On 8 July 2019, Professor Jean Casimir from the State University of Haiti will conduct a seminar entitled 'The Counter-Plantation System: the Communal as the Political' at ISS, followed by a discussion on Decoloniality, and the Haitian Revolution between him, Dr Rolando Vazquez and Charmika Samaradiwakera. This event is part of the Development Research Seminar series and hosting the Middelburg De-colonial Summer School at ISS.
- Date
- Monday 8 Jul 2019, 16:15 - 17:45
- Type
- Seminar
- Spoken Language
- English
- Room
- 3.14
- Location
- International Institute of Social Studies
The seminar should walk the public through the steps taken by the marginalized people of Haiti to build up a refuge against oppressive modern/colonial state policies. The excesses of slavery plantation drove the enslaved, the emancipated and the destitute of France to organize their private life in opposition to the state sponsored administrative system, accumulating gradually enough power to checkmate the state at it’s first major crisis. A network of autonomous communities produced a sovereign nation opposed to the state.
The Middelburg Decolonial Summer School
The Middelburg Decolonial Summer School places its emphasis not only on resisting coloniality but also on historical forms and current practices of re-existing beyond it. To engage in the regeneration and praxis of the communal it is essential to understand that the communal cannot be subsumed under the liberal common-good and the Marxist commons.
The concept of the communal allows to replace competition with cooperation to live together in plenitude; to replace development with communal economies; to replace disciplinary formations with the liberation of knowing; to replace the political and economic belief that we live to work with working for living together. These challenges are ways to engage in recovering the freedom of joy and love— and with it regenerate the communal as praxis of living.
Decoloniality, and the Haitian Revolution Discussion
In this discussion, Professor Jean Casimir, Dr Rolando Vazquez from UCR Middelburg and Charmika Samaradiwakera-Wijesundar from University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and ISS will reflect on the role that the Haitian Revolution plays for contemporary decolonial imaginaries and praxis across the world.
The seminar and conversation will be chaired by Dr Rosalba Icaza and commemorate the abolition of slavery in all regions of the Netherlands on 1st July 1863.
Jean Casimir
PhD Sociology, teaches at the Faculty of Human Sciences, State University of Haiti. He obtained his professorship at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where he taught for several years. He was a visiting Professor at Stanford University, at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica, and a Mellon Visiting Professor at Duke University. He published on social structures of Mexico, Brazil, Haiti and the Caribbean in general.
His major work La cultura oprimida published in Mexico in 1981 is also offered in French. He received the Jean-Price Mars 2013 Award of the Faculty of Ethnology at the University of Haiti and the 2016 Haitian Studies Association Award for Excellence. He has published in Haitian Creole and Spanish and English. His actual research focusses on the Haitian State, a study in historical sociology. Casimir is a former Ambassador of his country to the United States of America and to the Organization of American States.
Rolando Vázquez
Associate Professor of Sociology and Diversity Fellow at University College Roosevelt and affiliated researcher at the Gender Studies Department and at the Research institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON) of the Faculty of Humanities, University of Utrecht. He coordinates the Middelburg Decolonial Summer School together with Walter Mignolo for the last ten years. He co-authored the report of the Diversity Commission of the University of Amsterdam in 2016 under the direction of Gloria Wekker.
Through his work he seeks to develop practices of thinking and learning that transgress the dominant frameworks of contemporaneity, heteronormativity and coloniality. His research on the question of precedence and relational temporalities seeks to overcome the western critique of modernity and contribute to the ongoing efforts to decolonize knowledge, aesthetics and subjectivity.
Charmika Samaradiwakera-Wijesundara
Lecturer at the Wits School of Law and currently a PhD candidate in a joint ISS-Wits PhD programme. Prior to which she was a Research and Teaching Associate at the Wits School of Law and associated researcher of the Business and Human Rights Programme of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies. She completed her articles of clerkship in the Corporate and Commercial Law Department of Edward Nathan Sonnebergs Inc (subsequently ENSafrica) and is an admitted attorney of the High Court of South Africa.
She graduated her LLB (with distinction) from the University of the Witwatersrand. She has served on the Law Students’ Council of and was awarded the Law School Endowment Appeal Award by the University of the Witwatersrand. She is an Abe Bailey Fellow, member of the Golden Key International Honour Society and a graduate of the Robben Island Young Leaders Academy.
