:: Workshop A: Decoloniality and the Shifting the Geopolitical of Reasoning
Walter Mignolo, Dalida María Benfield, Miguel Rojas-Sotelo, Raul Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet - Duke University
Duration: 3 hours
Friday, October 11, 8:30am-11:30am
This workshop is a closed think-tank process for aprox 14-16 people. It will be divided into 2 sections.
Section 1- During the first section, the participants will learn how the decolonial option allows a review of the ways in which coloniality is interrelated with the western concept of modernity. The very concept of Man as model of Human, in the European Renaissance, served also as the model to evaluate and classify Humanity around the globe. Racism, as we understand it today, has its foundation in the European renaissance. Patriarchy, as we know it today, has its foundation also in the European renaissance. The renaissance concept of Man was the model for both the prototype that justified the disqualification of people who did not conform to Western Christianity, to Greco-Roman languages and categories of thoughts, rationality and knowledge; to political and economic organization, and to the sociological status attributed to gender roles both in Christianity as well as in its subsequent translation into secular liberalism. The participants will also learn how the Eurocentric paradigm has created systems of oppression placing non-western culture at the exteriority of anglo-eurocentric paradigm. Displacing the knowledge, culture, agriculture, and cosmological spiritualities of non-western cultures, naming them primitive, traditional, outdate and backward.
Section II: The second section of this workshop offers a series of decolonial strategies that today are employed in the global south by African descendants and Indigenous community such as Ancestrality, Re-Existentia, Delinking, Shifting the Geo-politic of Reasoning and Decolonizing the Creative. One is the concept of “Geo-politics of Knowledge” is a key concept of Philosophy of Liberation in Latin America, “Shifting the Geography of Reason,” was introduced as a key founding concept of the Caribbean Philosophical Association in 2002. This section includes the presentation of bibliography, artworks and creative projects by Latino artists and scholars.
:: Workshop B: Indigenous/Settler engagement: Dialogic Conversations on Writing de Land
Mimi Gellman & Barbara Meneley
Friday, October 11, 8:30am-11:30am
Land matters. In settler colonialism, maps have been deployed to advance the fictional narrative of terra nullius, uninhabited land, open and available, lands that belonged to no one and to which no one belonged. This is the foundational premise upon which North American national narratives have been constructed. For Indigenous people, these assertions and the policies that followed were devastating to both Indigenous bodies and Indigenous ways of knowing.
In his seminal text “Indigenous Aesthetics: Native Art, Media and Identity,” Stephen Leuthold states, “that the study of Indigenous aesthetics opens us up to the possibility of a general aesthetics of place for non-Indigenous people.” Our proposal builds on this idea, focusing on alternative cartographies and concepts of mapping-back and counter-mapping, beginning with the contextualization of Sherene Razack's notion of "unmapping" as a process that subverts colonial imaginaries. Our proposed workshop offers an activation of these terms through generating dialogic collaboration. This proposed dialogue and hands-on workshop will shape a literal disruption of the map as a “truthful” representation of land and function as a symbolic action that may open us up to a rethinking and restorying of place and its relationship to decolonial aesthetics. How can collaborative relationships to land contribute to the decolonizing of settler imaginaries? Our goal is to create a scaffold of questions that has as its center the goal of finding a space of shared affinity and attunement (to place) and therefore to land for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, who are often represented as inhabiting positional binaries. Potential outcomes could also include a future collaboration between participants.
:: Workshop C: The Sovereignty of Indigenous Aesthetics
Prof. Dylan A.T. Miner, Michigan State University
Saturday, October 12, 8:30 - 11:30 am
In the workshop, participants will collectively explore the interrelationship between the growing global Indigenous art world, notions of contemporaneity, and the anti-°©-capitalist surge that emerged out of the global economic crisis that began in 2008. At the core of this conversation will be an engaged investigation of the various nodes of anti-capitalist
and Indigenous insurgencies, both literal and metaphorical, that respond to the persistent specter of economic collapse. Indigenous Aesthetic Sovereignty (AES), a concept that intentionally draws from Western notions of ‘sovereign governance’ and more recent engagements with ‘artistic sovereignty,’ is the lecture’s principal focus.
Accordingly, contemporary Indigenous artistic practices in Anishinaabewaki (Turtle Island), as well as in other Indigenous territories, offer an alternative to prevailing modes of artistic and economic exchange that dictate the global art market. In this workshop, we will concentrate on Indigenous artists and our/their projects in Anishinaabewaki while drawing affinities with and connections to those initiatives blossoming in other parts of the fourth world. Directly aligning itself with the conference theme (Decolonial Aesthetics), my argument strives to dismantle the supposed divide between indigeneity and contemporaneity, categories that remain bifurcated to this day. By addressing these categories, we may further explore how the former is a term gaining popularity among emerging Indigenous artists and activists, while the latter is an organizational mode that continues to wane as non Native critics argue against its efficacy. By coupling our discussion of these ideas to an engagement with sovereignty, including political, aesthetic, epistemological and ontological manifestations, we allow Indigenous artists, theorists, critics, curators, and community-members to be the avant-garde vis-à-vis Indigenous art, its history, and its theory.
In the end, we will integrate contemporary Indigenous aesthetics and artistic practice within a larger discussion of recent resistance to Anglo-American neoliberal economics by deciphering the potency of Indigenous aesthetics and their embedded potentiality to dismantle capitalist social relations. Much of this workshop has its basis in my current book project, Indigenous Aesthetics: Art, Activism, and Autonomy (London: Bloomsbury, under contract) and my entry on ‘Indigenous Aesthetics’ in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, under contract).
:: Workshop D: Archives of the past and future: decolonization and cosmopolitanism
Susan Lord, Dannys Montes de Oca, Isabel Alfonso, David Austin
Saturday, October 12, 8:30 - 11:30 am
The broad and general objective of our research is to bring to light connectivities that compose and theorize the underlying imaginary of a decolonial form of cosmopolitanism. By “decolonial cosmopolitanism” we mean to point to an attitude and a material condition of belonging to a world made by those who for centuries had no “world” to which to belong. It is in turns "critical cosmopolitanism" (Mignolo) and insurgent cosmopolitanism (de Sousa Santos). With this term as our probe, we seek a better understanding of the limits and expediencies of culture in efforts to transform citizenship from its function in the liberal order of individuals, nation-states, nationalisms, and the markets that mediate each to each, toward that of an active participant in the making of a new society, with new geographies, affects, archives and collective rights (Harvey 2008; Lefebvre 1968) composed by those whose past and future is informed by the radicality of hope fought for in the decolonizing and anti-imperialist projects of the 20th century.
WIthin the larger network of research we are developing, we will be working with artists and researchers who are developing archives on Havana, Montreal, Santiago, Algiers, Istanbul. For this workshop we will focus on Havana and Montreal but we invite others to bring their archives of hope and resistance to consider:
1)The aesthetic experimentation that emerged from a new expressive relationship to the city—an aesthetic of decolonized cosmopolitanism. 2) the relationship between cities, citizenship, and cultural production that creates, sustains, and disseminates an imaginary of and fordecolonized cosmopolitanism; 3) the urban imaginary formed of and and by insurgent and revolutionary citizens; 4) the meaning, value and function for today and tomorrow of these profound moments in global cultural modernity, to be considered through reflections on relationships to and transformations by global flows.
REGISTRATION INFORMATION
Conferences and worktables:
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Workshop Registration: $15
One day only:
::Regular $30
::Student/retired/underemployed $20
ENTER HERE TO REGISTER
For more information, please contact:
Maria Alejandrina Coates or Julieta Maria
decolonialsymposium2013@gmail.com
contact@e-fagia.org
www.e-fagia.org www.fusemagazine.org
