“Before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had discovered happiness.” (de Andrade 94) This one line, phrase, sentence, or whatever you shall call it has been running through my mind since I first read Oswald de Andrade’s The Cannibalist Manifesto. I keep thinking about how so many people from before modernity up until now live/ lived […]
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 […]
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 […]
Anticipating the End
In the introduction to Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide, Boaventura de Sousa Santos discusses “strong questions” whose “weak answers … do not challenge the horizon of possibilities” . Among these, de Sousa Santos describes how “it is as difficult to imagine the end of colonialism as it is to imagine that colonialism has […]
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 […]