Introduction

This chapter starts with the premise taken up in the previous chapters – that decolonisation is a specific anti-colonial political project of justice (as per da Silva), instituted by colonised peoples, including, peoples in what is designated the Global South, racialised peoples, and indigenous peoples. So, decolonisation is the stubborn and enduring refusal of conditions of life imposed by the logics and praxes of colonial domination, through, inter alia, Euro-modern legal concepts and meanings of the human and space–time. Therefore, as legal academics attempting to think of legal knowledge through the prisms of decolonisation and anticolonialism, we need to understand what it means, theoretically and practically, to use the phrases ‘decolonise the law curriculum/law school’. Here, I must reiterate the point that decolonisation begins as and remains a political project. The phrase ‘decolonise the law curriculum’ and its (mis)use in that sense are somewhat and increasingly mismatched. This is especially so when we detach our work in Global North higher education from the political history and present of ongoing refusal of the capitalist-colonial-enslavement ever-present. Detached from its radical roots, to claim that we are ‘decolonising the law curriculum’ becomes akin to suggesting that we are ‘measuring the yellow’ or ‘climbing the fragrance’.

To avoid misuse of radical language we must consider the ways in which learning, teaching, research, practice, and other related activity, in law can adopt a position of refusal of colonial logics and praxes. This includes understanding, as Chapter 2 explored, how much colonial code is embedded and reproduced in legal knowledge. So, I suggest that care be taken with the phrase ‘decolonising the curriculum,’ as it may not be the right phraseology to describe what the marriage of these spheres of knowledge entails within higher education in the Global North, lest we dilute the political nature of the longstanding project of decolonisation.