_Syllabus

_Preface

Offered as part of RISD’s Decolonial Teaching in Action program, Decolonizing the Imagination is a semester-long seminar for RISD faculty, librarians, and museum curators aimed at generating a space for studying, analyzing, and discussing some of the central questions of ‘decolonization’ and ‘decoloniality’, one of the fastest-growing debates in the humanities, the social sciences, and contemporary art and design practices.

Conceived as a reading community the seminar interconnects diverse perspectives from the different histories and lived experiences of anticolonialism, decolonization, postcoloniality, and decolonial thought and praxis from around the globe, and focuses on the vast literature on methodologies ‘from below’ connected to a pedagogy of the oppressed, critical pedagogy, or engaged pedagogy.

Aimed at an audience of experts - artists, designers, scholars and intellectuals - this seminar seeks to broaden debates, complicate assumptions, cultivate conversations and perhaps most importantly, expand epistemologies among those interested in abandoning modernity’s naturalized fictions and imperatives; we would also try to imagine what a teaching practice that attempts to dismantle the ongoing dominance of Western epistemologies and ontologies while engendering emancipation with respect to thinking, being, knowing, understanding and living might look like. The seminar, thus, will try to provide us with historical and theoretical frameworks to examine efforts at decolonization from multiple ideological standpoints including but not limited to Fanonian thought, racial capitalism, global indigeneity, Black radical critique, intersectional and transnational feminisms, subaltern studies, and continuing examples of praxis in the Americas, South Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania.

_Weekly Readings

Week 1
Decolonizing the Imagination

Readings: 
. Wa Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ (1986). Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: J. Currey. (Preface, Introduction, ch.4)

. Tuck, Eve & Yang, Wayne K. (2012). “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1.1: 1‐40.

Suggested Readings:
. Mignolo, Walter & Walsh Catherine (2018). On Decoloniality. Durham: Duke University Press. (Ch.1, Ch.5)

Week 2
Anticolonialism, Decolonization, Postcolonialism and Decoloniality I

Readings:
. Fanon, Frantz (2004). The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press. (On Violence, Conclusion)

. Said, Edward. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. (Introduction)

. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2005). “Legacies of Bandung: Decolonisation and the Politics of Culture,” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 40, No. 46, 4812-4818.

Suggested Readings:
. Césaire, Aime (2000). Discourse on colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press.

. Nandy, Ashis. (1983). The intimate enemy: loss and recovery of self under colonialism. Delhi: Oxford University Press. (“The Psychology of Colonialism”)

. Spivak, Gayatri & Guha, Ranajit (1988). Selected Subaltern Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Introduction)

. Getachew, Adom (2019). Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-determination. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Week 3
Anticolonialism, Decolonization, Postcolonialism and Decoloniality II

Readings:

. Quijano, Aníbal (2000). "Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America." Nepantla: Views from South, 1.3: 533-80.

. Lugones, Maria (2007). “Heterosexualism and the Colonial / Modern Gender System,” Hypatia, Vol. 22, No. 1, 186-209.

Suggested Readings:
. Anzaldúa, Gloria (1999). Borderlands: La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. (Ch.1)

. Wynter, Sylvia (2003). "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—an Argument." The New Centennial Review 3.3: 257-337.

Week 4
Black Radical Theory I

Readings:
. Du Bois, W. E. B. (2007). Black reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880. New York: Oxford University Press. (Ch. 1, 2, 3, 4 & 7)

. Robinson, Cedric (1983). Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. (Preface, Acknowledgments, Introduction & Ch. 1)

Suggested Readings:

. James, C. L. R. (1963). The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage Books.

. Césaire, Aimé (1956). “Letter to Maurice Thorez,” Social Text (2010) Vol. 28, No. 2 (103), 145–152.

. Kelley, Robin (2017, 12 January). “What did Cedric Robinson mean by racial capitalism?,” Boston Review’s 2017 issue Race, Capitalism. 

Week 6
Black Radical Theory III

Readings:
. Lorde, Audre (1984). “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press.

. Wynter, Sylvia (1994). “No Humans Involved’: An Open Letter to My Colleagues,” Forum N.H.I.: Knowledge for the 21st Century. Vol.1, No 1, 42-73.

 . Hartman, Saidiya (2008). “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe. Number 26 (Volume 12, Number 2), 1-14.

Suggested Readings:

. McKittrick, Katherine (2015). Ed. Sylvia Wynter: on being human as praxis. Durham: Duke University Press.

. King, Tiffany Lethabo (2019). The Black Shoals: Offshore formations of black and native studies. Durham; London: Duke University Press.

Week 7
Indigenous Studies I

Readings:
.  Wolfe, Patrick (2006). Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native, Journal of Genocide Research, 8 (4), December, 387-409.

. Coulthard, Glen Sean (2014). Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Introduction)

. Martineau, Jarrett  & Eric Ritskes (2014). “Fugitive indigeneity: Reclaiming the terrain of decolonial struggle through Indigenous art,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, Vol. 3, No. 1, I-XII.

Suggested Readings:

. Alfred, Taiaiake (1999). Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto. Toronto: Oxford University Press. (First Words)

Week 8
Indigenous Studies II

Readings:
. EZLN, Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (1996). “Fourth Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle,” January 1st, 1996. 

. Gomez Barris, Macarena (2011). The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham: Duke Press. (Introduction, Ch. 5)

. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake (2011). Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence. Winnipeg: ARP Books. (Ch. 2)

Suggested Readings:

. Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne (2014). An Indigenous People’s History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press. (Introduction, Indian Country)

. Byrd, Jodi A. (2011). The Transit of Empire: Indigenous critiques of colonialism. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (Introduction).

Week 11
Critical Pedagogies:
Decoloniality as Praxis II

Readings:

. Freire, Paulo (1993). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum. (Preface, Ch. 1 & 3)

. hooks, bell (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge. (Introduction, Engaged Pedagogy)

. Moten, Fred & Harney, Stefano (2004) “The university and the undercommons: Seven theses.” Social Text, 79: 101-116.

Suggested Readings:

. Boal, Augusto (1985) Theater of the Oppressed. New York: TCG.

. Alexander, M. Jacqui (2005). Pedagogies of Crossing. Durham: Duke Press. (Ch.3)

. Ahmed, Sara (2004). “Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism” Borderlands 3 (2).

Week 12
Decolonizing the University (?)

Readings:

. paperson, la (2017). A Third University is Possible. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

. De Sousa Santos, Boaventura (2018). The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South. Durham: Duke University Press. (From University to Pluriversity and Subversity)

. Rohith Vemula’s Letter, My Birth is my fatal accident (January 17, 2017): https://thewire.in/caste/rohith-vemula-letter-a-powerful-indictment-of-social-prejudices.

Suggested Readings:

. Mbembe, Achille (2016). “Decolonizing the University: New Directions.”  Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 15.1: 29-45.

. Guru, Gopal (2002). “How Egalitarian are the Social Sciences in India?” Economic and Political Weekly. Vol. 37, No. 50.

. Bhambra, Gurminder, Dalia Gebrial & Kerem Nişancıoğlu (2018). eds. Decolonizing the University. London: Pluto Press.

Week 13
Decolonizing Art/Design Institutions (?)

Readings: 
. Azoulay, Ariella Aisha (2019). Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. NYC: Verso Books. (Ch. 1 and 2)

. Escobar, Arturo (2018). Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press. (Introduction)

Suggested Readings:
. Abu-Lughod, Lila (2020). Imagining Palestine’s Alter-Narratives: Settler Colonialism and Museum Politics. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 47, Number 1.

. Kavita Singh (2010). “Repatriation Without Patria: Repatriating for Tibet.” Journal of Material Culture, Vol. 15, Issue 2.

. Tunstall, Dori. Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.