Description
This paper argues the importance of considering coloniality of power in discussions of global designs, using the case study of Singapore. Using Utusan Melayu, a colonial period Malay newspaper in Singapore, this paper highlights how alternative knowledges emerging from and responding to colonial legacies grant us important non-Eurocentric critiques of coloniality such as racial divisions of labour, spatial divisions to serve the global economy, colonial extraction and commodification of labour power from the global South to benefit the global North and the myth of beneficial/benevolent colonisation. The reconstitution of alternative knowledges allows us to understand how global coloniality is reflected in local histories. Engaging directly with the theme of the conference, this paper puts forward a foundational decolonial framework towards charting solutions for the future – exposing roots of coloniality that are hidden under the rhetoric of modernity and reconstituting alternative sources of knowledge . Alternative sources of knowledge not only lead us to different truths, but allows us access to different logics, which allows us to imagine different (decolonial) futures.
