Decolonial Education as an Embodied Practice: Black Consciousness, Black Existentialism and Autobiography as Pedagogical Tools

Practical Information

Date: 10 July
Time: 15:00-18:00 
Venue: Stockholm University of the Art, 
114 28 Stockholm, Brinellvägen 58 (Studio 11)
Meeting Point: 14:45-14:55 at the entrance door
The event will be chaired by Prof. Martin Sonderkamp

Registration

To asisst with our arrangements, attendees are kindly asked to RSVP by emailing martin.sonderkamp@uniarts.se (by 10 July at 13:30). 

Decolonial Education as an Embodied Practice: Black Consciousness, Black Existentialism and Autobiography as Pedagogical Tools

Bringing together the politics of the flesh, “When Black Consciousness Meets White Consciousness,” and the decolonial contradictions of working alongside one’s colonisers, this seminar places the embodied practice of decoloniality and Black Existentialism at the centre of its interrogation. The workshop offers insight into the performance of racism and the lingering of its perverse cruelty. Racism is a form of labour . . . it is work done by the beneficiaries of racism who enter anti-racist spaces with oral protestations against racism but without a programme of political action that questions the very agency through which racialized White subjects reproduce the very racism they claim to be against.

 “Contradiction comes in many different forms. None is so debilitating than when the coloniser transitions, textually not politically, to decoloniality without taking the responsibility for the afterlife of colonialism, which they continue to benefit from. Self-examination and self-interrogation of the relations of coloniality, a necessity, seem nearly impossible for the coloniser who continues to act as beneficiary, masked in the new-found language of White fragility, devoid of an ethical responsibility of the very system of White domination they claim to be against.” 
Rozena Maart, Black Consciousness and the Politics of the Flesh 

de·col·o·nise
verb (used with object), de·col·o·nised, de·col·o·nis·ing.

1. to release from the status of a colony.
2. to allow (a colony) to become self-governing or independent.
   verb (used without object), de·col·o·nised, de col·o·nis·ing.
3. to free a colony to become self-governing or independent.
    

It is not difficult to comprehend that the word ‘colonial’ sits within the word ‘decolonial’. The de in decolonial is a prefix, and its dictionary meaning suggests: ‘removal, to do away with’.10 Thus, to employ the word decolonial is to understand that it means to remove the colonial. The bigger question is, what are we removing the colonial from? Ourselves? Our thinking? Our Being? And what does such a process include: a series of acts that involve an untying from colonial practices? If so, what do these entail as 400 years of colonialism in South Africa covers a broad spectrum of day-to-day activities that stand as a reminder every single day of our history of colonisation. Within the South African context of post-apartheid existence, our existential beings are constructed alongside our colonisers. Rozena Maart, “Unpacking Decoloniality and Decolonial Education: South Africa and the World.” Alternation Special Edition 33 (2020) 15 – 44

 . . . When one situates race within the construction and the production of knowledge that one believes ought to be there; when one presents it in the presence of White scholars for whom the process is foreign, alien, or intimidating, one is placing them in positions of alibis, witnesses to their own demise, without their consent. This process of placing racism on the grey faces of the very White scholars who dished it out, produces insurmountable White rage . . . for the White scholar is suddenly encased in the very racism they claim to be against and which the Black woman and the Woman of colour are expected to carry without resistance yet with eventual demise. Returning racism to the very agent who dished it out is a necessity; this is the evidence of racism that White scholars do not want to see . . . for they do not want to see themselves. They are only accustomed to seeing the Other at the backdrop of racism they believe are caused by the mere fact of Black presence. Rozena Maart, “Race and Pedagogical Practices [Black Consciousness and the Politics of the Flesh]

Biography 

Rozena Maart was born in District Six, the former slave quarter of the Cape, in Cape Town, South Africa. Her family along with thousands were forcibly removed in 1973 due to the Apartheid government’s Group Areas Act and the Forced Removal Act. It is from this forced removal date of 1973, that her annual hives arrived on her body, an annual staging that lasted for sixteen years to mark the anniversary of her family’s forced removal. The Dutch named the people they cargoed from Bengal, Indonesia and Malaysia, together with people from the Eastern Cape, according to the month of their enslavement. Rozena’s family carry the names of Maart, April and September.
In 1987, at the age of 24, Rozena was nominated to the “Woman of the Year” award in South Africa for her work in the area of gender-based violence, and for starting with four women the first Black feminist organisation in South Africa: Women Against Repression [W.A.R.]. She published her first book at the age of 27 in 1989. In October 1992, three weeks after the birth of her daughter at the age of 30, she won, “The Journey Prize: Best Short Fiction in Canada,” for a story, ‘No Rosa, No District Six,’  and four months later she started her doctoral degree, at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in the UK, and completed it exactly three years later. Professor Maart has published several books, journal articles and book chapters and has collaborated on various documentary and Art projects. "Rosa’s District Six" her short story collection made the best seller list in Canada and was on the HOMEBRU list in South Africa in 2006. In 2009, The Writing Circle was shortlisted by the African Studies Association for the Aidoo-Snyder award, named in honour of Ama Ata Aidoo, the celebrated Ghanaian novelist and short-story writer, and Margaret Snyder, the founding Director of UNIFEM. Professor Maart writes fiction and non-fiction. She recently edited, Decoloniality and Decolonial Education: South Africa and the World [2020], which includes the contributions of 27 contributors from South Africa and across the world. More recently, as one of three editors, including Lewis Gordon, she published Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge: The work of Lewis Gordon [Bloomsbury (2023], which sat at #1 on Amazon after 1 month of publication. Prof Maart has been recognised with two lifetime achievement awards in philosophy and literature, respectively from Philosophy Born of Struggle (2016) and the Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Lifetime Achievement Award for her contribution to literature and Philosophy by the Caribbean Philosophical Association (2021). Prof Maart is also a Research Ambassador to the University of Bremen in Germany, and a Mercator Fellow to the first Contradiction Studies programme, also hosted at the same University. Prof Maart is an award-winning writer, and a national and international critical race theorist and a scholar of decolonial thought. Her PhD is from the University of Birmingham in the UK, in political philosophy and psychoanalysis. Her edited book, Palates of Pleasure, with Routledge, was published at end of August 2025. She sits on the Editorial board of both Routledge and Bloomsbury and currently holds the South African Research Chair [SARChI Chair] on the Study of the National Question. Her book Black Consciousness and the Politics of the Flesh, is forthcoming.