Neil Larsen in Jacobin:
t’s now been a number of years since the term “decolonial,” together with its more activated verbal inflection, “decolonize,” have become familiar across popular and media culture, especially in connection with identity politics. Still another variant, “decoloniality,” joins these, though it is restricted to a narrower and more arcane academic lexicon. “Decolonization,” located at a middlebrow point of discursive insertion, has by now followed. Here, however, those with sufficient awareness, if not a residual memory of its historical context, will recognize in “decolonization” an older term with a distinct political resonance that can be traced considerably further back to the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, if not earlier, to the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland and the 1919 Amritsar massacre in British-ruled India. Certainly, by the time of the historic 1955 Bandung Conference of relatively newly independent and henceforth (for a time) nonaligned former colonies in Asia and Africa, a term such as “decolonial” would have been indissolubly linked to contemporary anti-colonial national liberation movements and to the actual historical process of decolonization then roughly at its apogee, particularly in what remained of formal European colonialism in many parts of Asia and much of Africa.
More here.