The genocide understood as the systematic elimination of the bodies of the colonized people, brought with it the epistemicide proposed by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (92) consolidating by this the hegemonic of the Eurocentric Epistemology in the South Globe. The demand for the (Mignolo, 451) require disarticulated the notion of Totality imposed by the Western. In […]
A Una Epistemología ética (Susana)
“How can the exclusive, ethnocentric “we” be articulated with the inclusive “we”—a homeland for everyone—that envisions decolonization?” (Cusicanqui, 97) Sylvia Rivera Cusicanqui, in this question on how to be inclusive in decolonizing movements, brings forth her salient argument on how to practice indigenous hybridity in the colonizing hegemonic order in her writing of “Chi’ixianakax […]
Time and Temporality: An Indigenous Refiguration
The indigenous world does not conceive of history as linear; the past- future is contained in the present. – Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui The issue of temporality is intimately linked to the various conceptions of history held throughout the world. As Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui writes, history and memory spring from a people’s relationship with both time […]
Writing Papers, An “Epistemicide”?
My working group for this class has been reflecting on different ideas and doings dealing with constructive ways to think “epistemologies” and “alternative pedagogies”. In those discussions the paradox of bringing forward the limitations of western academic while being imbedded in the system of an American private university, was central. We kept thinking, what’s the […]
Anticipating the End
In the introduction to Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide, Boaventura de Sousa Santos discusses “strong questions” whose “weak answers … do not challenge the horizon of possibilities” . Among these, de Sousa Santos describes how “it is as difficult to imagine the end of colonialism as it is to imagine that colonialism has […]
post to note that my algorithm started glitching
when i began writing in spanish without using a coded translator here. meaning, my typing of spanish randomly in an english algorithm slowed the speed and even ability to type majorly! just wanted to add this note to show how serious our readings on epistemology are here. because of western knowledges now being coded into […]
UN MUNDO DONDE QUEPAN MUCHOS MUNDOS
Para Ramón Grosfoguel la racionalidad moderna-colonial basada en el universal abstracto y el solipsismo cartesiano tiene su origen en los epistemicidios perpetrados contra musulmanes y judíos, pueblos indígenas americanos y africanos y mujeres portadoras de sabiduría no-occidental que fueron quemadas en la hoguera acusadas de brujería. Hay una asociación directa entre el genocidio y el […]
Epistemologies of the simple versus the complex
The book Epistemologies of the South recognizes that there is a ghostly relationship between theory and practice, since those who produce progresist changes, in more recent times, have been precisely social groups totally invisible to Eurocentric critical theory, as they are, women, indigenous people, peasants, the unemployed. That is to say, it recognizes that a […]
Many Responses
Zapatistas, insurgents, use Sp’ijilal O’tan (knowledges and epistemologies of the heart) as a way to “hearten ourselves” and rebel against hegemonic structures of knowledge and the capitalist hydra. I wonder if Intzin, as an academic who employs culturally-developed epistemologies, feels a division between his academic and community life or if his use of culturally-developed epistemologies […]
Towards a “heterogeneous we”
How can we begin to consider what we have begun to materialize in class as a heterogeneous “we”? This week’s readings really spoke to me as they attempted to bring some manifestations of this “we” into presence. Boaventura de Sousa Santos begins his book with a manifesto –and minifesto– against epistemecide (side note: I found […]