Bodhisattva Kar
Six Theses on Decoloniality
In developing “decoloniality” as a distinct theoretical program away from the earlier analytics of “postcolonialism,” Walter D. Mignolo has not only repeatedly affirmed his faith in the leadership of the BRICS countries but has also ascribed an untrammeled legacy of the Bandung vision to these states. Through a historically informed interrogation of this framing, this presentation attempts to offer an alternative account of the decolonial armature. In doing so, it engages five key points: namely, (1) the instability of the descriptor “colonial,” (2) the algorithm of authenticity in populist regimes, (3) the neo-phenomenological suturing of experience and episteme, (4) the post-Bandung shifts in economic ideologies, and (5) neoliberal institutionality. I contend that a careful consideration of these themes allows us to understand the ways in which decoloniality performs the ironic work of conjuring a revolutionary subject-position adequate to the demands of authoritarian populism.
Bodhisattva Kar is an associate professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town. He started reading history at Presidency College, Calcutta, and received his PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Kar has taught and held research fellowships in several premier institutions at Amsterdam, Berlin, Calcutta, Chicago, Delhi, Hamburg, Mexico City, Oxford, and Paris. He serves on the editorial boards of different international journals and academic series. Kar’s research interests include histories of disciplines; joint-stock capitalism; primitivism; nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of South and Southeast Asia; modern African intellectual history; and connected and comparative histories of frontiers. His work bridges economic and cultural histories, cultivates the anti-identitarian potential of the discipline of history, and seeks to develop an egalitarian ethic of engaging the non-historical without giving up on the delights of the archive.