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Forerunners: Ideas First
A Third University Is Possible
A Third University is Possible unravels the intimate relationship between the more than 200 US land grant institutions, American settler colonialism, and contemporary university expansion. Author la paperson cracks open uncanny connections between Indian boarding schools, Black education, and missionary schools in Kenya; and between the Department of Homeland Security and the University of California. Central to la paperson’s discussion is the “scyborg,” a decolonizing agent of technological subversion. Drawing parallels to Third Cinema and Black filmmaking assemblages, A Third University is Possible ultimately presents new ways of using language to develop a framework for hotwiring university “machines” to the practical work of decolonization. Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
73 pages, Paperback
Published June 1, 2017
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May 19, 2020
'for you, who likes to create a mess out of colonial apparatuses'
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January 30, 2023Read for class. Have very mixed feelings about it and will leave it unrated, though Yang’s politics are likely closer to mine than a lot of other books that I give good ratings to. I think I just feel there’s more at stake when I’m reading a text by someone who clearly identifies with leftist politics. I know communists who feel fairly strongly about Eve Tuck’s and K Wayne Yang’s text “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” and criticize it for mis-framing the project of global communism in this particular footnote:
“Colonialism is not just a symptom of capitalism. Socialist and communist empires have also been settler empires (e.g. Chinese colonialism in Tibet). “In other words,” writes Sandy Grande, “both Marxists and capitalists view land and natural resources as commodities to be exploited, in the first instance, by capitalists for personal gain, and in the second by Marxists for the good of all” (2004, p.27). Capitalism and the state are technologies of colonialism, developed over time to further colonial projects.”
And it’s worth noting a number of communists I know who are critical of this position are specifically maoists, who have no qualms deploying terms like “social imperialism” to describe the Soviet Union, and now contemporary China (something I would be very hesitant to do, if at all). I know when I first encountered that Tuck and Yang comment (and Sandy Grande) in Max Liboiron’s book it also rubbed me the wrong way (as a terminological issue), but I still think there are generative things that Yang has put forward with respect to decolonization. But this is a problem that persists in this text to some extent. E.g. Yang discusses breaking with ‘Eurocentric’ theory (specifically identifying Marx) and I personally think this is an unhelpful way to frame the problem of Eurocentrism:
“(Y)our task is to theorize in the break, that is, to refuse the master narrative that technology is loyal to the master, that (y)our theory has a Eurocentric origin. Black studies, Indigenous studies, and Other-ed studies have already made their breaks with Foucault (over biopolitics), with Deleuze and Guatarri (over assemblages and machines), and with Marx (over life and primitive accumulation)”
“Finally, land as biopolitical also draws upon global studies of biopiracy and of neoliberalism. Kalindi Vora breaks with Marx to insightfully describe how Global South human organs, time, intelligence, social life, and biological life functions are tapped to support cosmopolitan “life” in the Global North. “Vital energies” are drained and redirected to perform liberal “life support.” This moves away from the anthropocentric sense of “biopolitical” as principally referring to the control of life/death for human populations, when the very methods of life/death involve the bleeding of Indigenous worlds to pump life into a “First World.””
I understand the critique of Marxist humanism and certain anthropocentric strains of his work, but it seems weird to me you would stop reading Marx rather than read his work and identify what’s useful and what’s worth critiquing. This is what every Marxist has done; none have accepted Marx wholesale. For example, it is widely recognized that Marx's concept of the 'Asiatic mode of production' is actually Eurocentric (by many, including Samir Amin), and we can reject it, criticize it, etc. But to divorce your project completely from Marx seems really unhelpful to me, and unnecessary. Again, many of the scholars and orgs Yang is drawing from (like the Zapatistas, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, national liberation movements of the Third World, Audre Lorde, Fanon, Chris Mensalvas, etc) are deeply influenced by Marx, and would not think of themselves as "breaking with Marx". And I just think it’s weird (maybe even condescending to these Third World anti-colonial orgs and scholars) to frame decolonization in a way that believes removing Marx from reading lists is productive, especially because so many liberation orgs, activists, and scholars who work towards decolonization find Marx so important intellectually.
Overall, the writing in Yang’s short text can be a bit over-the-top in some ways, and I know some people who really disliked this text because of Yang’s style, but it’s actually not something I mind at all. My reservations about the book stem from elsewhere. The book’s main referent is the Third World and related decolonization struggles, particularly the form they took during the Cold War:
“Following other thinkers, I recognize the problematic uses of third world. On one hand, it was a signifier for different revolutionary nationalisms in the twentieth century: Juan Perón’s “third way” in Argentina [my own side comment, but out of all the revolutionary nationalisms to choose to platform here, why the one that literally harboured Nazis] and the Cuban Revolution were two such nationalisms that aspired to challenge Cold War binaries that revolved around the competing empires of the United States and the USSR. On the other hand, the third world is a warrant for nongovernmental organizations to operate as self-stylized humanitarian ventures and also for-profit corporations to dress up as charities. My choice to use third world is meant to be problematic. Any decolonizing project of the third world university should be a problematized one, in much the same way as revolutionary nationalisms and international aid should be problematized. Most directly, a third world university references the organizing by the Third World Liberation Front in the late 1960s and early 1970s to found a Third World College. These events reached an apex in the 1968–69 San Francisco State Strike; at 167 days, it was the longest student strike in U.S. history.”
This is in contrast to what Yang calls the Second University, described as such:
“The second world university, like Second Cinema, is marked by its investments in critical theory, that is, the diverse work of the Frankfurt School in critiquing media and capitalist systems in the “West” that emerged out of World War II. Two threads of critical theory run through academia in the arts and humanities, on one hand, and the social sciences, on the other. Literary critical theory focuses on the deconstruction of texts for their underlying meanings, whereas social theory focuses on domination within social systems, usually from a neo-Marxist frame.[15] At least ideologically, the second world university is committed to the transformation of society through critique, through a deconstruction of systems of power, and in this way offers fundamental analyses for any third world university curriculum. Yet its hidden curriculum reflects the material conditions of higher education—fees, degrees, expertise, and the presumed emancipatory possibilities of ”
“Usually, when traditionalists speak with nostalgia for the idealized university of old, the library counter in the sky where Kant and Hegel and Freire study together, this is the second world university. We are familiar with it; in the United States, it often houses the Marxist scholars, the ethnic studies formations, women’s studies, gender studies, and American studies.”
“When people say “another university is possible,” they are more precisely saying that “a second university is possible,” and they are often imagining second world utopias, where the professor ceases to profess, where hierarchies disappear, where all personal knowledges are special, and, in other words, none are… They are rarely talking about a university that rematriates land, that disciplines scholar-warriors rather than “liberating” its students, that repurposes the industrial machinery, that supports insurrectionary nationalisms as problematic antidotes to imperialist nationalism, that acts upon financial systems rather than just critiquing them, that helps in the accumulation of third world power rather than simply disavowing first world power…”
Yang notes how universities are most fundamentally colonial institutions deeply implicated in a land grant system that was directly dispossessing Indigenous nations of their Land:
““The act gave federal public lands to (Union) states, allotting thirty thousand acres of recently appropriated Indigenous lands for each senator and representative to stake out. States were encouraged to sell these “land grants” to raise money for new public universities that would research and educate American settlers in agriculture, science, and mechanical arts. Land is turned into capital for constructing universities for the principal goal of growing industry”
However, Yang also emphasizes these colonial institutions have maintained remarkable subversive potential and have produced many anti-colonial figures and theories that have aided in decolonization struggles for the cause of Indigenous self-determination and autonomy over their land:
“Colonial schools have a tradition of harboring spaces of anticolonial resistance. These contradictions are exquisitely written about by the eminent novelist, literary scholar, and postcolonial thinker Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. He describes how the machine of British colonial schooling in Kenya produced a Black governor of colonial Kenya and, paradoxically, also helped to produce Mau Mau revolutionaries. Fearful that schools sheltered the Mau Mau, who occupied the imaginations of Indigenous Kenyans and settlers alike as the quintessential Black, violent resistance movement, the colonial state banned many of its missionary-inspired schools in the 1952 declaration of a state of emergency. This ban included the Kenya Teachers College, whose campus was converted into “a prison camp where proponents of resistance to colonialism were hanged.”[5] During the Mau Mau Rebellion, wa Thiong’o attended Alliance High School, a segregated, elite missionary school for Black Africans in British Kenya. And prior to that, he attended Manguo elementary school, which was banned for a time by the colonial government. How can colonial schools become disloyal to colonialism?”
“Carter G. Woodson, noted founder of Black History Month and author of The Mis-education of the Negro (1933), attended the segregated Douglass School in post-Reconstruction Virginia (home to the Hampton Institute). A lesser-known de/colonial connection is that Woodson worked as a teacher, then as school supervisor, for the U.S. Army schools in the Philippines from 1903 to 1907. His book became the critical referent for Renato Constantino’s “The Miseducation of the Filipino” (1966). Taking off from the colonial landing are always already decolonial lines of flight”
At heart, decolonization for Yang is not about diversifying curricula or even about forming new theories and methodologies to produce novel forms of knowledge; its principal aim is the rematriation of Land back to Indigenous people:
“Decolonization is, put bluntly, the rematriation of land, the regeneration of relations, and the forwarding of Indigenous and Black and queer futures—a process that requires countering what power seems to be up to. To take effective decolonizing action, we must then have a theory of action that accounts for the permeability of the apparatuses of power and the fact that neocolonial systems inadvertently support decolonizing agendas.”
One of my main concerns with this book is that I believe the infiltration of academia is one of the things leftist intellectuals have spent a disproportionate amount of effort and energy on, and it should only be one of many subordinate projects that are primarily oriented towards revolutionary change with respect to political economy. The question is whether constructing a ‘Third University’ is worth it, or whether we should be focused on building other sorts of institutions or organizations that have more widespread influence. One of the examples Yang provides for a ‘Third University’ was the cadre of Cuban doctors that would train many other Third World medical students all over the world, but again this happened only after the Cuban Revolution (hence putting into question tactics that emphasize academia as a principle site of struggle, in contrast to state power):
“If we consider the Cuban Latin American School of Medicine as a university from which decolonizing work sometimes emerges—as it has trained more than twenty-five thousand physicians from eighty-four countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, North America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania to return to their home communities where doctors and medical care are scarce—then some third world university formations can operate at the scale of state apparatuses.[20] However, besides literal “third world” formations like Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina (ELAM), and explicitly decolonizing universities like Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi, the third world university also appears contemporaneously within first world universities.”
The one thing I find most helpful from this text is its emphasis on the way colonialism structures land relations and enables Indigenous dispossession:
“When we consider the transport of fracked oil via railways and pipelines, and the bulldozing of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe’s burial sites by the forces of Dakota Access Pipeline, we see the application of death to land itself. Destroying burial sites to lay pipeline is no different from the mass extermination of buffalo to lay rail. Both target the land (the nonhuman) to (1) eliminate Indigenous presence and (2) make the land alienable. Making death lands is an operation of making terra nullius. Death and extraction and fungibility ride together…. Removing land from people also means making war ontologically inherent on certain peoples. War-able peoples in turn lead to bombable lands, extinctionable animals, and genocide. The “human” is about all the idealizations above the flesh and above the land, what Sylvia Wynter describes as the elevation of an “ethnoclass” of the Western bourgeois conception of Man, “which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself.”
And finally, I’ll finish with this great excerpt on land relations and the more-than-human:
“[Tiffany Lethabo] King’s analysis thus extends our understanding of Black fungibility beyond the animal and into land, into the nonhuman beyond biological. In this way, King’s insights have provocations for the very relationship between the fields of Indigenous studies and Black studies. Whereas Blackness is obscured in ethnic studies as another “race,” it has greater capaciousness when thought about as a piece of the more-than-human world—the living world—as analyzed more deeply in Indigenous studies. When foundational Native studies scholar Jack Forbes asks, “where do our bodies end?” he draws attention to life as being far more than the unit of the living organism:
I can lose my hands, and still live. I can lose my legs and still live. I can lose my eyes and still live. I can lose my hair, eyebrows, nose, arms, and many other things and still live. But if I lose the air I die. If I lose the sun I die. If I lose the earth I die. If I lose the water I die. If I lose the plants and animals I die. All of these things are more a part of me, more essential to my every breath, than is my so-called body. What is my real body?”
“Colonialism is not just a symptom of capitalism. Socialist and communist empires have also been settler empires (e.g. Chinese colonialism in Tibet). “In other words,” writes Sandy Grande, “both Marxists and capitalists view land and natural resources as commodities to be exploited, in the first instance, by capitalists for personal gain, and in the second by Marxists for the good of all” (2004, p.27). Capitalism and the state are technologies of colonialism, developed over time to further colonial projects.”
And it’s worth noting a number of communists I know who are critical of this position are specifically maoists, who have no qualms deploying terms like “social imperialism” to describe the Soviet Union, and now contemporary China (something I would be very hesitant to do, if at all). I know when I first encountered that Tuck and Yang comment (and Sandy Grande) in Max Liboiron’s book it also rubbed me the wrong way (as a terminological issue), but I still think there are generative things that Yang has put forward with respect to decolonization. But this is a problem that persists in this text to some extent. E.g. Yang discusses breaking with ‘Eurocentric’ theory (specifically identifying Marx) and I personally think this is an unhelpful way to frame the problem of Eurocentrism:
“(Y)our task is to theorize in the break, that is, to refuse the master narrative that technology is loyal to the master, that (y)our theory has a Eurocentric origin. Black studies, Indigenous studies, and Other-ed studies have already made their breaks with Foucault (over biopolitics), with Deleuze and Guatarri (over assemblages and machines), and with Marx (over life and primitive accumulation)”
“Finally, land as biopolitical also draws upon global studies of biopiracy and of neoliberalism. Kalindi Vora breaks with Marx to insightfully describe how Global South human organs, time, intelligence, social life, and biological life functions are tapped to support cosmopolitan “life” in the Global North. “Vital energies” are drained and redirected to perform liberal “life support.” This moves away from the anthropocentric sense of “biopolitical” as principally referring to the control of life/death for human populations, when the very methods of life/death involve the bleeding of Indigenous worlds to pump life into a “First World.””
I understand the critique of Marxist humanism and certain anthropocentric strains of his work, but it seems weird to me you would stop reading Marx rather than read his work and identify what’s useful and what’s worth critiquing. This is what every Marxist has done; none have accepted Marx wholesale. For example, it is widely recognized that Marx's concept of the 'Asiatic mode of production' is actually Eurocentric (by many, including Samir Amin), and we can reject it, criticize it, etc. But to divorce your project completely from Marx seems really unhelpful to me, and unnecessary. Again, many of the scholars and orgs Yang is drawing from (like the Zapatistas, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, national liberation movements of the Third World, Audre Lorde, Fanon, Chris Mensalvas, etc) are deeply influenced by Marx, and would not think of themselves as "breaking with Marx". And I just think it’s weird (maybe even condescending to these Third World anti-colonial orgs and scholars) to frame decolonization in a way that believes removing Marx from reading lists is productive, especially because so many liberation orgs, activists, and scholars who work towards decolonization find Marx so important intellectually.
Overall, the writing in Yang’s short text can be a bit over-the-top in some ways, and I know some people who really disliked this text because of Yang’s style, but it’s actually not something I mind at all. My reservations about the book stem from elsewhere. The book’s main referent is the Third World and related decolonization struggles, particularly the form they took during the Cold War:
“Following other thinkers, I recognize the problematic uses of third world. On one hand, it was a signifier for different revolutionary nationalisms in the twentieth century: Juan Perón’s “third way” in Argentina [my own side comment, but out of all the revolutionary nationalisms to choose to platform here, why the one that literally harboured Nazis] and the Cuban Revolution were two such nationalisms that aspired to challenge Cold War binaries that revolved around the competing empires of the United States and the USSR. On the other hand, the third world is a warrant for nongovernmental organizations to operate as self-stylized humanitarian ventures and also for-profit corporations to dress up as charities. My choice to use third world is meant to be problematic. Any decolonizing project of the third world university should be a problematized one, in much the same way as revolutionary nationalisms and international aid should be problematized. Most directly, a third world university references the organizing by the Third World Liberation Front in the late 1960s and early 1970s to found a Third World College. These events reached an apex in the 1968–69 San Francisco State Strike; at 167 days, it was the longest student strike in U.S. history.”
This is in contrast to what Yang calls the Second University, described as such:
“The second world university, like Second Cinema, is marked by its investments in critical theory, that is, the diverse work of the Frankfurt School in critiquing media and capitalist systems in the “West” that emerged out of World War II. Two threads of critical theory run through academia in the arts and humanities, on one hand, and the social sciences, on the other. Literary critical theory focuses on the deconstruction of texts for their underlying meanings, whereas social theory focuses on domination within social systems, usually from a neo-Marxist frame.[15] At least ideologically, the second world university is committed to the transformation of society through critique, through a deconstruction of systems of power, and in this way offers fundamental analyses for any third world university curriculum. Yet its hidden curriculum reflects the material conditions of higher education—fees, degrees, expertise, and the presumed emancipatory possibilities of ”
“Usually, when traditionalists speak with nostalgia for the idealized university of old, the library counter in the sky where Kant and Hegel and Freire study together, this is the second world university. We are familiar with it; in the United States, it often houses the Marxist scholars, the ethnic studies formations, women’s studies, gender studies, and American studies.”
“When people say “another university is possible,” they are more precisely saying that “a second university is possible,” and they are often imagining second world utopias, where the professor ceases to profess, where hierarchies disappear, where all personal knowledges are special, and, in other words, none are… They are rarely talking about a university that rematriates land, that disciplines scholar-warriors rather than “liberating” its students, that repurposes the industrial machinery, that supports insurrectionary nationalisms as problematic antidotes to imperialist nationalism, that acts upon financial systems rather than just critiquing them, that helps in the accumulation of third world power rather than simply disavowing first world power…”
Yang notes how universities are most fundamentally colonial institutions deeply implicated in a land grant system that was directly dispossessing Indigenous nations of their Land:
““The act gave federal public lands to (Union) states, allotting thirty thousand acres of recently appropriated Indigenous lands for each senator and representative to stake out. States were encouraged to sell these “land grants” to raise money for new public universities that would research and educate American settlers in agriculture, science, and mechanical arts. Land is turned into capital for constructing universities for the principal goal of growing industry”
However, Yang also emphasizes these colonial institutions have maintained remarkable subversive potential and have produced many anti-colonial figures and theories that have aided in decolonization struggles for the cause of Indigenous self-determination and autonomy over their land:
“Colonial schools have a tradition of harboring spaces of anticolonial resistance. These contradictions are exquisitely written about by the eminent novelist, literary scholar, and postcolonial thinker Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. He describes how the machine of British colonial schooling in Kenya produced a Black governor of colonial Kenya and, paradoxically, also helped to produce Mau Mau revolutionaries. Fearful that schools sheltered the Mau Mau, who occupied the imaginations of Indigenous Kenyans and settlers alike as the quintessential Black, violent resistance movement, the colonial state banned many of its missionary-inspired schools in the 1952 declaration of a state of emergency. This ban included the Kenya Teachers College, whose campus was converted into “a prison camp where proponents of resistance to colonialism were hanged.”[5] During the Mau Mau Rebellion, wa Thiong’o attended Alliance High School, a segregated, elite missionary school for Black Africans in British Kenya. And prior to that, he attended Manguo elementary school, which was banned for a time by the colonial government. How can colonial schools become disloyal to colonialism?”
“Carter G. Woodson, noted founder of Black History Month and author of The Mis-education of the Negro (1933), attended the segregated Douglass School in post-Reconstruction Virginia (home to the Hampton Institute). A lesser-known de/colonial connection is that Woodson worked as a teacher, then as school supervisor, for the U.S. Army schools in the Philippines from 1903 to 1907. His book became the critical referent for Renato Constantino’s “The Miseducation of the Filipino” (1966). Taking off from the colonial landing are always already decolonial lines of flight”
At heart, decolonization for Yang is not about diversifying curricula or even about forming new theories and methodologies to produce novel forms of knowledge; its principal aim is the rematriation of Land back to Indigenous people:
“Decolonization is, put bluntly, the rematriation of land, the regeneration of relations, and the forwarding of Indigenous and Black and queer futures—a process that requires countering what power seems to be up to. To take effective decolonizing action, we must then have a theory of action that accounts for the permeability of the apparatuses of power and the fact that neocolonial systems inadvertently support decolonizing agendas.”
One of my main concerns with this book is that I believe the infiltration of academia is one of the things leftist intellectuals have spent a disproportionate amount of effort and energy on, and it should only be one of many subordinate projects that are primarily oriented towards revolutionary change with respect to political economy. The question is whether constructing a ‘Third University’ is worth it, or whether we should be focused on building other sorts of institutions or organizations that have more widespread influence. One of the examples Yang provides for a ‘Third University’ was the cadre of Cuban doctors that would train many other Third World medical students all over the world, but again this happened only after the Cuban Revolution (hence putting into question tactics that emphasize academia as a principle site of struggle, in contrast to state power):
“If we consider the Cuban Latin American School of Medicine as a university from which decolonizing work sometimes emerges—as it has trained more than twenty-five thousand physicians from eighty-four countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, North America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania to return to their home communities where doctors and medical care are scarce—then some third world university formations can operate at the scale of state apparatuses.[20] However, besides literal “third world” formations like Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina (ELAM), and explicitly decolonizing universities like Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi, the third world university also appears contemporaneously within first world universities.”
The one thing I find most helpful from this text is its emphasis on the way colonialism structures land relations and enables Indigenous dispossession:
“When we consider the transport of fracked oil via railways and pipelines, and the bulldozing of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe’s burial sites by the forces of Dakota Access Pipeline, we see the application of death to land itself. Destroying burial sites to lay pipeline is no different from the mass extermination of buffalo to lay rail. Both target the land (the nonhuman) to (1) eliminate Indigenous presence and (2) make the land alienable. Making death lands is an operation of making terra nullius. Death and extraction and fungibility ride together…. Removing land from people also means making war ontologically inherent on certain peoples. War-able peoples in turn lead to bombable lands, extinctionable animals, and genocide. The “human” is about all the idealizations above the flesh and above the land, what Sylvia Wynter describes as the elevation of an “ethnoclass” of the Western bourgeois conception of Man, “which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself.”
And finally, I’ll finish with this great excerpt on land relations and the more-than-human:
“[Tiffany Lethabo] King’s analysis thus extends our understanding of Black fungibility beyond the animal and into land, into the nonhuman beyond biological. In this way, King’s insights have provocations for the very relationship between the fields of Indigenous studies and Black studies. Whereas Blackness is obscured in ethnic studies as another “race,” it has greater capaciousness when thought about as a piece of the more-than-human world—the living world—as analyzed more deeply in Indigenous studies. When foundational Native studies scholar Jack Forbes asks, “where do our bodies end?” he draws attention to life as being far more than the unit of the living organism:
I can lose my hands, and still live. I can lose my legs and still live. I can lose my eyes and still live. I can lose my hair, eyebrows, nose, arms, and many other things and still live. But if I lose the air I die. If I lose the sun I die. If I lose the earth I die. If I lose the water I die. If I lose the plants and animals I die. All of these things are more a part of me, more essential to my every breath, than is my so-called body. What is my real body?”
June 11, 2020
MAJOR PEP TALK. basic premise is that no matter what kind of (US) university you are at, all its settler colonial machinery can be repurposed toward decolonial ends. First (land grant, D-1 sports, DoD funding, satellite campuses in the arabian peninsula, MDs & MBAs) and second (liberal arts, neo-marxist critique, self-actualization) all contain each other AND the possibility of the third (land back, indigenous sovereignty, black futures) university. the citations alone are fire and the synthesis is really important. some people are not ready for the conversation around BLACK INDIGENEITY and i admire it's centered so fully in this work through the example of Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's Kenya. The heart of this is the analogy to the project of third cinema/black cinematic production. and it shatters the mirage of legitimation through degrees and through DEBT (US personhood....). as a warning, it is very clunky sometimes. sorry i just hate the words "scyborg" and "agentive" and "assemblage" which are very fundamental in this piece. moreover, even though many of the liberatory examples are transnational, i think this is *very* US-centric but intellectual imperialism is a thing so makes sense. and the ofc global south is not just a place, but a ~position~. anyway, I was on the edge of my seat (up till the last chapter) even though i am MUCH TOO familiar with all the machinery la paperson talks about....
December 24, 2024
la paperson is also K Wayne Yang, of Tuck and Yang ‘Decolonisation is Not a Metaphor’ fame.
I’ll review proper after Xmas. The premise is that all my theoretical favs are here, and I feel scyborg, but paperson’s overemphasis on the technological might needlessly rule out the onto/agential dimensions of decolonising.
I’ll review proper after Xmas. The premise is that all my theoretical favs are here, and I feel scyborg, but paperson’s overemphasis on the technological might needlessly rule out the onto/agential dimensions of decolonising.
April 7, 2025
Essential read for anyone in higher education
August 8, 2024
This book is emblematic of what it means to be 'short but mighty'. The discussion around 'decolonising academia' is a very trendy one at the moment, but what does it actually mean to decolonize university? This book provides a framework for a third (and fourth) university that goes beyond the merely discursive practice of widening representation in types of knowledges taught but in actually decolonising the assemblage that is the university: the technologies and institutional frameworks that continue its colonial legacy. I thought about the University of Glasgow, being praised as the first British university to acknowledge its ties to slavery, yet not divesting from the arms industries reproducing neoliberal imperialism abroad. A read I will 100% recommend to anyone interested in the decolonisation of academia and the colonial legacy of university.
September 16, 2021
Every student should read this book.
January 9, 2025
an important work despite the jargon.
January 19, 2019
"I mean for you to apply this term to yourself. I hope you have fun with it. And also build a decolonizing machine while you're at it. For you, who likes to create a mess out of colonial apparatuses." (xiv)
"First worlding universities are machinery commissioned to actualize imperialist dreams of a settled world. Second worlding universities desire to humanize the world, which is a more genteel way to colonize a world that is so much more than human. A third worlding university is a decolonizing university." (xiv-xv)
"Taking off from the colonial landing are always already decolonial lines of flight..." (xvii)
"I am, and maybe you are too, a produced colonialist...As a colonialist scrap, I desire against the assemblage that made me." (xxiii)
"The subjugation of land and nonhuman life to deathlike states in order to support 'human' life is a 'biopolitics' well beyond the Foucauldian conception of biopolitical as governmentality or the neoliberal disciplining of modern, bourgeois, 'human' subject." (5)
"Under Western modernity, becoming 'free' means becoming a colonizer, and because of this, 'the central contradiction of modernity is freedom.'" (7)
"Attach a pacemaker to the heart of those machines you hate; make it pump for your decolonizing enterprise; let it tick its own countdown. Ask how, and how otherwise, of the colonizing machines." (24)
"When people say 'another university is possible,' they are more precisely saying that 'a second university is possible,' and they are often imagining second world utopias, where the professor ceases to profess, where hierarchies disappear, where all personal knowledges are special, and, in other words, none are. Their assumption is that people will 'naturally' produce freedom, and freedom's doppelganger is critical consciousness. They are rarely talking about a university that rematriates land, that disciplines scholar-warriors rather than 'liberating' its students, that repurposes the industrial machinery, that supports insurrectionary nationalisms as problematic antidotes to imperialist nationalisms, that acts upon financial systems rather than just critiquing them, that helps in the accumulation of third world power rather than simply disavowing first world power, that is a school-to-community pipeline not a community-to-school pipeline. In short, 'another university is possible,' so far, hasn't made possible a third world university." (42)
"As a strategic reassemblage of first world parts, [the third world university] is not a decolonized university, but a decolonizing one. But it still produces. It probably still charges fees and grants degrees.
What does the third world university feel like? You might find this part unsatisfying. I refuse to offer a utopic description for a strategic decolonizing machine (for utopias, go to the second world). I hope you make this same refusal." (44) he notes later on that because it is anti-utopian, its pedagogy might be disciplining and disciplinary in the name of decolonizing
"One ought to be a little agnostic about the value of democracy when inside a colonizing machine." (51)
"First worlding universities are machinery commissioned to actualize imperialist dreams of a settled world. Second worlding universities desire to humanize the world, which is a more genteel way to colonize a world that is so much more than human. A third worlding university is a decolonizing university." (xiv-xv)
"Taking off from the colonial landing are always already decolonial lines of flight..." (xvii)
"I am, and maybe you are too, a produced colonialist...As a colonialist scrap, I desire against the assemblage that made me." (xxiii)
"The subjugation of land and nonhuman life to deathlike states in order to support 'human' life is a 'biopolitics' well beyond the Foucauldian conception of biopolitical as governmentality or the neoliberal disciplining of modern, bourgeois, 'human' subject." (5)
"Under Western modernity, becoming 'free' means becoming a colonizer, and because of this, 'the central contradiction of modernity is freedom.'" (7)
"Attach a pacemaker to the heart of those machines you hate; make it pump for your decolonizing enterprise; let it tick its own countdown. Ask how, and how otherwise, of the colonizing machines." (24)
"When people say 'another university is possible,' they are more precisely saying that 'a second university is possible,' and they are often imagining second world utopias, where the professor ceases to profess, where hierarchies disappear, where all personal knowledges are special, and, in other words, none are. Their assumption is that people will 'naturally' produce freedom, and freedom's doppelganger is critical consciousness. They are rarely talking about a university that rematriates land, that disciplines scholar-warriors rather than 'liberating' its students, that repurposes the industrial machinery, that supports insurrectionary nationalisms as problematic antidotes to imperialist nationalisms, that acts upon financial systems rather than just critiquing them, that helps in the accumulation of third world power rather than simply disavowing first world power, that is a school-to-community pipeline not a community-to-school pipeline. In short, 'another university is possible,' so far, hasn't made possible a third world university." (42)
"As a strategic reassemblage of first world parts, [the third world university] is not a decolonized university, but a decolonizing one. But it still produces. It probably still charges fees and grants degrees.
What does the third world university feel like? You might find this part unsatisfying. I refuse to offer a utopic description for a strategic decolonizing machine (for utopias, go to the second world). I hope you make this same refusal." (44) he notes later on that because it is anti-utopian, its pedagogy might be disciplining and disciplinary in the name of decolonizing
"One ought to be a little agnostic about the value of democracy when inside a colonizing machine." (51)
October 15, 2018
In this work, La paperson (K. Wayne Yang) argues that a “third university” exists or has the potential to exist within the walls of established colonial institutions. This “third university” is home to the Scyborg, a machinic, Deleuzian subject who leverages the tools and resources of the university to reclaim land and to further the linked projects of Indigenous and Black sovereignty. Part of Paperson/Wang’s project is to historicize the university in relation to land; he calls it a land-grabbing “machine” designed to produce wealth for the settler colony. Yet this machine also produces forms of agency that exceed the colonial design: an example might be the “Hopification of settler schooling” whereby “decolonial elements” are written into educational readers, bending the colonial apparatus of “printing, distribution, and official cirriculum” toward Hopi reassemblages and a Hopi future. Paperson/Wang is agnostic about the shape of the decolonizing university, and admits that it will retain elements of the traditional university. Nevertheless, he urges readers to pursue “projects with decolonizing desires,” to build assemblages within the university that appropriate colonial technologies, and that turn students into “scyborgs.” An engaging, energizing challenge to our habitual ways of thinking about the university, but one that rewards familiarity with Deleuze and theories of the post-human.
September 1, 2020
This was a re-read for me, was so so good the second time. And learned so much more that I missed the first time. Very timely to read as I enter a virtual semester, envisioning radical and decolonial education in practical and tangible ways.
November 8, 2017
Fascinating, smart, really pushed me to think outside my comfort zone.
November 11, 2022
Whew! Just a little book, but took forever to read because it's so rich!
I originally picked it up b/c Max Liboiron cites it heavily in "Pollution Is Colonialism." I think the most useful concept that I gained from it is the idea of settler colonialism as a set of technologies. I'll be returning to that chapter often.
I originally picked it up b/c Max Liboiron cites it heavily in "Pollution Is Colonialism." I think the most useful concept that I gained from it is the idea of settler colonialism as a set of technologies. I'll be returning to that chapter often.
October 3, 2023
Every single person in academia needs to read this book. It is stellar in every way, and WILL reframe the way you think about the university system and academia in general. The book pushes, in the best way, for decolonization in the university system, and I loved the attention to language and importance placed on language choice throughout!!
December 25, 2019
"Figure out how technologies operate. Use a wrench."
May 1, 2020
Thank you Helya for enriching my life with this book
December 18, 2022
ventures into the kind of ambiguous academic speak that makes me wonder if it's the author or if it's me lol. this was just a lot of me nodding along pretending i understand what a scyborg is.
July 8, 2023
aaaagh amazing, this is the first academic book I have read in one sitting for a looong time. Partly this is because my brain is maybe (DON'T JINX IT) slightly (DON'T JINX IT) coming back to life, and partly because it is very short, but MAINLY it is because it is just a massive shot in the arm, the most hopeful thing I've read for ages and super exciting.
I got to this book via a couple of paths that converged lately: one was that I've recently co-edited a special issue of the journal Reception and one of the very cool papers therein was by Rosemary Johnsen, on the figure of the scholarly administrator, citing this Q&A with Max Liboiron, who says:
which, YES! That is very much what I also believe and hope and aspire to. (I have been describing my best self as a "bureaucrat for the revolution" for twenty years now.)
Anyway Liboiron cites this book, so I've had it on my radar to check it out. And then I finally got the energy to read it (in one hit, like I say) because of my good colleague Chrissy Howe's Introduction to Poetry subject at the University of Wollongong, which I had the good fortune to review recently, and while we were talking about it (it is, no lie, possibly the biggest piece of decolonial work done by a non-Indigenous scholar at UOW that I'm aware of), she recommended Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, which had been on my list for a long time. And reading that book - which is, in a VERY different way from Paperson's, also a way of centring Indigenous ways of knowing in a settler-colonial knowledge system, and inviting non-Indigenous people in - helped reorient me towards the way of thinking that this book takes further.
Anyway, sorry, this isn't really a review, is it? But the very cool thing about this book, La Paperson's book, this one I'm allegedly reviewing, is that it just charges in with the statement that the decolonial is always IN the colonial - that colonial machines ALWAYS FAIL to produce the perfect obedient colonial subjects/systems that they want to produce - and that out of that we can see how to subvert the colonial university by repurposing its machinery for decolonial uses at multiple scales. It's beautifully written - precise, poetic, pragmatic - and in its writing, La Paperson also reappropriates the canon of critical theory for decolonial uses, reminding me of the critiques of representation that I engaged with in the early 00s and that still underpin my tendency to think in terms of machines and apparatuses and assemblages, rather than the politics of representation, but that I haven't returned to explicitly for a long time so my thinking around that has become rather fuzzy and slippery (Like fuzzy slippers? okay...)
Anyway it is VERY EXCITING and now I think I am going to convene a decolonial committee in my School.
I got to this book via a couple of paths that converged lately: one was that I've recently co-edited a special issue of the journal Reception and one of the very cool papers therein was by Rosemary Johnsen, on the figure of the scholarly administrator, citing this Q&A with Max Liboiron, who says:
University admin, especially executive admin (what people mean when they say “the university”), is often assumed to be the opposite of activism and anticolonialism; but as someone who has been a professional activist for my entire adult life, I found admin to be the absolute best place to do lasting, systemic, and impactful anticolonial work.
which, YES! That is very much what I also believe and hope and aspire to. (I have been describing my best self as a "bureaucrat for the revolution" for twenty years now.)
Anyway Liboiron cites this book, so I've had it on my radar to check it out. And then I finally got the energy to read it (in one hit, like I say) because of my good colleague Chrissy Howe's Introduction to Poetry subject at the University of Wollongong, which I had the good fortune to review recently, and while we were talking about it (it is, no lie, possibly the biggest piece of decolonial work done by a non-Indigenous scholar at UOW that I'm aware of), she recommended Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, which had been on my list for a long time. And reading that book - which is, in a VERY different way from Paperson's, also a way of centring Indigenous ways of knowing in a settler-colonial knowledge system, and inviting non-Indigenous people in - helped reorient me towards the way of thinking that this book takes further.
Anyway, sorry, this isn't really a review, is it? But the very cool thing about this book, La Paperson's book, this one I'm allegedly reviewing, is that it just charges in with the statement that the decolonial is always IN the colonial - that colonial machines ALWAYS FAIL to produce the perfect obedient colonial subjects/systems that they want to produce - and that out of that we can see how to subvert the colonial university by repurposing its machinery for decolonial uses at multiple scales. It's beautifully written - precise, poetic, pragmatic - and in its writing, La Paperson also reappropriates the canon of critical theory for decolonial uses, reminding me of the critiques of representation that I engaged with in the early 00s and that still underpin my tendency to think in terms of machines and apparatuses and assemblages, rather than the politics of representation, but that I haven't returned to explicitly for a long time so my thinking around that has become rather fuzzy and slippery (Like fuzzy slippers? okay...)
Anyway it is VERY EXCITING and now I think I am going to convene a decolonial committee in my School.
April 15, 2022
la paperson makes clear in this slim volume that education as we know it is changing through the technologies that we have - what is radical about this volume is that the technologies go back to us: our bodies are the center for the "third university". This publication is wonderful in its move away from the discourse around the binary systems that clog movement forward in discussions concerning education.
"Democracy is not decolonization. Democratization will expand, at best, the normative class of citizens through reinvestments in settler colonialism and new articulations of antiblackness. However, "democracy" was also ready material for assemblage, a gear to attach to build the free university. The dream of universal education is born from the reality of exclusive schooling."
la paperson eliminates much of the romanticism that enshrouds the educative environment and with the veil drawn back, reveals our many complicities and resistances.
"Democracy is not decolonization. Democratization will expand, at best, the normative class of citizens through reinvestments in settler colonialism and new articulations of antiblackness. However, "democracy" was also ready material for assemblage, a gear to attach to build the free university. The dream of universal education is born from the reality of exclusive schooling."
la paperson eliminates much of the romanticism that enshrouds the educative environment and with the veil drawn back, reveals our many complicities and resistances.
July 8, 2024
This, like all about love, is one of those books that has had more impact on me the more it has sat in my brain and body. I read it as part of Dr Fatima's book club on Patreon
The idea of using the tools and technologies we have been educated in (especially in the University context) and then using them to subvert the systems they were intended to support, is really powerful. I don't quite know how far to compare this with The Master's Tools argument - to what extent do technologies sit outside Master's Tools and are able to be appropriated outside the system, or to what extent are they inherently part of it? Something to chew on.
Either way, I've already found myself referencing these arguments in a number of spaces, including religious ones. And for me, the lessons in how the individual can work towards radical different ends, and help build radical new systems, is really encouraging and hopeful - recommend!
The idea of using the tools and technologies we have been educated in (especially in the University context) and then using them to subvert the systems they were intended to support, is really powerful. I don't quite know how far to compare this with The Master's Tools argument - to what extent do technologies sit outside Master's Tools and are able to be appropriated outside the system, or to what extent are they inherently part of it? Something to chew on.
Either way, I've already found myself referencing these arguments in a number of spaces, including religious ones. And for me, the lessons in how the individual can work towards radical different ends, and help build radical new systems, is really encouraging and hopeful - recommend!
April 18, 2025
This book’s breakdown of/challenge to certain aspects of settler colonialism such as the settler-native-slave triad was very insightful, as were the explainations of the inherent colonialism of universities. While I’m a little underwheled by the vagueness conclusion/call to action, I think it was necessary and don’t see how it could have been any better. There were a few parts of this book that I honestly didn’t understand at all, and more parts where I’m sure I missed things, but it was still a very good read. This felt like a 4-4.5 star book to me, but I put it at 5 because I think my lack of understanding (which is a result of my minimal but growing exposure to theoretical texts on decolonialism such as this) was the reason this didn’t feel like a 5-star read to me, not the content itself. If I read this again in a few years I’m sure I would like it even more, and I highly recommend it.
January 28, 2020
I became aware of the book while reading about residential schools, where indigenous children were taken from family and community to receive an education intended to assimilate and destroy culture. And because I still saw the value of learning language and literacy, and had read something about distance learning, I thought this would be about other ways of teaching that could get around cost and distance prohibitions.
That is not what this is about.
I would say that this is more about decolonizing education - with some clear understanding of the obstacles - but it still really relates to residential schools as well as other kinds of schools, because to get to where we care about learning being open to everyone without destroying them, the decolonization has to come first, even though that is a process that won't be done completely, and certainly not through one effort.
That is not what this is about.
I would say that this is more about decolonizing education - with some clear understanding of the obstacles - but it still really relates to residential schools as well as other kinds of schools, because to get to where we care about learning being open to everyone without destroying them, the decolonization has to come first, even though that is a process that won't be done completely, and certainly not through one effort.
May 17, 2021
A wild ride all the way through. It feels like a call to action to take the resources you have access to within the US settler colonial university and repurpose them toward decolonial ends. The footnotes and references had me wanting to note down almost all of them. The writing may occasionally seem clunky or academic, but I think it is the most creative use of hyphens, parentheses, slashes and special characters I've ever encountered.
It's a pretty short book, I already know that I want to read it again with my friends in the university (and beyond) to see how we can work with the assemblages we have and build new ones. It seems like there's a lot of (dirty) work to do, but we must start somewhere. The book makes the task ahead seem quite uncertain, conspiratorial and dangerous, but that also makes it that much more thrilling to imagine.
It's a pretty short book, I already know that I want to read it again with my friends in the university (and beyond) to see how we can work with the assemblages we have and build new ones. It seems like there's a lot of (dirty) work to do, but we must start somewhere. The book makes the task ahead seem quite uncertain, conspiratorial and dangerous, but that also makes it that much more thrilling to imagine.
December 21, 2020
Honestly hard to read because of many obscure references, but that's probably on me (need to read more lol). It is based in the states also. But the 2nd chapter was pretty enlightening: "Land. And the University is settler colonial".
One thing I'm taking away from it: community is really important in decolonial work. Also this has opened my eyes to how universities are/were a colonial technology of the government, but also how (paraphrased) the third university can rise from scraps of the first and second.
I'd still recommend taking a look, mostly because it's so short and has some good nuggets.
https://manifold.umn.edu/read/a-third...
One thing I'm taking away from it: community is really important in decolonial work. Also this has opened my eyes to how universities are/were a colonial technology of the government, but also how (paraphrased) the third university can rise from scraps of the first and second.
I'd still recommend taking a look, mostly because it's so short and has some good nuggets.
https://manifold.umn.edu/read/a-third...
June 19, 2021
The writing was very heady & intellectual, but I actually quite enjoyed the academic/theoretical playfulness. The author discusses decolonizing potentials within the colonial/colonizing framework of the university, stressing the inevitable cracks and possibilities that have always existed inside structures of power and oppression. paperson writes that even as cogs in the colonizing machine, we can be “witches” and “scyborgs” in following decolonizing impulses within the “assemblages” of technologies working around and through us. A quick read, both thought-provoking and hopeful.
September 5, 2025
ironically this book is bogged down by the same ivory tower jargon that would be countered by a “school-to-community” third university—but that being said, paperson’s argument here is a good one
“Universities are giant machines attached to other machines: war machines, media machines, governmental and nongovernmental policy machines. Therefore the terms of the struggle in the university are also over this machinery—deactivating its colonizing operations and activating its contingent decolonizing possibilities.”
“Universities are giant machines attached to other machines: war machines, media machines, governmental and nongovernmental policy machines. Therefore the terms of the struggle in the university are also over this machinery—deactivating its colonizing operations and activating its contingent decolonizing possibilities.”
March 3, 2023
"In the alienation of land from life, alienable rights are produced: the right to own (property), the right to law (protection through legitimated violence), the right to govern (supremacist sovereignty), the right to have rights (humanity). In a word, what is produced is whiteness."
I think I am maybe in the middle of a massive shift within my politics, and I think this book speaks to much of what I am changing.
I think I am maybe in the middle of a massive shift within my politics, and I think this book speaks to much of what I am changing.
May 2, 2024
This little book packs quite a punch. I read it for a feminist pedagogy class in spring 2024, right around the time that pro-Palestinian protests were growing on US campuses, and it was the absolutely perfect time to encounter these thoughts. I know I'll return to this slim book many times in the future for its ability to illustrate the urgent needs for de-colonizing forces in higher education. I cannot recommend this volume highly enough for my fellow fans of liberatory pedagogy.
April 14, 2018
Leaves one unsatisfied, but, it seems to me, that is part of the point. To be unsatisfied. To seek out further sating. If that was the goal, the author has been exceedingly successful. For me, personally, builds on a lot of work and thinking on this topic, doing so from a different angle than I normally view it from. And engaging distinct sets of literature.
November 15, 2018
My favorite piece of nonfiction I've read this year! And a rad work of critical theory. Playing with ideas of the cyborg (or "scyborg") and third world cinema, paperson packs a lot of punch in short book on how to repurpose academic and artistic structures to decolonize the fuck out of some messed-up structures.
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