15 June 2020
“Many words are walked in the world. Many worlds are made. Many worlds make us. There are words and worlds that are lies and injustices. There are words and worlds that are truthful and true. In the world of the powerful there is room only for the big and their helpers. In the world we want, everybody fits. The world we want is a world in which many worlds fit.”
- Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, “The Fourth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle”
This course will be run as a reading seminar and survey course looking into the constitution, scale, and many dimensions of the modern\colonial world-system. The texts here are merely a tiny fraction of the work done by non-Anglo-European, non-white scholars and activists in articulating the origins, development, and hegemony of the modern world-system, and yet my hope is that these will act as sparks for curious minds and a place within which to situate oneself and start from. This course was created keeping design students in mind, so, yes, we will have a few choice readings connecting coloniality to technology, but really, anyone can and should take this!
For more on the course please visit this link.
Course Instructor: Ahmed Ansari
Dates & Times: Every Saturday, 2pm to 3:30pm EST
Rules: Please make sure you enter the Zoom session with your name, city or institution to prevent zoombombings. Please ensure you are muted during the lecture, and raise hands before speaking during the discussion. Be respectful and kind.
Thank you.
What Are We Reading\Discussing\Viewing This Week?
Every Saturday, 2pm to 3:30pm EST
Please enter Zoom with your full name, city and\or institution to be allowed in
June 13. Before European Hegemony
Janet Abu-Lugodh, Selections from Before European Hegemony
Ovamir Anjum, Islam as a Discursive World-System
If you have time, this is a nice video to watch on extractive global capitalismthat also briefly mentions (somewhat reductively) world-systems theory as a framework
Immanuel Wallerstein, one of the progenitors of world-systems theory, on the modern world-system after 1945 and its present crises
Audio Recording of the Lecture
June 20. On Violence
Frantz Fanon, Concerning Violence, from The Wretched of the Earth
Paolo Friere, Chapter I, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
If you have time, please also read W.E.B Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Chapter XIV, and Ashish Nandy, Revisiting the Violence of Development
June 27. The Invention of The Other
Edward Said, Reconsidering Orientalism
Dipesh Chakraborty, Provincialising Europe, Chapter 1
July 04. The Coloniality of Power
Anibal Quijano, Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism & Latin America
Ramon Grosfoguel, Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy
July 11. Borderlands & Delinking
Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands\La Mestiza, Chapters 1,2 and 7
Walter Mignolo & Madina Tostlanova, Theorizing from the Borders
July 18. Settler Colonialism
Patrick Wolfe, The Elimination of the Native
Eve Tuck & Wayne Yang, Decolonisation is not a Metaphor
July 25. Allyship
Sa'ed Atshan & Darnell Moore, Reciprocal Solidarity
Sara Ahmed, Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism or Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk
August 01. Pluriversality & Other-Thought
Marisol de la Cadena & Arturo Escobar, Pluriverse: A Proposal for a World of Many Worlds
Ruth Mayer, Africa as an Alien Future
August 08. Decolonising Research
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Beyond Abyssal Thinking
Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Twenty-Five Indigenous Projects
August 15. Decolonising Gender
Oyèrónke Oyewùmi, Selections from The Invention of Women
Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Chapter 5
August 22. Cosmotechnics
Yuk Hui, Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics
Shadreck Chirikure, The Metalworker, the Potter, and the Pre-European African Laboratory
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