IGD

Institute of Geography and Sustainability of the University of Lausanne
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Thinking with the Global Easts

Research fields Knowledge & techniques
Keywords Global North
Global South
Social theory
Postcolonialism
Postsocialism
Funding
Duration August 2022 - January 2040
Website
Researchers Müller Martin (Supervision) [web] [email]

The decolonial turn has led to a fundamental rethinking of the colonial imprints on theories and structures of knowledge production in the social sciences and humanities in recent years. This talk argues that by using the Western European colonial relationship as a starting point, the decolonial turn inverts the colonial gaze but at the same time reproduces the Eurocentric spatiality of North and South, coloniser and (de)colonised, and a temporality focused on the period after 1492. It shows that this spatiality and temporality have led the decolonial turn to sideline forms of coloniality outside of Western Europe, often with complex entangled histories, such as those prevalent in the Global Easts. I enquire into the reasons for these silences in the decolonial turn – partly linguistic, partly conceptual, partly historical. I mobilise the work of contemporary thinkers of coloniality that stand outside the North/South relationship and argue for the need to decolonise decolonialism. For this, I propose a change of vocabulary, suggesting that, rather than 'decolonising' our theories and knowledges, we need to 'world' them. Worlding opens up to different spatialities, beyond the binary of North and South, and to different temporalities, pre-1492.



Global East
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