In debate, that means the alternative should be understood as a break in colonialism’s occupation over regimes of knowledge.

As Fanon notes, decolonization is best understood not as a temporal event but as a process. Moreover, it is a process that can only be understood through study of the intellectual, historical, and political dimensions that constitute it. It is here that digital humanities is best poised to intervene: in the affordances of digital technologies that help make decolonization legible and reveal its limits.

Fanon argues that decolonization is necessarily a violent process—violence was a tool of colonial projects, so the master’s tools will dismantle the master’s house. For Fanon, the violence takes physical and figurative forms—the violence engaged by the colonizer against colonial uprisings, armed struggle, the epistemic violence of colonialism, and the violent process of its undoing. In the case of digital humanities, such violence appears in discursive forms. These include reproducing colonial influences in the production of digital knowledge and centering epistemologies and ontologies of the Global North, namely the U.S. and western Europe, which in turn decenters those of Indigenous communities and the Global South. Fanon is a key figure here because his analysis is located in the dynamic between the colonizer and the colonized, between the settler and the native. This is not to say that invoking decolonization is only speaking to the political fact of colonization. On the contrary, it encompasses epistemological dimensions because the political realities of colonization are interdependent with displacement of Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies. The existence of colonization relies on not only ongoing occupation of land but also occupation of regimes of knowledge erected to maintain and legitimate such occupation.

As Kenyan writer Ngugi wa’ Thiong’o (1986) argues, it is not only the colony that needs to be decolonized but also the mind of the colonized. This is a result of the way colonialism entails erasure of knowledge, belief, ways of being, and archives. It requires instantiation of structures like law, citizenship, and nationality that locate the colonizer at its center. Moreover, colonialism is not circumscribed by its temporal limits. Neo-colonialism—the control of a formerly colonized state from the outside via the operations of capitalism—demonstrates how legacies of colonialism persist after decolonization. This phenomenon manifests through globalization, cultural imperialism, foreign aid, and investment by multinational corporations.

Yet, the ways decolonization is often invoked in the context of digital humanities may do violence of their own. They risk becoming empty metaphors without specificity, equating decolonization with the need for diversity in the field. In doing so, they miss the opportunity to articulate the practices necessary for challenging the discursive violence of colonialism in digital knowledge production. This equating of diversity with decolonization is part of a trend within antiracist and other identitarian social justice movements, in which decolonization comes to signify a struggle for identity and recognition in the absence of a colonial condition. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012) have argued that invoking decolonization solely as a metaphor undermines the real possibility of decolonization for those whose lives are, in fact, determined by colonialism. Purely metaphorical invocations of colonization are a form of appropriation that decenters ongoing struggles for freedom of Indigenous people by recentering whiteness, even when decolonization is being invoked in favor of antiracist or other social justice-oriented movements (Tuck & Yang 2012). When we speak of social justice, it is often in favor of the liberation of oppressed people, of a drive for equity and representation in spaces where they have been disallowed. Yet, decolonization in digital humanities cannot be a simple articulation of the perceived exclusions of the field along lines of race, gender, class, ability, nation, or other axes of privilege and oppression. Such calls promote an “add and stir” approach that suggests the mere addition of “diverse” bodies will transform the practices of digital humanities (Bailey 2011). Instead, the move to decolonize digital humanities requires redress of the traces of colonialism that appear in digital scholarship, which has political and epistemological implications. While digital humanities offers tremendous potential for democratizing scholarly knowledge, such possibilities are undercut by projects that recreate colonial dynamics or reinforce the Global North as the site of knowledge production.

While many calls for the decolonization of digital humanities have articulated metaphors for dismantling the operations of power that undergird the production of knowledge in the field—the gatekeepers, reviewers, and definitions that delimit the boundaries of digital humanities—such calls efface the violence of colonialism and the violence of decolonization. Therefore, I am suggesting that—when invoking the relationship between decolonization and digital humanities—the central question is not how digital humanities itself could be decolonized but how digital humanities has contributed to the epistemic violence of colonialism and neo-colonialism. This is evident in both its implication in colonial forms of knowledge production and the ways digital humanities has contributed to historical processes of decolonization. Its further possibilities lie in resisting neo-colonialism in projects and tools.