Recently, I’ve found myself exasperated by the infighting among well-intentioned academicians who ought to be on the same side, especially at times like these.

The criticism of decolonial scholarship for being written in English is absurd, not the least because the go-to solution is often to expand the discourse to the languages of Latin America, by which what is meant is Spanish and Portuguese … which of course have nothing to do with colonialism at all!

Even overlooking that big problem for the moment, do these critics not see the “turtles” aspect of their hopeless attempt? Even if we expanded decolonial scholarship so as to always also be printed in Spanish and Portuguese (plus Dutch and French, so as not to leave out Suriname and French Guyana), won’t we soon be critiquing that, in turn, as lacking representation from the world’s Arab speakers, Persian speakers, Central Asian Turkic speakers, Swahili speakers, Oromo speakers, Hausa speakers, Manding speakers, Igbo speakers, Urdu speakers, Hindi speakers, Tamil speakers, Ainu speakers, Lao speakers, and on and on? (And if mattered so much, shouldn’t the push be for publishing in Quechua, Kakchiquel, Guarani, Garifuna, etc.?)

Pointing fingers in this way, i.e., making oneself look oh-so-meta while deadlocking useful discourse, seems self-serving to me—serving the global-northern academics who are doing it.

On that note, while some of my work has received this and one other types of critique for being colonialist from white academics, I think it says more that scholars from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Uruguay, and Nigeria are comfortable enough with my work to make use of it in theirs.

(Does the last paragraph constitute self-promotion? Yes, but without putting someone else down and even promoting others. We’re not in a zero-sum game.)