The Coloniality of Flourishing and Critical Psychology

Drawing on Mkhize’s chapter, “Psychology: An African Perspective,” in Hook’s Critical Psychology (2014), this paper explores the ontological and historical assumptions underpinning contemporary discourses of wellbeing, flourishing and optimal human functioning. While positive psychology has made important contributions to the scientific study of flourishing, comparatively less attention has been directed toward the cultural, metaphysical and ideological conditions through which flourishing itself becomes defined, legitimised and institutionally recognised. Engaging critically with Mkhize’s discussion of relational ontology, communal personhood, worldview and ubuntu, the paper argues that dominant flourishing frameworks frequently remain shaped by historically Western assumptions regarding individuality, autonomy and self-contained psychological functioning.

The paper introduces a series of preliminary conceptual co-ordinates for an emergent critical positive psychology, including wellbeing atomization, flourishing universalism, flourishing legitimacy, coloniality of flourishing, positive psychological hegemony and flourishing plurality. These concepts are used to examine how flourishing discourse may participate not only in describing wellbeing, but also in regulating which forms of life become culturally intelligible, institutionally visible and psychologically legitimate. Rather than rejecting flourishing discourse, the paper argues for a more historically situated, relational and ontologically reflexive engagement with wellbeing itself. In doing so, it proposes that critical positive psychology may need to concern itself not only with optimal functioning, but with the broader historical, relational and political conditions under which flourishing futures remain imaginable at all.