Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete Proving nature’s laws wrong it learned 2 walk without having feet Funny it seems, but by keeping its dreams it learned 2 breathe fresh air Long live the rose that grew from concrete when no one else even cared! -Tupac In […]
a dignidade da morte tupinambá
Uma condição constante de guerra ditava a tônica das relações entre os grupos , habitantes nativos da região da Guanabara, que sobreviveram menos de um século após a chegada dos colonizadores no Brasil. Guerreiros motivados pelo ciclo vital da vingança, entravam em embates corporais intertribais que terminavam, para os vencedores, com um banquete produzido a […]
ABC- A B C
Quijano, Rivera Cusicanqui, and Mbebe all explore the implementation of rigid power structures as mirrors through which individuals are allowed to see themselves. Either in the forcing of a conception of a “History” told as historical chains characterized by a framework of progress (Quijano), by the violent and forceful reorganization of sacred territories in Bolivia […]
for the week ironically titled “theories”
These texts come together as a braid, entangled and loaded with tension. Instrumentalizing human existence (and demise) like puppeteers (Mbembé, 14), the conquerors mentioned in these readings weave bodies and borders, denying the physical pain of tearing at roots. Most touching were the explorations into “body as place” (Mbembé, 28) and the very ways in […]
différance
Trying to examine the stitching of Cusicanqui’s text is maddening. Closing in on the detail of one stitch, for example the dyad chi’ixi-chhixi, I lose track of the of the greater weave. The only way is to move in and out, view the taypi from nearer and farther, in endless alternations of perspective. The wak’as […]
The Power of Duality in an Age of Globalization
I want to address a thread that runs through all three texts: the connection between dualism and globalization. In “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Quijano delineates and challenges the logic of Eurocentrism, which has a particular “perspective on knowledge” formalized through “a peculiar articulation between dualism (capital-precapital, Europe-non-Europe, primitive-civilized, traditional-modern, etc.) and a […]
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 […]
Eurocentric id and entity
I’d like to linger on the following sentence from Aníbal Quijano’s “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America”: Thinking through this id-entity, then: Europe constitutes the id—the Freudian understanding of unconscious drives and instinctual forces—of coloniality. European coloniality is its own personality, its own agential entity governed by the “natural” and “given” laws of 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 […]
Mascaras y Traducción: Trayectorias de la Hegemonía en Rivera Cusicanqui y Mbembe
Había leído hace un tiempo el gran ensayo de Achille Mbembe donde se acuña el tan necesario concepto de “Necropolítica”. Sin embargo, leerlo de nuevo a la luz del “Principio de Potosí” de Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui fue revelador; la forma y el lenguaje del texto de la última no se parecía en nada a la […]