Modernity + Coloniality



A free online summer seminar 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

A video to watch on extractive global capitalism

Immanuel Wallerstein, The modern world-system after 1945
For design historians, Design & The Question of History, Fry, Dilnot & 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

W.E.B Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Chapter XIV
Ashish Nandy, Revisiting the Violence of Development
Jennifer Morgan, Kinship & The Middle Passage
Krisis, Marx from the Margins
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

Hamid Dabashi's on Said
Gayatri Spivak on Said
Ranajit Guha's History at the Limits of World History
A relatively balanced critique of William Dalrymple's ouvre
An interesting blog dealing with cultural appropriation and orientalism
Orientalism in Christopher Alexander's text, Notes on the Synthesis of Form
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

Extra Resources
Nelson Maldanado-Torres on the genealogy of decoloniality
Maria Lugones on the coloniality of gender
Gayatri Spivak's response to Chibber's Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital
Interview with Walter Mignolo on postcolonialism, decolonialism, and decoloniality
Audio Recording of the Lecture


July 11. Borderlands & Delinking

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

Audre Lorde, The Uses of the Erotic
Barbara & Beverly Smith, Across the Kitchen Table
Abdelkabir Khatibi, Plural Maghreb
Rosalba Icaza, Border Thinking and Vulnerability as a Knowing Otherwise

Audio Recording of the Lecture


July 18. Settler Colonialism

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

Lorenzo Veracini, Facing the Settler Colonial Present
Dawi Kopenawa, from The Falling Sky
Marshall Sahlins & David Graeber, On Kings

Audio Recording of the Lecture


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

Ibram X Kendi, How to be an Antiracist
Jenell Navarro & Kimberly Robertson, The Countdown Remix
Robin DeAngelo, White Fragility

Audio Recording of the Lecture


August 01. Pluriversality & Other-Thought

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

Subcomandante Marcos, Seventh Wind: Some Dignified and Enraged Deceased

Kodwo Eshun, Further Considerations on Afrofuturism
Eduoard Glissant, Creolization in the Making of the Americas

Audio Recording of the Lecture


August 08. Decolonising Research

  1. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Beyond Abyssal Thinking
  2. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Twenty-Five Indigenous Projects
  3. Audra Simpson, On Ethnographic Refusal

Robina Anne Thomas, Honoring the Oral Traditions of My Ancestors
Antonia Darder, Decolonizing Interpretive Research
Eve Tuck & Wayne Yang, R-Words:Refusing Research

Audio Recording of the Lecture


August 15. Decolonising Gender

  1. Oyèrónke Oyewùmi, Selections from The Invention of Women OR her podcast here
  2. Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Chapter 5
  3. Mitsuye Yamada, Invisibility is an Unnatural Disaster

Abdullah Ocalan, Liberating Life: Woman's Revolution
Chandra Mohanty, Under Western Eyes
Jasbir Puar, I Would Rather Be A Cyborg Than A Goddess

Audio Recording of the Lecture


August 22. Cosmotechnics

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

Syed Mustafa Ali, A Brief Intro to Decolonial Computing
Vasudha Narayanan, Water, Wood, and Wisdom
Judith Farqahar, Eating Chinese Medicine


Audio Recording of the Lecture