Radical Traditions and Praxes Of Decoloniality

Catalog description

TAUGHT BY GTU. RADICAL TRADITIONS AND PRAXES OF DECOLONIALITY: LIBERATION, INTERNATIONALISM, REVOLUTION, AND THE LAND. This course has a required meeting time of 9:40 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and an optional additional monthly meeting time on Thursday evenings 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. for potluck/guest speakers/field trips. Radical Traditions and Praxes of Decoloniality is a public course designed to learn from (theory) and build with (practice) the radical traditions, theories, and critical pedagogies by which social movements, historic and contemporary, have engaged in emancipatory struggle, the deconstruction of oppression, and the construction of liberative futurities. This course studies the historical origins, theoretical trajectories, and analyses of radical Third World social movements (inclusive of the Global Souths within the Global Norths) and the contributions of the major theorist-activists of decolonial thought via the praxes by which people have moved and are moving in emancipatory motion. Teacher-learners enrolled for credit will read selections from Franz Fanon, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Walter Rodney, Aimé Césaire, Leanne Betasamosake, Gloria Anzaldua, bell hooks, Sylvia Winter, María Lugones, Paulo Freire, Ho Chi Min, and others. As a community, we will engage in the process of critical analysis, reflection, and action, what Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire termed conscientização: the praxis which unveils the sociocultural, political, and economic contradictions of lived reality and equips participants to take action against the oppressive elements of reality. Therein and therefore, critical race feminism, abolitionism, Maoist communism, Decolonial Marxism, Pan-Africanism, post/de/anti-colonial thought, queer theories, among other fields of critique and power form the theoretic landscape of our course, informing, complicating, and complementing the ways we will think, know, and work together in movement struggle. In no lesser import, national independence struggles of the twentieth century, landless and peasant movements before them and today, and Indigenous resistances and resurgences from Turtle Island to Palestine, Cuba, Combahee, to Bengali, inform and fortify our analyses, strategies, probity, and imaginaries of an-other world: of justice, freedom, love. participants' subjectivity, the refusal to abide the normative segregations coloniality establishes (I.e. between university and society, education and community, teacher and student, theory and action, knowledge and experience, Land and identity and existence), and the collective task of conscientização, this course-community mounts a political and ethical offensive, materially and discursively, to colonial modernity and Western academia's authority over what constitutes knowledge, existence, and the purpose of the human life. In so doing, this course-community takes up the sacred responsibility of and a part in the internationalist project of decolonial revolution ("militant love") from below. People of all ages and across all borders are strongly urged and warmly invited into a committed endeavor of transgression and attempt: to comprehensively theorize and embody the abolitionist declaration of bell hooks wherein "education is the practice of freedom" and "love is the most powerful antidote to the politics of domination." This course studies the historical origins, theoretical trajectories, and analyses of radical Third World social movements (inclusive of the Global Souths within the Global Norths) and the contributions of the major theorist- activists of decolonial thought via the practice of the pedagogies by which people have moved and are moving in emancipatory motion. Teacher- learners enrolled for credit will read selections from Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Walter Rodney, Aimé Césaire, Leanne Betasamosake, Gloria Anzaldua, bell hooks, Sylvia Winter, María Lugones, Paulo Freire, Ho Chi Min, and others. As a community, we will engage in the process of critical analysis, reflection, and action, what Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire termed conscientização: the praxis which unveils the sociocultural, political,and economic contradictions of lived reality and equips participants to take action against the oppressive elements of reality. Therein and therefore, critical race feminism, abolitionism, Maoist communism, Decolonial Marxism, Pan-Africanism, post/de/anti-colonial thought, queer theories, among other fields of critique and power form the theoretic landscape of our course, informing, complicating, and complementing the ways we will think, know, and work together in movement struggle. In no lesser import, national independence struggles of the twentieth century, landless and peasant movements before them and today, and Indigenous resistances and resurgences from Turtle Island to Palestine, Cuba, Combahee, to Bengali, inform and fortify our analyses, strategies, probity, and imaginaries of an-other world: of justice, freedom, love. Grounded in the historical legacy of emancipatory struggle, from the footsteps of ancestors who have brought us thus far on the paths of liberation, we will comprehensively investigate the imbricate epistemological, sociocultural, and political structures that operate oppression across the lines of race, class, and gender (the colonial matrix of power), its productions of metaphysical violence in the local and global, and the ontological roots that give empire rise. Wherever and whenever possible, we will remedy coloniality's symptoms which manifest in our locality through radical mutual-aid. The gravity of holding clear-sighted analysis into oppression, and the lived reality of precarity and violence it forces upon us across the world cannot be overstated. Therefore, we will counter-balance this study through just as attentive a recognition of the myriad humanist ways by which people have resisted across cultures, continents, and time, and the unfathomable power of militant love that is at-once local and internationalist in scope. Fortified by the aforementioned theories and historicity of movement struggle, we will see that this politics and pedagogy is, so too, the yearning and ethical orientation of the Land. This course is taught by PhD student Javney Mohr with a Newhall Award, under the supervision of Cynthia Moe-Lobeda.