Despite a decade of diversity policy plans, a wave of student rallies has ignited debates across western European university campuses. A series of decolonial and anti-racist initiatives have been established by students, researcher and lecturers in Belgian Higher Education, and have been vocal about the desire to rewrite Belgian cultural literacy by rewriting curricula, canons and history. In order to understand the context of these calls for anti-racism and decoloniality, this chapter inquires the trajectory of race in the Belgian Higher education landscape. A timeline of race in Belgian Higher education is constituted by listing race-centred decisions and initiatives in or related to Belgian Higher Education between 1960 and 2022. It lists the formation of racialised student groups, diversity policies, national anti-racism protests, decolonial activities at universities, open letters issuing institutional critique, research networks, race-centred incidents, etc.

The negotiation of race is studied through a corpus of 10 open letters issued at Belgian Higher Education institutions by distinct authors in the role of student, researcher, lecturer, professor and dean, between 2017 and 2022. Whereas institutionalised notions on race imagine anti-racism as tolerating and attracting racialised students to predominantly white universities, critical researchers' and students’ aspirations imagine anti-racism as an introspective process in which the dominant curriculum is critically reviewed on colonial and racist scripts. In the juxtaposition of the open letters’ distinct uses of race, Stuart Hall’s critical race theory is deployed to understand how interlocking meanings of race reshape a new hegemonic discourse of race. This means that the student’s perspectives are not studied as oppositional discourse but as dialogic discourse.    

The open letters question the trajectory of race in the Higher Education curriculum, and signify race both as ‘enabling’ and ‘violating’. It violates through processes of racialization (i.e. writing race on bodies and connecting it with an inclusion/exclusion rhetoric), and it enables when racialised students can critically appropriate racialisation and reimagine the trajectory of race. Contemporary rhetoric on (anti-) racisms at Belgian higher education campuses coin the idea of an ‘enabling’ inclusivity of the racial other in National cultural literacy. The benefits of such inclusion and diversity seem to be framed within the National-state’s desire for economic growth, global impact, and prestige. The trajectory of race is multifaceted but marked by a tendency to turn racial otherness into productive intranational cultural difference, in which the racial others become representatives of other nation states. Which leaves us with the question, what kind of political liberation does this anti-racism exactly imagine? Would it be possible to appropriate race in Higher education to imagine a political liberation beyond the Nation state?  

Dialogic Analysis, Rhetorical Analysis, Semiotic Analysis

A timeline charting the trajectory of race in Higher education, from 1960 until 2022. A framework to interpret the open letters as 'dialogic' rather then 'oppositional'. The state of the art Hegemonic discourse on race in Belgian Higher Education based on a dialogic analysis of the 10 open letters issued by students, researchers, professors and deans.

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