This Website is in perpetual Beta.
It is a container for my ongoing
un-learning and relearning.

Decolonizing
Our Imagination

unshackling from the hegemony

Expanding Edges, Shrinking Hegemony

The dangers of a single story trying to play the 'god trick' have become abundantly evident as the hegemonic world order crumbles. We are at a point of discontinuity, where one world is ending and another is painfully being born. What is taking shape and arising from the ashes and rubbles of Congo, Sudan, Gaza, and many other countries is vastly different from the narrative that has run the show for 500 years.

Those who dominate tend to fear existentially: Either they keep dominating, or they lose all. They see only a zero sum game. Each side’s status becomes frozen. People increasingly meet only as ‘adversaries’. Co-citizens become dangerous threats, who must be opposed. It is this hegemonic premise that the alternative narratives are challenging.

These narratives are appearing from the cracks and crevices, and from within the fault lines of a once-hegemonic world. They are not new; they have always existed in the shadowy, unseen corners. These are the unseen, unheard, and unacknowledged voices, delegitimized and rendered invisible. The edges are expanding and spilling over, decentering the dominant narrative and fracturing its stranglehold.

They are coalescing and connecting throughout continents and countries, across borders and boundaries, defying the divisive forces of a rapidly decaying and visibly decrepit hegemony.

Deconstructing the Hegemony

These myriad voices are harbingers of a very different world building. This reconstitution of our civilizational trajectory goes beyond the unipolar or the multipolar, or even the multilateral arrangements favored in the global geopolitical arena. This is a paradigm shift woven out of many cosmologies, epistemologies, and ontologies.

They represent a pluriversal world where many worlds fit--a civilizational trajectory that eschews hegemony, conformity, standardization, mechanization, and a single totalitarian truth. This is a parallel movement beyond geopolitics and nation-states rising from and through the voices and visions of people as they rise across continents. A portal toward different futures is opening up; the preparation for it is underway.

An era of changes is giving way to a Change of Era. The ground beneath our feet are roiling as one epoch gives way to another. History is being reshaped and reframed. The debris and decay of collapse hold the shoots of different possible futures.

There is an urgent need to shake off the shackles of the hegemonic monomyth. Premised on supremacy, separation, hierarchy, and colonialism, it is singularly unfit for an entangled and deeply interconnected world.

Welcome to this exploration of Decolonizing Our Imaginaries. As we teeter on the edge of a polycrisis, the imaginaries described here are not utopian, but compasses to traverse uncharted terrains.

"How do we inhabit this liminal space and our humanity to collectively reimagine and reconstitute the worlds we wish to inhabit and bequeath?"

As you delve into the different sections, I encourage you to pause, reflect, and rethink what this journey means to you.

Click each image for a brief introduction to the topic.