FILMEDIA 460: Decolonization and Decoloniality: Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy (ARTHIST 460, TAPS 460)

Course Description

In the past few years, campus protests and petitions have brought about a remarkable reckoning with systemic, curricular structures of inequality, underscoring the epistemic violence of the privileging of white, western, cisheteropatriarchal intellectual traditions in the academy. This seminar mobilizes multiple approaches and orientations from anti-colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial traditions to study discourses of race, caste, indigeneity, gender, and sexuality across a variety of regional and cultural contexts. We will engage with a range of materials -- written texts, films, visual and performance art. In addition to theoretical and historical engagements with decolonization and decoloniality, we will begin to explore decolonial praxis through somatic workshops (including basket-weaving and dance) and through radical pedagogy and critical university studies frameworks.