Department of English

Workshop and discussion of recent work by the keynote speakers for Decolonizing Knowledge Symposium. For reading materials, please contact Leah Rosenberg rosenber@ufl.edu

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…

Abraham I. Acosta,  For more than twenty years now, the concepts of coloniality of power and settler colonialism have been pivotal in the formation and development of decolonial critiques of power.  Understood as names for a cultural-political modality for establishing and sustaining geopolitical subordination, the concept has become conventionalized and routinely deployed in order to assert that the epistemological and political terms of dominance over the Americas has a specific, exclusively European, provenance. A closer look at the theoretical writing…

Macarena Gomez-Barris, “Archival Disappearances and Southern Submerged Perspectives of Resurgence” In this talk, I address how to think about the colonial archive in relation to disappearance and Indigenous resurgence in the Américas, specifically focused on the legacy of Darwin and in relation to the category “los desaparecidos” that is often used to describe modern state violence, but extends back to the colonial era of discovery, scientific exploration, and monocultural occupation. Given recent approaches in decolonial and Indigenous studies, is there…

Christa J. Olson “Nuestras Reliquías Históricas” and the Rhetorical Work of Ancestors at Machu Picchu” Between 1911 and 1915, Yale University Professor Hiram Bingham III and his Yale Peruvian Expedition illegally carried thousands of objects out of Peru, adding them to the collections of the Yale Peabody Museum. Analyses of the Yale Peruvian Expedition’s work and the international arbitration that finally established Peru’s claim to the objects in 2011 has tended to frame the conflict in terms of U.S. neo-colonial…

Speakers: Deepthi Siriwardena “Towards a Sri Lankan Feminism: Reading Sunethra Rajakarunanayke’s Metta” Dan Shurley “Philadelphia’s Forgotten Forebears: How Pennsylvania Erased The Lenape From Local History” Ivette Rodriguez “Anzaldua Pedagogies: Decolonizing Academia from the Inside” Martina Laura Speranza “Problematizing the gender gap: feminist, queer and postcolonial approaches to inequalities in the rural Global South” Alexander Slotkin “Along the Cow Path: Technical Communication within a Jewish Cemetery”