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Decolonizing Knowledge: Indigenous Theories in Latin American and U.S. Empire Studies
January 30, 2020 - January 31, 2020
In the last decade indigenous studies have emerged as a crucial theoretical site for understanding and critiquing the settler colonial present and for decolonial thinking. This symposium will address national and hemispheric conversations on indigenous theories as they
shape thinking and writing outside the dominant epistemological frameworks of modernity/coloniality. By connecting notions such as “epistemic delinking” from the discourses of modernity/coloniality devised by theorists like Walter Mignolo and the kind of “border
thinking” practiced by writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, indigenous critics simultaneously demonstrate the ongoing material project of settler colonialism and the different ways in which indigenous theories delink themselves from the web of imperial knowledges. This symposium is interdisciplinary in regard to area studies, addressing concerns of scholars who study the Americas and the postcolony (including Africa, Asia, and the Pacific), and in regard to discipline as its consideration of the role history, power, knowledge, and communication addresses questions posed by scholars of literature, language, rhetoric, history, anthropology, religion, philosophy, and sociology. A central aim is to bring to light intersections between the often separate fields of Latin American and postcolonial studies, as well as U.S. empire studies.
The symposium will be comprised of three keynote addresses and a panel of graduate student presentations. Sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere and the Department of English.