Decolonizing the Imagination emerges out of a long-standing intellectual concern with the provincialism of dominant historical and theoretical perspectives in art and design education, and specifically in connection with an interdisciplinary seminar for faculty, museum curators, and librarians that we recently taught during two semesters at the Rhode Island School of Design. Situated at the intersection of scholarship and praxis, the proposition here is not only to advance the undoing and unsettling of the totalizing claim and frame of Eurocentrism, including the Eurocentric legacies of epistemic violence incarnated in U.S.-­centrism and perpetuated in the Western geopolitics of knowledge, but to concurrently draw attention to the what, why, how, with and for whom of decolonization and decoloniality.

Decolonizing the Imagination is also the title of the book we are currently putting together that will assemble some of the most significant contemporary voices in these debates. 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.