In “Dead Capital,” Diana Taylor references Oswald de Andrade’s notion of cultual cannibalism, which asserts “that cultures remain strong by eating and digesting others” (Taylor 2). The metaphor of cannibalism is indeed an illuminating one, if a bit unsettling, in how it succinctly figures incorporated processes of hybridity, (re)appropriation, and consumption as cultural phenomena. The […]
How to Become Irreplaceable
Reading Cathy Davidson’s The New Education had a nearly therapeutic effect on me. Her warm writing style is at once optimistic and edifying as she breaks down several of the major issues facing higher education in the United States today. Rather than adopting a doom and gloom outlook, as many critics (and, I might note, defenders) of […]
¿Presente? A challenge
Diana Taylor poses a question in her book ¡Presente! that, for me, the central challenge of this course: How to be present ethically, as a scholar, an activist, and a human being—with/ to/ among the many people struggling against a virulent brew of Latin/ American colonial-imperialist- capitalist-authoritarian violence? (Taylor 25) I say challenge, and I mean that […]
Desborde: Overflow and the Politics of Resistance
Desborde: Overflow and the Politics of Resistance Belén Santiago Pedro Luke Mira Our investigation focuses on the edge of the acceptable in protests and politics. Through an array of complementary analytical approaches, we will explore this edge in order to draw broader conclusions on the role of desborde/overflow in the performatives acts of protest, language, […]
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 […]
Race and the Process of Othering
The politics of race and death are, as Mbembe maintains in “Necropolitics,” inextricably linked. He cites Hannah Arednt, who traces this intertwining to “the shattering experience of otherness and suggests that the politics of race is ultimately linked to the politics of death” (17). Many of the examples Mbembe uses to illustrate his point are conflicts […]
Rejection or Reappropriation? Revolution in Language
Faced with the suffocating hegemony of the English language in his native Kenya, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o calls for “African writers…to do for [their] languages… what all writers in world history have done for their languages by meeting the challenge of creating a literature in them” (452). For, as he rightly asserts, the African languages shunted to […]