Decomposing the Colonial Gaze:
A course taught by Chérie and Petna Ndaliko

Thanks to a generous anonymous donor, 15 teachers and assistants have taken this transformative course. Gathering via zoom for nearly 50 hours over a period of several months, participants will translate what they've learned to continue DWS's aim to recenter the curriculum away from Euro-centric bias.

Decomposing the Colonial Gaze is a practice of learning to see the world anew. It is a set of tools with which to interrogate the ways our lives intersect with systems of power. And an invitation to enact conscious and creative change.

The premise of Decomposing the Colonial Gaze is that manifestations of systemic violence—racism, sexism, nationalism, economic exploitation, ecological devastation, xenophobia, the suppression of indigenous knowledge—are symptoms of a dominant worldview, which we call colonial logic. While these symptoms are familiar to many, emphasis on issue-specific reform and superficial behavioral change often overshadows the need to expose and divest ourselves of the underlying premises of colonial logic.

To address the foundation of colonial logic, we have developed a four-part course in which participants undertake a series of creative and critical exercises that reckon with history (by asking how things came to be as they are) and with how our perceptions are conditioned (by asking how we came to see the world as we do). Through this process we learn to see the ways colonial logic shaped the past and the ways it continues to be represented—and internalized—as “reality” and thus persists in shaping the present. With these insights we then assign ourselves the task of imagining ways, big and small, to create and enact possibilities that are not grounded in colonial logic.

In a historical moment when issues of race—and specifically anti-Black racism—are receiving such heated attention it is important to be clear about our approach to race: Decomposing the Colonial Gaze is a transformative practice that directly addresses racial injustice in historically and geographically specific context. What distinguishes this approach is its commitment to exposing—and decomposing—the root causes that sustain all systems of oppression. Including race.

About the facilitators: Chérie and Petna Ndaliko bring a diverse set of skills, life experience, and perspectives to this course. For more than twenty years they have been studying systemic oppression with the intent of enacting radical systemic transformation. Along the way they have produced films, published books, founded and sustained a cultural center in the east of Congo and an educational farm in North Carolina. They also consult for international organizations around issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion, sustainability, and community building in the face of crisis.