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 […]
Keeping Up on Sundays
This weekend I find myself consuming and being consumed, now entertaining the ways in which this state can be one of sordid “glass half empty” or blissful “glass half full” existence. As Diana Taylor says in Dead Capital, we are at once the spectator and the product (15), both the almond milk and the almond […]
Becoming and the Pact
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 […]
As She Lays Dying
To find writing from an academic that flows in such a way is always telling of a person trying to be a person and to COMMUNICATE. I appreciate that congruency in Cathy Davidson’s book. I don’t think there is any other way to deliver this information, nor I think there was any other way for […]
o meu avô
Na sua Pedagogia das Pedras, Jesusa Rodriguez nos conta como o nascimento é a materialização da energia vital que está dispersa e atuante no Universo. Ao nascermos, essa energia primordial se torna uma pequena faísca, que habita o nosso coração. Para nos reencontrarmos com a nossa vitalidade, é necessário travar a Xochi-Yolotl (flor-coração), a Guerra […]
Removing the Mask
In the speech The Place of Indigenous Voice in the 21st Century, Tomson Highway said, “Every plant on Earth…has a role to play in the long survival of the planet.” After hearing Highway, I thought of Octavio Paz’s Mexican Mask, and how the mask is almost like the plants not getting enough water to fully […]
Past Tense, Future Perfect
“Past tense, future perfect” is a combination of words oft-used by author Zadie Smither in her 1999 novel White Teeth about immigrant identities and dehumanization in late 20th century London. Something between past and future is a desiring, unrepresented present. This gap is widened by the the physicality of “tense” versus the grammatical association of […]
THE WAR HAS NO REHEARSAL
In between/coexistence(s): roots, choices, freedom, repetition, spirals and cycles [constructions and destructions] As diferentes epistemologias apresentadas nesta semana são defendidas como possibilidades reais e efetivas de ação diante do que constituímos como MUNDO (WORLD). Seria ingênuo, mais uma vez, acreditar na existência de uma em detrimento de outra como “solução” ou caminho para as complexas […]
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 […]
Breaking the pact: epistemologies, history, and modernity
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 […]