When discussions around decolonising the curriculum take place, it is often difficult to discern what the decolonising is referring to, and whether the discussion is about curriculum at all. Many of the major decolonisation scholars, such as Walter Mignolo, Nelson Maldonado-Torres and Ramon Grosfoguel are concerned with the ‘colonial power matrix,’ which continues to structure the world system, and with how to bring about ‘the epistemic decolonial turn’ (Grosfoguel 2007). Certain scholars who are more critical of some of these current ideas point out the complexity of changes in the forms of knowledge production. Achille Mbembe (2015) argues that rather than a sustained attack on the Western canon (that is not purely Western), decolonisation entails a radical rethinking of the purpose of knowledge production. He gives the example of a shift in orientation to ‘deep time’ and ‘to rethinking the human not from the perspective of its mastery of the Creation as we used to, but from the perspective of its finitude and its possible extinction’ (2015: 25). For Mahmood Mamdani (2017), decolonising knowledge entails ‘a series of acts which sift through the historical legacy, and the contemporary reality, discarding some parts and adapting others to a new-found purpose’, and, crucially, institutionalising the gains made.

Scholars such as Mbembe and Mamdani are concerned with questions of epistemology and knowledge production, while those working in the decolonial frame often cast arguments in broad socio-political terms (‘geo-politics’ and ‘bodypolitics’) rather than in relation to questions about particular knowledge forms or disciplines and their organisation in curriculum. As both Kathy Luckett and Suellen Shay (2017) and Shannon Morreira (2017) argue, there is a gap between their ‘high-level metaepistemological debates’ and questions around education systems, curriculum and pedagogy. A result of this gap is that it is difficult for those tasked with curriculum work to draw on decolonial theorising in addressing questions relevant to their work. There is no substantive decolonial theory of curriculum that can guide curriculum change, nor analyse it sufficiently. So, although we may be charged with being part of the problem, we draw on the work of a European theorist, Basil Bernstein, in order to understand the debates more clearly.