An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Sandeep Bakshi (IASH-SSPS Research Fellow 2022, Université Paris Cité / LARCA)
Writing over: Putting decolonial thinking into practice
This work-in-progress seminar presentation considers what decolonising the study of literature and/or art might entail. Given the overpopulated discourse in academia on decolonisation and other cognate terminology, this talk will endeavour to enact a return to the past, i.e., the spectre of colonisation in order to understand strategies of what has been referred to as the ‘decolonial turn’. As part of my larger project on decolonial thinking to which this talk is tied, I turn to the labour in addressing the meaning of ‘decolonising’ knowledge, which calls forth an honest-cum-thorough critical appraisal of euro-american canon of knowledge without eliding critical questions of privilege in terms of race, gender, sexuality, and social capital inter alia. Interrogating the specific contours of the decolonial analytic, this presentation will describe the tenor of decolonisation by providing two examples in domains of literature and art. The presentation is impelled by the numerous calls to “decolonise the curriculum” in various disciplines, often with encouraging results of universities taking cognisance of the ubiquity of the canon. However, it remains an enterprise of either diversity-inclusion or insufficiently careful addition of newer sources. Through what I term as the act of ‘writing over’, informed by the cultural co-constitution that the global North and South produce, a strategy can potentially become visible in various inter-disciplines.
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81322391722
Passcode: Vr8f3ew2