Diaspora Studies

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A decolonial critique of diaspora identity theories

and the notion of superdiversity

Finex Ndhlovu

To cite this article: Finex Ndhlovu (2016) A decolonial critique of diaspora identity
theories and the notion of superdiversity, Diaspora Studies, 9:1, 28-40, DOI:
10.1080/09739572.2015.1088612

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09739572.2015.1088612

Published online: 24 Sep 2015.

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Diaspora Studies, 2016
Vol. 9, No. 1, 28–40, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09739572.2015.1088612

A decolonial critique of diaspora identity theories and the notion of

superdiversity
Finex Ndhlovu*

Archie Mafeje Research Institute, College of Graduate Studies, University of South Africa, Pretoria,
South Africa
(Received 6 August 2015; accepted 27 August 2015)

Superdiversity is among the latest theories of diaspora cultural identities from the Global North
inspired by the failures and limitations of multiculturalist social policies of the twentieth century.
This paper addresses the question to what extent do theoretical suppositions of superdiversity consti-
tute a genuine and radical departure from the logics of multiculturalism. The paper concludes that
superdiversity suffers from the same limitations that prompted the rejection and ultimate demise of
previous theories such as multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism. Like multiculturalism and other
similar theories that have tried to grapple with questions of diaspora cultures and identities, superdi-
versity reinforces the same ideas that it purports to question and challenge – namely, the tendency to
homogenize cultural and social groups, and the uncritical embrace of elitist neoliberal conceptualiz-
ations of culture and identity.

Keywords: diaspora identities; diaspora cultures; superdiversity; multiculturalism; decolonial

epistemology; Southern theory

Introduction
Diaspora cultures and identities have been theorized from a wide range of perspectives. However,
the majority of such theorization has come from the Global North, a development that has invi-
sibilized other alternative epistemologies, particularly those from the Global South. The hegemo-
nic dominance of Euro-American perspectives, that include multiculturalism and superdiversity,
has meant that the promises held by other ways of knowing, reading and interpreting the world
have been consigned to the fringes of mainstream identitarian discourses.
Multiculturalism was especially at the forefront of social policy agendas and guiding philos-
ophy for identitarian debates from the 1960s to the late 1990s. Superdiversity is, on the other
hand, a more recent theoretical approach developed by Steven Vertovec in 2006 to describe
the complexity of issues relating to migration in twenty-first century Britain and the entire Euro-
pean Union. While superdiversity was devised to be a framework that would lead to a better
understanding of the complex nature of cultural and linguistic diversity in a manner that surpasses
the traditional strand-based multiculturalism approaches, it is also fraught with limitations. A
major problem with these two theoretical frameworks is their tendency to privilege and impose
a Western worldview of identities often masked behind discourses of universalism, modernity,

*Email:fndhlovu@une.edu.au

© 2015 Organisation for Diaspora Initiatives, New Delhi

 Diaspora Studies 29

globalization and other similar terminologies. Universality, in particular, is now repeatedly

invoked to express and qualify the status of certain values and principles (Ramadan 2011). The
ultimate consequence of this has been the marginalization of other alternative ways of looking
at identities, particularly those from the Global South. Most frameworks from the Global
South, such as Southern theory (Connell 2007; Rehbein 2010; Comaroff and Comaroff 2011)
and decoloniality (Mignolo 2000, 2002, 2007, 2011; Quijano 2000; Grosfoguel 2005, 2006,
2009; Dussel 1995, 1998), are currently absent from the table of ideas that inform past and
present understandings of the world and humanity in general. It is for this reason that this
paper suggests decoloniality as a marginalized epistemology that promises to shed some new
and progressive insights on contending issues around diaspora cultures and identities.

Critique of multiculturalism1
The period from the 1960s to the mid-1990s witnessed a surge in the adoption of multiculturalism
policies by many Western liberal democracies as a measure for increased recognition and accom-
modation of immigrant and minority cultural identities. Multiculturalism was seen at the time as
part of a larger human-rights revolution motivated by the desire to overturn a range of pre-World
War II illiberal and undemocratic relationships of hierarchy, which had been justified by racialist
ideologies that explicitly propounded the cultural superiority of some people over others (Bis-
soondath 1994; Kymlicka 2012). The foundational logic of multiculturalism was, therefore, to
challenge the legacies of earlier ideologies of ethnic, cultural and racial hierarchization and
replace them with democratic values of equality, diversity and the respect and recognition of cul-
tural difference. In a 2012 report for the Migration Policy Institute, Will Kymlicka developed an
eight point Multicultural Policy Index that attempts to capture the evolution of multicultural pol-
icies particularly in Western democracies and to also tease out the substance of multiculturalism in
relation to immigrant populations.2
However, notwithstanding their positive intentions, multiculturalism policies also have a
darker side that has seen the persistence of racial hierarchies, inequalities and the social stigma-
tization of indigenous and immigrant minorities. Multiculturalism has failed to address the under-
lying sources of these issues that are still alive and kicking under its watchful eye. Indeed, as
Turner and Khondker point out in their recent book titled Globalization: East and West, ‘multi-
culturalism as an idea of political cultural accommodation or as a policy option remains embroiled
in complex controversies’ (2010, 175). Multiculturalism and its associated policy ideals have, in
fact, been criticized for unintentionally contributing to the further isolation, negative stereotyping
and marginalization of immigrants and other ethnic minorities (Kymlicka 2012). These limits of
the ideological assumptions of multiculturalism coupled with its blind spots have led to incipient
calls for alternative paradigms. Such calls have been inspired further by the increasingly multi-
formed, multidimensional and convoluted nature of migrant and diaspora identities that require
us to rethink our understandings of cultural and identity politics.
The critique of multiculturalism undertaken in this section, therefore, aims to address two
theoretical and empirical questions that have been raised by other scholars of race, migration
and diaspora identity studies: (a) Are the logics of multiculturalism celebrated among many
Western liberal democracies able to sufficiently articulate transnational frames needed to compre-
hend the cultural identities of diasporas? (b) In what ways do discourses of multiculturalism in
nations of the Global North end up being alibis for exceptionalism in relation to migrant cultural
identities from the Global South? Flowing from these questions are five strands of criticisms that
have been leveled against multiculturalism both as a policy agenda and as a philosophy for under-
standing identitarian discourses. First, some critics and commentators have pointed to the ways in
which multiculturalism contributes to the marginalization of minorities by keeping them off
30 F. Ndhlovu

serious policy agendas (Vertovec 2010). The logic of multiculturalism is thus seen as being used
to reinforce neoliberal modes of governmentality in which the values of minorities are imprisoned
and sacrificed at the altar of the hegemonic ambitions of the nation-state with its desire to govern
and control unfettered. Second, others have suggested that multiculturalism comprises a divide-
and-rule strategy by governments in relation to indigenous and immigrant ethnic minorities,
wrought by ethnic minority associations’ competition for funding or political influence. Third,
the multicultural ideology has been criticized for being loaded with misleading, tokenist and rei-
fying view of communities as never-changing, socially bounded entities. The fourth criticism is
about multiculturalism’s overemphasis on the maintenance of culture while paying less policy
attention to socio-economic imperatives and other non-cultural aspirations of groups and individ-
uals. Fifth, multiculturalism has been criticized for being often an official and institutional tool for
producing inequality instead of functioning as a framework for inclusion (Vertovec 2010; Shome
2012). This fifth criticism stems from the realization that multiculturalism seems to have facili-
tated the cultural and linguistic profiling of different groups of people leading to the emergence
of social hierarchies, which are often easily justified on grounds of cultural difference. The con-
sequence of these somewhat reified social structures that are sustained by the rosy promises of
multiculturalism have inadvertently provided fodder for many forms of inequality; including
the entrenchment of bigotry, discrimination; what Bonilla-Silva (2006) calls colour blind
racism or racism without racists – that is, a new form of racial inequalities and attitudes repro-
duced through practices that are subtle, institutional and appear non-racial on the surface.
These failures and the apparently disingenuous nature of multiculturalism are summed up in
Hall’s (2001, 3) poignant criticism:

Over the years the term ‘multiculturalism’ has come to reference a diffuse, indeed maddeningly
spongy and imprecise, discursive field: a terrain of false trails and misleading universals. Its references
are wild variety of political strategies. Thus conservative multiculturalism assimilates difference into
the customs of the majority. Liberal multiculturalism subordinates difference to the claims of a uni-
versal citizenship. Pluralist multiculturalism corrals difference within a communally segmented
social order. Commercial multiculturalism exploits and consumes difference in the spectacle of the
exotic ‘other’. Corporate multiculturalism manages difference in the interests of the centre.

A number of other political theorists (e.g. Brubaker 2001; Jopkke 2004; Vertovec and Wessendorf
2010) have added their voices to this rebuttal, questioning in particular the basic premises and
assumptions as well as claims about the perceived alliance between multiculturalism and lib-
eralism. For Shome (2012, 145), the biggest downside of multiculturalism lies in its conceptual
logics that ‘often remain situated within a nation-centred ethos of citizenship, justice, rights, and
identity, and also in West-centric assumptions about “freedom”, “belonging”, and “democracy”’.
Shome further argues that in a transnationally connected world, categories of culture collide in
messy and crisscrossing ways that defy any sense of neat or organized patterns. In particular,
the globalization of media, capital, culture and the assertion of multiple non-Western modernities
have given rise to new and complex identities and identity narratives that collide and collude in
unprecedented ways. As used in this article, the concept of ‘multiple non-Western modernities’
refers to knowledge systems, civilizations, development pathways and other epistemologies
and philosophies that originate from the Global South or non-Western regions of the world.
Echoing the words of Scott (1999) and Hall (1996), Shome posits that the ‘problem space’ of
culture requires new significance in a world of connected and colliding modernities where
what happens ‘elsewhere’ impacts the ‘here’ and where the ‘elsewhere’ and ‘here’ are not
always geographically where we think they are (2012, 145). These are complex issues, which
the insular and reifying multiculturalism perspectives have failed to adequately capture. The
theoretical concepts and logics of multiculturalism have not been able to speak to what Hage
 Diaspora Studies 31

(2010, 235) calls the ‘ungovernable intercultural and transnational relations that interrupt nation-
based multicultural governmentality’. Therefore, in order for us to fully grasp the logics of cul-
tural tensions and dynamics in shifting landscapes such as those occupied by diaspora commu-
nities around the world, we need to re-examine the tendencies and conceptual frameworks
through which we theorize the experiences of these people and the issues besetting them.
These reservations about the usefulness of multiculturalism are particularly prompted by per-
ceptions about the persistence of discrimination and racism against ethnic and immigrant min-
orities in countries such as Canada, Australia, the UK, Germany and in most of the European
Union where multiculturalism policies have previously been embraced and successfully main-
streamed in the public sphere. The theory and practice of multiculturalism have recently come
under intense scrutiny from political leaders of leading Western liberal democracies, particularly
in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the USA, the Bali bombings of 2002 and the July
2005 bombings in London. For example, in 2010, German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared
that multiculturalism had been an ‘utter failure’. Similarly, British Prime Minister David
Cameron bemoaned the failure of multiculturalism, which he suggested was fostering extremism.
David Cameron pointed specifically to what he described as immigrants living ‘parallel lives’
when the expectation is for them to integrate into the values of the British ‘national culture’.
Along the same lines, in February 2011 the then French President Nicolas Sarkozy suggested
that the concept of multiculturalism was a ‘failure’, declaring that ‘We have been too concerned
about the identity of the person who was arriving [in France] and not enough about the identity of
the country that was receiving him’ (The Telegraph, 11 February 2011). In a Televised interview
in which he singled out Muslim immigrants, Sarkozy went further, declaring that ‘ … we don’t
want a society where communities coexist side by side’ (The Telegraph, 11 February 2011),
which suggests multiculturalism has failed to achieve the neoliberal ideals of a somewhat seam-
less and cohesive French society.
I argue that what multicultural policies have succeeded in doing is to produce multiple mono-
culturalisms, multiple monolingualisms and multiple monolithic identities that exist side by side
in a shared geopolitical space known as the nation-state. I also argue that the real problem is not
the immigrants but the unreasonable, if not unrealistic, expectation that in its current iteration the
theory and logic of multiculturalism would have achieved such an onerous task. As multicultur-
alism is essentially designed to produce and promote singular unitary social and cultural groups
(Bissoondath 1994; Ndhlovu 2014, 2015; Vertovec and Wessendorf 2010), it is inevitable that its
policies will always result in multiple communities coexisting in a non-seamless way as there is
nothing that binds them together other than the shared geographical space. I certainly see no
problem with this type of a society. The only thing that makes such a social arrangement some-
what untenable is the overarching multicultural conceptual framework that is locked in the nation-
state-centric view of cultural identities, which fails to step up to the realities of transnationalties –
including multiple competing and contending relations of modernities that traverse the ever-shift-
ing frontiers of belonging and identity narratives.
In order to illustrate the above points on the limitations of multiculturalism, I look at the
example of Australia where multiculturalism policies were introduced in the 1970s by the
Malcom Fraser Liberal Government. In Australia, multiculturalism policies have always been
seen as a positive move that paved the way for a more open, tolerant and welcoming Australian
society against the backdrop of previous policies that were overtly discriminatory. Australian mul-
ticultural policies sought to achieve a number of things including cultural maintenance and insti-
tutionalizing ethnic difference, addressing the negative consequences of Australia’s old identity as
‘white’ and ‘British’ and providing an identity option for an Anglo-Saxon settler society without
an own founding myth (Joppke 2004). Three policy documents shaped the form and content of the
Australian multiculturalism discourse, namely the Galbally Report of 1978, the Australian
32 F. Ndhlovu

Council on Ethnic and Population Affairs (ACPEA) document titled Multiculturalism for all
Australians: Our Developing Nationhood (1982) and the National Agenda for a Multicultural
Australia (Australian Government 1999). The latter was the key government statement on multi-
culturalism that was to shape national discourse in this area for the rest of the past millennium.
There were several colourful clichés that emerged at the time seeking to project Australian multi-
culturalism as one of the most enviable policies ever devised. Some such clichés included the fol-
lowing: ‘multiculturalism is a matter for all Australians’, ‘the development of a multicultural
society will benefit all Australians’ (Galbally 1978), ‘we must be multicultural to be national’
(Castles et al. 1988) and ‘take away multicultural Australia and you have nothing’ (Betts 1999).
What we see here is a consistent coupling of multiculturalism with Australian nationhood and
national identity. The distinction between the concept of multiculturalism and that of nationhood
lies in that the latter has more to do with being a member of an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson
1991, 6), which is the nation-state. For one to be a legitimate member of that polity or nation, he/
she has to be imagined as such by members of the community in question. On the other hand,
multiculturalism is about the coexistence of many cultures alongside each other. The coexisting
cultures may or may not be related. However, the nation or nationhood is not always a necessary
condition for a society to be described as being multicultural. Another important concept relevant
here is that of pluralism, which, unlike both multiculturalism and nationhood, is about the recog-
nition of diversity and difference. Pluralism calls to mind a pattern in which different groups are
given the possibility, and perhaps, a certain level of support, to maintain their distinctive charac-
ters without the coercive and defence mechanisms usually associated with segregation (Allwood
1985). It is for this reason that other scholars (e.g. Oommen 2002) have preferred to use the term
pluralism instead of multiculturalism in the context of South Asia.
While the conflation of multiculturalism and Australian national identity might have been
attractive from the early to the mid-twentieth century, it has since proven to be problematic in
the sense that a multicultural identity was and has never been a uniquely Australian phenomenon.
Multiculturalism policies were introduced at just about the same time in other comparable immi-
grant societies such as Canada and the USA. Furthermore, the policy of multiculturalism in Aus-
tralia seems to have long outlived its usefulness and now exists as a shadow of its former self. The
profiles of people who now call Australia home are far more complex, diverse and dynamic to be
accommodated within the traditional multiculturalism paradigm with its narrow focus on the
coexistence of many cultures alongside each other. The Australia of today and, indeed, the
entire world is a lot more different from the Australia of the 1970s due to the prevailing situation
in which ‘more people are now moving from more places, through more places, to more places’
(Vertovec 2010, 86). The cultural and linguistic identities of present-day migrant background
Australians require new theorization that takes into account the migration stories, life histories
and experiences. Contemporary conditions of unprecedented human population movement
have meant that, unlike a few decades ago, people’s identities can no longer be predicted with
any degree of certainty. Whereas the Australian population of the 1970s was made up of indigen-
ous Australians, European settlers and Asian immigrants, this picture has changed drastically with
people from virtually all over the world now living in this country as permanent residents, citi-
zens, skilled migrants, temporary residents or humanitarian entrants. The breadth and depth of
Australian diversity have, thus, become more complex. It now surpasses the reach of conventional
multicultural perspectives that are now tired, exhausted and no longer robust enough to capture
the complexities of contemporary identities and identity narratives.

Superdiversity and its theoretical suppositions

In their critique of multicultural policies in Western countries, several scholars have proposed a
range of alternative conceptual frameworks that fall under the rubric of what has come to be
 Diaspora Studies 33

known as the ‘post-multiculturalism’ paradigm. Superdiversity is one of them. Pioneered by

Steven Vertovec in 2006, the term superdiversity refers to the vastly increased range of resources
– linguistic, religious, cultural and technological – that characterize late modern societies. A key
goal of superdiversity is the investigation into how and why diverse conceptualizations and under-
standings about these resources need to be recognized.
The superdiversity approach posits that at the centre of calls for broadening the ways in which
diversity is viewed are two sets of developments that can be observed globally. The first devel-
opment is about the changing patterns and itineraries of migration that have become more
complex than ever before – involving the movement of people across multiple national and con-
tinental boundaries and the continued movement by the same people within their migration des-
tinations (internal migration). These multi-formed, multidimensional and convoluted migration
histories, journeys and itineraries suggest that people often bring with them continuously more
different resources and experiences from a variety of places in their everyday interactions and
encounters with others and institutions (JØrgensen and Juffermans 2011). The second develop-
ment is technological. As the new social media and information communication technologies
have increasingly become easily accessible to the masses, the individual is now exposed to a
much wider range of networks and resources and a cacophony of voices than there was a few
decades ago.
One consequence of these conditions is the increase in the lack of predictability of people’s
identities, their belief systems, their linguistic repertoires and how their needs can best be
met both by government and non-government agencies. Whereas it was possible a few
decades ago to predict with a degree of certainty the linguistic, cultural and religious affiliations
and preferences of migrants from specific countries of origin, this is no longer the case anymore.
In a research report on superdiversity in Britain, Fanshawe and Sriskandrajah (2010) posit that
even the protected traditional classificatory strands of gender, race, ethnicity, disability, sexu-
ality, faith, belief and age have increasingly become difficult to predict with any substantial
degree of certainty. All these identity markers that are traditionally conceived as given are
now highly contested and problematic notions that can no longer be used with absolute
certainty.
Therefore, what superdiversity claims to advocate is a new politics of identity as ‘people can’t
be put in a box anymore’ (Fanshawe and Sriskandrajah 2010). The complex conditions of the con-
temporary postmodern world are said to have prompted the need for a revisit and rethink of theor-
etical toolkit for analysing and understanding the phenomena of migration and diaspora cultural
identities. Traditional analytical categories such as ‘speech community’, ‘ethnic group’ and ‘min-
ority’ are now very difficult to pin down in any meaningful way; and the often assumed relations
among ethnicity, citizenship, residence, origin, legal status, religion and language are no longer as
straightforward as previously thought (JØrgensen and Juffermans 2011). Under these circum-
stances, unity or social solidarity among the people derives from shared views on politics, econ-
omics, culture and other social experiences that cut across the ethnic and speech community
divide. While ethnicity and affiliation to specific speech communities may still remain, they
are no longer the sole prime markers of group solidarity especially in predominantly immigrant
societies where diasporas construct and (re)negotiate their identities on the basis of shared
migration histories and other life experiences.
It is informative to note that while the failures and limitations of multiculturalism did, indeed,
provoke a new search for alternative conceptual paradigms and methodologies of imagining
global cultural identities, alternative approaches such as superdiversity still remain trapped in
what Quijano (2000) has termed ‘colonial matrices of power’ and ‘global imperial designs’.
For Quijano and other like-minded critics from the Global South, what we need is theorization
that ‘offers fresh reflections on the invisible imperial global technologies of subjectivation that
34 F. Ndhlovu

continue to underpin and enable asymmetrical global power relations’ (Dastile and Ndlovu-Gat-
sheni 2013, 105). Superdiversity in particular has been recently criticized by Makoni (2012) who
finds the prefix ‘super-’ confusing, and as constituting a cover up by elite researchers and those in
power to keep certain groups out of their areas of interaction. In the words of Makoni, ‘superdi-
versity contains a powerful sense of social romanticism, creating an illusion of equality in a highly
asymmetrical world, particularly in contexts characterized by a search for homogenization’ (2012,
192–193).
In what I would consider to be the most incisive critique of the hypocritical nature of super-
diversity and similar post-modernist theories, Ramadan (2011, 35) says:

The theoretical magnanimity of human beings, when their daily life or their prosperity only marginally
exposes them to other people’s difference, is indeed welcome but it tells us nothing about life and it
does not go any way towards solving the difficulties of diversity. Elaborating fine, high-sounding phil-
osophies of tolerance and pluralism, when our ways of life have enclosed us within the restricted uni-
verse of our [small circles] of friends similar to ourselves is a highly virtual petition of generosity.
Those are but good intentions. They amount to claiming to be antiracist, intellectually, while in
one’s daily life one hardly ever comes across Blacks, Arabs, or Whites …

There are several pertinent questions that proceed from and support the above critique: Are such
rosy and highly esoteric intellectual dispositions enough to come to terms with the complex rea-
lities of diversity in people’s daily lives? Is observing and knowing that our quests and hopes are
identical in spirit and that we must put up with our practical differences enough for us to recognize
our similarities and approach our distinctions positively? As already indicated in the critique of
multicultural policies in Australia and other so-called Western liberal democracies, all these
social policy frameworks reveal as much as they hide, in equal measure. Like multiculturalism
and, indeed, the doctrine of cosmopolitanism that was in vogue in the 1960s, the deceitful and
hypocritical nature of superdiversity is hidden behind legislative formalisms that conceal the
real intention of such policies – which is exclusion. People do not automatically get to recognize
and treat others as part of themselves simply by getting messages repeated again and again about
the things that we share as humanity. It should be a lot more than this; what is required is stepping
out of refined theoretical, idealistic concepts and getting involved in real life. This is about putting
the shoulder on the wheel and getting one’s hands dirty – living and meeting with the other, with
his or her differences in skin colour, dress, beliefs, customs, linguistic repertoires, habits and intel-
lectual logic. The conceptual frames of superdiversity, just like those of multiculturalism, are ill-
equipped to meet this premium largely due to their idealism that does not easily translate into
practical reality.
The other major limitation of superdiversity is that it tends to describe any situation in the
world including aspects of globalization and name it ‘superdiversity’ – there is absolutely
nothing new and novel about this since migration is not a new phenomenon at all. Many
‘pre-modern’ and pre-colonial African societies, for example, were characterized by high
levels of human population movements for all sorts of reasons including barter trade, adven-
tures, seasonal pastoral migrations and so on. However, these early forms of African migration
have so far not been recognized as fitting under the rubric of ‘typical’ migration typologies.
Rather, they have been labelled as ‘nomadic’ movements; a derogatory term that takes away
the value and significance of pre-colonial forms of African migration. Furthermore, the body
of literature on early human civilizations is replete with examples illustrating the long
history of the social processes of migration and cultural diversity. Turner and Khondker
(2010), for example, recount observation that since cities in the Middle Ages were the loci
of business and trade, they were home to people from different nationalities and races:
 Diaspora Studies 35

Two of the oldest mosques were built in China –one in the port city of Guanzhou in the south and the
other in Xian for the benefit of the Arab Muslim traders in the first millennium … Dhaka, the capital
city of Bangladesh, was home to various nationalities in the eighteenth century. Foreign and Indian
merchants, traders and bankers –Europeans, Armenians, Pathans, Turanis, Marwaris, and other up-
country Hindus –came to Dhaka to do business. (Turner and Khondker 2010, 176)

This clearly shows that what is currently being described as superdiversity does not necessarily
typify a new phenomenon. These developments have always been there even in pre-modern
times. Therefore, any new conceptual framework that claims to look differently at issues around
migration, diversity and diasporas should make significant theoretical contributions beyond mere
empirical observations of human population movements from one point to another. In its present
iteration, the superdiversity approach does not seem to measure up very well when considered
against this premium.
The third problem with the current framing of superdiversity is that it runs the risk of reinfor-
cing and reproducing the same single-strand identity categories that it supposedly seeks to chal-
lenge. The focus on groups and communities (as opposed to individuals) is a clearly
homogenizing tendency that fails to take into account the unique past and present linguistic
and cultural experiences of individuals and how these bear onto their future-oriented aspirations
and visions about quality of life. For instance, the empirical observations of superdiversity have
not been theorized adequately enough to explain the complex and nest-like patterning of linguistic
usages by individuals, what I have called elsewhere, the language nesting model of identity
(Ndhlovu 2013).
Now, in the light of the limitations and blind spots of both the multiculturalism and superdi-
versity paradigms that have been fleshed out above, it is only prudent that we look for alternative
frameworks that will help close the identified gaps and omissions in diaspora theorization. The
significant point is this: there is, indeed, no single theory that can explain everything about any
particular issue, including the subject of diaspora cultures and identities. As Nabudere (2011) cau-
tions, mainstream Euro-American scientific knowledge and theorization is unable to explain – on
its own – everything about the world around us. The best that any theory of diaspora cultures and
identities can do is to tell us only part of the story about this phenomenon. This is precisely what
the frameworks of multiculturalism and superdiversity have done.

Alternative frameworks
In the section that follows, I suggest pluralization of theoretical orientations in order to capture the
myriad ways in which diasporas imagine themselves and are imagined by other global commu-
nities. In particular, I draw our attention to Southern theory with a specific focus on the benefits of
decolonial epistemology.
Southern theory (Connell 2007; Rehbein 2010; Comaroff and Comaroff 2011) is about the
role of perspectives from the Global South in a globally connected system of knowledge, politics,
culture and the economy. The premise of Southern theory is that other paths for theory-building
do exist and that we really need to face the difficulty of doing theory in globally inclusive ways if
we are to transcend the pervasive effects and fundamentalist claims of Western-oriented theories
such as multiculturalism and superdiversity. Southern theory does not seek to supplant theoretical
frameworks from the Global North; neither does it seek to assert its own theoretical interests as the
only legitimate way of understanding diaspora identities. Rather, it presents a case for a radical
rethinking of social science theorization and its relationships to knowledge, power, democracy
and identity discourses in a manner that takes into account the experiences of the majority of
the world’s populations. The main argument of Southern theory is that the Global South does
36 F. Ndhlovu

also produce knowledge and understanding of society; that Southern knowledge systems need to
be recognized and included on the table of ideas about development, social progress and what it
means to live life and live it well.
Decolonial epistemology, also known as decoloniality, is part of Southern theory. It questions
the monopoly and universalizing tendencies of epistemologies from the Global North and calls for
the recognition and mainstreaming of other knowledges and ways of engaging with knowledges.
Dastile and Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2013, 107) trace the historical origins of decolonial epistemology
to ‘human political and intellectual struggles against the dark aspects of modernity such as mer-
cantilism, the slave trade, imperialism, colonialism, apartheid, neo-colonialism, underdevelop-
ment, neoliberalism, and globalization’. All these discourses of modernity did, in one way or
another, sow the seeds of hierarchized and racialized identity categories that underpin dominant
understandings of diaspora cultures and identities all over the world. Through its unique take on
power, knowledge, culture, history, human existence and globalization, decolonial epistemology
aims at elaborating not just another paradigm within the typically modern way of thinking but a
totally new paradigm that shatters such thinking (Banazak and Ceja 2010, 113). In other words,
decolonial thought is not just concerned about the need for new ideas. Rather, it goes a step further
to call for a completely new way of thinking – about languages, about cultural identities, about
regimes of knowledge and knowledge production, and just about everything else we do. A key
underpinning concept in decolonial scholarship is that of ‘coloniality’, which consists of four
strands: coloniality of power, coloniality of knowledge, coloniality of being and coloniality of
nature (Quijano 2000). In the paragraphs that follow, I elaborate on key contours of three of
these notions and how they promise to illuminate better our understanding of diaspora cultures
and identities.
First is coloniality of power, which theorizes interrelations of the practices and legacies of
European colonialism in social orders and forms of knowledge. It describes the living legacy
of colonialism in contemporary societies in the form of social discrimination that outlived
formal colonialism and became integrated in succeeding social orders and behaviours (Quijano
2000). In his explication of the coloniality of power thesis, Grosfoguel (2009) begins with a cri-
tique of how globalization studies, political economy paradigms and world-systems analysis have
so far marginalized theoretical contributions from the Global South. Consequently, the academy
in the former colonial world has continued ‘to produce knowledge from the western man’s point
zero god-eye view’ (Grosfoguel 2009, 17). He goes on to suggest that these epistemological para-
digms are in need of decolonization whereby the locus of enunciation (point of departure/world-
view) moves away from the European man to the Latin American Indigenous woman, or to the
African diaspora, for example. In a critical reflection on the African decolonization project,
Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2012, 73) uses the notion of coloniality of power to reveal how ‘African
people are today entangled, woven and entrapped in the colonial matrix of power underpinning
asymmetrically structured global social order.’ He laments those African scholars who are obliv-
ious to the ‘invisible hierarchies of [ … ] linguistic and racial arrangements underpinning imperial
global designs within which African struggles for decolonisation took place’ (2012, 74).
Because the concept of coloniality of power enables critical thinking about how the legacy of
colonialism continues to shape and influence the behaviours of former colonial outposts, it prom-
ises to shed some useful insights for questioning and challenging the epistemological foundations
of how diaspora cultural identities have been and continue to be imagined. The notion of coloni-
ality of power also supports the argument that current views on diaspora identities are, in fact,
manifestation of the world-systems power structures in that they strive to approximate a
mirror-image of Euro-American pretentions about there being somewhat seamless global identi-
ties based on notions of globalization and universalism. For instance, the conceptual logics of
both multiculturalism and superdiversity discussed above emerged out of the belly of the
 Diaspora Studies 37

Euro-American Empire. Both are loaded with high sounding but very deceptive ideas of equality,
inclusion and recognition that hide as much as they reveal.
The second strand of decolonial thought is coloniality of knowledge. The remit of this strand
is to problematize Eurocentric knowledge systems that see race as grounds for the naturalization
of colonial relations between Europeans and non-Europeans. From this perspective, the Euro-
centric system of knowledge is brought under spotlight for assigning the domain of knowledge
production exclusively to Europeans and prioritizing Eurocentric ways of knowledge valuation
and knowledge production. This entails problematizing the West as the logical starting point of
valid and relevant theory, and as a privileged site of knowledge production. ‘To speak of coloni-
ality of knowledge is to speak of a key aspect of the colonial power matrix [and] our understand-
ing of the world cannot limit itself to encompass only the occidental scientific renderings’
(Suárez-Krabbe 2009, 2). The coloniality of knowledge thesis posits that the Western tradition
of knowledge is only valid and useful for some ends; for others it is unworkable (Suárez-
Krabbe 2009). Therefore, the overall mission of decolonial epistemology is to forge new and
alternative categories of thought, the construction of new subjectivities and the creation of new
modes of being and becoming (Fanon 1986, 1).
Coloniality of being is the third pillar of decolonial epistemology. The main punch line of
coloniality of being is about how colonialists used Western scientific theories of racism to con-
struct cultural and identity categories that enabled them to doubt the very humanity of the colo-
nized peoples from the Global South. In the words of Maldonado-Torres (2007, 242), the concept
of coloniality of being ‘enables appreciation of the impact of colonial technologies of subjectiva-
tion on the life, body, and mind of the colonized people’. Thus, coloniality of being speaks to the
past and present lived experiences of people who were once subjected to colonial domination.
Current global diaspora cultural identities and the ideas about who they are as a people are influ-
enced in many ways by colonial imaginaries of race and racial categories that were informed by
the condescending politics of ‘Othering’; as well as the modernist and post-modernist discourses
that divided the world into developed (Global North) and developing (Global South) societies.
The notion of coloniality of being, therefore, seeks to provide counter-narratives on identities
and identity formation processes by drawing our attention to what Maldondo-Torres calls the phe-
nomenology of subjectivity. It alerts us to those technologies and mechanisms that produced
current understandings of global identities, particularly the bifurcated discourses of ‘Them’ and
‘Us’; the ‘developed’ and the ‘developing’.
By drawing on the foregoing insights from decolonial epistemology, it is possible for us to
question and challenge the rather simplistic and homogenizing assumptions of multiculturalism
and superdiversity that do not help us understand clearly the complex identity formation processes
of diasporas. What decolonial epistemology suggests is that there is need for us to push for the
recognition of alternative knowledges and alternative ways of conceptualizing cultural identities
in order to both counter and complement dominant Euro-American epistemologies. What we
learn from epistemologies such as decoloniality is that we stand a better chance of coming up
with more nuanced understanding and appreciation of the diversity of diaspora identities if we
approach them from multi-pronged angles or paths. The linguistic and cultural identities of dia-
sporas proceed from a multiplicity of histories and experiences that can only be adequately cap-
tured through the deployment of open-minded and sensitive theoretical frameworks such as decoloniality.
Overall, the benefit of decoloniality lies in that it promises to overcome those hegemonic and
universalizing epistemological injustices that were put in place by global imperial designs – such
as modernity, racism, colonialism and neocolonialism. The current definitional tropes of diasporas
and other migrant identities originating from the Global South are underpinned by colonial and
neo-colonial imaginaries. Decolonial epistemology is better positioned to challenge these by
recourse to its key contours that question ‘the long standing claims of Euro-American
38 F. Ndhlovu

epistemology to be universal, neutral, objective, disembodied, as well being the only mode of
knowing’ (Dastile and Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013, 114). The point of greater significance about deco-
loniality is that it is ‘an-other thought’ that seeks to inaugurate ‘an-other logic’, ‘an-other
language’ and ‘an-other thinking’ that has the potential to liberate ex-colonized people’s minds
from the clutches of Euro-American epistemological hegemonies (Mignolo 2007). Thus, decolo-
niality announces a radical departure from the often taken-for-granted identitarian discourse that
has constructed images of diasporas as somewhat reified, inflexible and never-changing. The need
to embrace decoloniality as an alternative epistemology is inspired by its potential to enable us to
overcome racist, invisibilizing and paternalistic perspectives on cultural identities that often go
undetected as they are camouflaged by the homogenizing banners of universalism. Unlike epis-
temologies from the Global North, decoloniality is open-minded, outward-looking and concedes
space for other epistemologies from different geo-historical sites and human experiences.

Conclusion
This article has argued that theory-making and the valuation of knowledge production have for a
long time been under siege from neoliberal hegemonic forces of the Global North. Both multicul-
turalism and superdiversity are part of this hegemonic tradition and are too limited to successfully
capture the complexities of diaspora cultures, identities and languages. What this essentially
means is that in attempting to think through and re-imagine conceptual frameworks for under-
standing the languages, cultures and identities of diasporas, we need to draw from a much
wider battery of other conceptual frameworks in order to circumvent the shortcomings of previous
and current paradigms such as multiculturalism and superdiversity. The ultimate goal of taking
such an approach is to announce the need for scholarship to also consider alternative ways of
looking at processes by which diasporas construct and (re)negotiate their identities in the midst
of multiple and competing frames that collude and collide in rather unpredictable ways. The
point of greater significance here is about the need to understand, acknowledge and also
further develop other ways of creating meaning, knowledge and action. While past and present
conceptual frameworks from the Global North do help us understand some aspects of humanity
including diaspora identity formation processes, they certainly do not and cannot explain every-
thing especially about the complexities of newly emergent diaspora cultural identities. For this
reason, this article suggests the opening up of space in our epistemological conversations such
that previous and emerging scholarly traditions from both the Global North and the Global
South can be recognized as part of the discourse and praxis of diaspora identity imaginings.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Finex Ndhlovu is Senior Lecture in Applied Linguistics in the School of Behavioural, Cognitive and Social
Sciences at the University of New England in Australia. This article was written while he was on a six-month
Research Fellowship at the Archie Mafeje Research Institute, University of South Africa.

Notes
1. Some of the material in this and the next section appears in Ndhlovu (2014).
2. Refer to Kymlicka (2012, 7) for a summary of the eight policies that fall under the purview of the Multi-
cultural Policy Index.
 Diaspora Studies 39

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