Decolonisation course
Beschrijving
This lecture will identify colonized political practices and offer decolonizing alternatives. More specifically, we will explore ways to unlearn colonial ways of thinking and practicing politics. Among others, the lecture is based on Ariella Aisha Azoulay’s “Unlearning Imperialism” in Potential Histories.
Programma
This lecture is part of the course on ‘Decolonisation’ and 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.
