‘Decolonization’ as neoliberal ideology: Anthropological theory and the political economy of the modern university

Current management-led proposals to ‘decolonize the university’ within elite Anglo-American institutions ideologically legitimate their restructuring as transnational businesses. While anthropology is uniquely placed to critique social institutions and ideologies, its current dominant theoretical orientation is blind to the forms of power which shape its own institutional environments. Even as anthropologists have engaged in theories said to address problems of representation and epistemic injustice, they have failed to analyze the multiple crises of contemporary higher education, resulting from the profound transformation of universities’ political economy under neoliberal capitalism. A genuinely decolonial anthropology is one which frankly analyses its own structural economic conditions and combines this with a political practice of national and transnational solidarities to transform the institution of the university at the local and global level.