Saturday, 23 June 2018
6 – 8 pm

PANEL
Hope

Nadje Al-Ali (Professor of Gender Studies, SOAS University of London)
Nadia Yala Kisukidi (Associate Professor, University Paris 8)
Rolando Vázquez (Associate Professor of Sociology, University College Roosevelt, Utrecht)
Moderation: Rirhandu Mageza-Barthel (Lecturer at Institute of Political Science, Goethe University Frankfurt)

Given that Europe universalized its values, norms and epistemologies through colonialism, decolonization is inextricably linked to deuniversalizing Europe. However, this aspiration is both impossible but necessary, for the gift and curse of the legacies of European Enlightenment and its ideas of equality, liberty, justice, rights and democracy are inseparable from the processes of decolonization. Although Europeans have proven to be the worst betrayers and abusers of the Enlightenment, the lofty postcolonial ambitions to save the legacies of the Enlightenment from the Europeans is turning out to be a missed appointment with history. This confronts us with the problem of postcolonial oppositional criticism: whom and what should it be directed against? What should be the grammar of this critique?

 

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