The course is divided into three parts. The first part (approximately 15 hours) is devoted to Frantz Fanon and to his conceptualization of the Third World as a collective political subject emerging from anticolonial struggle. In Frantz Fanon’s thought, many of the central issues in postcolonial and decolonial debates take shape: from “decolonization” as a process of liberation, to the conceptual, as well as political and economic, legacy of European modernity, and the relationship that can be established with it. Through Fanon’s critical positions on the Manichaeism of colonial society, on the relationship between political organization, national perspective, and struggles for independence, the category of the “Third World” will be introduced.
The second part of the course (approximately 14 hours) is devoted to reconstructing the trajectory of the category of the Third World, from its emergence at the Bandung Conference and within anticolonial struggles to its crisis in the 1980s. Particular attention will be paid to the polysemy that has marked the category of the Third World, through a focus on the Tricontinental Conference, before analyzing its connection with the conceptual laboratory of postcolonial studies. In order to examine this broad theoretical laboratory in light of the way it interrogates the rearticulation of colonial logics after the processes of independence, the course will focus on Robert Young’s analysis and on the related critiques, through texts by Arif Dirlik and Ella Shohat. The second part of the course concludes by addressing the image of the “Third World woman” through the reading of authors such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Chandra Talpade Mohanty.
The third part (approximately 15 hours) focuses on the debate that marked the emergence of the category of the Global South, understood as an attempt to move beyond the limits of postcolonial studies and of the category of the Third World, and on decolonial studies. This part of the course introduces the decolonial option by following the lines of inquiry developed by the Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality project. Starting from Aníbal Quijano’s idea of the “coloniality of power”, the course will focus on the decolonial critique of European modernity and on the hypotheses of epistemic disobedience and of the rearticulation of knowledge from the Global South, as well as on the critiques addressed to this project.
The second part of the course (approximately 14 hours) is devoted to reconstructing the trajectory of the category of the Third World, from its emergence at the Bandung Conference and within anticolonial struggles to its crisis in the 1980s. Particular attention will be paid to the polysemy that has marked the category of the Third World, through a focus on the Tricontinental Conference, before analyzing its connection with the conceptual laboratory of postcolonial studies. In order to examine this broad theoretical laboratory in light of the way it interrogates the rearticulation of colonial logics after the processes of independence, the course will focus on Robert Young’s analysis and on the related critiques, through texts by Arif Dirlik and Ella Shohat. The second part of the course concludes by addressing the image of the “Third World woman” through the reading of authors such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Chandra Talpade Mohanty.
The third part (approximately 15 hours) focuses on the debate that marked the emergence of the category of the Global South, understood as an attempt to move beyond the limits of postcolonial studies and of the category of the Third World, and on decolonial studies. This part of the course introduces the decolonial option by following the lines of inquiry developed by the Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality project. Starting from Aníbal Quijano’s idea of the “coloniality of power”, the course will focus on the decolonial critique of European modernity and on the hypotheses of epistemic disobedience and of the rearticulation of knowledge from the Global South, as well as on the critiques addressed to this project.
- Teacher: Anna Guerini