Join us for an engaging series of lectures that tackle urgent questions about colonial histories and their impact today.
Beschrijving
Join us for an engaging series of lectures that tackle urgent questions about colonial histories and their impact today.
This year, our new course ‘Decolonisation’ (part of university-wide ‘korfvakken’) opens its doors to a broader audience.
Understanding and Practicing Decolonisation
The course on ‘Decolonisation’ will offer students the tools to gain insight into the complex realities and debates on the processes of decolonization. It also hopes to train the young generation to gain confidence and experience themselves as agents of change by teaching how past violence can be remedied and how these complex histories that shape our present realities can be repaired. The course identifies co-constitutive relationships between colonization, racism, sexism, and knowledge production. This shows how the relationships between “the West” and its colonial and post-colonial subjects and territories are produced and reproduced. The critical decolonization framework also identifies, interrogates, and contests the past and present entangled relationship between colonization, racism, elitism, and sexism to create more equal and just societies and more inclusive structures of knowledge production. The course offers students a critical decolonization framework to engage past and present societies and our dominant structures of knowledge production.
Every lecture starts with a case study from contemporary society (for instance, the statues of Leopold II, the war on Gaza, the criticism of black female athletes whose bodies are considered too masculine,…) and equip students with critical conceptual, theoretical, historical, and creative tools to analyse the complex societal phenomenon.
Programma
The lecture examines how cultural practices and relations continue to establish and maintain colonial relations even after colonial independence. It also identifies decolonizing approaches to colonial cultural relations and practices. The lecture is based on Edward Said’s “Introduction” in Culture and Imperialism, John Tomlinson’s “Cultural Imperialism,” and some parts of Raoul Peck’s documentary film I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO, Mat Diop’s documentary film Dahomey, and Ruben Hordijk’s video essay “The Green Mile: white masculinity and the myth of the black rapist.”
