Decolonizing Higher Education: A Virtual Book Launch

Please join the International Solidarity Action Research Network (ISARN) as we launch new books by three of the networks’ participants. All are welcome to this Zoom event, but please register in advance for the access link.

9am PST/12pm EST/5pm GMT

Featured speakers

With commentary by Jini Kim Watson (NYU) and Anita Girvan (UBC), moderated by Jessica Stites Mor (UBC).

Tony Alessandrini (CUNY), Decolonize Multiculturalism

The book focuses on the student and youth movements of the 1960s and 1970s, inspired by global movements for decolonization and anti-racism, which aimed to fundamentally transform their society, as well as the fierce repression of these movements by the state, corporations, and university administrations. Part of the response has been sheer violence—campus policing, for example, only began in the ’70s, paving the way for the militarized campuses of today—with institutionalized multiculturalism acting like the velvet glove around the iron fist of state violence.

Anna Bernard (King’s College London), Decolonizing Literature 

Anna Bernard argues that the decolonization of literary studies requires a change to not only what, but how, we read. In lively prose, she explores work that has already been done, both within and beyond the academy, and challenges readers to think about where we go from here. She suggests ways to recognize and respond to the political work that texts do, considering questions of language and translation, comparative reading, ideological argument, and genre in relation to the history of anticolonial struggle. Above all, Bernard shows that although we still have far to go, the work of decolonizing...

Gary Wilder (CUNY), Concrete Utopianism

In this book, Gary Wilder insists that we place solidarity and temporality at the center of our political thinking. He develops a critique of Left realism, Left culturalism, and Left pessimism from the standpoint of heterodox Marxism and Black radicalism. These traditions offer precious resources to relate cultural singularity and translocal solidarity, political autonomy and worldwide interdependence. They develop modes of immanent critique and forms of poetic knowledge to envision alternative futures that may already dwell within our world: traces of past ways of being, knowing, and relating that persist within an untimely present; or charged residues of unrealized possibilities that were the focus of an earlier generation’s dreams and struggles; or opportunities for dialectical reversals embedded in the contradictory tendencies of the given order.

Register in advance for this meeting.