“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 […]
upside-down and under the spell
Living in the upside-down of time as linear discourse is the product of a hegemonic idea deeply rooted in colonialism. Who can say how time ends and begins? This is a decision made by the powers of domination which reverberate like the church bells marking every hour… For Cusicanqui we perform our commitment to modernity […]
Pathways
Thinking with Juan López Intzín and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, throughout this week’s texts a certain political urgency (in-)surges up: writing, acting, feeling-thinking between the two impossibilities of writing that exceeds rational categorization and writing collectively (de Sousa Santos 5). Or as the Zapatistas put it: “a world where many worlds are possible” . Grosfoguel […]
Dicen: What Remains Unwritten; What can’t be Translated
(Inspired by Manifesto for Intellectual-Activists) They say. They said, they said. They also say that they said. This is what is said that they said. They say that they said, they said. They also say that they said. This is what is said that they said. They say. They said, they said. And not only […]
Leaving Denial
This week’s reading demonstrated how colonization has made many people’s history of their ancestors vanishes under modernity. Susana Cota Amaral quotes, “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 […]
Embodied Epistemology
The genocide understood as the systematic elimination of the bodies of the colonized people, brought with it the epistemicide proposed by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (92) consolidating by this the hegemonic of the Eurocentric Epistemology in the South Globe. The demand for the (Mignolo, 451) require disarticulated the notion of Totality imposed by the Western. In […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]