Decolonization is the historical struggle for national sovereignty against colonialism. By contrast, decoloniality is an epistemological category that takes colonialism as constitutive of modernity. It seeks to dismantle colonialist frameworks of thinking and sensing, delinking from colonialism's habits, forms of life, and subjectivities. As an analytic, decoloniality concerns the reconstruction and restitution of histories excluded from the universalist frameworks of modernity. As a programmatic, it establishes a pluriversal epistemology.

This series of panels places the frameworks by which we produce historical knowledge at its center. Questions we seek to focus on include: How to address the colonizer/colonized relationship not as a universal binary but simultaneously in its global and local specificity? How to provincialize the West without ignoring the lived realities of its hegemony? What to make of the increasing problematization of hybridity and syncretism? And how does a decolonial framework help us understand the relations between socio-economic and cultural forms?

The conference is hosted by the Department of Art History & Archaeology and the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University with support from the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art. It is organized by Alex Alberro and Pujan Karambeigi. The poster is by Andreas Siekmann.