The Critical Perspectives on Democratic Anti-Colonialism project brings together faculty and students across The New School interested in exploring the theoretical foundations and political manifestations of radical democratic and anti-colonial
traditions. It seeks to renew the critical tradition of The New School by incorporating scholarly debates, issues, and approaches that have not been adequately represented.
Critical Perspectives on Democratic Anti-Colonialism focuses on the struggles of peripheral peoples in countries of the core and the periphery, with the aim of making sense of the changing meanings and practices of plebeian forms of dissent, resistance,
and self-rule that have surfaced in the modern and contemporary world. Those involved with the project critically examine dominant socio-institutional structures, power relations, and regimes of knowledge and the way plebeian groups reformulate and
subvert them and generate emancipatory and heterodox alternatives.
Three thematic areas guide the project: the history of concepts, contemporary debates, and critical methodologies. Events and classes build on these areas, and discussions combine theoretical and empirical readings to highlight the
continuities and discontinuities that are part of radical democratic and anti-colonial traditions. Discussions also examine recent "post-positivist" approaches and alternative epistemologies to the human sciences that grant primacy
and centrality to intersubjectivity, interpretation, and performativity.
Writings from influential thinkers from core and peripheral countries—such as Karl Marx, Vera Zasulich, W.E.B. DuBois, Antonio Gramsci, José Carlos Mariátegui, Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, Li Ta-chao, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Oyèrónkẹ́
Oyèwùmí, Maria Lugones, and the Latin American Dependency and Indian Subaltern Schools—feature prominently in the project. Their writings spotlight some of the most significant past and current debates in the field, including uneven
and combined development, the boomerang effect of colonialism, indigenous anti-imperialism, Third Worldism, world systems and unequal exchange, critical race theory, decolonial feminism, and heterodox democratic and council formations.
Events
The project hosts monthly workshops for affiliated faculty and graduate students at which they can present and comment on works-in-progress. Together with several NSSR departments, the project also co-hosts a lecture series featuring guest
speakers and an annual distinguished lecture followed by a one- or two-day intensive seminar.
Upcoming events include:
March 29, 2023: Book Launch: Benoit Challand and Jill Schwedler on Popular Mobilization in the Arab Middle East
Past events included:
Against Terricide with Arturo Escobar
Why Austerity Persists with Jon Shefner
The White Supremacy of Cultural Sociology: Toward a Critical Race Assessment with Crystal Fleming (watch video)
Egypt's Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism, a book launch and roundtable with Aaron Jakes, Benoit Challand, Nancy Fraser, Julia Ott, Emma Park, and Ann Stoler (watch video)
Living Phenomenology as a Decolonial Practice with Lewis Gordon
Bolivian Immigrants and the Right to Have Rights in Buenos Aires in the Wake of Austerity: An Alter-Native Translation of Balibarianism with Carlos Forment and Udeepta Chakravarty (watch video)
Contesting OPEC: The Lost History of Democratic Anti-Colonial Oil Conservation with Michael Dobson and Robert Vitalis (watch video)
The Global South and the History of Political Thought with Lorenzo Ravano (watch video)
For information about events, please email [email protected]
Courses
Graduate courses connected to the project build on the three core themes and help students develop the theoretical, empirical, and methodological skills needed for rethinking established structures of political power and control, including
state sovereignty, empire, nationalism, racialized and patriarchal capitalism, the North-South divide and the global color line, and the transnational commons and its political ecologies. NSSR students can follow the established graduate minor in this area. All New School graduate students can engage with issues
and concerns shaping the project in these fall 2022 courses:
NINT 5251: Political Economics of Development
NINT 5465: Global Pandemics in an Unequal World: Learning from COVID-19
GSOC 5101: Classical Sociological Theory
GPOL 7003: Field Seminar in Political Theory: Radical Theories of Democracy
GSOC 5160: Power and Domination in the Middle East
GECO 6291: Economic Development II
NINT 5000: Theories, Histories, and Practices of Development: Decolonizing International Affairs
NINT 5220: Media, Culture, and Global Politics
GPOL 6477: World Making and Border Politics
NEPS 5020: Indigenous Ecologies
NEPS 5001: Climate Change: Systemic Crisis and Systemic Change
Articles
NSSR and Lang Students Explore Suppressed Histories in New York City, NSSR Research Matters blog
People
Project Co-directors
Sandipto Dasgupta, Assistant Professor of Politics
Carlos Forment, Associate Professor of Sociology
Andreas Kalyvas, Associate Professor of Politics
Affiliated Faculty
Jonathan Bach, Professor of Global Studies
Chiara Bottici, Associate Professor of Philosophy
Benoit Challand, Associate Professor of Sociology
Ying Chen, Assistant Professor of Economics
Sandipto Dasgupta, Assistant Professor of Politics
Leonardo Figueroa Helland, Associate Professor of Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management
Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Professor of International Affairs
Sean Jacobs, Associate Professor of International Affairs
Aaron Jakes, Assistant Professor of History
Clara Mattei, Assistant Professor of Economics
Anne McNevin, Associate Professor of Politics
Romy Opperman, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Philosophy
Emma Park, Assistant Professor of History
Ann Stoler, Willy Brandt Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and History
Terry Williams, Professor of Sociology
For more information, please contact Carlos Forment, Associate Professor of Sociology, at [email protected].