Today, urgent calls to decolonize are accompanied by unproductive ambiguities surrounding decoloniality. This presentation derived from a larger project that attends to distinct registers and divergent claims of decolonize/decolonial/decoloniality, in order to carefully unravel these notions and practices as prescient optics unto contemporary worlds. Here, two competing conceptions assume salience: first, always-prior “universals”, commanding “origins” that severally announce the West as vanquishing and/or salvaging the primitive, the backward, the native, the non- and anti-modern. Second, already-a priori “alterities”, counter “epistemes” that innately subvert or/and subtend the colonial, the modern, the West, the North, the dominant. Taken together, might there be common connections yet contended histories at stake here? Can such concerns be articulated through specific steps yet in broad strokes, interleaving concept and evidence, theory and narrative, discipline and difference?
Saurabh Dube, Professor of History at the Centre for Asian and African Studies, El Colegio de México, and Guest of the IWM.
Research Director of IWM’s program Eurasia in Global Dialogue Clemena Antonova opened the colloquium.
Commentator: Julian Strube, Assistant Professor in Religious Studies at the University of Vienna.
