The Colonial Haunting of Dark Academia: An Apartheid of Knowledge in the Ivory Tower

The Colonial Haunting of Dark Academia: An Apartheid of Knowledge in the Ivory Tower

“The real aim of colonialism was to control the people’s wealth; what they produced, how they produced it, and how it was distributed; to control, in other words, the entire realm of the language of real life. Colonialism imposed its control of the social production of wealth through military conquest and subsequent political dictatorship. But its most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonized, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world. Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control. To control a people’s culture is to control their tools of self-identification in relationship to others.”

• • An excerpt from The Language of African Literature by Kenyan Author Ngugi Wa Thiong’o

“Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story.”

• • An excerpt from the TEDTalk, The Danger of a Single Story, by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I. Prologue: The Tower’s Shadow

(Setting the stage—introducing Dark Academia’s allure, its romanticization of knowledge, and the silence beneath its aesthetic.)

Strolling down the dimly lit corridors of academia, one clutches tattered books and brittle scriptures, and their spines cracked from centuries of reverence. Dust lingers in the air, disturbed only by the hushed whispers of scholars whose voices echo through vaulted halls lined with towering shelves. The scent of old parchment, ink faded, pages yellowed—carries histories of the arcane, of knowledge once hoarded by empires that have since crumbled yet whose ideological spectres still haunt the present.

 

 

 

 

 

 

II. The Literary Canon’s Tombstones

(Interrogating the exclusion of non-Western voices and the buried histories beneath the literary and philosophical canon.)

Beyond these halls lie the graves of brilliance, burial grounds for the most intelligent black and brown minds, their stories left to decay beneath the weight of Western intellectual hegemony. It is not the poetry of Pakistani writers Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Saadat Hasan Manto that fills these corridors. The words of Palestinian poets Mahmoud Darwish and scholar Edward Said do not grace the plinths of literary immortality. Kenyan essayist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie are not carved into the marble of institutional prestige. Instead, the pantheon of academia remains devoted to its chosen saints: Shakespeare, Austen, the Brontës, Oscar Wilde, Marx, Lenin, Tolstoy, Galileo, Aeschylus, Aristotle, and Plato, an unyielding edifice of Eurocentric thought, upheld as the only worthy lineage of knowledge.

As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o writes, “The most coveted place in the pyramid and the system was only available to the holder of an English language credit card.” The gates of academia have long been fortified against the global majority, its custodians safeguarding a tradition that thrives on exclusion. It is no wonder, then, that this institution, built on the systematic erasure of colonized voices, continues to uphold the engines of oppression, its Western studies enshrined as literary monuments, its literary canon a mausoleum of imperial legacy.

And yet, this legacy has not just persisted; it has been aestheticized and repackaged into a romanticized vision of intellectual pursuit. The truths of the Dark Academia genre and subculture have been adorned as an elegant, almost mythical interpretation of higher education, where dimly lit libraries and candlelit studies mask the colonial foundations of knowledge itself. It is a world that devours all considered classic literature, ancient art, and philosophy, clinging to the “high-brow” liberal arts topics that institutions have long regarded as the pinnacle of intellectualism. But beneath its obsession with ink-stained fingers, towering bookshelves, and brooding scholars, Dark Academia is ultimately a nostalgic eulogy to an era when access to knowledge was a privilege reserved for elite, white men, an era that institutions like Oxford, Harvard, and Yale once epitomized and, in many ways, still do.

III. Ink, Stone, and Shadows: The Origins of Dark Academia

(Tracing the roots of Dark Academia—its inspirations from classical literature, Gothic romanticism, and exploring the internet phenomena and aesthetics.)

Dark Academia traces its origins not to an internet aesthetic but to a virtual book club on Tumblr in 2015. Its primary inspiration is Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel, The Secret History, which follows a group of elite university students who, under the guidance of an enigmatic professor, isolate themselves in the pursuit of knowledge, only to become entangled in secrecy and intrigue. Over the years, particularly during the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dark Academia has evolved into an online phenomenon, flourishing on platforms like TikTok and Instagram under #DarkAcademia. Its greatest influences stem from European culture, drawing heavily from the Renaissance, Baroque, and Romanticism—artistic epochs steeped in themes of anatomical studies, classical and Christian mythology, and the fleeting nature of life, often encapsulated in the vanitas motif.

https://vm.tiktok.cohttps://vm.tiktok.com/ZMkbjdCbTm/ZMkbjdCbT

Set in a liminal space where time bends, somewhere between a distant, romanticized past and a foreboding present, Dark Academia is curated through literary and aesthetic clues: heavy wool coats, candlelit writing desks, and a conspicuous absence of modern technology. It existed just before the moment of revolution, in the shadow of civil wars that had not yet been fought, as if knowledge and intellectualism could be frozen in a time when power remained firmly in the hands of a privileged few. It is a space where fiction and reality blur, where secret societies, murdered professors, and academically burnt-out students who only study Greek or Latin construct a narrative that seems timeless but, in truth, is deeply rooted in exclusion.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IV. The Broken Tongue: Literature, Identity, and the Colonial Wound

(Examining how colonialism fractured the relationship between language, identity, and literature, leaving an indelible scar.)

But what is literature? What counts as literature? Who decides? Arundhati Roy posits in her novel AZADI: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction. that these questions have no singular, edifying answer. Yet, if literature is built by readers and writers, it is fragile and indestructible. When the language of literature is broken, we rebuild it because we need shelter. And if literature provides shelter, then it is, above all, a refuge from all things.

Language and literature do not merely tell stories; they transport us further from ourselves to our other selves, from one world to another. However, this movement was not one of expansion but of severance for the colonial child. Language, in any form, is both a communication tool and a vessel of culture. Ngugi Wa Thiong’o stated that this vessel was shattered under colonial rule and, with it, any sense of harmony between language, identity, and lived reality. The colonial subject was not simply alienated but actively impaled—pierced by the European sword of cultural domination. From art to geography, history to music, every discipline positioned bourgeois Europe as the epicentre of knowledge and civilization’s sole architect. Culture, a product of history and a reflection of the people who shape it was stripped from the colonial child and replaced with a world external to them. However, culture does not just reflect the world in images; it constructs it through images. The colonial child, immersed in the imposed language, came to see themselves not through their own stories but through the distorting mirror of European literature and thought. Their history, identity, and very existence were filtered through a language defining them as the Other. The grand mirror of imagination reflected only Europe; all else was peripheral, alien, and lesser.

Yet the actual violence of this process was not only in the external imposition of language but in its internalization. The colonial child, conditioned to associate their native tongue with illiteracy, humiliation, and savagery, encountered these same narratives in the literature of their imposed language. Their mother tongue became the language of the uneducated, the primitive, and the unsophisticated, while the colonizer’s language became synonymous with intellect, status, and power. Reinforced by literature filled with racist caricatures, this conditioning did not merely wound; it disfigured. There was no harmony in the colonialist gaze, only distortion. Colonial alienation begins with a deliberate severance: the language of thought, formal education, and intellectual development is forcibly detached from the language of home, community, and daily life. It is not merely an educational shift but a violent rupture, as if splitting the mind from the body, forcing the self to exist in two irreconcilable linguistic spheres. On a larger scale, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o writes that this linguistic dismemberment produces societies of bodiless heads and headless bodies, zombies trapped behind linguistic fences.

V. The Burial Grounds Beneath the Tower: Reclaiming Knowledge from Colonial Ruins

(A reckoning with the cost of this erasure—what has been lost, what has been buried, and who still lingers beneath.)

Yet, the colonial project was never absolute, and the fences it erected around knowledge are not impermeable. The imposed linguistic and intellectual hierarchies that sought to sever the colonial subject from their cultural and historical roots have not gone unchallenged. Across generations, writers, thinkers, and revolutionaries have resisted these structures, reclaiming language, literature, and history as sites of defiance. I do not believe we are bound by these fences, as evidenced by the literary revolutions that have reshaped world history. Writers have met the challenge of creating literature in their languages, constructing entire worlds beneath worlds, and extracting the essence of our collective soul from the burial grounds of erasure. This reclamation does more than preserve our native language—it opens avenues for the sciences, technology, philosophy, music, and art. To liberate the colonial child is not merely to write in native tongues; it is to create a higher level of democracy, one where imperialist paradigms no longer bind knowledge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yet imperialism continues to impugn our communities, reinforcing the structures that seek to divide and suppress. But within these struggles, there is also an alliance—a unity in the act of resistance through the very pen that was once wielded to erase us. By documenting our fallen empires and exposing the cracks in colonial elitism, we forge connections across histories and geographies. For the comprador-ruling regimes, the true threat is not the intellectual elite but the awakened peasantry and working class. A writer who dares to communicate the language of revolution in the tongues of the people is rendered a subversive figure, one who threatens the neocolonial state’s monopoly on knowledge and power.

VII. Epilogue: The Silence Will Not Hold

(Closing with the necessity of reclamation—voices rising from the margins, undoing the singular story, and dismantling the tower’s finality.)

The fear of true democratic participation lies at the heart of these anxieties. Colonial and neocolonial systems do not merely survive on linguistic and cultural fragmentation; they depend on it, ensuring that the people remain severed from the power to define themselves. But the pen remains mightier than the sword because while regimes may imprison bodies, ban books, and silence voices, an idea is beyond the reach of executioners. A revolutionary shrine cannot be razed when it is built into the marrow of the people. To reiterate Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story.”

We do not need permission to exist in the fullness of our histories. We do not need a seat at a table carved from the ruins of our stolen worlds. What we need—what we have always needed—is not mere representation, not the tired spectacle of inclusion, but an unrelenting reclamation. A multitude of aesthetics, a multitude of ideologies, voices rising from the margins not as echoes of the dominant order but as unrepentant forces in their own right. We must unearth the tongues buried beneath the empire, exhume the stories deemed unworthy of ink, and carve them into the bones of history. The world does not belong to one narrative, one voice, or one vision. It belongs to the multitude—the voices that refuse to be silenced, the tongues that defy erasure, the stories that, once told, make it impossible to return to the lie of a single truth.