Decolonizing Theory

The past year has witnessed a remarkable reckoning with systemic racism and embedded structures of inequality, underscoring once again the epistemic violence of the privileging of a white, western, heteropatriarchal intellectual tradition in the academy. This seminar mobilizes multiple approaches and orientations, including decolonial theory, the Black Radical Tradition, postcolonial theory, and transnational decolonial feminisms. We consider critiques from these traditions of the Eurocentrism of critical theory, its imbrication with western modernity, colonial capitalism, and neocolonial geopolitics. Through texts ranging across frameworks of the coloniality of gender, epistemologies of the South, critical race studies, and theories of the global, we examine ways to de-universalize, de-imperialize, decolonize, and globalize Theory. Limited to graduate students; undergraduates must contact instructor for permission (seniors only).The seminar can be taken for less than 5 units only under extenuating circumstances. Contact instructor in such cases for permission.