ABSTRACT
One of the fundamental challenges faced by scholars of decolonization in the 21st century has been the challenge of developing an epistemic project that fully captures the multiple manifestations of colonial wounded-ness among the subjects that exist on the dominated side of the colonial power differential, beyond the reductionisms that are promoted by the culturalist and political economy paradigms. These are paradigms that negate rather than encourage a concerted effort against the colonial system. Thus, among the reductionist tendencies promoted by the political-economy and the culturalism paradigms, whose unintended consequence has been the promotion of ‘non-revolutionary violence’ that negates rather than promotes a concerted effort against the colonial system among the colonized subjects, are those that view the struggle against the system in terms of either class, gender, ethnic, sexual, religious, environmental or racial struggle. In this chapter, I argue that decoloniality is one of the few epistemic projects that has succeeded in resolving the reductionisms proffered by the cultural versus the political-economy paradigm of colonial wounded-ness through making Marxism its key component rather than its exclusive alternative. Thus, I deploy the decolonial epistemic lens to examine the nature of colonial wounded-ness that is represented by the idea of cultural villages in South Africa. This is with a view to revealing how decoloniality has incorporated Marxist political-economy paradigm to resolve the reductionisms that are driven by either an anti-identity politics of the cultural studies paradigm or an anti-capitalist politics of the political-economy paradigm in a manner that promotes a concerted effort against the colonial system.
