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 […]
The ghost refrain.
Can we be presente in masks? At first it seems impossible. Within the mask not only the face but the heart is encased, one is separate and separated through concealment. Can there be a heartening beneath the hardness of stoicism? Can you be one with a mask (to be me, I have to walk and […]
if you can make it there you will make it anywhere
When I woke up today, I lazily got rid of my comfortable and warm Chinese blankets and went to the kitchen to drink my Colombian coffee. I absently skipped through the news on my American computer while trying to explain to my Californian roommate that, despite what she had seen in films, Rio is not a jungle […]
A Una Epistemología ética (Susana)
“How can the exclusive, ethnocentric “we” be articulated with the inclusive “we”—a homeland for everyone—that envisions decolonization?” (Cusicanqui, 97) Sylvia Rivera Cusicanqui, in this question on how to be inclusive in decolonizing movements, brings forth her salient argument on how to practice indigenous hybridity in the colonizing hegemonic order in her writing of “Chi’ixianakax […]
Writing Papers, An “Epistemicide”?
My working group for this class has been reflecting on different ideas and doings dealing with constructive ways to think “epistemologies” and “alternative pedagogies”. In those discussions the paradox of bringing forward the limitations of western academic while being imbedded in the system of an American private university, was central. We kept thinking, what’s the […]
whose footprints are on the American constitution?
As I begin reading Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics, I stop after reading the Lamba proverb from Zambia he uses to begin the essay: “Wa syo’ lukasa pebwe Umwime wa pita” I make an anatomical link with the essay by Aníbal Quijano’s essay, Coloniality of Power, Eurocentricism, and Latin America and I remember the two most powerful […]