As we read in Cannibal Metaphysics, the Tupinanbá anthropophagic ritual had the purpose of erasing the enemy’s alterity. Throughout the months or years that the captive would spend in the town of his captors, his otherness would disintegrate and he would become a husband, a brother, a friend. The movie Como era gustoso o meo […]
The new education and the decolonial debate
Cathy Davidson’s The New Education provides interesting insights on how to better the current university machinery in the era of homo economicus and neoliberal rationality. Her proposal relies on an ethical assemblage of all the gears involved, achieved by interdisciplinary approaches and alliances with state-of-the-art educational technology. Her book showcases examples of engaging professors who […]
Rajadas y Atravesados
The Borderlands is a porous territory, a locus of hybridity of ethnicity, race, language, and gender, as Anzaludúa poignantly proposes. She sees herself as atravesada por la frontera, split, rajada. Y esa raja, that split, positions her being in a state of open possibilities. It is the Coatlicue state, el estado de la serpent, a […]
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 […]
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 […]
Takiy-thaki
Extending Foucault’s notion of biopolitics and biopower, Achille Mbembe points to the insufficiency of Giorgio Agamben’s theories about homo saccer, bare life, and the paradigm of the state of exception. Mbembe does not resort to an obscure figure from Roman law to locate the paradigm in which juridical right and its exception coexist. In […]
Dialogics Against Internalization of Oppression
Anyone who has been involved in facilitating the process of teaching-learning has most certainly attempted ways of distancing herself from “the banking concept of education.” The exercise of the practice reveals that something is wrong in a system of education that reproduces the structures of power and perpetuates colonialism, oppression, and above all, the internalization […]
A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things
Here is the intro of the book A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things by Raj Pattel and Jason W. Moore. The authors, writing from another field, analyze the same set of quandaries that we were tackling in our discussion on coloniality and the decolonial turn during our first session. Their concept of frontier can illuminate the idea […]