Description
Book SynopsisIn
The Center Cannot Hold Jenna N. Hanchey examines the decolonial potential emerging from processes of ruination and collapse. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in rural Tanzania at an internationally funded NGO as it underwent dissolution, Hanchey traces the conflicts between local leadership and Western paternalism as well as the unstable subjectivity of Western volunteers—including the author—who are unable to withstand the contradictions of playing the dual roles of decolonializing ally and white savior. She argues that Western institutional and mental structures must be allowed to fall apart to make possible the emergence of decolonial justice. Hanchey shows how, through ruination, privileged subjects come to critical awareness through repeated encounters with their own complicity, providing an opportunity to delink from and oppose epistemologies of coloniality. After things fall apart, Hanchey posits, the creation of decolonial futures depends on the labor req
Trade Review“A true work of unlearning for relearning! Erudite, lucid, profound, this book successfully shakes the foundations of Western messianism.” -- Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Professor and Chair of Epistemologies of the Global South, University of Bayreuth
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction. The Center Cannot Hold 1
Part I
1. Doctors with(out) Burdens 25
2. All of Us Phantasmic Saviors 58
3. Haunted Reflexivity 88
Part II
4. Water in the Cracks 117
5. Fluid (Re)mapping 141
6. Things Fall Apart 163
Conclusion. Rivulets in the Ruins 185
Notes 195
Bibliography 217
Index 231
