The Transnational Decolonial Institute (TDI) is committed to explore and better understand the formation and transformation of the darker side of modernity: coloniality, in order to foster decolonial projects. The Institute has a deep engagement with global social justice. It starts from the assumption that Western Civilization and more generally modernity, has made a signal contribution (as many other previous civilizations) to the history of human kind but, at the same time, it has created the conditions for inequalities, imperial domination, racism, oppression and a permanent state of war. These are some of the signs revealing the work of coloniality, the hidden agenda of modernity.
Decoloniality is neither about denying the contributions of the West and modernity nor about submitting to its imperial bent. It means opening up the option of delinking from the logic of coloniality. TDI will encourage meetings, artistic projects, workshops and debates around the analysis of modernity/coloniality. TDI will promote decolonial projects in the entire spectrum of the social sciences and the humanities such as professional schools (law, business, environmental studies); as well as artistic practices related to decolonizing aesthetics in art and museums’ history. TDI will look for decolonial options in thinking, sensing and doing and will focus on education and dialog within and outside existing institutions.
Hendrik Witbooi, Nama Chef who wrote one of the first decolonial manifestos against German colonizers on August 4th, 1892 and was killed during the Herero-Nama War in 1905. • • Gugelberger, George M / Witbooi, Hendrik 1984: Nama Namibia. Diary and letters of Chief Hendrik Witbooi. Boston: Boston University Press.
