Cornell Dept. of English presents:

The Critical Race Series lecture by Nelson Maldonado-Torres (Rutgers University)

“The World that Coloniality Built: Fanonian Meditations on Language and Love”

The world that modernity/coloniality built is a world of Manichean hierarchies and forms of segregation and separation that serve those hierarchies. Language and love are fundamental forms of connection, which means that they find themselves in precarious conditions in the modern/colonial world. This presentation explores the meaning of language and love, as well as the idea of their respective decolonizations (e.g., decolonial language and decolonial love), with particular attention to Frantz Fanon’s classic text, Black Skin, White Masks.

Nelson Maldonado-Torres is Associate Professor in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies, member of the core faculty of the Comparative Literature Program, and faculty affiliate in the Doctoral Program in Women and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He has been President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association (2008-2013), Director of the Center for Latino Policy Research at the University of California, Berkeley (2009-2010), and Chair of the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies at Rutgers (2012-2015). He is a board member of the Frantz Fanon Foundation in Paris, France, and honorary member of the Fausto Reinaga Foundation in La Paz, Bolivia. His publications include Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (Duke UP, 2008), and the collection of essays La descolonización y el giro decolonial (Decolonization and the decolonial turn), compiled by the Universidad de la Tierra (Chiapas, Mexico) in 2011. He has guest edited two issues on “mapping the decolonial turn” for the journal Transmodernity, and is currently working two book projects: Theorizing the Decolonial Turn and Fanonian Meditations.

Co-sponsored by Latina/o Studies