Book Review: Patel, Leigh. Decolonizing Educational Research: From Ownership to Answerability. Routledge, 2016, 120 pp.

Abstract

Leigh Patel’s work on decolonizing educational spaces provides a glimpse into an important transcendental motif in decolonial studies: that decolonization must be visible in the structure of being as such. I argue in this book review that the specific ontological picture provided, what I call a “Decolonial Deleuzean” view, implies a one-and-many relationship characterizable by what one scholar has called a “vegetal” ontology, the human social coordinate system in the metaphor of “the plant that is not one.” I argue further that this view fails to provide a believable picture of specifically human decolonial belonging in its ontological register by claiming that the plant metaphor provides an inappropriate one-and-many relationship to actual human spaces. “Decolonial Deleuzean” education therefore reintroduces the very exclusivity criterion it is designed to eliminate. I provide, finally, a psychoanalytical correction, one which is compatible with the decolonial project, but strictly speaking, not the Deleuzean one.