Introduction to and overview of decolonisation

'To me, decolonisation is an understanding about how the historical processes of colonisation have shaped the world we live in today, and shaped our systems of studying and learning about the world. It is all about recognizing some of the imbalances, inequalities, and biases that are introduced through those processes. It doesn't mean we have to reject everything that has been studied and learned about through Western systems of learning, but it's about opening up and recognizing the different ways of understanding the world that there are -- and thinking about the ways that they can be combined with what we do in the West, to create even richer, fuller, and better understandings about how the way the world works.'

--Dr Tom Currie, Associate Professor in Cultural Evolution, University of Exeter

'[There is] is a major question and a major research problem that has to be resolved. The record of...resistance does not necessarily lie in written archival documents; one has to really search into what might be called 'cultural memory'. Of course, there are evidences of cultural memory that can be recovered; that is where this effort that decolonisation must explore, in order to find such material and develop what would be a more internal critique of the past. It seems to me that is a major challenge of decolonising higher education today.'

--Professor Partha Chatterjee, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies, Columbia University and former Director (1997-February 2007) at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata