Calendar 2020-2021

This year, DPW will assemble online as a reading group. Each meeting will focus on a key concept related to decolonization and racial justice, including decolonization, antiracism, abolition, restorative justice, co-liberation, and others.

FALL 2020

Meeting 1: Decolonization

30 September 2020, 7pm - 8:30pm EST

Read Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, "Decolonization is not a Metaphor" Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, Society 1(1, 2012): 1-40.

Please bring 1-2 quotes from the reading that you would like to discuss in more depth, as well as the page number. RSVP for the reading group here

Meeting 2: Black Studies Response to Decolonization is not a Metaphor [King and Garba Sorentino suggested by Eve Tuck's tweet here]

14 October 2020, 7pm - 8:30 EST

Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism. New York: MR, 1972, [parts i and ii], pp. 31-46

Tiffany Lethabo King, "At the Pores of the Plantation," The Black Shoals, pp. 111-140 [note King recaps her argument here]

Tapji Garba and Sara-Maria Sorentino, “Slavery is a Metaphor: A Critical Commentary on Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s ‘Decolonization is not a Metaphor’” in Antipode 52, Issue 3 (May 2020)

Meeting 3: Re-reading and being blown out of the texts

28 October 2020, 7pm - 8:30 EST

Please read either the King or the Garba and Sorentino, we will spend more time with these texts.

Meeting 4: Afropessimism

11 November 2020, 7pm - 8:30 EST

Wilderson III, Frank B. “The Ruse of Analogy,” in Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Duke University Press, 2010), 35-53.

WINTER 2021

Meeting 5: Undermining Racial Justice

3 February 2021, 7:30–9:00pm EST

Johnson, Matthew, "Introduction" in Undermining Racial Justice: How One University Embraced Inclusion and Inequality (Cornell University Press, 2020).

Book discussion, Fall 2019 at UMich available here.

Meeting 6: Text Annotation

16 February 2021, 7-8:30 EST. RSVP here, texts here.

Meeting 7: Next steps

9 March 2021, 7 EST

Meeting 8: Plaque Annotation

31 March 2021, 7 EST

For this event please read this University Record article containing the plaque text and history of the land grant and the American City (1817 and Beyond) from Tiya Miles' the Dawn of Detroit, which you can access in the DPW texts folder here

For your reference, you can find the text of the Treaty of Fort Meigs here we call your attention to Article 16, “Grant for the education of Indian children” on p. 166.

Meeting 9: Next semester

21 April 2021, 7 EST

For reference, we're linking here to Prof. Michael Witgen's talk from 2017, "The Political Economy of Plunder."