Degree
Master of Arts
Program
Comparative Literature
Supervisor
Teresa Hubel
Abstract
This project is an inquiry into modes of decolonial resistance that mobilize alternative relationships to the past against the modern/colonial writing of history from a Eurocentric perspective taken as universal. I contend that knowledges and memories rooted in non-Western cultural traditions have formed the epistemological basis for ongoing opposition to the hegemonic conception of history as the unfolding of global structural transformations on a single, homogenous timescale. I examine works by Frantz Fanon, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Zapatista videomakers that expressly reject a Eurocentric, monotopic perspective of history. My objective is to demonstrate the decolonial efforts of intellectuals and ordinary people to critically engage this hegemonic understanding of history from its epistemic borders and propose alternatives which do not merely repeat the monological impulse by replacing the West’s imperialist perspective of history with the orthodoxy of another cultural or national tradition.
Recommended Citation
Crowley, Patrick, "Mobilizing Insurgent Pasts Toward Decolonial Futures" (2013). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 1280.
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/1280
Included in
African History Commons, Cultural History Commons, Epistemology Commons, Latin American History Commons, Latin American Languages and Societies Commons, Other Film and Media Studies Commons, Other History Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons