The alt solves their indicts by articulating decolonial counter-discourses linked to material practices of free intellectual production and exchange.

Decolonisation/decoloniality is an act of refusal transformed into a life-affirming (geo)political act (Simpson, 2007; Tuck & Yang, 2014). As Mbembe (2021) suggests, it is ‘a struggle by the colonized to reconquer the surface, horizons, depths, and heights of their lives…an act of rebellion turned into an act of refoundation’ (p. 44). The problem with decolonisation or decoloniality, however, is that these terms have become the property of academics who tend to empty these concepts of their geopolitical and liberatory content, including collective modes of resisting, organising and producing knowledge from below. To reclaim our histories, stories and memories implies situating the curriculum in sites of struggle. A counter-curriculum is needed to challenge the modern/colonial system of signification maintained by coloniality. Students collectively challenging modern/colonial (dis)courses are usually those who are punished, silenced and disappeared in Latin America and the Caribbean, for instance, yet these acts of rebellion have created small cracks in a system that appears unbreakable. As Wynter (1992) observes, we must refuse or ‘fail to stay the course by violating the central interdiction’ of modernity that configures our subjectivities according to colonial and colonising desires (p. 64).

Despite systematic erasures, there exists a paradox in any system of domination. In other words, resistance often appears in spaces we least expect. Schools and universities, for instance, became places of molecular resistance for Indigenous and Pan-African movements linked to decolonisation. As la paperson (2017) so clearly demonstrated, the paradox of coloniality is that symbolic and material resistance emerges within colonial spaces, namely in colonial institutions such as schools and universities (e.g. Indigenous students resisting in boarding schools and Pan-Africanist student intellectuals in universities situated in the Global North). Although the geopolitics and coloniality of curriculum is a ‘behaviour-regulatory inferential system of meanings’ that constitutes the modern/colonial world symbolically and materially (Wynter, 1990, p. 358), there are moments of resistance and re-existence revealing the limitations of imposed systems. While the geopolitics and coloniality of curriculum depend on the metaphysical and pedagogical imperative of negating others the right to live with dignity, is it not also true that students, Indigenous, Black, Latinx, peasant and Afro-Indigenous communities (among others) have always resisted their dehumanisation by articulating counter-discourses and practices? Is it not also true that resistance is also accompanied by re-existence, that is, by affirming reciprocal ways of being and relating? Decolonial theory, as advanced by Quijano, happens to be one of many counter-discourses and interpretive lenses that enable us to interrogate and unlearn the many ‘truths’ taught to us by educational institutions while uncovering and reclaiming other truths hidden by the curriculum.

As organic intellectuals committed to unsettling colonial domination, we must critically examine the socio-systemic reality of modernity/coloniality. We must also challenge the notions that we cannot delink ourselves from the historically complicit and ‘intellectually indentured intelligentsia’ incapable and unwilling of directing their theories towards the geopolitical (Wynter, 1990, p. 365). From Wynter and Quijano, we learn that it is imperative to dismantle the ascription and re-articulation of race, its regulatory meaning-making function, and the social pyramid it has configured globally since 1492. Although the silencing of the past by the coloniality of curriculum is not new, there are moments when the deafening silence of the past is interrupted by those on the receiving end of domination.

Quijano invites us to escape this prison by thinking of decoloniality in liberational, relational, epistemological and intercultural terms: ‘The liberation of intercultural relations from the prison of coloniality also implies the freedom of all peoples to choose, individually or collectively, such relations: a freedom to choose between various cultural orientations, and, above all, the freedom to produce, criticise, change and exchange culture and society” (Quijano, 2007, p. 178). Decoloniality is, finally, a relational and ethico-political praxis aimed at replacing vertical understandings of the global with horizontal understandings of the planetary, which demands an ethic of reciprocity, relationality, communality, conviviality and convivencia (co-existence) with others and the world. It is an affirmation of life.