Diana Taylor argues that “Capitalism has desecrated matter and destroyed the material supports for human life…We are in the land of the production of death” (10). Through a walking through the performance of Bom Retiro 958 metros by Teatro da Vertigem, Taylor observes how the capitalist system consumes us and then spits us out– as commodity, as consumer, as […]
The System is Broken
This book is dedicated to Millennials and to all future generations. You deserve a better chance than you’ve been given. I felt strangely disarmed reading the words that Cathy Davidson chooses to begin her book because I never felt like I deserved an apology. But there is also a sense of catharsis upon digesting the […]
Corpus
Susan Leigh Foster examines this paradox, asserting that deeper awareness of one’s own movements––logically, an intensely interospective and therefore private ‘lived experience’ of one’s own body––actually allows access to understanding how another moving body might feel, a body that is external yet at the same time continuous with the subject…Kinesthesia, in short, implies an intimacy with […]
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 […]
“Discovery” in the 21st Century
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture-exploration/2018/08/brazil-uncontacted-tribe-indigenous-people-amazon-video/ Although the above hit the news cycles around a month ago, it has been in the back of my mind since the start of class. It seems as if the trope of “discovery” as spectacle is alive and well– and here there is not only an exoticization of these “uncontacted tribes” but an acknowledgment […]
Ongoing colonialities of power
Achille Mbembe and Aníbal Quijano both interrogate the power structures that exist at the foundations of the modern nation-state. Mbembe challenges what he names the “normative theories of democracy” (), turning instead to the exercise of sovereignty as a practice of the “generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and […]
Pedagogies/Practices: Keywords and an Alternative Praxis
Awareness and demystification, contextualization and translation, dialogue and communication, community and organization, action and transformation, reflection… These are some of the keywords proposed by this week’s readings, which work towards establishing an alternative pedagogical practice, a praxis, that is built upon mutual understanding and support, a sense of “being with.” Aimé Césaire posits that we […]