This week’s readings played a debate on the hegemonic epistemologies of forgetfulness and denial. Western colonial capitalism modes of producing knowledge have disenchanted and disregarded the indigenous and colonized ancestral culture, turning a “vast experience into merely things and commodities” (Intzín, pg 11). In search of emancipatory transformations in the world, the authors approach from different perspectives the grammars and scripts imposed by the Western-centric critical theory. As Boaventura (2014) shows, global social justice is not possible without global cognitive justice, which means that without the recovery of the epistemological diversity existing in the global south, no form of intellectual instrument will be able to stand against the logic of market-ridden social injustice – that is, the logic of colonization per se.

Extending the debate, Mignolo argues, “[T]he crooked rhetoric that naturalizes ‘modernity’ as a universal global process and point of arrival hides its darker side, the constant reproduction of ‘coloniality’ (Mignolo, pg 449). By de-linking from the colonial, Eurocentric philosophy of modernity, on the terrains of what he terms geo-politics, Mignolo’s project is for the decolonization of the mind and the imaginary in the form of a “critical border thinking” (Mignolo, pg 498).

In a close sense, Cusicanqui presents an anti-colonial philosophical approach to modernity, in which no discourse or theory can be built/perceived outside of a practice, for “there can be no discourse of decolonization, no theory of decolonization, without a decolonizing practice” (Cusicanqui, pg 100). Instead of a “geopolitics of knowledge”, Cusicanqui proposes a “political economy” of knowledge (Cusicanqui, 102), where the indigenous modernity operates as a tactical instrument for the “retaking of their own historicity” (96).

While analyzing the successive waves of recolonization in the Andean region throughout history and the spectacle of the multicultural state politics, the Bolivian author quarrels with the long-standing Western pact on modernity and its necessary interarticulation with a philosophical conception of historical time. She argues that the indigenous project of modernity allows for the entering and exiting of Western modernity through the metaphor of hybridity. It is, most of all, about restoring a perspective of agency for indigenous people in a “creative dialogue” through a “process of exchanging knowledge, aesthetics, and ethics” (Cusicanqui, 106). She writes: “Such actions demonstrate that we indigenous were and are, above all, contemporary beings and peers, and in this dimension [aka pacha], we perform and display our own commitment to modernity.”

But what it means to make a commitment to a temporality?

In Cusicanqui’s view on this performative commitment, indigenous modernity is an experience of the perception of time – that would be best addressed as an experience “with” time, more than “of” time, – in a dimension where the indigenous subject has agency over time, for if can choose from different perspectives. As the author argues, there is no post or prehistory, because the shape of history for indigenous is not linear or theological, but instead, it moves in cycles and spirals. This perception of time changes the perspective of one’s experience of time and history progress. In fact, it quarrels with the conception of progress itself, for it allows to experience of time as a sort of Moebius ribbon, where there is no point of start or end, there is only a trajectory, a continuum movement that is neither forward or backward, but spiral, in a “continuous feedback from the past and future” (Cusicanqui, 2012:96).  And because it is shaped like a spiral, in a continuous movement, – an impulse that never ceases, – it can only be assimilated as a presence grounded in the present, a being in the world as an experience of being in the intense now. It is linked with action and it differentiates itself from the Decartian’s subject that “thinks, therefore is” because it implicates the body as a grounding anchor for consciousness and as a permeable membrane.

The project of indigenous modernity, as Cusicanqui states, is a project of a relationality sensibility – (not a shock experience, as W. Benjamin claims for the European modernity, a topic I would like to further discuss it in class), – in which subjects are informed mainly through their relations with others things of the world, in a simultaneous way. It informs the world, much like it is informed by the world. Cusicanqui calls it a “principle of hope” and an “anticipatory consciousness”. In this sense, as the author clarifies, is an experience of being committed to the present and in which the future can only emerge “from the depths of the past” (Cusicanqui, 2012:96).