Center for Cultural Analysis (CCA)

Danai Mupotsa, Wits University, South Africa. “Reading Audre Lorde in/from South Africa.” 

The “What is Decoloniality?” speaker series offers a space to reflect on the formation of, and contemporary relevance and multiple modes of opposition to doctrines of discovery, conquest, and modern colonization as well as of their entanglements with indigenous genocide, racialized slavery, and the coloniality of gender, power, knowledge and being. Rather than being strictly an academic disciplinary approach, decolonial thinking emerges at the intersection of various knowledges and practices that give expression to questions about dehumanization, rehumanization, and decolonization, and to perspectives on and projects toward epistemic, material, and symbolic transformation. As such, this speaker series aims to enrich conversations that shed light on the understanding of coloniality and the unfinished project of decolonization  that is taking place within academia, but even more so outside of academia, and, across universities and other spheres and communities of knowledge production. At stake is the possibility of redefining excellence and relevance through a serious consideration of decolonial forms of critical theorizing, research, literature, social and world-system analysis, pedagogy, artistic work, and other modalities of engagement with communities in struggle. 

Sponsored by the Rutgers Advanced Institute of Critical Caribbean Studies and the Center for Cultural Analysis