In Cannibal Metaphysics, de Castro writes, “Every becoming is an alliance. Which does not mean, once again, that every alliance is a becoming” . I am fascinated by this sentence because it reminds me of the idea of the “pact,” which I am writing about for my group’s final project. According to the Oxford English […]
For Any Seat at Any Table for Every Student!
has me thinking about the spatial-material axis of learning. How is learning affected by proximity, and what shape does this proximity take? I couldn’t agree more with Davidson’s claim that “the lecture is broken, and so we must think of better ways to incorporate active learning into the classroom” (Davidson, 248). The hierarchy of the […]
“Continual Creative Motion:” A Politics of Ambiguity
Diana Taylor concludes ¡Presente! with a meditation on walking theory and the “cultural coding” of walking which is never just walking (Taylor, 38). Recently, U.S. news has been saturated with images and stories seeking to reify the “migrant caravan” – an assemblage of Central Americans travelling mostly on foot towards the U.S. – Mexico border […]
Class 5 Notes from 10/15/2018
Epistemologies – a record of our discussion on 10/15/2018 By Text: “Sp’ijilal O’tan: Knowledges and Epistemologies of the Heart” by Juan López Intzín (Xuno) “Systems of care and healing that include midwifery, dreams…” Systems of knowing differently, and knowing different things. Different systems of knowledge The creation of knowledge through translation Having a “child eye” […]
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 […]
The Power of Duality in an Age of Globalization
I want to address a thread that runs through all three texts: the connection between dualism and globalization. In “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Quijano delineates and challenges the logic of Eurocentrism, which has a particular “perspective on knowledge” formalized through “a peculiar articulation between dualism (capital-precapital, Europe-non-Europe, primitive-civilized, traditional-modern, etc.) and a […]
The “Classroom Monitor” and the “Instrument of Production”
Aimé Césaire writes powerfully about the colonizer-colonized relationship, refuting the term “human contact” as a descriptor of that relationship. “Human contact” lacks any reference to the dialectical opposition between colonizer and colonized, where the former dominates the latter in order to exploit them. Instead, Césaire describes the colonizer-colonized relationship as “a classroom monitor… and an […]