Decolonizing Our Names in the 21st Century

This book combines different decolonial approaches from around the world to offer a roadmap for updating names and naming practices, restoring and protecting precolonial ones, and reimagining or recontextualizing the relationship between place, identity, and names. In a postcolonial context, naming often serves as a bitter reminder of past harms through commemorative naming practices, whether through a system of baptismal names or a former colony’s approach to dealing with the names that the col