The Decolonial Initiative at Brown is one of the sponsors for a new Initiative called “Decolonize Hellas”, aimed at re-examining the place of modern Greece in relation to the geographies and genealogies of European colonialism. Other faculty from Brown are also sponsors/collaborators in this project. As they state “To decolonize Hellas means to expose the colonial genealogies that…

As attention turns increasingly toward the “global” in art history, has postcolonialism fallen into obsolescence? Although touted as liberating, does the new “global” dispensation mark a rupture with history? What shall become of the generative critical theory that emerged in the 1980s and ‘90s, which partly grew out of reflections on anticolonial movements and post-independence…

What can a radical practice of history look like? Unlearning Imperialism is a forum that brings together a range of interlocutors to consider the challenges of Ariella Azoulay’s Potential History/Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019) for thinking about photography, archives, museums and the practice of history. The Decolonial Collective on the Migration of Objects and People is…

Over two days, men and women marched 26 miles to New Orleans to mark an overlooked uprising against slavery’s brutality – and pay tribute to those who fought for freedom… Read More Here

THE EXHIBITION IS NOW ONLINE! Every year, hundreds of thousands of migrants from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Congo, and other countries across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia try to cross the Mediterranean Sea, hoping to enter the European Union. These open-water crossings have become the deadliest migratory routes in the world. Since 2014, nearly…

The mass plunder of objects from different places was instrumental in shaping the institution of museum and imposing it as the ultimate destination for precious objects of art. This was inseparable from the attack on and degradation of different forms of art-making with which women were engaged as part of a broader care for the…

The Palestine Heirloom Seed Library A Journey of Reclaiming Life in One of the World’s Centers of Diversity: Palestine  In Arabic the generous ones are referred to as the people of the soil, ahl Al athra. The Arabic language has other references to soil as the mother of us all; but the most telling of…

Tamara Lanier and her lawyer, Joshua D. Koskoff, discuss her case against Harvard University which is a milestone in the discourse on photography, slavery, and reparations. In 2019, Lanier filed a lawsuit against Harvard University for the wrongful possession and expropriation of images of her ancestors who were enslaved in South Carolina in the 1850s. Lanier’s…

The teach-in was based on an open call across Brown and RISD to respond to the Sarr-Savoy Report on the Restitution of African Heritage: Towards a New Relational Ethics that was published by the French government in November 2018. This was an attempt on our part to use the report to forefront long on-going struggles…