Colonialism’s Dual Paradigm of Destruction and Imposition

The late Anibal Quijano wrote in 1992 that colonialism consists of the systematic repression of all ways of knowing and modes of producing knowledge, which includes the production of “perspectives, images and systems of images, symbols, modes of signification, over the resources, patterns, and instruments of formalized and objectivised expression, intellectual or visual” (p. ). As Quijano notes, colonialism is always followed “by the imposition of the use of the rulers’ own patterns of expression…to impede the cultural production of the dominated, but also as a very efficient means of social and cultural control…. In Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism (2000), Quijano argues that colonizer imposes “a mystified image of their own patterns of producing knowledge and meaning. At first, they placed these patterns far out of reach of the dominated. Later, they taught them in a partial and selective way, in order to co-opt some of the dominated into their own power institutions. Then European culture was made seductive: it gave access to power. After all, beyond repression, the main instrument of all power is its seduction. Cultural Europeanisation was transformed into an aspiration.

Eurocentrism, therefore, shouldn’t be understood as representing every way of knowing that has ever come out of Europe. It instead constitutes a particular rationality aligned to multiple, interlocking systems of domination. Both analytics enable one to understand what Daud Abdullah refers to as colonialism’s dual paradigm of destruction and imposition. The physical destruction Palestinians endured during the Nakba and are currently enduring in the ongoing genocide in Gaza both constitute one side of this paradigm. The other side is about the imposition of knowledge that aims to prevent colonized peoples from questioning and resisting the material destruction of their world and the imposition¹ of a worldview that justifies the former.

Colonization undeniably involves genocide, yet it is the destruction and distortion of the history and knowledge of the colonized that serves as a means to erase the past and thus to minimize resistance in the present. That is to say, scholasticide is a means to permanently foreclose the possibility of building another future. It is a close companion of genocide, a violent process that not only destroys other modes of knowing but also alternative approaches to life or other ways of being and relating to the world. Ultimately, it aims to destroy a colonized peoples’ ability to live on their own land. To forget who they are. To forget where they came from. To forget what was stolen from them. To aspire to be what they are not and what they will never be. To side with those who’ve destroyed their lifeworld. To side with the colonial state responsible for the genocide of their people and erasure of their history. These are certainly the aims but we know that colonial powers, despite how much they have tried to impose their philosophy and pedagogy of domination, they have never got rid of the ideas of resistance and the dreams of liberation. It is not for nothing that there is a systematic attack on those who risk their livelihoods just to keep these ideas and dreams alive. In this regard, scholasticide is and has always been integral to counterinsurgency, for it is the erasure and distortion of insurgent histories, knowledges, and practices that gives permanence to settler colonial states such as Israel and the United States.

Scholasticide is central to Israel’s zionist settler colonial project. Access to radical texts is perceived as a threat to Israel’s dominant narrative. It is for this reason that books and other rare texts are targeted. As Samar Saeed and Juman Abujbara note, access to radical texts has formed part of the collective resistance in Palestine. The fedayeen, for instance, read texts that “expanded their horizons and connected them with other revolutionaries, thinkers, and philosophers, while also arming them with historical facts and theories that informed their revolutionary work and strengthened their commitment to returning to Palestine”. Ghassan Kanafani recognized this revolutionary act of reading and learning from the social reality of other contexts, such as Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. As Patrick Higgins writes, Kanafani “encouraged readers to hold up a wide-angle lens to these events and view them as connected, not as random or isolated happenings in countries far-flung from one another.” Reading here becomes a revolutionary act aimed not solely at reinterpreting social reality but, more importantly, finding ways to collectively act upon the world to change it, while making connections between struggles for liberation across geographies. It is a radical practice when directed at unsettling the distorted worldview upheld by racist, dehumanizing colonial discourses that justify colonial violence. Zionist settler colonialism seeks to not only annihilate Palestinian existence but also to permanently disappear sites of knowledge production (e.g., libraries, museums, and archives), while creating “facts on the ground” that try to legitimize the permanence and presence of Israel and, conversely, the disappearance of all that which is Palestinian, both past and present, as well as a denial of the material conditions for a Palestinian future.

1. It’s important to remember that the dual paradigm of destruction and imposition is both material and symbolic. Imposition is not solely an epistemological concern. It’s about that concrete imposition of non-native trees in Palestine, buildings, and universities that are founded directly on top of destroyed villages.