Decolonizing the Imagination hopes to be a site for reading, thinking and collaboration around the what, why, how, with and for whom of decolonization and decoloniality. It also includes an expanding list of resources that enable the undoing and unsettling of the totalizing claim and frame of Eurocentrism, including its legacies of epistemic and material violence incarnated in U.S.-­centrism, and perpetuated in the Western geopolitics of knowledge. Situated at the intersection of scholarship and praxis, the impulse for this project comes from our experience with the enduring provincialism of dominant historical and theoretical perspectives in art and design education, and specifically from a series of interdisciplinary seminars for faculty, museum curators, and librarians that we taught in 2020-2021 at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Decolonizing the Imagination is also the title of the book we are currently editing that will assemble some of the most significant contemporary voices in these debates. While we take our inspiration from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s prescient call for “decolonising the mind” in the 1980s we see our effort as a contribution to the ongoing conversation around the troubling evasions and consequences that result from a “metaphorization of decolonization,” as sharply announced by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, when the latter is adopted too easily by educational advocacy in institutions as well as in scholarship and artistic practice.