About the Conference
Reimagining Pasts, Presents, and Futures in International Contexts
Introduction
How do cultural representations imagine decolonial futures in international contexts? How can we in the university enable and promote further dialogue on the multiple, layered, and complex effects of colonization globally and within Canada? How do mediations of class, caste, gender, and race inflect such dialogue? Decolonial Conversations aims to address these questions to create a broader space for diverse conversations on historical and contemporary forms of colonialism and decolonization.
Ideas that shaped academic discourses on colonialism in the last few decades - such as Albert Memmi’s, Aimé Césaire’s, and Frantz Fanon’s work on race and decolonization, Ngugi Wa Thiongo's collection of essays, Decolonising the Mind (1986), on the dismantling of power-relations through languages, literature, and theatres, Edward Said’s work on the links between empires and literary-cultural production in Culture and Imperialism (1994) and Gayatri Spivak’s critical analysis of gender and race in transnational contexts - offered theoretical frameworks that prised open intersectional and interdisciplinary scholarship on the psychological and material ramifications of colonialism. A signal contribution of this corpus of critical work was to bring attention to questions of subaltern activism and agency by acknowledging the significance of “small” voices that are often marginalized in broad and overarching discussions of empires, which focus primarily on the achievements of leaders. The renewed focus on decolonization has seen conversations shift towards an emphasis on the multiple ways in which literature, visual cultures, and the arts articulate challenges to power structures and also enable new intersectional connections that examine the overlaps, ruptures, and alignments to show “how the politics of connectivity are produced in and through struggles over “difference,” (Avtar Brah, Decolonial Imaginings, 2022) and how border controls, partitions, migrations, and (im)mobilities affect livelihoods, displacement, environments, and questions of land and territoriality. To this end, the recent exhibition Arctic/Amazon: Networks of Global Indigeneity, curated by Gerald McMaster, Nina Vincent, and Noor Alé at Toronto’s Power Plant Gallery, provides a compelling platform for examining contemporary Indigenous culture across borders and continents. Such conversations also demand that we examine decolonial thought and practices in their historical and contemporary contexts to understand what Achille Mbembe in Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization (2021) calls “entanglements,” which shape cultural responses in the present. As we move towards greater recognition of the complexity of salient questions in universities with a renewed sense of urgency regarding decolonial initiatives and strategies, it is imperative to ask what role cultural sites such as literature, film, and visual cultures, and community contexts, perform in unpacking colonial power structures and reimagining futures in international contexts.
Project Methodology
This three-day public conference with its accompanying research-creation events, presented through the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, draws on presentations that analyze how cultural materials function as sites for reimagining decolonial pasts, presents, and futures. It pursues a multi-disciplinary and multimedia methodology that brings together academic scholars, artists, activists and publics. The papers will be pivoted around the intersections of environment, land, migration, settlement, and citizenship, intersections that have thrown up new claims and contradictions in the current global climate of displacements and migrations that are nonetheless embedded in specific histories of colonialism, and addressed through the following questions: How do writers, artists, and activists, articulate the complicated trajectories of displacement and inter-generational memories in the environment we inhabit? How do they deal with environmental pressures of belonging and non-belonging, settlement, and feeling at home and not at home? The conference brings together scholars and artists who will provide Indigenous, South Asian, East Asian, Islamic, African, and other diasporic perspectives that enable cross-disciplinary and cross-border conversations. These scholars, who represent voices from Canada, South Asia, the USA, Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean, will enter the conversations from different vantage points. Such conversations will enable several interrelated goals: i) to acknowledge other systems of knowledge that demonstrate, as Walter Mignolio argues, the need to delink them from Eurocentric epistemologies; 2) to understand how the attempt to realize the principles of decolonization are channeled through a range of sites and methods: art, literature, film, and performance, food; 3) to examine these venues as important sites for activism, community engagement and outreach, and recognize the intersections and confluences that emerge amongst various groups and constituencies as they interweave local histories and struggles to render visible locations of power, marginality, along with individual and collective agency,
Project Context: The Organizers
This proposed interdisciplinary conference, with its innovative events, builds upon the SSHRC-funded research by Nandi Bhatia and Patrick Mahon, and the collaborative community initiatives undertaken by Henri Boyi and Candace Brunette. Their collective initiatives have resulted in the organization of and participation in various symposia and roundtables held at Western such as “Decolonizing Learning,” “Teaching with Humanity: Antiracist, Decolonizing and Indigenizing Pedagogical Practices in Arts & Humanities,” ‘Women and Decolonization.”
In February 2023, Mahon’s SSHRC Insight and Connections Grant-funded project, GardenShip and State, brought together artists and scholars in the humanities, and members of other communities to examine how art can help create and disseminate knowledge about sociocultural and ecological systems, which are complexly intertwined. Mahon’s projects resulted in a research-creation practice through a collective research group in which artists worked in conjunction with scholars to produce interdisciplinary work.
Bhatia’s previous SSHRC-funded projects on the interlinkages between colonialism and theatre, and ongoing research on decolonization and displacement in the aftermath of the 1947 Partition - when India simultaneously gained independence from the British Raj after more than two centuries of rule - have resulted in edited books and monographs that examine the connections between colonialism, nationalism, and literature. Over the years, this research has brought together scholars from India, UK, Europe, Australia, and Canada, through forums and symposiums held in India and Canada, to discuss how literature provides a nuanced understanding of the ongoing ramifications of boundaries and borders created by the Partition - not just for South Asia but across the world.
Candace Brunette’s arts-informed research findings highlight the experiences of Indigenous women administrators who have been leading transformative change in Canadian universities post-TRC but who continue to remain absent in the broader discussions about Indigenous women’s contribution to academic discourse.
Boyi’s Rwanda course, which was taught through Western for twelve years, exemplifies how a collaborative pedagogy between The University of Western Ontario and institutions in Rwanda offers new methodological frameworks for thinking about and researching decolonial futures. The conference will include an exhibition on the Rwanda Course that brings together art, paintings, photography, and narratives by those who participated in the course and offers attendees the opportunity to generate new possibilities regarding collaborative research.
