Decolonization Now:
Histories, Politics, Possibilities

Ahead of our second workshop the Graduate Institute's communications team conducted a short interview with us about our workshop series. 

Please tell us about your workshop (series) and the inspiration(s) behind it?

We are all funded through the SNF Doc.CH program and individually planned for a workshop within our projects. Realising that we work on different aspects of decolonization as a historical process, we decided to turn our individual workshops into a more coherent series. Organising this series together means that we continuously engage with methodological and historiographical questions regarding decolonization and work as a team, resisting the individualisation that unfortunately is part of our PhD journey. The first workshop asked how we archive decolonization and where to look for it. The upcoming second workshop interrogates how decolonization has been linked to teaching and communal learning. Workshops three and four will look at decolonization and the promises of development and the aesthetic and cultural imaginations of decolonization. 

What angles are you adopting in your approach? 

While bringing together scholars from different disciplines as well as practitioners, we understand decolonization as a historical formation. Decolonization as a process went beyond the formal transfer of power. It raised fundamental questions about the future and order of the world and until today, the discourse of decolonization continues to resonate, inspire, and compel. At the same time, it remains crucial to note that never has “decolonization” been an automatically liberating term. With our series, we want to think through, interrogate, and re-imagine the histories, political stakes, and potentialities of decolonization. In this sense, the “now” in the title of our series performs three tasks. First, it refers to the “now” burgeoning scholarship that illuminates the multidimensional histories of decolonization. Secondly, it throws its weight behind the more polemic calls for “decolonizing” hierarchies and structures of (settler-)colonialism which still endure in the present. And third, we critically ask how we might move forward towards different futures from the horizons of the “now” in which we find ourselves.

What impact do you hope the workshop will have on both your work and the work of the participants? 

We certainly hope to profit in our work from intellectually stimulating conversations. The larger point however is to create a community and forge personal connections that hopefully last beyond the framework of this series. We hope to go beyond the confines of academia in working with practitioners (artists, archivists, activists) and learn from their experiences in interacting with non-academic audiences. Lastly, we would like to build a digital platform with resources to learn about and teach decolonization.

Decolonization Now:
Histories, Politics, Possibilities

Decolonization – as moment, process, and aspiration – stands as one of the most transformative and enduring historical developments of the 20^th century. More than the transfer of political power from colonial empires to postcolonial nation-states, decolonization represents a complex becoming touching upon all facets of political, economic, and cultural lives in the postcolonies (and metropoles). Put otherwise, if decolonization constituted the end of “empire” as a political form, it also stood for the creation of multiple new beginnings, free from the legacies of colonial and imperial rule.

Thus, decolonization raised fundamental questions about the future and order of the world. Setting their sights on the "global" across the decolonizing world, anticolonial thinkers and intellectuals fashioned and moulded forms of communities, and trajectories neither reducible to nor containable by the nation-form. Further, this period also witnessed the active participation of non-state actors like educators, poets, musicians, architects, and performers, beyond the realm of state-relations or postcolonial diplomacies. In this sense, decolonization not only spanned the "world," but included within its worldmaking ambitions (and ambit) an eclectic cast of protagonists. Moreover, materially, it led to the formation of new postcolonial solidarities and institutions – often with the official patronage of the postcolonial nation-state, but equally often through networks and affiliations that cut across fixed territorial or ideological boundaries. Taken together, these projects envisioned a future free from the legacies and hierarchies of race, class, and gender.

However, these histories which profoundly shaped the 20^th century are not confined to it. In different – public, epistemic, and worryingly nationalist – registers, the discourse of decolonization continues to resonate, inspire, and compel. From our own vantage point in "international" Geneva, decolonization has offered scholars and practitioners a productive rubric for reckoning with the city’s imbrication in a (albeit hidden) racist and colonial past. At the same time, it remains crucial to note that never has "decolonization" been an automatically liberating term, shorn off its co-optations within pernicious ideologies of control, resentment, and purism – especially in our "postcolonial" presents. For instance, and as a generation of feminist and gender historians have shown, for many women, the experience of decolonization continued to remain coterminous with restrictive sexual and gender norms and various instances of violence. Further, turning towards more contemporary manifestations, over the last few decades the  rhetoric, prose, and poetry of what once might have been associated with a liberatory anticolonialism has been increasingly instrumentalized to consolidate and legitimise new forms of ethnonationalism and settler colonialisms.

With these concerns in mind, this workshop series offers a platform for scholars and practitioners alike to collectively think through, interrogate, and re-imagine the histories, political stakes, and potentialities of decolonization through four axes – Archives, Pedagogies, Aesthetics, and Promises. In this vein, the "now" in our title performs three interrelated tasks. First, it refers to the "now" burgeoning scholarship that illuminate the multidimensional histories of decolonization. Secondly, it throws its weight behind the more polemic calls for "decolonizing" hierarchies and structures of (settler-)colonialism which still endure in the present. And third, we critically ask how we might move forward towards different futures from the horizons of the “now” in which we find ourselves.

Based at the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID), each workshop will last for two days and welcome senior and junior scholars as well as practitioners from outside the academy. We envision these workshops to bring together a small number of participants with the aim of fostering an intimate and collegial atmosphere of intellectual exchange and encounter. Recognizing the pressures of academic life and constraints posed by disciplinary boundaries, we invite submissions that are either in process, exploratory, or multi-genre. We thus encourage participants from various disciplines to submit their contributions in a variety of forms, including textual (working paper, dissertation chapter), visual (poster, collage), oral (podcast, interview), and so on.

In terms of output, we aim to collaborate with participants on creatively giving shape to the workshops’ aspirations. This will include curating a living archive via this website that will bring together the various contributions and discussions (currently under construction). In the longer term, we intend to publish the workshops’ findings in a special issue.