Decolonial Futures and Fissures

Global literary and academic culture since the eighteenth century has been shaped by colonial histories. In our global moment, we continue to grapple with the residual colonial matrix of power structures steeped in various forms of bigotry such as racism, sexism, classism, and colonial legacies of ecological violence attributable to the present planetary environmental crises. In the quest to imagine a different present and futures for various parts of the world, decolonialism, decoloniality, and decolonization are interlinked terms that have vociferously animated discussions and practices in the academy and beyond. Whether as a catchphrase for some, a theory cum praxis for others, or a bête noire, decoloniality seems to have a lot of cachet. This is mostly evident in terms of questioning inherited Western knowledge regimes, ways of being, and the hegemonic hierarchization of languages and cultures to forge new ways of existence, sensing, and thinking through the epistemic virtue of indigenous or marginalized communities inter alia.

This lecture series invites participants to think about decoloniality not only in the spatio-temporal limit of modernity and the Global North, but beyond to examine the global connectedness of this category with the Global South. It reflects on how comparative literature and thought reckon with decoloniality and perhaps become a vital resource for it. Put differently, how does the theory of decoloniality bring to bear or put generative pressure on the comparative method? It also explores how comparative literature can make itself aspirational through the project of decoloniality and postcolonial thinking embedded in various aesthetic forms of expression such as poetry, fiction, the visual arts among other media, and across disciplinary frameworks such as the environmental humanities. In essence, the series unveils how decolonization illuminates our global moment insofar as it resists normative colonial inscriptions of ways of knowing and world building, thus offering an alternative theory-praxis for dealing with planetary challenges. We also consider the potential fissures of the decolonial turn. That is, whose decolonial turn is it anyway? In other words, who owns or should drive the process? How do discourses of decoloniality get co-opted or in some instances inadvertently center coloniality? Regardless of the apparent contradictions and possibilities, the lecture series recognizes the validity of pluriversal decolonial perspectives.

Jill Jarvis is a Professor in the Department of French at Yale University. She specializes in the aesthetics and politics of North Africa, specifically questioning the assumptions of area studies and methodological orthodoxies.  Her notable book, Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony (2021), brings together close readings of fiction with analyses of juridical, theoretical, and activist texts to illuminate both the nature of violence and the stakes of literary study in a time of unfinished decolonization. Her other book project, Signs in the Desert: An Aesthetic Cartography of the Sahara, envisions the Sahara as a site of material, intellectual, and linguistic exchanges that challenge both disciplinary boundaries and received notions of African studies. Some of work also features in New Literary History, PMLA, The Journal of North African Studies, and Expressions maghébrines.