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). Mignolo offers an intellectual program of de-linking from coloniality, through which the given-ness of Western epistemic foundation is punctured, opening up possibilities for a Dusserlian pluriverse of life-worlds. Or as the Zapatistas put it: “a world where many worlds are possible” (qtd. in Grosfoguel 87). Grosfoguel writes a similar program drawn heavily from Dusserl’s and de Sousa Santos’s ideas: that in recognizing coloniality, genocide, and “epistemicide” (or the killing of epistemological life-worlds) as constitutive of the Western philosophical project, the ego cogito as ego extermino, decolonial intellectual-activists can move towards a more capacious academic project in which epistemologies are learned in contiguity (Grosfoguel 77).
Decolonial thought-practice—as one gesturing away from the Western “I” and taxonomical compulsion towards a relational and affective understanding of subjectivity and the stuff of our world, as one refusing to walk the marble halls of normative scholarly citationality—operates with intense ambivalence in the university setting. Decolonizing thought is one thing, but how and in what circumstances is this process triggered? Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, in her article, critiques the North American university system for deploying indigenous studies as intellectual adornment; for Cusicanqui, complacent participation in the pyramid-economy of North American to South American academic production amounts to a vapid decolonial theory without a practice (100). Or as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang put it, “Decolonization is not a metaphor.”
These readings, especially Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies, dig into the violence at the center of Western pedagogy and philosophy, revealing how colonization created the conditions for certain ideations of subject/object relations and knowledge production (e.g. the Cartesian conception of the self as a neatly bound epistemological being). With this in mind, I’m interested in how we might perform beyond colonial scholarship. De Sousa Santos’s entangled manifestos at the beginning of Epistemologies of the South are a beautiful example of performative textuality: reorienting the way the reader approaches the act of reading itself. Do you read one all the way through, flip back to page one, and read the next one? Or do you attempt to read them side-by-side, eyes flitting from left side to right? The horizontality of this movement seems to me a performance of pluriversality in its non-linearity and non-hierarchy, in its refusal to be just one thing, in its negotiation of relational substance contiguous at the borderline of the spine. Where is the heart in the body of a book? Bringing López Intzín back into the fold, how might “heartening”—worlding, thinking-feeling, affecting and being affected—potentialize a decolonial affect that could widen the pathway from theory to practice?
Tuck, Eve, and K.Wayne Yang. "Decolonization is not a metaphor." Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1. no. 1: 2012. 1-40. Mignolo, Walter D.. "Delinking: The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality." Cultural Studies 21. no. 2: 2007. Accessed 10 Oct 2018. Grosfoguel, Ramon. "The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities: Epistemic Racism/Sexism and the Four Genocides/Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century." Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 11. no. 1: 2013. 73-90. Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. "Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization." South Atlantic Quarterly 111. no. 1: 2012. Accessed 12 Oct 2018.