Dissolving Master Narratives

Decolonial Reconstellations, Volume Two

Laura Doyle, Simon Gikandi, Mwangi wa Gĩthĩnji

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040359297
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Dissolving Master Narratives comprises one volume in an unprecedented three-volume set, collectively subtitled Decolonial Reconstellations. Together with Volume One (Dynamics of Deep Time and Deep Place) and Volume Three (Reconceiving Identities in Political Economy), it gathers thinkers from across world regions and disciplines who reconfigure critical global thought.

Collaboratively conceived, the volumes are founded on the observation that we cannot fully uproot the epistemological-material violence of coercive systems, nor fully (re)imagine more ethical visions of planetary community, without shared attention to the deeper histories of place and peoples that shape the present. Accordingly, the volumes gather social scientists and humanists, Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, and intersectional and materialist thinkers who reconceptualize longue-durée history and its afterlives. They engage in the dual project to dismantle eurocentric, colonial, androcentric frameworks and to make visible the legacies of care and creative world-making that have sustained human communities. Uncovering pasts that are as complex and dynamic as the present, the contributors brilliantly transform notions of temporality, relationality, polity, conjuncture, resistance, and experimentation within histories of struggle and alliance. They richly decolonize political imaginaries. The co-editors' introductions articulate fresh frameworks of "deep place" and "deep time" freed from eurocentric modernity paradigms, indicating pathways toward decolonial collaboration and institutional change.

Decolonial Reconstellations offers invaluable resources for researchers and teachers in decolonial, postcolonial, anti-colonial, and Indigenous studies, and will also strongly appeal to feminist, anti-racist, Marxist, and critical theory scholars across disciplines.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Conceptual Introduction
• 1 The Afterlife of Colonialism in Narratives of Civilizational Collapse: The Maya Region of the Americas
• 2 Multiple Temporalities in Nineteenth-Century Ibero-America: Questioning Temporalization and the Persistence of the Past
• 3 “Unmodern” Subjects: Africa, Fetishism, and European Self-Fashioning
• 4 Abjuration and Subjectivity: Palmares, Quilombolas, and Republicanism
• 5 Race and Renaissance Historiographies
• 6 Decolonial Reflections on Abbasid Political Thought: The Adab-Siyāsa Ethos
• 7 Science in the Mirror of the Qur’an: Islam and Rationalism in the East African Context
• 8 “Literature Translated”: The Moral Grounds of Comparison in Ottoman Letters
• 9 Theorizing the Horizon: From World to Worlds to Planetarity
• 10 Afterword: “Worlds of Difference”/Different World(s)—Reading Decolonial Reconstellations Within and Beyond the Pluriverse
• Index