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Decolonial Bewilderment

Fri, November 10, 10:00 to 11:45am, Hyatt Regency Chicago, Stetson FG, Exhibit Level West Tower

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Dialogue Format

Abstract

Drifting from a long legacy of decolonial thought that has sought to recuperate or redefine “civility” in the colonies against colonial force, this roundtable experiments with forms of bewilderment—of being lost in the wild—as modes of decolonization. Whether in the academy, in the United States, or in the world we call “global,” the embrace of bewilderment against colonial logic may offer us more generative ways of becoming decolonized. We begin with the premise that the activity of bewilderment—of letting ourselves become lost, of recognizing that we are already lost—is a performance of anarchic refusal. Rhyming with this year’s ASA theme, we ask over how we can teach and learn bewilderment as an ethico-politics of decolonization.

As the concept of “wildness” emerges in contemporary queer theory through a desire to embrace subjugated, unruly, anti-masterful forms of being in and reading the world, we emphasize the acts and processes of becoming lost, of turning toward dis-orientation and unsettlement in those spaces of civility to which we have been bound. Even as we remain staunchly policed at borders, disciplined in thought, domesticated by capitalism, we might also concede that we no longer know where we are. What forms of human, inhuman, de-human, creaturely, material, and imaginative belongings and solidarities might flourish through the embrace of being and becoming lost? What historical, aesthetic, textual, performative lines of flight can we dream into the wild, and into the radical disorientations it promises?

We bring together emerging and established thinkers whose works span across and intersect through black, Asian and Asian American, colonial and postcolonial, queer, and performance studies. In so doing, we aim to produce a collective space in which to become lost alongside and in conversation with each other.

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