Volume 3 issue 1 May 2015

Interview Foreword: On the Significance of Inviting Professor Mendieta to Birkbeck

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
Professor Eduardo Mendieta has been the department chair at the School of Philosophy, State University of New York at Stony Brook, United States, for some time now, and from the summer of 2015 will take up a position as Professor at Pennsylvania State University. On 11 and 12 September 2014, he and I co-hosted a two-day seminar at Birkbeck School of Law. The seminar was entitled ‘Focus on the Funk: Decolonising Epistemologies, Politicising Rights.’ During this seminar, Professor Mendieta presented his paper: The Decolonial Turn: The Post-Human and the Anthropocene amongst Others.  The significance of this seminar was its continuing effort to examine the future of critique, and its role in legal studies. This topic was particularly riveting because it allowed us to focus on the ongoing ‘Southern Turn’ that politics, law and philosophy are taking in the wake of political challenges to Europe’s ‘self-colonisation’ (e.g. Greece, Spain, etc), America’s persistent issues concerning race, and efforts in Latin America and parts of Africa to leave behind Western tutelage and self-imposed dependence—legal, economic and intellectual.