Pluriversity

from Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive by Achille Mbembe

... at the end of the decolonizing process, we will no longer have a university. We will have a pluriversity.

What is a pluriversity?

A pluriversity is not merely the extension throughout the world of a Eurocentric model presumed to be universal and now being reproduced almost everywhere thanks to commercial internationalism.

By pluriversity, many understand a process of knowledge production that is open to epistemic diversity.

It is a process that does not necessarily abandon the notion of universal knowledge for humanity, but which embraces it via a horizontal strategy of openness to dialogue among different epistemic traditions.

To decolonize the university is therefore to reform it with the aim of creating a less provincial and more open critical cosmopolitan pluriversalism – a task that involves the radical re-founding of our ways of thinking and a transcendence of our disciplinary divisions.

Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive^[1]