Colonialism is often understood as a historical period that ended with political independence. This understanding assumes that power left together with colonial administrations. However, in many postcolonial societies, daily life did not reset after independence, because colonial rule had already shaped how labour, education, and culture were organised and evaluated.
This persistence of power is what sociologist Aníbal Quijano later named coloniality. Coloniality refers to structures that survived colonial rule and continued to organise race and labour together. These structures became visible in institutions such as schools, archives, and museums, where certain histories were preserved while others were sidelined or treated as marginal knowledge.
Because coloniality describes what endures, it complicates how decolonisation is often understood. Decolonisation usually refers to the moment when political authority shifted from colonial rulers to local elites. Yet this moment did not always disturb inherited systems, since many colonial categories continued to organise governance, culture, and social life under new national frameworks.
Thinking through de/coloniality places these conditions side by side. Coloniality points to ongoing arrangements of power, while decoloniality refers to efforts to detach from them. Writers working in this field describe decoloniality as unfinished work, because colonial ways of organising knowledge and value remain active in everyday relations, including cultural production.
Readers interested in understanding these debates more deeply can turn to key texts that map how colonial power continues to shape the present, while leaving open how it might be unsettled through critical work and collective struggle.
Recommended Reading
The following publications deepen the discussion on de/coloniality by tracing how colonial power continues to shape knowledge, history, gender, and cultural practice. Read together, they offer conceptual tools as well as grounded case studies.
1. Sadiah Boonstra (2022). On the Nature of Botanical Gardens: Decolonial Aesthesis in Indonesian Contemporary Art.
Published in Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia.
This article examines botanical gardens as colonial knowledge infrastructures and explores how Indonesian contemporary artists respond to and unsettle colonial ways of seeing nature and culture.
2. Sadiah Boonstra et al., eds. (2025). Rethinking Histories of Indonesia: Experiencing, Resisting and Renegotiating Coloniality.
ANU Press.
This edited volume brings together historians and researchers to rethink Indonesian history through lived experiences, resistance, and ongoing negotiations with coloniality rather than linear nationalist narratives.
3. María Lugones (2010). Toward a Decolonial Feminism.
Originally published in Hypatia.
Lugones introduces the concept of the coloniality of gender, arguing that modern gender itself was imposed through colonial domination, making decolonial feminism inseparable from struggles against racial and epistemic violence.
4. Walter D. Mignolo & Catherine E. Walsh (2018). On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis.
Duke University Press.
This book outlines decoloniality as both a critical framework and a practice, emphasizing the geopolitics of knowledge and the need to think from colonial differences rather than universal categories.
5. Aníbal Quijano (2024). Foundational Essays on the Coloniality of Power.
Duke University Press.
A collection of Quijano’s key writings that articulate coloniality as a global structure linking race, labor, capitalism, and knowledge, forming the backbone of decolonial thought.
6. Aníbal Quijano (2007). Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.
Published in Cultural Studies.
This essay clarifies how modern rationality is inseparable from colonial domination, showing why coloniality cannot be understood as a completed historical phase.