Center for Study & Investigation for Global Dialogues
Decolonizing Knowledge: Postcolonial Studies, Decolonial Horizons
a summer school in Tarragona, Spain
July 8 - July 22, 2009
Thursday, February 21 and Friday, February 22, 2008:
Reflections on the De-Colonial Option and the Humanities: An International Dialogue
John Hope Franklin Center, Room 240
2204 Erwin Road
Thursday, February 21, Noon - 5:00 PM
Friday, February 22, 9:30 AM - 5:30 PM
Wednesday, February, 2008:
Coloniality & Latinidad: A Conversation with Nelson Maldonado-Torres
"Coloniality and Latiniwhat?: Decolonization in Multiple Voices"
John Hope Franklin Center, Room 240
2204 Erwin Road, 6:00 pm to 8:30 pm
The
Center for Global Studies and the Humanities at Duke University
examines the
entanglement of the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of coloniality in the sphere of place (imperial/colonial geo-historical configurations), and power. Consequently, the analytic dimension goes hand in hand with the projective one, de-colonization of knowledge and of being. The seminars,
lectures, university partnerships and classes that spring from its activities
seek to de-colonize knowledge. For example, our partnerships
with scholars at educational institutions in Bremen, Melbourne, Quito,
Bogotá,
Buenos Aires, Moscow, Berkeley, and elsewhere have encouraged a horizontal
interchange of knowledge, counteracting the vertical model of education
whereby third-world scholars receive knowledge from (but are not supposed
to give knowledge to) scholars in the U.S., Canada and Europe. These
intellectual interchanges contributed to the publication of a web
journal, Worlds
and Knowledges Otherwise, the first issue of which was unveiled
in Spring 2004. Also contributing to our mission is the faculty and
graduate student seminar, Dialogical
Ethics and Critical Cosmopolitanism, comprised of about twenty-five
scholars from Duke, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and
the University
of North Carolina-Greensboro. This seminar enables interactions
across disciplinary boundaries. Duke’s undergraduates have benefited
from these interactions through the several
team-taught seminars that have emerged from the Ethics
and Cosmopolitanism Seminar. The undergraduate seminar “Empires
Clash: Religion, Power, and Civilization,” for
example, which was co-taught by a professor from the Religion department
and a professor from the Literature Program,
distilled the themes explored by the Center into a fascinating, interdisciplinary
course.
The Center for Global Studies and the Humanities, represented by Walter D.Mignolo, (CV) and the Institute for Postcolonial and Transcultural Studies, represented by Sabine Broeck and Gisela Febel, will jointly organize and hold a bilateral, international symposium, Transcultural Humanities Between Globalization, and Postcolonial Re-Readings of History, at the University of Bremen in the summer of 2006.
By
working at the very foundations of knowledge and interdisciplinarity, the
Center for
Global Studies and
the Humanities hopes to carry out a new
kind of transformation —one in which knowledge takes many forms in many
places and the university’s commitment to critical thought and
global interaction is renewed.
Upcoming events sponsored by the CGSH