Decolonising European Modernity: Text, Paratext, Urtext

11 July '22 at 10:00 am - 14 July '22 at 12:30 pm

Should the project of modernity be salvaged from the legacy of its European provenance?

Decolonising European modernity is predicated on the historical text of that modernity itself— of the allegorical dubious hold of “Europe” as a beleaguered metaphor. Locating that text in the colonial paratext of the globality of its reach reveals the urtext of a renewed reasoning that overrides the instrumental reason of colonial modernity. What could the liberating contours of that reasoning be?

European colonial modernity conquered and ravaged the earth and left it breathless on the verge of climate calamity. The condition of postcoloniality is now contingent on the renewed articulation of a levelled epistemology of a knowing subject that must begin by restoring agency to the wretched of the earth against the richest savageries the earth has endured.

Course Convenor: Professor Hamid Dabashi

Professor Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

This is an in-person four-day short course held between 11 July – till 14 July, 10:30 am – till 12:30 pm.

Venue

Aga Khan Centre

10 Handyside Street, London N1C 4DN

Organiser

Aga Khan University’s Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations

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