A post by Seth Goldwasser
I never had the pleasure of meeting or speaking with Dr. Melz Owusu before his passing, which occurred after I had cited interest in reviewing his book. I’m deeply saddened at his loss; the world has lost an exceptional thinker and preeminent Undisciplined Scholar. So, I’d like to dedicate a moment to Melz’s memory with a breathing exercise to which he invites the reader midway through the book (2025: 56):
Pause, and breathe.
Breathe deeply through your nose until your body is filled with gentle air, hold on to it for a few moments.
Release it through your mouth.
Repeat this a few times.
If you knew Melz, take this moment to honor his memory. If you didn’t, take it to center your thoughts on your breath and on the liberatory action of marginalized scholars and activists that you do know.
Dr. Seth Goldwasser is a lecturer at the University of Miami. Seth’s research focuses primarily on skillful mental action with an emphasis on skillful remembering and imagining. He has also written on the ascription of normal-proper functions in cancer biology and on the epistemic status of traumatic memories.
Undisciplined is at once a sustained argument for the need to abolish academia as an institution and an exploration of Owusu’s personal journey towards discovering this need. According to Owusu, the academy is the cornerstone of the Western European colonial project because it propounds both explicitly and in its methodology a characterization of knowledge as rigid validation of a reality that is supposed to exist independently of us. This characterization of knowledge is then wielded as a sword both within and outside of academia, cutting down indigenous practices of knowledge production (hereafter, epistemes) that don’t meet its standards of validation. And since the academy is the cornerstone of the colonial project, decolonization requires its abolition (Ruíz 2020 reaches a similar conclusion through exploring institutionalized gaslighting). As I’m writing a review for an imagination blog, I’ll focus on the arguments in the book and on the role of the “radical imagination” within those arguments. That said, the book is equally a reflection of Owusu’s development as an Undisciplined Scholar. And this is intentional: Undisciplined leads by example.
The book composes roughly two parts divided by the invitation to practice a moment of mindfulness in chapter four. The first part focuses on the Undisciplined Scholar, while the latter focuses on the object of the Undisciplined Scholar’s decolonizing work, namely, abolition of the academy and colonial epistemes as well as laying the groundwork for constructing decolonized epistemes. I’ll give a rough description of each chapter and highlight the role of radical imagination where appropriate. I’ll then conclude with two potential worries.
Chapter one characterizes the movement of Undisciplined Scholarship. Here, imagination plays a role similar to one familiar to contemporary philosophers of mind, namely, that of representing something that is not necessarily actual or is not present to perception. However, Owusu immediately radicalizes imagination: to imagine is to represent possibilities that strike us as impossible from within the colonial perspective. Importantly, this includes ever-evolving conceptions of freedom. A major theme of the book is reclaiming the right to imagine such possibilities as the first step towards actualizing those conceptions. Chapter two concretizes the Undisciplined Scholar as an individual. Owusu claims that scholars working towards decolonization often find themselves split between researching decolonization and a lack of practical implementation of such research. He suggests that the Undisciplined Scholar is an individual who leans into the intention to decolonize rather than the intention to produce verifiable results, who in doing such work draws directly from their identity and scholars with whom they share that identity, and whose defining activity is “[en]vision[ing] alternative ways of being and new realities” (2025: 40). Here, the Undisciplined Scholar is conceived of as an individual whose goals, sense of self, and action all aim at and draw from increasingly radical imaginings. Chapter three qualifies what it is to be Undisciplined. It’s not a matter of shirking all forms of regularity in one’s life or work. Rather, it’s a matter of resisting and destroying the forms of colonial discipline (read: system for inculcating obedience) that have come to dominate the academy and, by extension, the West through the “epistemicide” of indigenous epistemes.
Opening the second part of the book, chapter five focuses on what Owusu calls “spiritual knowledge.” Such knowledge isn’t necessarily religious in nature: it doesn’t need to come from or have as its object something divine or otherworldly nor consist in a divine or otherworldly mode. Rather, it’s knowledge that “exists within us all, within the self, and it does not always need to be witnessed, ratified, and validated by a scholarly community to be verified as true” (62; original emphasis). Owusu argues that such knowledge was rooted out within Europe by the Church before being rooted out of indigenous communities outside of Europe by Christian missionaries and settlers. If Owusu is right, spiritual knowledge is anathema to dominant epistemes because it doesn’t adhere to the latter’s standards of validation. Thus, decolonization requires revitalizing spiritual knowledge. And such revitalization, in turn, requires radical imagination.
Chapter six tackles the nature of colonial epistemes. At various points throughout the book, Owusu asserts that colonial epistemes are the actualization of the (then potentially radical) imaginings of white Christian males like René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, etc. He likewise asserts in multiple places that the academy is the locus of the continued legitimization of those thinkers’ imaginings. This chapter is the culmination of this negative part of Owusu’s project. He argues that academics exist in a “panopticon of knowledge” wherein the implicit threat of punishment for failing to abide by colonial epistemes is so severely ingrained that we readily police ourselves in our knowledge producing activities. Since this panopticon “is essentially the proverbial bricks and mortar that the university is made up of” (82), because it reinforces the actualized imaginings of those like Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, etc., and because the university is the cornerstone of the wider colonial project, successful decolonization entails abolishing the academy.
Chapter seven unpacks what it means to reclaim the right to imagine while problematizing current decolonization work focused on making room for marginalized voices within academia. In contrast to treating identity as something to protect and defend—as much Inclusivity, Diversity, and Equity work has done admirably—Owusu argues that we ought to treat it as “a space of epistemic beauty and possibility” (90). That is, marginalized folk should be playing the political game of identity “on the offensive” (ibid). Chapter eight concretizes the discussion in chapter seven using Owusu’s own experience of transness (and Blackness) as a template for grounding radical imagination in the trans identity rather than arguing for protections against oppression. That is, using his own transition, he embarks on developing a “trans epistemology” by radically imagining what trans freedom might look like under the assumption that trans people have spiritual knowledge of their identity. He does this rather than detailing the harms suffered by trans folk through cisgendered oppression as justification for certain protections under the colonial system.
Chapter nine advocates a love ethic as the foundation of Undisciplined Scholarship. The Undisciplined Scholar must approach abolishing the academy and what comes after with love, roughly as bell hooks (2018) understands it. Accordingly, such love must include work that contributes to “spiritual wellbeing” and thereby “strengthens the capacity to love” (2018: 63). It must also include releasing control “over the outcome of what liberated futures will look like” (Owusu 2025: 132). We can and should radically imagine such outcomes, but we cannot bring them into being with brute force. Finally, the love ethic must include a “willingness to grow in intimacy” (ibid.). Owusu identifies such intimacy with a form of knowing and claims that it is interpersonal and processual. That is, there is no definite endpoint to coming to know another. And, importantly, he claims that radically imagining a future containing genuine freedom involves the same kind of processual, interpersonal knowing of our presently existing yet evasive freedom. Finally, chapter ten situates Undisciplined Scholarship as an expression of spiritual knowledge we already in some sense possess and, so, as a kind of remembering. So much for the overview.
On to the potential worries. Undisciplined was originally published in October 2024. Living through the sustained attacks on academia in the US under the second Trump administration might give one significant pause about abolishing the institution. Surely, one might think, to advocate abolishing academia is tantamount to razing our own city before the barbarians can get past the gates. But there might be a fundamental difference between Owusu’s position and that of the anti-intellectualist rightwing (29). Specifically, extending the former as I understand it, the latter don’t wish to abolish academia. Rather, they wish to refine it, making it a lean(-ish) credentialing institution geared towards providing training for a career without any of the cumbersome curriculums that threaten to inspire radical imaginings hostile to capitalism and white supremacy. Neoliberalism aims to maintain the status quo by keeping radical theory and praxis separated (see especially chapters 1, 2, 4, and 7). It seems that Owusu’s position is the one that advocates for a complete but ultimately just destruction of the academy. So, we might not need to worry that his arguments are in alignment with the ongoing dismantling of the institution as we know it. The anti-intellectualist transformation that academics have long been and are currently experiencing might not ultimately aim at destruction. It is no less the stuff of nightmares. By contrast, Owusu’s vision of intellectual communities and pursuits post-abolition is inspiring.
The second worry is more pressing and potentially reinforces the first. Owusu locates the engine of colonialism in the academy. It is from the ongoing reinforcement of the imaginings of colonial thinkers that we end up locked into particular conceptions of freedom and purpose in life. And the dissemination of these conceptions into the wider world props up the ongoing colonial project. The academy, then, is at the center of the colonial project and these thinkers’ imaginings are at the center of the academy. My worry is that the foregoing is a mischaracterization of the place of the academy within the colonial project. It might well be that the academy functions to support and legitimize conceptions of knowledge, freedom, purpose, etc. that in turn function to prop up that project and it might well be that such conceptions stem from the imaginings of white male Enlightenment thinkers. But it does not follow that the academy is the center of the project. Indeed, it would follow only if one assumes a Cartesian theory of mind and a significant dependence of the activities of institutions and whole cultures on the imaginings and intentions of individuals. Moreover, the readiness and seeming fervor with which the current administration pursues its supposed radical retooling suggests that the academy is not the center of the project.
On a more pragmatist conception of knowledge production and institutionalized power, the academy is one among multiple organs of the powers that be which function together to legitimize and reinforce the colonial project. On such a conception, the imaginings of white male Enlightenment thinkers are aids to the destruction of indigenous and decolonial epistemes rather than the font of the colonial one. The oppression and institutionalized violence of the colonial project might then have more straightforward and material points of origin: seeking to amass and keep land and resources in the hands of a select few, finding and exploiting cheap or slave labor, etc. The role of the academy is merely to place an intellectualized veneer on those less palatable dimensions of the project or to pay lip service to acknowledging the resulting harms under the banner of decolonizing curricula. It is thus dispensable if another institution can take over its role or if the powers that be find that they no longer need it.
However, even if the foregoing pragmatist conception is right, I don’t think it undercuts Owusu’s claim that the academy needs to be abolished. On this conception, because the academy depends for its existence on performing its legitimizing function within the colonial project, ending the project would still require abolishing the academy. However, if the academy isn’t at the center and can be dispensed with, the anti-intellectualist rightwing might want abolition too. Indeed, I fear we’re at a point where, in the eyes of the powers that be, the academy is dispensable: increasingly in the US, technocrats, corporatists, conmen, neo-Nazis, and fascists are able to do as they like with little or no need to obfuscate nor pay lip service to the ideals of the academy. Their reasons can be nonsensical or stupid and their goals can be blatantly self-serving, misogynistic, racist, transphobic, ableist, eugenic, anti-democratic, authoritarian, totalitarian, or genocidal. We are living in dark times. Owusu’s radiant imaginings—abolishing the academy among them—and those he invites us to undertake are therefore much needed.
References
hooks, bell (2018). All About Love: New Visions. New York: William Morrow.
Ruíz, Elena (2020). Cultural Gaslighting. Hypatia, 35(4), 687–713. doi:10.1017/hyp.2020.33