Decolonising the curricular’s disciplining methodologies’ quest to humanise the humanities

Abstract

Searching for the humanity African descents lost through European colonisation, Post-1994 South Africa continues the struggles in large-scale protests that have become it’s defining feature. And not much in the way of scholarly rigour interrogates this antagonism. Privileging the narrative of hope as a humanistic approach for nation building, creative interventions from radical social movements have not been intellectually engaged as such, but have been characterised as backward and unlawful, therefore requiring violence as a mediating force. But the slow and constant growth of radical black studies in the midst of post-colonial scholarship has been met with academic resistance.
This is because the ‘post’ in the post-colonial is an open-ended accommodation that expands by way of inter- and trans-disciplinary scholarship required to conform to already established methodologies, while black studies pose more disciplinary challenges informed by anti-colonial-slavery movements. In this article, I argue that the call for ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ and a decolonised curriculum was not for an expansion of the current disciplinary measures of learning rooted in colonial scholarship, but a push for an anti-colonial method of learning. I argue that current attempts at accommodating by way of expanding post-coloniality are rooted in the academy’s self-reflection’s self-perpetuating mechanism. I contend that there exists outside the academy what I call ‘creative radical interventions’ that come from black social movements. Land occupations that result from community protest such as the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ student movement’s ‘Shackville’ was one of the many testing grounds at the call for an embrace for theories emanating from outside institutional disciplinary confines.
Contribution: As the curriculum expands towards more disciplines, with it comes methodologies which I posit cannot deal with what it means to accommodate protests that resist academic disciplinary measures. Looking at creative interventions from social movements, this article interrogates what it means to be creative beyond academic disciplinary confines.