Workshop for a Decolonial Global Studies Collection
In April of 2021, scholars came together to workshop the purpose, overview, and objectives of a Decolonial Studies Collection, which has since been written and will be released in 2024. The workshop conversation resulted in the following:
Purpose & Overview
Our aim is to develop methods and visions for the epistemological/material decolonizing of both past and present, including the accruing formations of culture and political economy. Our approach is driven by the view that we cannot understand any moment, era, or event separately from its long historical backstory. The work of decolonizing therefore involves dismantling Eurocentric, androcentric epistemologies that misrepresent both the sustaining legacies and the political struggles of those pasts.
Per our workshop conversation, we are all seeking to generate fresh, often speculative terms or to recover suppressed values as a key aspect of decolonial work. Together, the essays do not develop a unified vision or vocabulary. Rather they offer resources for teachers and scholars, whose teaching and collaboration disseminates ideas that have themselves been seeded and shaped by alliances with non-academic communities.
Our methods are collaborative, interdisciplinary, long-historical, inter-cultural, and intersectional. The collaborative process in particular nourishes the self-reflexive aspects of our work. It allows us to learn from each other about our own blind spots, grapple with the challenges of conceptual translation across languages and worlds, and together consider the diverse colonial and decolonial histories that both shape today’s crises and offer paths for ethical alliance.
Interweaving Threads
All of our essays address both colonizing histories and decolonizing practices/possibilities, each with a distinctive balance and regional/period focus. We hope that the rough, incomplete groupings below offer provisional coordinates. The essays will highlight:
- Misrepresentations and erasures;
- Noneurocentric, nonandrocentric configurations of communities, polities, knowledges/beliefs;
- Reconceptions of human economy—political/labor, moral, and/or cultural economies;
- Long-historical processes—palimpsests, ruptures, migrations, sustaining legacies, layered language worlds, translation practices, retooled epistemologies;
- Reconstructions of particular longue durée histories and/or worlding values.