 |
|
|
|
 |
|
||
 |
|
||
 |
|
||
 |
|
||
 |
|
||
 |
 |
|
|
 |
|
||
 |
|
||
 |
|
||
 |
 |
|
|
 |
|
||
 |
|
||
 |
|
||
 |
|
||
 |
|
||
 |
|
||
 |
|
||
Description
De-colonial thinking takes up Anibal Quijano's coloniality of power as a confluence of the production of race and the production of modern eurocentered epistemology and seeks to de-colonize it. That is, it seeks to reach deeply into an alternative geopolitics of knowledge, one that valorizes resistant thinking at the point of colonial encounter. That resistant thinking seeks a connection with indigenous and African cosmologies and ways of knowing.
What is sought is a de-colonial turn: an evolving theorization that originates or attempts to respond to the questions and concerns that emerge from different geo-political and social positions that are deeply marked by the histories of colonialism and racism.
The taking up of a de-colonial turn begins with a detailed understanding of coloniality, one that includes an understanding of the imposition of the deeply heterosexualist modern/colonial gender system. One of the aims of this understanding is to see the present as contracted. This takes up what Boaventura De Souza Santos calls a “sociology of absences.”
It is also part of the de-colonial task to expand the present. This aspect of the project traces de-colonial practices since the sixteenth century. These practices challenge Western power, in part by making visible what the dark side of domination has obscured. The vision of liberation that is created is one that instead of trying to go back to the past, brings the past into the present in order to expand the limited (and oppressive) Western version of the present, the enactment of the past in the present produces a tension with the Western present. Decolonial thinking prompts knowing the past in order to search for both experiences that resonate with the present and for experiences that have survive (transformed or not,) so as to enrich resistant imagination and illuminate multiple senses of the present.
The De-colonial Thinking workshop will meet bi-weekly. The meetings will include presentations by the participants, joint research into the questions that make up our problematic. We will begin by revisiting that large problematic as it is engaged in the work of several key authors, including Walter Mignolo, Boaventura De Sousa Santos, Chela Sandoval, Anibal Quijano, Rodolfo Kusch, Enrique Dussel, Gloria Anzaldua, Anne Mc Clintock, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, and others. The questions that we are posing call both for individual and group research; archival research; interviews; reading of the significant literature.
In addition to organizing the graduate student conference with Stonybrook, Syracuse, Cornell, UCSanta Barbara, UC Berkely, Lemoyne College, we plan to present the work of the workshop in conferences and publications. We aim to make ourselves solid members of this impressive network of intellectuals working on decolonial turn, decolonial mapping, decolonial thinking throughout Latin America, the Caribbean, and the US.
We aim to include faculty and students--both graduate and undergraduate--in LACAS, the Braudel Center, Sociology, PIC, and those faculty members in Africana, Comparative Literature, Asian American Studies, English, Art History and History who are interested in the questions posed by the de-colonial turn as conference participants. The keynote will be open to the general public, the conference presentations will be open to all conference participants.
Faculty:
Mary Pat Brady, Cornell University. Lubna Chaudrhy, HD. María Lugones, PIC, COLI. Joshua Price, HD. Mario Saenz, LeMoyne College, Philosophy.
Cindy Cruz, Postdoctoral Fellow, Cornell University.
Faculty On line:
Enrique Dussel, Universidad Autonoma de Mexico, Philosophy. Chela Sandoval, UC Santa Barbara, Chicano Studies. Laura Elisa Perez, UC Berkeley, Ethnic Studies. Nelson Maldonado Torres, UC Berkeley, Ethnic Studies.
Shireen Roshanravan, Women's Studies, Kansas State University.
Graduate students:
Mazi Allen, PIC. Manuel Chavez, PIC. Pedro Di Pietro, PIC. Anne Jahn, COLI. Rafael Motta, PIC. Nicholas Natividad, PIC. Wesley Saavedra, PIC. Gabriel Soldatenko, PIC. Gabriela Veronelli, PIC.
Jen-feng Kuo, PIC. Wanda Alarcon, English. Desmond Jagmohan, Cornell University.
Note: These plans are for the next two years.
The workshop will meet bi-weekly. The group will conduct research [individual and joint research] on the following topics:
*Translation and colonialism:
1) How translation practices reveals linguistic relations of power, both relations of domination, and of resistance?
2) What different linguistic cartographies do practices of translations draw?
3) How have the problem of translation and the very figure of the translator been addressed in different periods and cultures?
4) How has translation been linked to linguistic equivalents as well as to displacement or linguistic incommensurability and excess? 3) How have processes of translation - the translation from oral to written, the passage from non-written languages to written languages, the literacy of oral languages, the compilation of dictionaries, the invention of grammars, and adaptations of drama to opera, novel to film, or “historically informed” performance to a “modern” setting were used in “civilizing” and colonizing projects?
5) How may translation be related to processes of cultural transmission and inscription, or to anxieties about memory and the cultural archive?
6) What possibilities are opened by the multilingualism and multiculturalism of the colonized subject in the face of a dominant language or discourse?
*Communication across deep horizontal differences crossed with a de-colonial disposition.
*The modern/colonial gender system: the following questions will be addressed, each leading to significant research:
1. Is gender a colonial idea?
2. What was the social sexual organization in pre-colonial societies in Latin America and Africa? Were they gendered societies? How many genders? How was gender understood?
3. How did colonialism introduce gender? What are the particularities in each case? How was the pre-colonial organization destroyed and to what end? Did the changes introduced de-stabilize the social among the colonized? What guided the composition of the colonial gender systems in their particularities?
4. How have the organization of sexuality and gender in the region been affected by resistance to the colonial imposition?
5. What is the relation between coloniality and the modern/colonial gender system?
6. Comparative study of pre-colonial, colonial, postcolonial, and contemporary sexualities.
Below is a list of books and articles that we read for our research agenda. They reflect the development of our political and intellectual concerns.
For your information, you could access to most of the journal articles online via the databases paid for by your academic institution.
For instance, the journal Nepantla is available at databases such as Project MUSE and Academic Search Premier.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera. 2nd edition. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999.
Jiménez-Lucena, Isabel. "Gender and Coloniality: the 'Moroccan Woman' and the'Spanish Woman' in Spain's Sanitary Policies in Morocco." História, Ciências, Saúde. 13:2(Apr.-June 2006), 33-54.
Lugones, María. "Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System." Hypatia. 22:1 (Winter 2007), 186-209.
Marcos, Silvia. Taken from the Lips: Gender and Eros in Mesoamerican Religions. Boston: Brill, 2006.
Mignolo, Walter D. "Border Thinking and the Colnial Difference." Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton University Press, 2000.
--"Prophets Facing Sidewise: The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference." Social Epistemology. 19:1 (January - March 2005), 111-127.
Mignolo, Walter D., and Madina V. Tlostanova. "Theorizing from the Borders: Shifting to Geo- and Body-Politics of Knowledge." European Journal of Social Theory. 9:2 (2006), 205-221.
Quijano, Anibal. "Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America." Nepantla: Views from the South. 1:3 (2000), 533-580.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979.
Sandoval, Chela. "Dissident Globalizations, Emancipatory Methods, Social-Erotics." Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism. Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Matin F. Manalansan IV, eds. New York: New York University Press, 2002. 20-32
Tlostanova, Madina. "'Why Cut the Feet in Order to Fit the Western Shoes?': Non-European Soviet Ex-colonies and the Modern Colonial Gender System." Unpublished paper.
Walsh, Catherine, and Edizon León. "Afro-Andean Thought and Diasporic Ancestrality." Shifting the Geography of Reason: Gender, Science, and Religion. Marine Paola Banchetti- Robino and Clevis Ronald Headley, eds. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006. 211-224.
Walsh, Catherine. "Shifting the Geopolitics of Critical Knowledge: Decolonial Thought and Cultural Studies 'Other' in the Andes." Cultural Studies. 21:2-3 (March 2007), 224-239.
--"Interculturality and the Coloniality of Power: An 'Other' Thinking and Positioning from the Colonial Difference." Forthcoming.
PIC Website - State University of New York - Binghamton
webmaster: gverone0@binghamton.edu