Decolonization

As economic and political inequality intensifies worldwide and the modern social contract frays to reveal its racial and colonial logic, this lecture offers a systematic rethinking of the moral history of decolonization. What can the anticolonial conception of human freedom—and its archaeology of violence—today offer to democratic ideals and institutions that seek a more just, more equal world?

Examining three foundational texts on political violence produced in the Southern tradition, this two-part lecture probes what was right and what has gone wrong with liberal theories of global justice and moral responsibility, and how to retrieve the idea of the human from its neodemocratic and technocratic shambles.

To probe this is also to ask, in the wake of Fanon, how the spirit of decolonization has mutated in our time to become the very scaffold upon which regimes of capital and resentment—which is to say, of inequality and selfhood—today sit. Event co-sponsored and…