Event

Decolonial Love: Learning to Redream Dangerously Again

Co-sponosored by the BCTR, the 2023 cohort of the Einaudi Center’s Global Racial Justice graduate fellows will host the “Decolonial Love” symposium. The symposium aims to reconstruct and reimagine the multifacetedness of individuals and the complexity of their ties with the self, others, and the natural world through the lens of coloniality and decoloniality.

The two-day symposium brings together scholars, creative writers, and activists to discuss and envisage how the theories, practices, and visions of the roles of love, identity, and land are complexly intertwined with (trans)national structured challenges.

Saturday, May 13

Registration, 12:30 p.m. EDT

Opening Remarks, 1:00 p.m. – 1:15 p.m. EDT

• Mohamed Abdou (Cornell University)

Keynote Address, 1:15 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. EDT

• Mariana Mora (Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology), “Towards a politics of listening and sensorial truths, the struggle for racialized justice for the 43 disappeared students of Ayotzinapa, Mexico”

Panel I – Identities, 2:45 p.m. – 4:15 p.m. EDT

Moderator: I-An “Amy” Su (Cornell University)

• Alaina E. Roberts (University of Pittsburgh), “Is Black and Indigenous Reconciliation Possible?”
• María Elizabeth Rodríguez Beltran (Rutgers University), “Redefining Black Caribbeanness: Peripheral Relationships Decentering the Colonial Family”
• Michele Cheng (Cornell University), “The Aftermath of Colonization and Colonialism: Musical Identities of a 1.5 Generation Taiwanese American”
• Amber Starks, “The Disenfranchising of Black Indigeneity from Global Indigeneity”
• Alivia Moore (Cornell University), “Truth Bias and Intergroup Dynamics”

Film Screenings and Discussions, 4:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. EDT

Moderator: Chinasa T. Okolo (Cornell University)

• 1000 Gifts of Decolonial Love
• Egúngún (Masquerade)
• Counterfeit Kunkoo
• Cane/Cain

Reception, 5:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m. EDT

***

Sunday, May 14

Registration and Lunch, 11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. EDT

Panel II – Solidarities of the Earth: Envisioning and Enacting Reparative Land Justice, 1:00 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. EDT

Moderator: Kendra Kintzi (Cornell University)

• Enrique Salmón (Cal State East Bay), “We Still Need Rain Spirits: Cultivating Indigenous Land-based Relationships, Resilience, and Identity”
• Kristen Bos (University of Toronto), “Beads Land”
• shakara tyler (University of Michigan)
• Troy Richardson (Cornell University), “Land Labors: Smallest Gestures, Empirical Intimacies”

Panel III – Decolonial Love, 2:45 p.m. – 4:15 p.m. EDT

Moderator: Karina Edouard (Cornell University)

• Billy-Ray Belcourt (University of British Columbia), “Queer Indigenous Poetics and Erotics”
• Erica Violet Lee, “Inner City Love Notes: On Street Graffit, Protest Art, and Other Signs of Blooming”
• Gina Goico (Cornell University), “Envisioning Possibilities: Naming and Archiving Memories of Love and Care from the Dominican Republic”
• Ariel Dela Cruz (Cornell University), “Don’t You Remember?: Intergenerational Filipinx Care and Refusal”

Poetry Reading and Color Therapy, 4:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. EDT

Moderator: Ariel Dela Cruz (Cornell University)

• Billy-Ray Belcourt (University of British Columbia)
• Valeen Jules
• Erica Violet Lee

Closing Remarks, 5:30 p.m. – 5:45 p.m. EDT

• Mohamed Abdou (Cornell University)