ABSTRACT
In the opening chapter of this book, we introduce the concepts of coloniality and decoloniality. Decolonising as a concept and as a practice can be thought of as being in opposition to the concept and practice of colonising. It is an undoing, a cancelling, a transformation, a going beyond. In short, control over the lives of a people is shifted from one national body, the coloniser, to what we might want to call the indigenous people of that nation, the colonised. These colonising and decolonising processes operate within political, social, cultural, epistemological, temporal, geographical, categorising and semantic framings and settings. The process of moving from the one to the other is not straightforward and is usually fragmentary and gradual, and generally does not involve a going back to an imagined utopic view of the past. A new sense of nationhood and nationality is being developed.
