Dissolving Master Narratives

Dissolving Master Narratives comprises one volume in an unprecedented three-volume set, collectively subtitled Decolonial Reconstellations. Together with Volume One (Dynamics of Deep Time and Deep Place) and Volume Three (Reconceiving Identities in Political Economy), it gathers thinkers from across world regions and disciplines who reconfigure critical global thought.

Collaboratively conceived, the volumes are founded on the observation that we cannot fully uproot the epistemological-material violence of coercive systems, nor fully (re)imagine more ethical visions of planetary community, without shared attention to the deeper histories of place and peoples that shape the present. Accordingly, the volumes gather social scientists and humanists, Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, and intersectional and materialist thinkers who reconceptualize longue-durée history and its afterlives. They engage in the dual project to dismantle eurocentric, colonial, androcentric frameworks and to make visible the legacies of care and creative world-making that have sustained human communities. Uncovering pasts that are as complex and dynamic as the present, the contributors brilliantly transform notions of temporality, relationality, polity, conjuncture, resistance, and experimentation within histories of struggle and alliance. They richly decolonize political imaginaries. The co-editors’ introductions articulate fresh frameworks of “deep place” and “deep time” freed from eurocentric modernity paradigms, indicating pathways toward decolonial collaboration and institutional change.

Decolonial Reconstellations offers invaluable resources for researchers and teachers in decolonial, postcolonial, anti-colonial, and Indigenous studies, and will also strongly appeal to feminist, anti-racist, Marxist, and critical theory scholars across disciplines.

Laura Doyle is Professor Emerita at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and founding Co-Director of the World Studies Interdisciplinary Project (WSIP) with Mwangi wa Gĩthĩnji. Book publications include Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labors, and the Literary Arts of Alliance (Wallerstein Prize); Bordering on the Body (Leeson Prize); Freedom’s Empire; and two edited collections Bodies of Resistance: New Phenomenologies of Politics, Agency, and Culture; and Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity. Doyle has received a Leverhulme Research Professorship (UK), a Rockefeller Fellowship in Intercultural Scholarship in Afro-American Studies (Princeton University), and two ACLS Fellowships.

Simon Gikandi is Class of 1943 University Professor of English at Princeton University and Chair of the English Department. His most recent book, Slavery and the Culture of Taste, was awarded both the MLA James Russell Lowell Award and the Melville J. Herskovits Award of the African Studies Association. In addition to numerous articles, his several books include The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean since 1950 (Volume 11 of the Oxford History of the Novel in English). Gikandi has served as President of the Modern Language Association and as editor of PMLA, its official journal.

Mwangi wa Gĩthĩnji is Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and founding Co-Director of the World Studies Interdisciplinary Project with Laura Doyle. His publications include Ten Millionaires and Ten Million Beggars: A Study of Inequality and Development in Kenya; the co-authored An Employment Targeted Plan for Kenya; and numerous articles. He has served in multiple editorial roles and consulted with agencies and NGOs, including the UNDP, Economic Commission for Africa, Africa Center for Economic Transformation, and the Society for International Development.