Research Grants

Decolonising Humanism 

BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant (SRG2223\230092) - April 2023-2025

Principal Investigator: Filipe Carreira da Silva

Abstract 

Decolonising Humanism is a study of decolonisation. It examines a worldmaking yet neglected episode in decolonisation’s intellectual history: the anticolonial critique of humanism. According to the standard account, the crisis of humanism and the emergence of antihumanism in the postwar period is a direct result of the devastation suffered by Europe in the Second World War and the anticolonial critique plays at best an external and secondary role. This reinforces rather than questions the racialised hierarchical ordering of the postwar period, including its hagiographical historiography. Instead, Decolonising Humanism posits that anticolonial thinkers and leaders spearheaded the crisis of humanism through their narratives of anticolonial founding. By theorising the end of colonialism and the beginning of the postcolony, these anticolonial narratives critiqued humanism in ways that still retain much of their relevance today. Debates on the Anthropocene, in particular, are likely to benefit from bringing power back into the analysis.