Decolonial Thought

How do we make sense of the colonial foundations of the modern world? What is it to decolonize our institutions, minds and politics? In recent years, the Rhodes Must Fall movement in South Africa has spurred on a vibrant and difficult discussion across the world, about the legacy of colonialism in the modern university. Students and academics have been engaged in devising methods to understand and undo this colonial inheritance and confront the various connected structures of power such as hetero-patriarchy, racism, and class. One aspect of this endeavor has been to delve deep into the intellectual resources developed by anti-colonial and decolonial writers, revolutionaries, academics, and activists from the postcolonial world. This course is designed as a deep engagement with this critical decolonial work by some of the most significant thinkers from the Global South in the last hundred years. We will begin the course by developing a basic understanding of the contemporary call for decolonizing the university and the field of postcolonial and decolonial scholarship. After this, the main focus of this course will be a close reading and reflection on the writings that today constitute a rich reservoir of ideas for contemporary struggles to decolonize, to think critically about structures of power and injustice and to search for languages of liberation.