as an analytic framework, as practice, and as representation in psychology—are largely derived from theories primarily rooted in Eurocentric understandings of self and personhood.

Recommended Citation

Bhatia, S., Ram, A. (2024). Reproducing Coloniality: Language, Gender, and Neoliberal Discourses of Selfhood. In: Sonn, C.C., Fernández, J.S., Moura Jr., J.F., Madyaningrum, M.E., Malherbe, N. (eds) Handbook of Decolonial Community Psychology. Community Psychology. Springer, Cham.