Teaching

The course begins by contextualizing the recent feminist turn toward decoloniality (esp. decoloniality from the Latinx tradition). Our initial encounter with Sojourner Truth and Audre Lorde helps us understand the exclusions performed by feminism, the challenges endemic to any project that seeks to redefine the disciple, and what decolonial feminism has to offer to such endeavors. In the first part of the course, we will begin to make sense of what decoloniality entails by learning more about coloniality, as articulated by exponents of the Modernity/Coloniality Research Program. As we will see, coloniality has repercussions that exceed theory and academia; coloniality structures all aspects of people’s lives, from their ways of thinking and being to how they organize labor, gender, and reproduction. The writings of Gloria Anzaldúa will reveal the tensions, ambiguity, and existential confusion entailed by living in a colonial context. In the second part of the course, we will grapple with the challenges posed by the coloniality of language: if reason, concepts, and language are colonial tools, how can oppression and practices of resistance be articulated without reifying coloniality itself? Informed by the writing Gayatri Spivak, Ofelia Schutte, María Lugones among others, we will contend with the limitations of any dialogical approach to decoloniality. In the third part of the course, we will engage thinkers like Anzaldúa, Da Silva, and Rivera Cusicanqui and explore decolonial practices of communication, writing, and theorizing that do not play into colonial structures and logic.

Critical Phenomenology

This is one in a series of courses on contemporary critical phenomenology. The course could be taught in relation to the texts of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the thinker that is often credited for having initiated the critical turn of phenomenology. As you will see, the work of Merleau-Ponty is not assigned (although it is often in the background of some of the thinkers we will read). Rather, this course tracks the ways in which attending to differentially situated experiences calls for different phenomenological approaches. In a sense, this is the gift left to us by Merleau-Ponty when he asks, rather than definitively telling us, “what is phenomenology?” 

Specifically thematizing the possibilities of a phenomenology of the political world for feminism, critical race theory, and, especially, decoloniality, throughout the course, we will explore how one’s historical and social context comes to inform the concerns, questions, and methods of investigation. We will grapple with questions like, can critical phenomenology bear witness to phenomena that colonial heteropatriarchy relegates to invisibility? If so, are there modalities of bearing witness better suited to attend to these experiences? And, does a critical phenomenology entail a move beyond itself, toward the aesthetic, perhaps? We will engage writings by Lorde, hooks, Fanon, Anzaldúa, Ruiz, Ortega, Baldwin, Bettcher, Spillers, and Hainämaa among others.