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 by adhering to the linearity of time. She expounds indigenous discourse, “There is no post or pre” (Cusicanqui, 96) there is only we. We spiral and turn together moving in cycles and sets of returns, trans-eternally and epistemologically, “we as producer of knowledge…can have discussions as equals with other centers of thought and currents in the academies of our region and also the world.” (Cusicanqui, 106)
Time as we know it does not exist in the cosmos. Juan López Intzín reminds us to rethink our place within the multiverse. He heeds, life goes beyond, “Western or scientific classification affirming the existence of animate and inanimate beings.” (Intzín, 5) This impulse to classify, claim and name is a way the neoliberal subject affirms its existence. It is indeed a spell as Mignolo would state:
“Under the spell of neoliberalism and the magic of the media promoting it, modernity and modernization, together with democracy, are being sold as a package trip to the promised land of happiness, a paradise where, for example, when you can no longer buy land because land itself is limited and not producible or monopolized by those who control the concentration of wealth, you can buy virtual land!! “(Mignolo, 450)
What does it mean to let go of this vision of an unattainable, problematic paradise locked in a specific temporal state?
Engaging in pluriversality instead, as a move towards de-centering the individual, the human and linear time…
he de-links. This pluriverse is echoed in how Grosfoguel tells the story of Transmodernity;
“Moreover, Transmodernity calls for inter-philosophical political dialogues to produce pluriverses of meaning where the new universe is a pluriverse.”(Grosfoguel, 88)
This intra-dialogue produces a plurality of new meanings. The trans-modern mode is a project of de-centering ‘modernity’ and redefining perspective through the practice of rebuilding what was lost in the genocide/epistemicide induced by Euro-centrisim. Inside the Western project one remains upside-down and under the spell of the genocides that haunt it, as well as what xenophobic structures grow in the resting place of the cultures who once were. Western-centric thought exists instead as its own organism, its own universe. According to Smith,“Imperialism still hurts, still destroys and is reforming itself constantly.” (Smith, 20) It is a parasitic cycle of destructive, hyper-production which regulates our everyday through standardized linear time frames.
López Intzín, Juan. "Sp'ijilal O'tan: Epistemologies of the Heart." 1 Jan 1970: Print.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. Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London & New York: Zed Books, 2012. 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.