Decolonizing Diversity: The Transnational Politics of Minority Racial Difference

Through the theoretical interrogation of both “diversity” and “decolonization” as key concepts in contemporary university life, this essay (1) offers a vision for a transnational “decolonizing diversity” approach that serves as public and political pedagogy within and beyond the university, and (2) provides intellectual and methodological interventions in contemporary organizational manifestations of racialized minority difference — namely, (neo)liberal multicultural formations of diversity in the US academy. The essay offers case studies of “diversity” and/or “decolonizing” work across the United States and African (Ugandan) context, based on institutes and programs at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda; and the University of California, Merced. The decolonizing diversity approach does not locate racial difference in the “diverse bodies” and domesticated forms of inclusion in the university, but in the logics of longue durée imperial formations and coloniality that (re)produce racial difference, linking the politics of race and racial and epistemological inequality in liberal universities of the North to those in the global South.