Syllabus
Decoloniality: Past, Present, and Future
Fall 2020 & 2021| 7-week course
Taught by Hajira, PhD Researcher
Carnegie Mellon University, School of Design
Tribal Land Acknowledgement: We acknowledge that the land in and around Pittsburgh has been home to Indigenous peoples for centuries and millennia longer than we have known it as Pittsburgh. Because of its advantageous location, Pittsburgh has been home to numerous tribes over the centuries. We acknowledge these are the tribal lands of the Osage, and we also acknowledge the Seneca, the Shawnee, the Haudenosaunee, and Lenape peoples who were stewards of this land. Furthermore, we acknowledge that the United States is a settler colonial state sprung from the genocide of millions of Indigenous peoples. Nevertheless, Pittsburgh continues to be home for Indigenous peoples of many nations, and we strive to honor their rights and to live together in ethical kinship.
— adapted from Alexa Woloshyn
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Decolonization has become a metaphor for re-centering discourses away from the hegemonic, Eurocentric West towards subaltern and marginalized ways of knowing, being, and doing. Calls for decolonization address a range of topic areas, from maps, to food, to pedagogy, to design.
Indeed, centuries of colonialism have impacted nearly every corner of the globe and every aspect of society, and it continues to influence how we understand social movements, inequality, pluriversality, globalization, and the state of our world today. Thus, understanding the centuries-long impact of colonialism is critical to understanding the current problems we face today.
How did we get here, and why do such stark inequalities exist across cultures and places? “Who is developed and advanced, and who is lagging behind?” Questions like this are colored by modern, colonial frames of thought. In order to move beyond these inequalities, we have to address our own thinking first.
In this course, we will survey the core texts and theories that have spurred decolonization movements, both in the literal and metaphorical sense. Given that decolonial discourse now touches on nearly every aspect of society — past, present, and future — the topics covered in this course will by no means be exhaustive, but are solely meant to serve as an entry point into that vast discourse unfolding even today.
Though not intended to be a history course, the topics will follow a temporal framing. We will discuss the role of modernity in facilitating colonization and the erasure of cultures, beginning by taking a look at what the pre-modern, pre-colonial world system looked like and how empires across the world interacted with one another prior to colonialism and globalization. We will then read how major thinkers of the time responded to the threat of colonization as a rupture from that prior world system. Not content to leave these histories in the past, we will then delve into decolonial theories, looking particularly at how coloniality still impacts us today as well as influencing the futures we envision.
Though we acknowledge the particular subjectivities of the authors we will encounter in this course, through their texts, we will attain a more comprehensive picture of history and today’s reality — that of the subaltern, one often left out of the narrowly-construed, hegemonic perspectives often presented in textbooks and media.
Audience
Whether applied to maps, pedagogy, or design, decolonization is an emancipatory movement that delivers us from mythologies that valorize the oppressor and devalue, subdue, and silence the oppressed. The ideas we explore in this course will challenge and force students to confront (perhaps in uncomfortable ways) how they interpret the world and their place in it. In so doing, this course will also prompt them to reflect on their own disciplines and future work with greater criticality, enabling them to broaden their perspectives and think outside the oftentimes narrowly-construed frameworks of traditional discourses. Thus this course is particularly important for both BIPOC and white allies interested in creating a more equitable, pluriversal future for all.
This course is open to both undergraduate (4.5 credit hours) and graduate students (6 credit hours) across the university. No prior background knowledge is required to take this course.
Format and Organization
This is a half-semester, 7-week seminar course that relies heavily on reading assignments and in-class lectures and discussions. Classes begin with a short lecture of about 30 minutes (sometimes more, sometimes less), and the remainder of the class is spent discussing the topics and readings in small groups and as a class.
Final Assignment Brief
For the final assignment, students will research on a topic of their own choosing related to decoloniality that they want to explore further. Students will be given the option to write a research paper or design a project as an output of their research.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this course, students will be able to:
- Think critically and reflectively on dominant paradigms that often go unquestioned
- Begin to trace the genealogy of those dominant paradigms and the role that colonialism played in advancing them
- Develop a sensitivity and respect for other cosmologies (ways of being, doing, and thinking) and their place in the world
- Achieve a familiarity with the major decolonial theorists and describe their foundational theories
- Articulate the relevance of decolonial theory to contemporary social and political issues, in one’s discipline and otherwise
- Develop and share “expertise” on a particular topic related to decoloniality and articulate its relevance to contemporary issues
TOPICS
Topics we will be covering in this course:
- The pre-modern world system
- History, narrative, and mythology
- Principles of modernity and modernity’s link to colonization
- Encounters with the West and reactions to colonial advancement
- Modernity, colonialism, and the development of race
- Coloniality of knowledge & ways of knowing
- Orientalism: media and the myth of the savage
- Progress, development, and aid
- Colonial theft and extraction
- White saviorism
- Diaspora of the colonized in a postcolonial world
- Decolonization as metaphor & approaches to decolonization
- Eurocentrism & colonized futures
READING LIST
Some of the resources we will be referencing in this course:
Abu-Lughod, Janet. 1989. “Ch. 11: Restructuring the Thirteenth Century World System.” In Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350, 352–372 of PDF. New York: Oxford University Press.
Adam, Barbara. 2010. “History of the Future: Paradoxes and Challenges.” Rethinking History 14 (3): 361–78. https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2010.482790.
Anderson, Benedict. (1983) 2016. “Ch 1: Introduction” and “Ch 2: Cultural Roots.” In Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised, 1–7. London, UK: Verso.
Ansary, Tamim. 2010. Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes. New York: PublicAffairs.
Camila. 2016. “Extraction as a Colonial Mechanism.” Geofuturism: Raw Materials. December 17, 2016. https://rampages.us/rawmaterials/2016/12/17/extraction-as-a-colonial-mechanism/.
de Sousa Santos, Boaventura. 2018. “Preface and Introduction.” In The End of Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South. Durham: Duke University Press.
Escobar, Arturo. 2016. “Thinking-Feeling with the Earth: Territorial Struggles and the Ontological Dimension of the Epistemologies of the South.” AIBR, Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana 11 (1): 11–32. https://doi.org/10.11156/aibr.110102e.
Fanon, Frantz. 2008. “Ch 5: The Lived Experience of the Black Man.” In Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Richard Philcox, 89–119. New York, NY: Grove Press.
— — — (1963) 2004. “Ch 4: On National Culture.” In Wretched of the Earth, translated by Richard Philcox, 145–80.
Freire, Paulo. (1970) 2017. “Chapter 1.” In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, translated by Myrna Bergman Ramos, 41–67 of PDF. UK: Penguin Classics.
Grosfoguel, Ramon. 2011. “Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality.” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1 (1): 1–37.
Karia, Aneil. 2020. The Long Goodbye. Short Film. WeTransfer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzz50xENH4g.
Las Casas, Bartoleme de. 1542. “Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies.” History Is a Weapon. 1542. http://hiaw.org/defcon1/delascasas.html.
Mahmud, Tayyab. 1999. “Colonialism and Modern Constructions of Race: A Preliminary Inquiry.” University of Miami Law Review 53: 29.
Martin, John. 1622. “A Proposal for Subjugating the Indians.” Webpage. Library of Congress. December 15, 1622. www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/timeline/colonial/indians/propose.html.
Mignolo, Walter D. 2011. “(De)Coloniality at Large | Time and the Colonial Difference.” In The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options, 149–80. Durham: Duke University Press.
Nandy, Ashis. 1996. “Bearing Witness to the Future.” Futures, What Futurists Think, 28 (6): 636–39. https://doi.org/10.1016/0016-3287(96)84465-X.
Ogunnaike, Oludamini. 2017. “African Philosophy Reconsidered: Africa, Religion, Race, and Philosophy.” Journal of Africana Religions 5 (2): 181.
— — — . 2016. “From Heathen to Sub-Human: A Genealogy of the Influence of the Decline of Religion on the Rise of Modern Racism.” Open Theology 2 (1): 785–803.
— — — . 2018. “Of Cannons and Canons.” Renovatio | The Journal of Zaytuna College, December. https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/of-cannons-and-canons.
Quijano, Anibal. 2000. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from South 1 (3): 533–80.
Said, Edward W. 1978. “Knowing the Oriental.” In Orientalism.
Sardar, Ziauddin. 1998. Postmodernism, the Internet and the Future. Interview by Jamie King. https://foresightinternational.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Sardar_Iview_1998_2015.pdf.
The Breakup (Shikwa). 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2tGEVwUuKw.
Tlostanova, Madina V. 2019. “What Is Coloniality of Knowledge?” In The Design Philosophy Reader, edited by Anne-Marie Willis, 110–15. London: Bloomsbury.
Tonino, Leath. 2016. “Two Ways Of Knowing: Robin Wall Kimmerer On Scientific And Native American Views Of The Natural World.” The Sun Magazine, April 2016. https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/484/two-ways-of-knowing.
Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. 2012. “Decolonization is not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 40.
