Decolonial Arts Praxis

Decolonial Arts Praxis: Transnational Pedagogies and Activism illustrates the productive potential of critical arts pedagogies in the ongoing work of decolonization by engaging art, activism, and transnational feminisms. Offering contributions from scholars, educators, artists, and activists from varied disciplines, the volume highlights how arts can reveal intersectional forms of oppression, inform critical understandings, and rebuild transnational solidarities across geopolitical borders. The contributors present forms of enquiry, creative writing, art, and reflection which grapple with issues of colonialism, racism, and epistemological violence to illustrate the power of decolonial arts pedagogies in formal and informal education. Using a range of multiple and intersectional critical lenses, through which readers can examine ways in which transnational feminist theorizing and art pedagogy inform, shape, and help strategize activism in various spaces, it will appeal to scholars, postgraduate students, and practitioners with interests in arts education, the sociology of education, postcolonialism, and multicultural education.

In On Decoloniality Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh explore the hidden forces of the colonial matrix of power, its origination, transformation, and current presence, while asking the crucial questions of decoloniality's how, what, why, with whom, and what for. Interweaving theory-praxis with local histories and perspectives of struggle, they illustrate the conceptual and analytic dynamism of decolonial ways of living and thinking, as well as the creative force of resistance and re-existence. This book speaks to the urgency of these times, encourages delinkings from the colonial matrix of power and its "universals" of Western modernity and global capitalism, and engages with arguments and struggles for dignity and life against death, destruction, and civilizational despair.

Decoloniality is a process and a practice. This process and practice requires a depth of understanding into the ways in which colonialism's legacy of intellectual authority over colonized regions and bodies have shaped and constructed ideas of one's own subjectivity as marginalized being. We must interrogate the imaginary produced by the West, reproduced by the East, and rooted in a coloniality of race, gender, and sexuality (Lugones 2003). Understanding Orientalism is in and of itself a practice of decoloniality, because Orientalism is the study of the West's symbolic and cultural imprinting on a perceived "East" (Said 1978). This paper intends to interrogate dominant knowledges' interpretation of South Asian cultural practices rearticulated by South Asian diasporic communities; navigating Orientalist projection while contending with a colonial past. This paper tracks the praxis of 1.) confronting and examining Orientalism as it constructs the Western imaginary of South Asianness, and 2.) creating performance art that speaks to, and pushes back on Orientalist attitudes to create authentic, empowered representation and narrative by and for the South Asian diaspora. Performativity, according to Judith Butler, is concerned with the meaning associated with the social and cultural significance of the gestures imprinted on the body as it performs culturally meaningful acts (1990). Performance art offers symbolic and literal space to embody, examine, and enliven such performative acts to explore subjectivity, oppression, resiliency, resistance, and decoloniality. The resulting artistic performance is commentary on the gestures that carry meaning, and ultimately becomes a decolonial, ritualized practice; what Gloria Anzaldúa terms "conocimiento" (2002).

Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh introduce the concept of decoloniality by providing a theoretical overview and discussing concrete examples of decolonial projects in action.

This volume presents empirical research on contemporary forms of decolonization and anti-colonialism in practice within areas of Indigeneity, citizenship, migration, education, language and social work. The contributions will be of interest to interdisciplinary education practitioners and students.

Are we living in a post-colonial world? Anti-Colonial Theory and Decolonial Praxis uses case studies from around the world to explore this concept as it relates to education. It takes up the subject of anti-colonial praxis and its specific implications--the larger questions of schooling and education in global contexts.

Analyzing the confluence between coloniality and activist art, Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future argues that there is much to gain from approaching contemporary politically committed art practices from the angle of anticolonial, postcolonial, and decolonial struggles. These struggles inspired a vast yet underexplored set of ideas about art and cultural practices and did so decades before the acceptance of radical artistic practices by mainstream art institutions. Carlos Garrido Castellano argues that art activism has been confined to a limited spatial and temporal framework—that of Western culture and the modernist avant-garde. Assumptions about the individual creator and the belated arrival of derivative avant-garde aesthetics to the periphery have generated a narrow view of “political art” at the expense of our capacity to perceive a truly global alternative praxis. Garrido Castellano then illuminates such a praxis, focusing attention on socially engaged art from the Global South, challenging the supposed universality of Western artistic norms, and demonstrating the role of art in promoting and configuring a collective critical consciousness in postcolonial public spheres. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to Knowledge Unlatched—an initiative that provides libraries and institutions with a centralized platform to support OA collections and from leading publishing houses and OA initiatives. Learn more at the Knowledge Unlatched website at: https://www.knowledgeunlatched.org/, and access the book online at the SUNY Open Access Repository at http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/7166.

By foregrounding language practices in educational settings, this timely volume offers a postcolonial critique of the languaging of higher education and considers how Southern epistemologies can be used to further the decolonization of post-secondary education in the Global South. Offering a range of contributions from diverse and minoritized scholars based in countries including South Africa, Rwanda, Sudan, Qatar, Turkey, Portugal, Sweden, India, and Brazil, The Languaging of Higher Education in the Global South problematizes the use of language in various areas of higher education. Chapters demonstrate both subtle and explicit ways in which the language of pedagogy, scholarship, policy, and partcipiation endorse and privelege Western constructs and knowledge production, and utilize Southern theories and epistemologies to offer an alternative way forward – practice and research which applies and promotes Southern epistemologies and local knowledges. The volume confronts issues including integrationism, epistemic solidarity, language policy and ideology, multilingualism, and the increasing use of technology in institutions of higher education. This innovative book will be of interest to researchers, scholars, and postgraduate students in the fields of higher education, applied linguistics, and multicultural education. Those with an interest in the decolonization of education and language will find the book of particular use.

Through innovative and critical research, this anthology inquires and challenges issues of race and positionality, empirical sciences, colonial education models, and indigenous knowledges. Chapter authors from diverse backgrounds present empirical explorations that examine how decolonial work and Indigenous knowledges disrupt, problematize, challenge, and transform ongoing colonial oppression and colonial paradigm. This book utilizes provocative and critical research that takes up issues of race, the shortfalls of empirical sciences, colonial education models, and the need for a resurgence in Indigenous knowledges to usher in a new public sphere. This book is a testament of hope that places decolonization at the heart of our human community.

This companion is the first global, comprehensive text to explicate, theorize, and propose decolonial methodologies for art historians, museum professionals, artists, and other visual culture scholars, teachers, and practitioners. Art history as a discipline and its corollary institutions - the museum, the art market - are not only products of colonial legacies but active agents in the consolidation of empire and the construction of the West. The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History joins the growing critical discourse around the decolonial through an assessment of how art history may be rethought and mobilized in the service of justice - racial, gender, social, environmental, restorative, and more. This book draws attention to the work of artists, art historians, and scholars in related fields who have been engaging with disrupting master narratives and forging new directions, often within a hostile academy or an indifferent art world. The volume unpacks the assumptions projected onto objects of art and visual culture and the discourse that contains them. It equally addresses the manifold complexities around representation as visual and discursive praxis through a range of epistemologies and metaphors originated outside or against the logic of modernity. This companion is organized into four thematic sections: Being and Doing, Learning and Listening, Sensing and Seeing, and Living and Loving. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, museum studies, race and ethnic studies, cultural studies, disability studies, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.