On October 13, 2021 Director and founding member of NACDI Dr. Lynda Jessup participated in the opening keynote of ICRRA’s (International Cultural Relations Research Alliance) annual conference by introducing and responding to Dr. Walter Mignolo’s keynote presentation. NACDI is a member of ICCRA, an initiative of ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) and close partner to the British Council. The online conference Cooperation in a Fragmented World commenced with Mignolo’s talk entitled “Colonial and Imperial Differences: A Hindrance to Inter-National Cultural Cooperations”.

In her response, Jessup first summarized Mignolo’s arguments: that two key terms -“the inter-national” and “the cultural”- are Eurocentric formations operating in the modern-colonial imaginary. They reproduce the power inequities informing the nature of the “relations” in international cultural relations, which are characterized today as “fragmented.” At the same, these two concepts serve to recast power differential as “cultural difference.” Having outlined Mignolo’s ideas, she then asked the audience to consider “the myth of culture’s neutrality” which serves to deny the power differentials informing global relations and conflict, relating such a myth to “move to innocence” (Tuck and Yang 2012). Springing from Mignolo’s foundational discussion of coloniality, Jessup raises the question of how international cultural relations may instrumentalize “the cultural” to maintain the conditions of coloniality. Jessup proposes that an example of this is “arms-length principle” and calls this convention, which implies national cultural organizations do not play a role in the hard power exercises of out as a “move to innocence.”

October 18 2021 -Dr. Jessup was joined in a conference forum by fellow NACDI team member César Villanueva Rivas to share how the research of Cultural Diplomacy as Critical Practice delves more deeply into the critical points raised in Mignolo’s discussion.