Modernity + Coloniality



A free online summer course on coloniality and decoloniality



Course Instructor: Ahmed Ansari

Dates & Times: Every Saturday, 2pm to 3:30pm EST. There are 300 seats in the Zoom session, and it is first come, first serve. The link will be up every Friday before class below the readings for the session.

Rules: Please make sure you enter the Zoom session with your name, city and\or institution to prevent zoombombings. Please ensure you are muted during the lecture, and raise hands before speaking during the discussion. Be respectful and kind.

Thank you.



What's this course about?



“Many words are walked in the world. Many worlds are made. Many worlds make us. There are words and worlds that are lies and injustices. There are words and worlds that are truthful and true. In the world of the powerful there is room only for the big and their helpers. In the world we want, everybody fits. The world we want is a world in which many worlds fit.”
- Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, “The Fourth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle”


This course will be run as a reading seminar and survey course looking into the constitution, scale, and many dimensions of the modern\colonial world-system. The texts here are merely a tiny fraction of the work done by non-Anglo-European, non-white scholars and activists in articulating the origins, development, and hegemony of the modern world-system, and yet my hope is that these will act as sparks for curious minds and a place within which to situate oneself and start from. This course was created keeping design students in mind, so, yes, we will have a few choice readings connecting coloniality to technology, but really, anyone can and should take this!



What are the expectations for the course?



A list of readings for each session have been provided below. I realize that the readings here are somewhat long, and so I've indicated which readings you should go over if you have limited time, and will be adding more resources to go over. The readings are at a Masters graduate level, and if you can only skim over the readings, please come anyway - the way I plan to run this is around a 30-45 minute lecture or presentation clarifying many of the key points and insights, and then we can open it up to discussion. If you have knowledge expertise in any of the domains we'll be discussing, don't be afraid to speak up and chime in!



When is this happening?



So, we're going to try and make the time as possible for most people, but we can always discuss this and change things around if needed after the first class, and folks can drop in and out as they wish. I've been debating whether to hold these on weekdays or weekends, since people are all working from home, but we will start with Saturdays after lunch, and change it if we need to later. You can Zoom in at the link provided below for each meeting.


How are we securing these meetings and preventing zoombombings?



We can't ensure that meetings won't be zoombombed, but all participants will move from a waiting room into the active call, so if someone fishy shows up the host won't let them in; similarly, if anyone in the meeting does misbehave or attempt to bomb it, they will be immediately kicked out and not allowed back in. I would really urge people coming in to attend to have their full name on display, and ideally, their city or institution, e.g. Ahmed Ansari (NYC, NYU).



What Are We Reading\Discussing\Viewing This Week?



Every Saturday, 2pm to 3:30pm EST
Please enter Zoom with your full name, city and\or institution to be allowed in. Noisy participants will be kicked out of the session, so please be on mute and raise your hand if you want to speak.


June 13. Before European Hegemony

  1. Janet Abu-Lugodh, Selections from Before European Hegemony
  2. Ovamir Anjum, Islam as a Discursive World-System

Extra Resources

If you have time, this is a nice video to watch on extractive global capitalism that also briefly mentions (somewhat reductively) world-systems theory as a framework

Immanuel Wallerstein, one of the progenitors of world-systems theory, on the modern world-system after 1945 and its present crises
Since people were curious about what to read with regards to design history, I would recommend starting with the difficult but rewarding Design & The Question of History, by Fry, Dilnot and Stewart

Audio Recording of the Lecture


June 20. On Violence

  1. Frantz Fanon, Concerning Violence, from The Wretched of the Earth
  2. Paulo Freire, Chapter I, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Extra Resources

If you have time, please also read W.E.B Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Chapter XIV, and Ashish Nandy, Revisiting the Violence of Development
To better understand the violence of the trans-atlantic slave trade, please read this essay by Jennifer Morgan
For postcolonial\decolonial critiques of Marx, you might want to read through this special issue
For a critique of the present poverty of thought in the social sciences, you might want to watch this short video of Roberto Unger as an introduction to his thought
For an interesting take on Gandhi's nonviolence and its historical moorings in Indian cosmologies, you may want to see Romila Thapar on Gandhi and ahimsa
Audio Recording of the Lecture

June 27. The Invention of The Other

  1. Edward Said, Reconsidering Orientalism
  2. Dipesh Chakraborty, Provincialising Europe, Chapter 1

Extra Resources

If you would like to read more on Said's continuing relevance to analytics of colonial representation, you could start with Hamid Dabashi's work, or Gayatri Spivak's assessments of Said
For more reflection on postcolonial critiques of historical\historiographical work, please read Ranajit Guha's History at the Limits of World History
A relatively balanced critique of the more 'positive' treatments of non-Western cultures, specifically William Dalrymple's ouvre
An interesting blog dealing with cultural appropriation and depictions of the Far East
Prominent among the texts of the Design Methods Movement, Notes on the Synthesis of Form by Chris Alexander has an entire chapter dedicated to 'unselfconscious' cultures and craft
Audio Recording of the Lecture


July 04. The Coloniality of Power

  1. Anibal Quijano, Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism & Latin America
  2. Ramon Grosfoguel, Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy


July 11. Borderlands & Delinking

  1. Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands\La Mestiza, Chapters 1,2 and 7
  2. Walter Mignolo & Madina Tostlanova, Theorizing from the Borders


July 18. Settler Colonialism

  1. Patrick Wolfe, The Elimination of the Native
  2. Eve Tuck & Wayne Yang, Decolonisation is not a Metaphor


July 25. Allyship

  1. Sa'ed Atshan & Darnell Moore, Reciprocal Solidarity
  2. Sara Ahmed, Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism OR
  3. Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk


August 01. Pluriversality & Other-Thought

  1. Marisol de la Cadena & Arturo Escobar, Pluriverse: A Proposal for a World of Many Worlds
  2. Ruth Mayer, Africa as an Alien Future


August 08. Decolonising Research

  1. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Beyond Abyssal Thinking
  2. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Twenty-Five Indigenous Projects


August 15. Decolonising Gender

  1. Oyèrónke Oyewùmi, Selections from The Invention of Women
  2. Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Chapter 5


August 22. Cosmotechnics

  1. Yuk Hui, Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics
  2. Shadreck Chirikure, The Metalworker, the Potter, and the Pre-European African Laboratory