What does it mean to "Decolonize"? The Consumption of Life and the Regeneration of the Communal
The 10th anniversary of the Middelburg Decolonial Summer School, will explore the growing frustrations and disenchantments in face of the failed promises of modernity and development. The themes explored in the past 10 years will be brought in a new light.
The analytics of the Colonial Matrix of Power (CMP) reveals a machinery that generates un-justice and death, from the Atlantic Slavery in the sixteenth century to the Jew Holocaust in the twentieth century. We have responded to the promises advanced in the name of modernity, democracy and development with the urgency to delink from CMP and to engage in the variegated localities of struggle opened up by the decolonial option. This analytics of the CMP will be complemented by explorations of decolonial joy and decolonial love in the regeneration of the communal.
The 10th Middelburg Decolonial Summer School will place its emphasis not only on resisting CMP but also on historical forms and current practices of re-existing beyond it. To engage in the regeneration and praxis of the communal it is essential to understand that the communal cannot be subsumed under the liberal common-good and the Marxist commons. The concept of the communal allows to replace competition with cooperation to live together in plenitude; to replace development with communal economies; to replace disciplinary formations with the liberation of knowing; to replace the political and economic belief that we live to work with working for living together. These challenges are ways to engage in recovering the freedom of joy and love and with it regenerate the communal as praxis of living.
