Decoloniz(s)ing Knowledge Through Performance and Technology: A Collaborative Research Approach

Milija Gluhovic

My interest in this project stems out of my engagement with a transnational interdisciplinary research project ‘Thinking through the Silk Roads. Cross-Cultural Exchanges and Mobilities,’ which proposes an innovative framework for the study of cultural productions, visual arts and performances, cultural heritage, and geocultural politics, emergent in the broad context of old and new Silk Roads. See: Project link.

I am interested in exploring how performance, theatre, dance, visual arts and other aesthetic practices across geographies that connect East Asia to Europe unsettle dominant epistemic regimes and dismantle the colonial legacies embedded in the “grand narrative” of the Silk Road and its deep entanglement with colonial and sovereign histories. I am also interested in finding out how imperial, neo-imperial and post-Soviet power formations continue to shape knowledge, bodies, affects, and cultural imaginaries; how artists and communities generate counter-histories, reclaim indigenous epistemologies, and produce new performative mappings that exceed Eurocentric or Western-centric frames; and how decolonial performative practices travel, resonate and are received transnationally. I hope to bring some of the insights form this project – e.g. on alternative ontologies of the Silk Roads grounded in situated experience, post-/anti-colonial solidarity, and speculative future-making – to bare on our collaborative workshops in Toronto and at Warwick.

I have also been inspired by the important work of my PhD students who have been exploring the decolonial paradigms in their own work, such as Lara Barzon’s project on aesthetics and politics of decolonial practices in contemporary dance, and Stephen Okpadah’s Practice as Research project on participatory theatre and climate justice in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. What all these projects share in common has been an effort to respond to the question, ‘What does the imperative to ‘decolonise’ entail?’ I am looking forward to taking part in and facilitating the exchange between our diverse scholarly communities at the University of Toronto and Warwick and probing the questions of the politics, ethics and aesthetics of decolonisation. I hope that in this time of unprecedented global challenges – ecological destruction, the global expansion of right-wing movements, conflict and war –  this forum will enable us to listen to one another, share affinities and experiences, and explore decolonization as a contested epistemic field in which the past is worked on, the present negotiated, and futures are imagined otherwise.

Silvija Jestrovic

My interest in this project arises from the need to interrogate the possibilities and contradictions of decolonising knowledge and pedagogies within the context of the neoliberal university and the epistemological paradigms of the Global North. While the term itself has become something of a buzzword—often used to signal progressiveness and inclusivity in academia—it has nonetheless opened a space for debate and experimentation with different practices, perspectives, and locations of knowledge. By the same token, however, the agenda of decolonising knowledge has frequently been decontextualised, dehistoricised, and even depoliticised in the process.

The project of cultural and epistemological decolonisation does not originate within the progressive academia of the neoliberal Global North, but rather in the histories of decolonial struggles in the Global South, giving rise to projects such as the Non-Aligned Movement (founded in 1961 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia). Among its central priorities were struggles against cultural imperialism, alongside the pursuit of alternative modernities and the establishment of former colonies not merely as objects of study, but as sites from which to speak. In this light, the contemporary agenda of decolonising pedagogies, curricula, and knowledge in the Global North appears as yet another instance of appropriation.

Through our project, I see the possibility of repositioning the agenda of decolonising knowledge and pedagogies by recontextualising, rehistoricising, and repoliticising it. By mobilising performing theory as a distinct pedagogical tool for decentring dominant narratives, I identify a method for accessing different forms of knowledge—embodied, quotidian, and suppressed—as practices of learning and unlearning. Through performing theory as methodology, I seek to explore the contradictions inherent in attempting to formulate decolonial pedagogical and epistemological practices within neoliberal academia and imperialist world-systems. At the same time, I hope that this project might open the possibility of temporal thirdspaces of learning, emerging through what Boaventura de Sousa Santos terms “epistemologies of the South,” and giving rise to what Bojana Piškur describes as “epistemological solidarities.”