Decolonial and Radical Planetary Futures: Defatalizing Colonial Literacy and Imagination
Professor Anna M. Agathangelou, Department of Politics, York University, Canada
March 15, 2022
2pm – 3.30pm
Virtual Event
Register at: tinyurl.com/bahai-agathangelou
Abstract:
COVID-19 has brought to the fore once more that violence, direct and structural, disproportionately affects Black, indigenous, and other marginalized peoples. Discourses, deliberations, and policy documents that speak about “crisis” and “disasters” have proliferated in the last two decades. Ranging from neoliberals to the most conservative thinkers we seem to be reaching a consensus that the world is reaching its end. Many are rushing to design new “Leviathan contracts” that expand coloniality and imperial projects to other planets. In this presentation, I examine the entwinement of time, coloniality, enslavement and global racial capital. Inspired by radical decolonial visions and experiments and from the vantage point of black, indigenous, and anti-capitalist feminists I argue that it is key to grapple with contemporary fatalisms that come in the form of critical environmentalisms, reproductive fascisms and innovative technoscientific capitalism. Crucial to this conversation are the dominant ways that time, coloniality, and value are sutured together to co-constitute fatal notions, imaginations, and projects about species and the planetary. I conclude with some experimental orientations. In conversation with several radical and decolonial experiments, I point to literacies and imaginations which focus on the possibilities for thriving and multispecies relationalities and planetary futures beyond global racial capitalism.
Speaker Bio:
Anna M. Agathangelou is a Professor at York University in the Department of Politics. She was a fellow in the Program of Science, Technology & Society at the School of Government, Harvard (2014-2015) where she developed her project “Found in Translation: Cosmopolitics, the Value of Biotech, and Racial Capitalism.” Her most recent work includes a special issue in Globalizations with Kyle D. Killian (2021) titled “It’s About Time: Climate Change, Global Capital and Radical Existence.” She is the co-editor (with Kyle D. Killian) of Time, Temporality and Violence in International Relations (De) Fatalizing the Present, Forging Radical Alternatives, Routledge, co-author with L.H.M. Ling, 2009 of Transforming World Politics: From Empire to Multiple Worlds, Routledge, and author of the Global Political Economy of Sex: Desire, Violence, and Insecurity in Mediterranean Nation-States, 2004. Palgrave/MacMillan.
About the Author:
Kate Seaman is the Assistant Director to the Bahá’í Chair for World Peace where she supports the research activities of the Chair. Kate is interested in understanding normative changes at the global level and how these changes impact on the creation of peace.
You can find out more about the Bahá’í Chair by watching our video here.