Utopian Openings and Decolonial Futures
7 October 2024, 13-16:00, TAU Pinni B1096
Keynote Speaker: Divya Dwivedi (Associate Professor of Philosophy and Literature; Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India) with the lecture on “Provincializing Decoloniality”
Organised by Natalya Bekhta (IAS Fellow 2022-2024) and Mikko Joronen (IAS Fellow 2022-2024)
Political, scholarly and media treatment of Russia’s invasive war in Ukraine and of Israel’s new intensification of eliminatory mechanisms in Palestine, Gaza in particular, has brought about the need to re-examine the current anti-imperialist and decolonial discourses. In the case of Ukraine, the fact that it found an ally in the US has made it impossible for most anti-imperialist intellectuals to understand, let alone support, the Ukrainian cause. Referring to western ‘anti-war’ movements in response to the Syrian war, Leila Al-Shami described such “anti-imperialism of idiots” as the inability to think in non-dogmatic terms attuned to the concrete socio-political realities rather than to the sole fact that the actions of the US are indeed largely imperialistic. In the case of Palestine, on the other hand, efforts to reduce the complicity of European countries and the US in what appears to be a textbook case of genocide have been minimal, even after the ICJ opened its investigation into the Gaza genocide and (re)confirmed that Israeli settlement policy is illegal under international law. Despite the scale of destruction in the confined death-space(s) of Gaza, many European countries, including Finland, choose to stay restrained and unjudgmental on imperial and settler colonial realities in Palestine, while continuing their arms trade with a party that according to UN is responsible for the destruction of housing unseen since the WWII. This raises questions about the politics of care, mourning and accountability: whose life do we care about, whose do we not? Whose death do we mourn, whose do we ignore? Whose killing is considered worthy of accountability, whose not?
In this half-day symposium we discuss the conditions of anti-imperialist and liberatory decolonial practices today – conditions that have often been seen to enable, rather than hinder, emancipatory intellectual solidarities. In particular, we want to ask, what is the work that the decolonial does? Recent years have seen massive proliferation of academic (and non-academic) writing on decolonisation, accompanied by calls to extend it from the past to the present condition, from knowledge production to unlearning, and from metaphorical uses to questions of land, dispossession and racial geographies of power. While such calls almost invariably point to alternative futures and liberation, and various processes of recovery and reconciliation, we still need to ask what decolonisation means when it becomes geographically differentiated. What narratives and politicisations do the provincialized views of decolonisation produce? What sites of everyday violence and spatialized relations of power 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?
Our guest speaker, Divya Dwivedi, will take on the theoretical status quo in post- and decolonial theory today from a historical and geographical 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 discussion, 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. How do we find in the present the language suitable for discussing a better future?
Keynote Speaker: Divya Dwivedi (Associate Professor of Philosophy and Literature; Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India)
Programme:
Introduction: Natalya Bekhta and Mikko Joronen (10 min)
Guest Lecture: Divya Dwivedi: “Provincializing Decoloniality” (30-45 min)
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 (7-10 min):
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
The event is organized with support of the Tampere Institute for Advanced Study and in collaboration with the research projects “Utopia and Eastern Europe after 1989” (Research Council of Finland) and “Dwelling with crisis: home at spaces of chronic violence” (HOMCRI; ERC Consolidator Grant).