Defatalizing Colonial Literacy and Imagination with Professor Anna M. Agathangelou, Department of Politics, York University, Canada
COVID-19 has brought to the fore once more that violence, direct and structural, disproportionately affects Black, indigenous, and other marginalized peoples. Discourses, deliberations, and policy documents that speak about “crisis” and “disasters” have proliferated in the last two decades. Ranging from neoliberals to the most conservative thinkers we seem to be reaching a consensus that the world is reaching its end. Many are rushing to design new “Leviathan contracts” that expand coloniality and imperial projects to other planets. In this presentation, I examine the entwinement of time, coloniality, enslavement and global racial capital. Inspired by radical decolonial visions and experiments and from the vantage point of black, indigenous, and anti-capitalist feminists I argue that it is key to grapple with contemporary fatalisms that come in the form of critical environmentalisms, reproductive fascisms and innovative technoscientific capitalism. Crucial to this conversation are the dominant ways that time, coloniality, and value are sutured together to co-constitute fatal notions, imaginations, and projects about species and the planetary. I conclude with some experimental orientations. In conversation with several radical and decolonial experiments, I point to literacies and imaginations which focus on the possibilities for thriving and multispecies relationalities and planetary futures beyond global racial capitalism.