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15 June 2020

Modernity + Coloniality: A free online summer course on coloniality and decoloniality

“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!

For more on the course please visit this link.


Course Instructor: Ahmed Ansari

Dates & Times: Every Saturday, 2pm to 3:30pm EST

Rules: Please make sure you enter the Zoom session with your name, city 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 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


June 13. Before European Hegemony

Janet Abu-Lugodh, Selections from Before European Hegemony

Ovamir Anjum, Islam as a Discursive World-System

If you have time, this is a nice video to watch on extractive global capitalismthat 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

Audio Recording of the Lecture


June 20. On Violence

Frantz Fanon, Concerning Violence, from The Wretched of the Earth

Paolo Friere, Chapter I, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

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


June 27. The Invention of The Other

Edward Said, Reconsidering Orientalism

Dipesh Chakraborty, Provincialising Europe, Chapter 1


July 04. The Coloniality of Power

Anibal Quijano, Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism & Latin America

Ramon Grosfoguel, Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy


July 11. Borderlands & Delinking

Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands\La Mestiza, Chapters 1,2 and 7

Walter Mignolo & Madina Tostlanova, Theorizing from the Borders


July 18. Settler Colonialism

Patrick Wolfe, The Elimination of the Native

Eve Tuck & Wayne Yang, Decolonisation is not a Metaphor


July 25. Allyship

Sa'ed Atshan & Darnell Moore, Reciprocal Solidarity

Sara Ahmed, Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism or Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk


August 01. Pluriversality & Other-Thought

Marisol de la Cadena & Arturo Escobar, Pluriverse: A Proposal for a World of Many Worlds

Ruth Mayer, Africa as an Alien Future


August 08. Decolonising Research

Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Beyond Abyssal Thinking

Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Twenty-Five Indigenous Projects


August 15. Decolonising Gender

Oyèrónke Oyewùmi, Selections from The Invention of Women

Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Chapter 5


August 22. Cosmotechnics

Yuk Hui, Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics

Shadreck Chirikure, The Metalworker, the Potter, and the Pre-European African Laboratory



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