Though a buzzword, “decolonization” is far from a settled matter. From a by-now-distant sequence of political independence to contemporaneous efforts to decolonize institutions, decolonization has become – or not, to invoke Tuck & Yang – a metaphor. Today, most scholars would dispute a focus on decolonization that ignores nuances of decoloniality, reparations, ecology, etc. As the war on Gaza and scholasticide in Palestine (Nabulsi) demonstrate, colonial domination and dispossession persist in the crudest sense; meanwhile, the crackdown on pro-Palestine campus protests in the United States, and elsewhere, point to uneven if linked aspects of contemporary decolonization spaces, actors, and articulations. Alongside, the far-right has appropriated (inverted) decolonizing rhetoric, whether it is the French ideologues of the “Great Replacement” reading Frantz Fanon or the Hindutva nationalists in India inspired by Latin American decolonial theory (Davidson). Given the multiple trajectories of decolonization, can “unevenness” – not only as a description of but also as a heuristic for the present conjuncture – be helpful to illuminate these processes? Elaborated by Leon Trotsky in his analysis of the Tsarist empire, the materialist framework of uneven and combined development has allowed, directly or implicitly, explorations of varied forms of colonialism and resistance to these. To take just two examples, both Roberto Schwarz’s notion of the “misplaced” literary figurations of liberalism and slavery in post-colonial Brazil, and Kim Tallbear’s recent articulation of Indigenous-ecological “caretaking relations” against anthropocentric progress narratives in the contemporary US and Canada draw on combined unevenness albeit in divergent ways. This seminar proposes to dialogue across (compare) the irreducibly specific contexts of decolonization, and how these might illustrate or not a singular modernity (Jameson). Papers foregrounding literature, cinema, and other cultural forms and media on the seminar theme are welcome—especially but not limited to the following areas:

 

• Texts, media, and uneven and combined development


• Regional or “neglected” histories, spaces, and figures and internationalisms of the left and the right


• Decolonization in the global north and south; east & west; first, second, and third worlds


• Imperial war, violence, and “culture” (broadly defined)


• The anthropocene, the capitalocene, and decolonization