Dissolving Master Narratives

Reviews / Votes

"This triple-tier collection on decoloniality is most distinctive in the way it opens new pathways for understanding the complexly intertwined past and present histories of communities, which are often located outside a hegemonic European modernity, while simultaneously pointing to radically transformative future possibilities. Bringing together non-indigenous and indigenous histories, the core purpose of this well-conceived project is to retrieve deep-time and deep-place histories, demonstrating to us that there is no living history with a dead past. Its lasting value is the interdisciplinary approach, which invites readers to adopt a nuanced, pluriversal understanding of the planetary universe and of the many shifting streams and legacies of history that point toward reconstellations of a decolonial space. "Decoloniality," the volumes argue, has to be both intersectional and global in reach, while remaining steeped in the values of conviviality and poetics of relationality -- if it is to uproot epistemological and material violence imposed by the tyranny of colonial modernity. The volumes offer a rare multi-dimensional approach to decoloniality that opens up new avenues of exploration."

- James Ogude is Professor and Senior Research Fellow, Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria. Ogude's most recent edited volumes include, Ubuntu and the Reconstitution of Community and (with Tafadzwa Mushonga), Environmental Humanities of Extraction in Africa: Poetics and Politics of Exploitation (Routledge), and (with Neil Kortenaar) The Archives of African Literature, (forthcoming).

"Decolonial Reconstellations magnificently launches "World Studies" as a sustained project of decentering of Western/modern and androcentric narratives of history, the economy, and "progress." It is based on the re-grounding insight that if there were, and are, multiple histories, there must also be multiple new beginnings for other world histories, and hence multiple possibles and futures emerging from the deep times and deep places existing, and at times even thriving, all over the world. Taken together, these volumes provide a cogent introduction to World Studies as a genuine pluriversalization of world histories -- essential at this historical juncture of planetary crisis and urgent civilizational transitions. This book will be of great interest to courses in history, anthropology, geography, political ecology and development, global, ethnic, and diverse area studies."

- Arturo Escobar, author of Pluriversal Politics (2020) and co-author of Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human (2024).