Utopian Openings and Decolonial Futures

This half-day symposium discusses the conditions of anti-imperialist and liberatory decolonial practices today – conditions that have often been seen to enable, rather than hinder, emancipatory intellectual solidarities. Our guest speaker, Divya Dwivedi, will take on the theoretical status quo in post- and decolonial theory today from an angle rarely discussed in the European context: That of the 3000-year long oppression of the majority of population in India by the Hindu minority via the caste system. In a series of responses and a conversation, following her talk, we will focus on the question of how exactly we, as scholars, can properly engage with multiplicity of politicisations and spatialisations of the decolonial? What sites of everyday violence and spatialized power relations decolonization inhabits when travelling from one site to another? Against all the promises of liberation, utopia and recovery, is there a negative work of the decolonial? How do we find in the present the language suitable for discussing a better future? 

Programme:

“Provincializing Decoloniality”

Guest Lecture by Divya Dwivedi, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India

The contemporary  schematizations of the “world” and its civilizational “discontents” through the theory of decoloniality – and its concomitant understanding of coloniality – have installed a new homogenization of the world and its histories. The purported universality of a decolonial ethics and politics must be interrogated for i) the “provinces” of oppression that it marginalizes and for ii) the old and new social oppressions that it enables and even masks. A prime instance is the discriminatory and oppressive order of caste in the Indian Subcontinent and its diaspora, where decoloniality has served as the effective vehicle of upper caste supremacism. Caste, which has been falsely deemed a colonial construct by decolonial scholarship, is the oldest racism where a descent-based hierarchy is maintained by the denigrate-dominate function. In colonial times, the upper castes devised new calypsologies—ways to mask their denigrate-dominate function against the rising anti-caste thought and politics. Postcolonial and subaltern theories disguise caste’s racism as “religion,” “culture,” and subaltern subjectivity, while sociologists denigrate Dalit scholarship as unacademic and emotional. The homologies of caste with race are still dangerously regnant today through the resurfaced “Aryan Doctrine” whose origins lie, not in Nazism or European racism” but in millennia-old upper caste supremacism. Epistemologically and ethically, we must therefore provincialize decoloniality and examine its anti-emancipatory work in certain “provinces” of the world.

Responses:
Ivana Perica (Berlin), Research Fellow, Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL)

Wassim Ghantous (Tampere), Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Regional Studies, Palestine Research Group/Space and Political Agency Research Group

Natalya Bekhta (Tampere), Academy Research Fellow, Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies

Mikko Joronen (Tampere), Associate Professor, Regional Studies, Palestine Research Group/Space and Political Agency Research Group