Activity

Discontent and the Promise

Coloniality, Modernity and De-Colonial Epistemologies

Auditori

Walter Mignolo begins his critical re-reading of the history of modernity with a bold hypothesis: the hidden agenda behind the Renaissance and the civilising narrative of the Enlightenment was not humanism but coloniality. The ‘colonial matrix’ is not an accidental by-product of modernity, but the epistemic foundation of capitalism and of its global expansion. This complicity between modern knowledge and regime of power implies an insurmountable political rupture in the universalist project of Western modernity and justifies the urgency of epistemic disobedience. Although for 500 years colonialty had been created, managed, and transformed from Europe, the imperial states of the North Atlantic and the United States, after the Bandung Conference in 1955 two counter-projects –which were both complementary and opposite– called into question the legitimacy of the promises of the rhetoric of modernity. On one hand, the arguments in favour of ‘dewesternalization’ grew stronger in East and South East Asia, and on the other, ‘decolonisation’ began to dismantle racial and patriarchal reason and its differential logic of progress. What is the role of cultural institutions in the narrative of colonial modernity? Can the museum be a place for the decolonisation of knowledge and of sensibility, or is it still a site of regulation and control of the production of meaning and of subjectivity?

dates

2 June 2014 – 4 June 2014

price

Meier Auditorium. Free admission. Booking not required Limited capacity.

title

Discontent and the Promise