Modernity and the Global South: Decolonial and Postcolonial Hubs

Culture, Language, Arts, and Society Lab at the faculty of Languages, Arts and Human Sciences, Ibn Zohr University in Agadir invites chapter proposals on the theme of "Modernity, Decolonial, and Postcolonial Discourses" for the second volume of our book series.

For centuries, it has been a relished pretext to lead non-European others to freedom, prosperity, progress, etc., without the least hesitation to reconsider a possibility of a civilized and knowledgeable 'other', even if not in the European 'modes of knowing'. Strictly speaking, modernity forged a structural hegemony over the knowledge that baned other ways of knowing and doomed them to obliteration. Yet by the very nature of things, this domination of the West had to be contested at some historical point.

Accordingly, the 20 C witnessed the emergence of two ground-breaking perspectives that requestioned and undetermined the imposed Western universal mode of modernity. Unquestionably, the postcolonial and decolonial premises have provided, each in its way, abundant theoretical and conceptual lexis through which modernity and power are fenced in academia as well as in everyday practices worldwide.

In short, this book is a call to scrutinize a double encounter whose main players crisscross over time and space. The first encounter was first unfolded through the legacy of the postcolonial theory where the ''self'' and the ''other'' are subject matter, and the colonizer/colonized binary opposition is the currency that sells the story of the encounter. Another face of this encounter is engraved in the intellectual dialogues between scholars from the Global North and their counterparts from the Global South ( Foucault/ Said, Gramsci/ Guha, etc.). 

We are taking a broad approach to the topic of the politics and aesthetics of modernity. We aim to be broad in scope, and we are happy to consider English language proposals in fields including, but not limited to:

• Postcolonial theory and praxis
• Decolonizing universities and minds
• Theory from the margin
• Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism
• Captivity and memory narratives
• Collective memory and colonial legacy
• Writing postcolonial memory in MENA
• Modernity and the notion of the nation-state
• Modernity and postnational temporalities
• Theory of modernity and the cultural politics of everydayness
• Modern temporalities in North African cinema
• Modernity and Moroccan popular culture
• Modernity and ''the aesthetic regime of art''
• Modernity and the idea of progress
• Modern times and spaces in postcolonial African literature
• Mimesis and the shortcomings of the notion of modernity
• Decolonizing cultural institutions and heritage in the North African context
• Modernity and its relations to postmodernity and postcolonial modernity