Global Political Thought Working Group
About the Cluster
The cluster seeks to create an interdisciplinary platform for scholars working on anticolonial, postcolonial, decolonial, global, and comparative thought to better understand the meaning of these approaches, identify their differences and limits, and reflect on the future theoretical possibilities they may provide. The objective is not only to critically engage with these debates but also to reflect on new frameworks that draw on social and political life beyond the Euro- American world.
The question of finding new theories, methods, and approaches is highly debated in contemporary scholarship on social, political, and historical thought subsumed under postcolonial, decolonial, anticolonial, global, and comparative studies. These approaches and theories are said to not only advance powerful critiques of Euro-American political thought and their assumptions but also recover and theorize alternative or “non-colonial” ways of being, doing, and knowing. However, it is still not clear what novelty these theories and approaches add as they are seemingly produced within the same epistemological assumptions and approaches that have long informed and shaped the colonial order of things and, perhaps more importantly, whether going beyond these assumptions is possible at all.
For example, the recent field formation of “comparative political theory” attempts to show that political theory or theorization is not a privilege of “the West” or Western thinkers and academics but rather there has been thought/theorization all the time in the Global South, by intellectuals, activists, militants, and the colonized, which in fact poses creative challenges to the structures of thought that have been universalized and singularized by colonial modernity. Yet, still, the question remains: does thought from the Global South really pose a challenge to the premises of “theory,” or does it merely offer additional references or authors? In centering non- Western voices, are we, in fact, challenging the existing canon? Is introducing a rupture with the basic tenets of critical theory desirable or even possible?
A related set of issues are rooted in questions of translation. Many scholars have reflected on the ways in which epistemological terms take on different meanings as they “travel” across languages and historical contexts. Investigating the relationship between European languages and the modes of expression in the Global South must necessarily tackle the thorny question of language and the process by which certain theoretical tools are made commensurable.
What do we do when we translate this thought into the terms of academic debates in the Euro- American world? Does this activity of translation shape the translated into the terms and needs of the translator? Or rather, does it challenge the very limits and limitations of the translator’s language, forcing it to new forms and new vocabularies? What is the task of the translator (if any)?
Lastly, the cluster aims to examine the human figure as a colonial project; more specifically, it will explore the ways in which the coloniality of our world produces humanity, yet this production always requires the making of the “inhuman.” In other words, this allegedly allinclusive category of humanity always renders certain groups and individuals inhuman; the idea of humanity thus often is reduced to a process of dehumanization. We plan to create a space for discussion as to whether any discourse or humanity necessarily imply coloniality; whether there are ways, forms, practices, and genres in which the human might not be a colonial figure; if not, what are the ways in which we can go beyond the language and practice of humanity.
Co-Principal Investigators
Muriam Haleh Davis, History Department
Megan Thomas, Politics Department
Marc Matera, History Department
Affiliated Faculty
Yasmeen Daifallah, Politics
Vanita Seth, Politics
Thomas Serres, Politics
Robert Nichols, History of Consciousness
Nidhi Mahajan, Anthropology
Affiliated Graduate Students
Md Mizanur Rahman, Politics
Emre Keser, History of Consciousness
Yudi Feng, Politics
Pablo Escudero, History of Consciousness
Robin Jones, History of Consciousness
Henry Mclaughlin, Politics
Leonard Butingan, History
Wayne Huang, Anthropology
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Banner Image: Photo of a three-finger salute, by Pyae Sone Htun on Unsplash.