Generations of Western thinkers have argued that the French Revolution, the U.S. revolution, and the long struggle for democracy in England ushered in political modernity. This intellectual tradition has pointed to the reparative potential of North Atlantic liberal democracy, emphasizing its progress-driven and inclusionary temporal politics. Yet, these political upheavals maintained—and in some cases were spurred by the desire to maintain—racial slavery and colonial domination. As the U.S., French and British empires congealed abstracted ideas of equality and freedom in the metropoles, it was anticolonial movements and revolutions in their colonial outposts that pushed against these empty universals, putting forth more expansive liberatory political imaginaries and laying the seeds for the development of anticolonial democracy. We contend that anticolonial traditions offer powerful alternative starting points for building radical democratic futures.

The Anticolonial Lab centers anticolonial projects in the Caribbean and its global diasporas. The Caribbean basin was at the epicenter of the emergence of capitalism, colonial domination, attempted indigenous genocide, the dispossession of lands, racialized labor structures, and the reproduction of neocolonial systems. At the same time, it has been a laboratory of anticolonial projects and experiments in forms of anticolonial democracy, from marronage to contemporary movements for sovereignty. The Lab seeks to reconstruct these genealogies beginning with subjugated histories. We unearth the political imaginaries of Caribbean anticolonial movements, which put forth an answer to enslavement, the plantation system, and colonial rule—a political quest never addressed in European political genealogies. We also attend to Fanon’s warning, and deal with the historical experience of anticolonialism slipping into authoritarianism, often reproducing neocolonial, patriarchal, violent state structures despite its liberatory rhetoric. As a result, we aim to shift the focus away from elite cadres to instead recuperating radical democratic and feminist practices situated in movements, peasant struggles, and popular imaginations. If North Atlantic visions of democracy have continuously constrained who “we, the people” are, our lab aims to create a repository of those who have long struggled for freedom against colonial and racial structures. We aim to produce a repository and institutional memory of colonial grievances and inter-generational resistance, that brings together anti-imperial movements located in the Bay Area, the Caribbean and its diaspora, and instances of solidarity worldwide.

This project seeks to generate an alternative methodology for participatory democracy generated by those most affected by inequities to actively engage in shaping policies and solutions. What makes the Dialogues of Knowledge special is that they emphasize experiential frameworks as living talking and listening circles whereby many communities have been able to effectively scale these conversations through different spaces and at all levels of government. This team will produce media and Dialogue circle events including one workshop in English providing participants with an in-depth understanding of methodology and facilitation techniques. Film and audio record the dialogue circles and workshop to document the process and outcomes of the Dialogues of Knowledge methodology. Last, the team will develop a facilitation kit based on experiences and lessons to share with communities.