Political Science 797DE - ST-Politics of Decolonization

This seminar examines political theories of decolonization. Instead of restricting our view to the period of decolonization after World War Two when European colonial possessions attained formal sovereignty, we will center on the 500-year struggle of Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples as well as creole-settlers against and with the modern-colonial world system in the Americas. And rather than view decolonization solely as a struggle for national independence, we will emphasize its transnational dimensions, how ideologies and practices of decolonization travel across boundaries of race, nation, and empire and in doing so transform global power relations. In our efforts to theorize decolonization transnationally, we will situate our analyses in the interstices of different framings of the colonial situation (e.g. coloniality of power, neocolonialism, postcolonialism, settler colonialism). Readings draw from (but not exclusively) Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Ottobah Cugoano, Jose Marti, CLR James, Jose Carlos Mariategui, Frederick Douglass, WEB Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Enrique Dussel.