1 Chapter accepted in Historicizing Curriculum Knowledge Translation on a Global Landscape. Editors: Weili Zhao, Thomas Popkewitz, Tero Autio. Weaving threads that gesture beyond modern-colonial desires Vanessa Andreotti, University of British Columbia In this chapter I weave a tapestry of theoretical threads that combine postcolonial, decolonial and psychoanalytical concerns and that (to a great extent) inform the work of the “Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures” arts/research collective, of which I am a part. The thread-insights are intentionally organized in a non-linear way, requesting from the reader the labor of contextualization and re-contextualization as an effort of co-weaving reciprocity. The weaving interlaces threads in the works of David Scott, Leela Ghandi, Ashis Nandy, Ananya Roy, Ilan Kapoor, Michalinos Zembylas, Nick Mitchel, Gayatri Spivak and Denise Ferreira da Silva, with Carl Mika’s work being woven across all threads. The patterns that are woven in this process attempt to visibilize problematic normalized affective and intellectual economies focused on mastery, progress and universality at work in different attempts to critique and transform the world through human agency and imagination. They highlight the limits of modern-colonial frames of desire and intelligibility in terms of wording-the-world to control it, and the onto-epistemic difficulties of wanting, hoping and imagining something genuinely different from the parameters of reality, existence and desirability that one has inherited. The conclusion of this chapter outlines selected aspects of the work of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective and the collective’s modest attempts to issue an invitation for horizons of hope to be set beyond what is imaginable within “the house modernity built”. David Scott’s thread In 'Refashioning futures: Criticism after postcoloniality', David Scott (1999) presents an empathetic critique of representational and epistemological claims that have been emphasized in postcolonial theory as foundational for justice-to-come (see also Andreotti 2014). In his critique, he focuses on the ‘essentialism versus non-essentialism debate’, drawing attention to how it reinforces a circular intellectual economy of competition for a position of epistemic privilege. He shows that the unexamined terms of intelligibility normalized in this intellectual economy severely constrain what can be imagined, asked, wanted or talked about in the actual debate. He illustrates this by showing how anti- essentialist modes of critique attempt to expose the naivety of essentialist positions using an 'epistemological law' (p. 9) that declares that cultures are heterogeneous, subjectivities are inscripted in language, identities are fluid, community borders are constructed, and so on. This strategy of delegitimisation and dismissal of essentialism, according to Scott, is used to establish epistemological superiority by historicizing answers to questions that are left unexamined. Scott explains: The anti-essentialists are not interested in what constellation of historically constituted demands may have produced the supposedly 'essentialist' formulations. They are not interested in determining what the strategic task at hand was or what the epistemic and ideological material conditions were that formed the discursive