15 October 2018 Decolonial Theories & Practices Professor Diana Taylor Group Members: Susana Costa Amaral, Lee Xie, Ricardo Duarte Filho, Annie Seminara, Kristen Holfeuer Proposal: Being With Introduction A giant white sheet floats around the city. The fabric is punctuated by heads from the participants of this collective performance. Their bodies are hidden under the […]
The tapas and the panopticon
Let’s imagine the following scene: 16th Century. A person enters a bar or posada (a male most certainly) and asks the bartender for a glass of wine. With the wine comes a tapa (a culinary specialty to acompany the drink that dates from the Middle Ages). The tapa is in this case a slice of […]
Past Tense, Future Perfect
“Past tense, future perfect” is a combination of words oft-used by author Zadie Smither in her 1999 novel White Teeth about immigrant identities and dehumanization in late 20th century London. Something between past and future is a desiring, unrepresented present. This gap is widened by the the physicality of “tense” versus the grammatical association of […]
Tradução como Xjul Xch’ulel
Todos os seres são dotados de potência. Aprender a nomear com palavras traz uma outra direção na existência. O coração irá se perder, desviar do rumo. Apagar-se por instantes, deixando-se para trás. Uma febre. Mas o coração sabe retornar ao seu prumo. A família é construção de pertencimento. O acúmulo de todas as memórias, a […]
THE WAR HAS NO REHEARSAL
In between/coexistence(s): roots, choices, freedom, repetition, spirals and cycles [constructions and destructions] As diferentes epistemologias apresentadas nesta semana são defendidas como possibilidades reais e efetivas de ação diante do que constituímos como MUNDO (WORLD). Seria ingênuo, mais uma vez, acreditar na existência de uma em detrimento de outra como “solução” ou caminho para as complexas […]
upside-down and under the spell
Living in the upside-down of time as linear discourse is the product of a hegemonic idea deeply rooted in colonialism. Who can say how time ends and begins? This is a decision made by the powers of domination which reverberate like the church bells marking every hour… For Cusicanqui we perform our commitment to modernity […]
Pathways
Thinking with Juan López Intzín and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, throughout this week’s texts a certain political urgency (in-)surges up: writing, acting, feeling-thinking between the two impossibilities of writing that exceeds rational categorization and writing collectively (de Sousa Santos 5). Or as the Zapatistas put it: “a world where many worlds are possible” . Grosfoguel […]
Dicen: What Remains Unwritten; What can’t be Translated
(Inspired by Manifesto for Intellectual-Activists) They say. They said, they said. They also say that they said. This is what is said that they said. They say that they said, they said. They also say that they said. This is what is said that they said. They say. They said, they said. And not only […]
Trickster Epistemologies
How can we truly decolonize ourselves? If there is a common post-colonial discourse that focuses on the importance of achieving a political and economical independence from the Global North, when we begin noticing that knowledge and worldviews were, and still are, constantly colonized, things appear to be even more tricky. Even if the economic and […]
Leaving Denial
This week’s reading demonstrated how colonization has made many people’s history of their ancestors vanishes under modernity. Susana Cota Amaral quotes, “This week’s readings played a debate on the hegemonic epistemologies of forgetfulness and denial. Western colonial capitalism modes of producing knowledge have disenchanted and disregarded the indigenous and colonized ancestral culture, turning a “vast […]