Decolonial Futures

A book on teaching and learning in theological education, Decolonial Futures: Intercultural and Interreligious Intelligence for Theological Education is guided by the questions, "What makes education intercultural and interreligious?" "How might we rethink and redesign spaces of learning to be hospitable to cultural and religious differences as well as to dismantle the coloniality of theological education?" "How might we subvert traditionally colonial spaces to model the engaged intercultural and interreligious world that we seek?" The book helps educators and practitioners of intercultural and interreligious learning both deconstruct and reconstruct spaces of learning by centering interreligious and intercultural intelligence through the voices, experiences, and narratives of minoritized people.

The world is in a terrible mess. It is toxic, irradiated, and full of injustice. Aiming to stand aside from the mess can produce a seemingly satisfying self-righteousness in the scant moments we achieve it, but since it is ultimately impossible, individual purity will always disappoint. Might it be better to understand complexity and, indeed, our own complicity in much of what we think of as bad, as fundamental to our lives? Against Purity argues that the only answer—if we are to have any hope of tackling the past, present, and future of colonialism, disease, pollution, and climate change—is a resounding yes. Proposing a powerful new conception of social movements as custodians for the past and incubators for liberated futures, Against Purity undertakes an analysis that draws on theories of race, disability, gender, and animal ethics as a foundation for an innovative approach to the politics and ethics of responding to systemic problems. Being against purity means that there is no primordial state we can recover, no Eden we have desecrated, no pretoxic body we might uncover through enough chia seeds and kombucha. There is no preracial state we could access, no erasing histories of slavery, forced labor, colonialism, genocide, and their concomitant responsibilities and requirements. There is no food we can eat, clothes we can buy, or energy we can use without deepening our ties to complex webbings of suffering. So, what happens if we start from there? Alexis Shotwell shows the importance of critical memory practices to addressing the full implications of living on colonized land; how activism led to the official reclassification of AIDS; why we might worry about studying amphibians when we try to fight industrial contamination; and that we are all affected by nuclear reactor meltdowns. The slate has never been clean, she reminds us, and we can’t wipe off the surface to start fresh—there’s no fresh to start. But, Shotwell argues, hope found in a kind of distributed ethics, in collective activist work, and in speculative fiction writing for gender and disability liberation that opens new futures.

Providing examples of successful approaches to unsettling Western archival paradigms from Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia, this book showcases vital community archival work that will illuminate decolonial archival practices for archivists, curators, heritage practitioners, and others responsible for the stewardship of materials by and about Indigenous communities.

Contesting Extinctions: Decolonial and Regenerative Futures critically interrogates the discursive framing of extinctions and how they relate to the systems that bring about biocultural loss. The chapters in this multidisciplinary volume examine approaches to ecological and social extinction and resurgence from a variety of fields, including environmental studies, literary studies, political science, and philosophy. Grounding their scholarship in decolonial, Indigenous, and counter-hegemonic frameworks, the contributors advocate for shifting the discursive focus from ruin to regeneration.

DIVA new and more concrete understanding of the inseparability of colonialism and modernity that also explores how the rhetoric of modernity disguises the logic of coloniality and how this rhetoric has been instrumental in establishing capitalism as the econ/div

M. Jacqui Alexander is one of the most important theorists of transnational feminism working today. Pedagogies of Crossing brings together essays she has written over the past decade, uniting her incisive critiques, which have had such a profound impact on feminist, queer, and critical race theories, with some of her more recent work. In this landmark interdisciplinary volume, Alexander points to a number of critical imperatives made all the more urgent by contemporary manifestations of neoimperialism and neocolonialism. Among these are the need for North American feminism and queer studies to take up transnational frameworks that foreground questions of colonialism, political economy, and racial formation; for a thorough re-conceptualization of modernity to account for the heteronormative regulatory practices of modern state formations; and for feminists to wrestle with the spiritual dimensions of experience and the meaning of sacred subjectivity. In these meditations, Alexander deftly unites large, often contradictory, historical processes across time and space. She focuses on the criminalization of queer communities in both the United States and the Caribbean in ways that prompt us to rethink how modernity invents its own traditions; she juxtaposes the political organizing and consciousness of women workers in global factories in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Canada with the pressing need for those in the academic factory to teach for social justice; she reflects on the limits and failures of liberal pluralism; and she presents original and compelling arguments that show how and why transgenerational memory is an indispensable spiritual practice within differently constituted women-of-color communities as it operates as a powerful antidote to oppression. In this multifaceted, visionary book, Alexander maps the terrain of alternative histories and offers new forms of knowledge with which to mold alternative futures.

The book exposes various mechanisms and methods by which covert colonial mechanisms are employed to perpetuate colonialism, especially in Africa. Less overt and more covert perpetuation of colonialism is done through the use of networks. The main achievement of the initial phase of colonialism was the establishment of networks that are nefarious and omnipresent; constituting “distributed presence,” which allows for “action at a distance.” As a result, colonial subjects became willing participants in these processes, unbeknownst to them, which perpetuated their own colonialism. The book exposes forms of colonialism where manufactured consent is used to perpetuate colonialism. Trapped in this capitalist, Western, Christian language and moral world order without sovereignty, African countries continuously sink deeper into the colonial quagmire.

In The Black Shoals Tiffany Lethabo King uses the shoal—an offshore geologic formation that is neither land nor sea—as metaphor, mode of critique, and methodology to theorize the encounter between Black studies and Native studies. King conceptualizes the shoal as a space where Black and Native literary traditions, politics, theory, critique, and art meet in productive, shifting, and contentious ways. These interactions, which often foreground Black and Native discourses of conquest and critiques of humanism, offer alternative insights into understanding how slavery, anti-Blackness, and Indigenous genocide structure white supremacy. Among texts and topics, King examines eighteenth-century British mappings of humanness, Nativeness, and Blackness; Black feminist depictions of Black and Native erotics; Black fungibility as a critique of discourses of labor exploitation; and Black art that rewrites conceptions of the human. In outlining the convergences and disjunctions between Black and Native thought and aesthetics, King identifies the potential to create new epistemologies, lines of critical inquiry, and creative practices.