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Decolonising Decolonialism Morgan Quaintance challenges the reductive and partial conception of the decolonial project that allows the liberal art world to feel good about itself while ignoring continued colonialism in the present. In May 2015, a series of protests erupted at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Agitators gathered to demand the removal of a statue commemorating the colonial achievements of one man: former Cape Colony prime minister, angliciser of the African landscape, eugenicist and racist, Cecil Rhodes. Perhaps traceable as part of an unofficial 21st-century wave of de-monumentalisation that could begin with the destruction of Saddam Hussein’s Firdos Square statue in 2003 and then extend to the removal (or not) of Confederate monuments in the US, the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ movement also birthed an enthusiasm, at least in Europe and North America, for a specific term: decolonisation. Signalling a critical approach to the hegemony of prejudicial western, heteronormative socio-cultural, economic, political, racial and aesthetic values, the word has, in the past five years, reached a point of linguistic saturation as a one-size-fits-all, radicalising prefix. In any given week, calls for decolonising fashion, art history, university curricula, Rupaul’s Drag Race, ballet or the BAFTAs will clamour for attention in the fraught public markets of online and offline opinion. What have been the cultural and ideological implications of this development? For some, this widespread use of an ostensibly uncomplicated critical tool may be welcomed as a sign that progression and postcolonial redress are now popular. But, trending terminology aside, there is also a negative aspect to the dynamic. Through widespread use of the term, a process of dilution has taken place, leading to the loss of an essential critical rigour. The problem is semantic. In the West, and particularly in the art world, ‘decolonisation’ is largely understood and propagated as a symbolic and metaphorical process that has, for the most part, targeted objects, ideas and sociocultural behaviours. In parts of the majority world (that is to say, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, South America and so on) where the effects of colonial and neocolonial rule are concrete, enduring and operate at state level, the process of decolonisation is literal, economic and actual. The problem is that the former approach (the Euro-American symbolic) has dominated discourse, debate and action in the West to such a degree that the economic and actual effects of colonisation elsewhere are effectively marginalised and remain unchecked. The detrimental results of this parochial activism are twofold. First, the critical privilege – that is the privilege of operating in an environment virtually free from censorship or the threat of political violence – of those who live in the global south (whether white, black, South or East Asian and so on) is rarely, if ever, used to draw attention to events in countries in the majority world where such liberties may not exist. Second, western organisations which benefit from the concrete core features of state-level colonial structures operate with impunity within the partial critical frame that the Euro-American symbolic territory creates. It enables such organisations and institutions to project an image of themselves as moral agents and supporters 6 Musquiqui Chihying, The Sculpture, 2020, video Art Monthly no. 435, April 2020
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This abhorrent state of affairs can only continue if the partial decolonial view within the art world remains in place, a view that also passes over in silence the invasion, plunder and seizure of one land’s sovereignty, infrastructure and natural resources by a foreign power – that is to say, real and literal colonisation. of social justice even as they continue to use and to legitimise global systems – both structural and ideological – of exploitation. The point, here, is simple: while symbolic decolonisation might be a vital front from which to challenge prejudicial attributes of western sociocultural, economic and political hegemony, to do so without paying attention to colonial processes elsewhere undermines the symbolic project, and ultimately excuses, recentres and redoubles the same hegemonic and discriminatory western system that agitators are attempting to dismantle. In other words, it is not necessary to displace one approach with the other, but if progression from a global perspective is the goal then it is the ‘decolonial’ parochialism that must go. One of the major economic strategies used to hamper development and yet continue to secure revenue from former colonies is the facility of the secrecy jurisdiction or tax haven. It is a largely offshore system seemingly designed to receive illicit financial flows and corrupt capital under the bureaucratic veil of plausible legal deniability. Putting it in plain terms, Suketu Mehta, journalist and author of This Land is Our Land, noted that: ‘colonialism isn’t over. It got replaced by this incredibly inequitable system of world trade and particularly tax havens.’ On that score the UK is among the worst offenders. According to Nicholas Shaxson, ‘it is now clear that the UK sits, spider-like, at the centre of a vast international web of tax havens, which hoover up trillions of dollars’ worth of business and capital from around the globe and funnel it up to the City of London. The British Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories are some of the biggest players in the offshore world’ and ‘Jersey [is] the most important’ tax haven of them all. Jersey is also where two of the three Frieze subsidiary companies funnel their money (Frieze Publishing and Frieze Events Ltd; the third, Frieze Public Programmes, is the ‘non-profit’ whose only source of funds seem to be from Arts Council England, which according to ACE’s published figures has, since 2003, supplied it with approximately £446,371) to parent company Denmark Street Ltd for the purposes of what co-founder Matthew Slotover admits to be financial secrecy. In a comment on an article I wrote for the e-flux Conversations website, Slotover wrote, ‘we set up Denmark Street Ltd in Jersey [...] to keep our finances private from competitors’. In fact, Denmark Street Ltd is itself a subsidiary of another parent company based in the notorious onshore US tax haven of Delaware. According to Frieze Events Ltd’s 2019 accounts, ‘the immediate parent company is Denmark St Ltd [...] the ultimate parent company is WWE Entertainment Parent LCC, a company incorporated in Delaware, USA.’ What seems to have escaped those who continue to support the commercial brand despite its disclosure of offshore dealings, is that the use of tax havens for the purposes of financial secrecy is not a neutral or benign activity. To push millions through and thereby legitimise a system that enables the funding of terrorism, far right extremism, corruption, tax evasion, arms dealing, and just about every nefarious activity in the world that requires funding and an untraceable transfer of capital, is to be complicit. The one saving grace of all this is that it provides us with a perfect, textbook example of the hypocrisy, virtue signalling and fundamental undermining of the decolonial project that the co-option of a purely symbolic approach enables. It is an activity that reached the height of absurdity with Frieze magazine issue 199 from November-December 2018, the ‘decolonial’ issue. ‘DECOLONIZING CULTURE: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?’, all capitals and in bold text featured on the front cover, positioning the magazine as part of some progressive abstract ‘we’. ‘This issue of Frieze ,’ wrote joint editors Pablo Larios and Amy Sherlock in an opening statement, ‘examines the relationship between culture and colonialism, and explores the ways in which historic forms of domination have given rise to others …’ Without a trace of irony, contributions from Naeem Mohaimeen, Rey Chow, Aruna D’Souza, Jackie Wang and Erika Balsom are placed between ads for commercial galleries and luxury brands, and have been drafted in to tackle ‘hegemony’, Edward Said’s Orientalism, Spotify’s ‘neocolonial ambitions’, the films of Trinh T Minh-ha and so on. Not one contributor or staff writer mentions the elephant in the room, that the main economic extractor of capital and facilitator of illicit financial flows from former colonies (see the Luanda Leaks for recent evidence) is the very real structure of tax havens. The final passage of Larios and Sherlock’s introduction reads: ‘our attempt with this issue is to listen more, listen better – in the hope and commitment that, as [Achille] Mbembe has written: “From now on, the world will be conjugated in the plural.”’ The strange tonal mix of self-importance and affected solemnity in these banal final lines returns us to the fundamental semantic differences in approaches to decolonisation. Here we can see how, in the West, decolonisation also functions as a broad synonym for establishing multiculturalism. To decolonise, in this instance, essentially means to diversify, to encourage heterogeneity, to have more ‘people of colour’ in a magazine than usual – but only for one issue. What is also evident is how this process recentres and redoubles the hegemony of culpable and complicit western institutions as efforts are aimed towards their acceptance of decolonisation/ diversity. In issue 199, the Frieze team centre themselves as the intended recipients of messages delivered by the moral agents they have solicited to write, uncritically, within the magazine’s reductive editorial frame. It is they who hear the pleas of the gathered disenfranchised and promise to ‘listen more’, to ‘learn’ and to generally ‘do better’, even as they (and the contributors who are paid by them) continue to participate in and benefit from actual colonial systems that are actively undermining development, democracy and human rights in countries across the world. This abhorrent state of affairs can only continue Art Monthly no. 435, April 2020 7

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Decolonising Decolonialism

Morgan Quaintance challenges the reductive and partial conception of the decolonial project that allows the liberal art world to feel good about itself while ignoring continued colonialism in the present. In May 2015, a series of protests erupted at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Agitators gathered to demand the removal of a statue commemorating the colonial achievements of one man: former Cape Colony prime minister, angliciser of the African landscape, eugenicist and racist, Cecil Rhodes. Perhaps traceable as part of an unofficial 21st-century wave of de-monumentalisation that could begin with the destruction of Saddam Hussein’s Firdos Square statue in 2003 and then extend to the removal (or not) of Confederate monuments in the US, the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ movement also birthed an enthusiasm, at least in Europe and North America, for a specific term: decolonisation. Signalling a critical approach to the hegemony of prejudicial western, heteronormative socio-cultural, economic, political, racial and aesthetic values, the word has, in the past five years, reached a point of linguistic saturation as a one-size-fits-all, radicalising prefix. In any given week, calls for decolonising fashion, art history, university curricula, Rupaul’s Drag Race, ballet or the BAFTAs will clamour for attention in the fraught public markets of online and offline opinion. What have been the cultural and ideological implications of this development?

For some, this widespread use of an ostensibly uncomplicated critical tool may be welcomed as a sign that progression and postcolonial redress are now popular. But, trending terminology aside, there is also a negative aspect to the dynamic. Through widespread use of the term, a process of dilution has taken place, leading to the loss of an essential critical rigour. The problem is semantic. In the West, and particularly in the art world, ‘decolonisation’ is largely understood and propagated as a symbolic and metaphorical process that has, for the most part, targeted objects, ideas and sociocultural behaviours. In parts of the majority world (that is to say, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, South America and so on) where the effects of colonial and neocolonial rule are concrete, enduring and operate at state level, the process of decolonisation is literal, economic and actual. The problem is that the former approach (the Euro-American symbolic) has dominated discourse, debate and action in the West to such a degree that the economic and actual effects of colonisation elsewhere are effectively marginalised and remain unchecked.

The detrimental results of this parochial activism are twofold. First, the critical privilege – that is the privilege of operating in an environment virtually free from censorship or the threat of political violence – of those who live in the global south (whether white, black, South or East Asian and so on) is rarely, if ever, used to draw attention to events in countries in the majority world where such liberties may not exist. Second, western organisations which benefit from the concrete core features of state-level colonial structures operate with impunity within the partial critical frame that the Euro-American symbolic territory creates. It enables such organisations and institutions to project an image of themselves as moral agents and supporters

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Musquiqui Chihying, The Sculpture, 2020, video

Art Monthly no. 435, April 2020

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